Understanding the 20th Century

For the first time since Christianity formed souls and societies, we find ourselves faced by a public and social apostasy which is no longer merely the schism of a nation or a king, nor the heresy of a teacher or a sect, nor a political and moral revolt, but which is a whole civilization cutting itself off completely from Christianity, a civilization that must be reconquered, re-Christianized."

Maurice Blondel

I suppose what I want to do with this post is lay out my understanding of the "grand narrative" of the 20th Century. In essence, my theory is that "practical" Christian Society failed in the the 19th Century and events of the 20th Century were the results of the secular attempts to build a better society.

Catholic Traditionalists are inclined to think that the serious rot in Western Civilisation began with Vatican Two, but more perceptive minds were well aware that the rot had set in well before then.  The above quote is from Maurice Blondel, written at the beginning of the 20th Century.

Perceptive Christian  minds of the time, like Blondel, realised that the society built by institutionalised Christianity was in DEEP trouble. Indeed, reading some of his contemporaries at the end of the 19th Century, one is impressed with their keen awareness of a sense of an impending transformational change about to engulf society. These authors were passionate Christians who were horrified at the progressive secularisation of society and wanted to reverse the trend and yet they realised they were up against a formidable foe in the face of Modernism.

Now by Modernism, I mean a philosophy of life that is for all intensive purposes Positivistic. And what was apparent to these thinkers, writing at the about the turn of the 20th Century is that positivism was crushing the all before it. Essentially, the history of the 20th Century could best be described as the battle of ideas born within the Positivist vision following the practical irrelevance of European Christian Culture. When Nietszche proclaimed that 'God was dead", he shouting the death of the motive force of European Civilisation.

Now it needs to be understood that understood that Fascism, Communism and contemporary Liberal Democracy are all ideologies framed within the Positivistic metaphysical system, and as such, all are a break from the European Civilisation which existed before 1914. They arose out of the vacuum that came about with the "Death of God". Sure the philosophical foundations of Modernism/Positivism go all the way back to intellectual errors in the Medieval philosophy but they only become culturally transformative after the First World War, when significant numbers of people took them on board and were able to effect their consequences.

Why people took them on board is interesting. What's really apparent in reading the authors of the late 19th Century, is the social ferment and instability in all of the European countries of the time.  Europe's population increase by four hundred percent during the 19th Century, and despite all the scientific advances, vast numbers of people were malnourished, uneducated, poorly housed and living in poverty.

Happy, well fed people don't revolt, and the fact of the matter is that many people weren't happy. Not in the Gloria Freedman sense but in the sense that their crushing poverty and limited ability to escape it induced a yearning for something better. Traditional Christianity taught them to "bear their cross" and seemed unable, with certain few exceptions, come up with any real solutions. The practice of Charity was inadequate to the needs generated by the population explosion and traditional Christianities defence of private property and the realities of lasseiz faire Capitalism meant that the social structure of society was pretty much entrenched. This left people with three options:

1) Bear your cross. i.e. Suck it up.
2) Emigrate to the New World.
3) Abandon the traditional conception of Man and Society and look for something new.

 

Emigration is an interesting one, and it would be interesting to see how much it contributed to the stability of the 19th Century by acting as a "pressure valve" against social agitation. But its also interesting as a metric with regard to how bad things really were in Europe at the time. Passage to the New World was not without its perils ship wreck were common and emigration was usually final, in the sense that it severed a man from his family and his past.  The fact that large numbers of people were prepared to undertake it gives some idea of the social pressures that people were under. Europe, despite its technological and cultural glories was a social mess.

Likewise the French revolution is seen as the originator of the modern world, but it needs to be understood that the Revolution did not arise ex nihilo, rather deep social problems were its gestational medium. The Revolution needs to be seen as an attempt to escape them. Had France of Louis XVI been prosperous and well fed, I doubt if there would have been any Revolution at all. Likewise, specter of Socialism only became real only after the population explosion of 19th Century Europe was able to digest it through the laissez faire Capitalism of the time, producing an exploited urban proletariat, disaffected and ripe for agitation. The ideas of the philosophes are only given an audience when times are hard.

Furthermore, the triumphs of science vastly undermined the authority of religion. Childbirth, which had roughly a 5% mortality at the end of the 19th Century was bought down to less than 1%, not by prayer but by modern medicine. Why go to the priest when the doctor is more effective. It didn't take much of a push to lure the masses towards secularism.

The point of this is that Christianity had practically failed, particularly as a social phenomenon and while people still continued to mouth religious platitudes and perform religious observances, they did so out of habit rather than conviction. When more liberty was finally given to them, especially Catholics after Vatican Two, religious practice withered.

The intellectual vacuum left by Christianity paved the way for secular solutions to societal problems, solutions which rejected the Christian metaphysic and which were ultimately positivist, and therefore modernist, in their foundation. Fascism, Liberal Democracy and Socialism are the Right, Middle, Left repesctive "solutions" to these problems but are ultimately all cut from the same modernist cloth. And there is nothing in Modernism which prevents the transformation of one to the other except perhaps historical contingency.

Reality

To understand what the core problem of the 20th Century is, we need to understand the foundation upon which it rests. And this article, in the Daily Mirror, of all places, serves well to illustrate the problem.

Elon Musk isn't stupid but even he admits that there is a chance that we could be living in a "simulated" reality. He is indeterminate on the matter because, quite simple, it's impossible to be definitive.




Let me illustrate what I mean. In the movie the Matrix, the "reality" human beings experience is simply a computer program operating though a spinal modem which completely controls their sensory experiences. The famous scene of Neo "unplugging" from the Matrix serves to illustrate the difference between the reality, as experienced through the spinal modem and the "real" reality.

But here is an interesting thought experiment: Suppose you are connected to a spinal modem and disconnected yourself, how could you prove that you were really disconnected? How could you be sure that the act of disconnection was not just another "simulation" designed to lull you into thinking that you were, when you really weren't? Think about if for a while.

The idea of living in a reality that is only just a simulation isn't as far fetched as it sounds once you start thinking about the problem. The real problem is how do you prove the question is not true once it has been asked? The answer is you can't, and it's why Musk doesn't give a definitive yes or no answer to the question. As I say, he's not an idiot. Kurt Godel and Alfred Tarski would both answer along the same lines.

What's all this got to do with 20th Century history? A lot actually.

Prior to the Enlightenment, European culture believed--as do most other cultures--that there was more to reality than we simply experienced: they realised that there was a world which existed outside the "matrix". While the dumber Europeans made up stuff about this other world, the smarter Europeans recognised that there was no way to access this reality through human effort alone. A person needed to be "unplugged" but he could not do it through his own efforts. In Christianity this concept was called revelation.

The real changed occurred around the time of the Enlightenment. Most Christians see the Enlightenment as the beginning of the decline, I don't. These Christians fail to distinguish between the mother and its bastard offspring, Positivism. Positivism (in all of its variants)  was a corruption of Enlightenment thinking. The fundamental premise of the Positivists was that there was nothing outside the Matrix, and like Agent Smith, they set about ensuring that any ideas of reality outside it were punished.

Positivism was really a fringe element in European history till about the mid 19th Century when it achieved "critical mass" and started influencing European culture in a meaningful way. I think its important to realise that it's not enough just to have the ideas, one also needs the means of effecting them. Hence my graph from a previous post which Nick Steves took some issue with. The rot in European civilisation really starts when people enough people start getting on board with the notion that the Matrix is all there is.

Strange to think that the Christians are more akin to Neo and his friends whilst the Positivists are the modern day Agent Smiths.

Neo illustrates the philosophical problem.

Hillary thinks I'm Alt-Right, Stormfornt and Vox think I'm a cuck

For this author, the response by most of the Alt-Right to Hillary's speech was one of naivete. Back in the "Old Days" of the Soviet Union, when Uncle Joe singled out an enemy, the astute recognised that that that person was about to receive a world of hurt. Looked in that context, Hillary's speech, if it really did represent the position of Communist Democratic Party of the United States, was pretty much both a declaration of war against the Alt-Right and public recognition that the GOP are it's "house pet".  Both parties agree that the Alt-Right is their common enemy and they are now, for all practical purposes ideologically indistinct.

Both parties are have shown that they are committed to the managerial state and its existence, and as the purpose of the managerial state is to fix "problems" for the common good, what Hillary (and the GOP) did is identify the Alt-Right as a "problem" and thereby declared war on it. What this means is, that should Trump not win,  in the next few years the state apparatus will be orientated towards the suppression and destruction of the Alt-Right. I also need to add that I'm not convinced that Trump is all that "Alt-Right" either, I hope I'm wrong, but any victory of his will simply be a stay of execution, till the political cycle restores the Democrats, unless there is a fundamental shift in the political culture of the U.S.

Personally, I would have preferred the public denunciation of the Alt-Right to have occurred in the future,  as this would have given more time for the ideas of the Alt-Right to have gained "cultural penetrance" but the enemy is not stupid and recognises that he is losing the war for the hearts and minds of the body politic and has to act now.

I hope I'm wrong, but by the time this is over I imagine that there will be persecutions against the Alt-Right done withing the Anglo-Saxon tradition. What this means is that whilst there won't be the Gulags in Alaska, people will lose their jobs, have their careers wrecked, be politically disenfranchised, economically crushed, publicly ridiculed and with the state turning a blind eye to their abuse by "socially just" criminal elements with the occasional lynching.

The people whom the Left will go after will be the people they consider Alt-Right and I think this is an important distinction which many of the Alt-Right fail to understand. The Left's definition of the Alt-Right includes everyone who is "right" of the GOP and is not a libertarian. That includes traditionalist Christians, Nazi's, NRx, nationalists etc. Everyone who's not with the program. This definition suits the Left, since by mixing Nazi's with Christians it conflates them in the minds of the sheeple, and it can punish one with the sins of the other, all with public approval.  It's a political tactic designed to conflate and by the Left's definition I fall into the Alt-Right.

Within the non-approved Left however, the alt-Right has a specific meaning which has developed over the last year or so. The stormfront-esqe entryist hordes have shifted its real world meaning to mean something akin to "soft Nazism" with an emphasis on; anti-Christianity, genetic Calvinism, blood and soil politics, Judaic obsession and mass-man political theory. From this perspective I'm explicitly NOT of the Alt-Right. These guys, have as their "tradition", the rejection of pre-Modernist European culture and the embrace of Right-Modernism. Anybody who wants to see how eerily similar the past was to the present should google up the political philosophy of Charles Maurras. His ideology was a dead end.

The "Right" I belong to is incompatible with the Alt-Right, primarily because it's anti-Christian and ultimately Modernist in foundation,therefore by its definition I'm a cuck. But it won't really matter. When Hillary sends in her Soros-troopers we're going down together.

Sam Francis on the Jews

As I've mentioned in my previous posts, I don't really like talking about the Jews since whenever the topic is raised everyone goes mental and it becomes impossible to have a serious discussion on the subject. Still, I thought I'd put this post up in reply to commentator Dystopia Max, who in the made the following comment in reply to this post.

By the way those coincidences are probably the main reason Sam Francis implicitly distrusted the neocons, much more so than 'containing the essence of liberalism', which strikes me as a lame excuse for something he could not say in polite company.

Francis was never one to be politically correct and this ultimately cost his job. One of the things I like about Francis is that he devoted some serious thought to analysing the failure of conservatism drawing from a wide intellectual tradition and from schools of thought not traditionally thought of as conservative. He realised that the conservative failure had deeper roots than one of inappropriate organsiation and that in many ways the problem was one of the conservative relationship with modernity. Francis also recognised that most of the right was intellectually brain dead and that in order to escape the fatal embrace a new leadership was required which would not repeat the same mistakes of the past.

One of the Right's most serious problems has been its relationship with Judaism. There is no doubt, that as a whole, the Jewish community in the U.S. pushes Left, and therefore provides a plausible causative agent for the the cognitive-lite-Right, but Francis, unlike most of the alt-Right was not stupid and saw that the problem was much deeper.

Sam Francis had an exchange with a certain Vic Gerhard over at the Vangaurd News Network in 2003, (I'm not going to link to it since I don't endorse the site, but readers can Google it.) which I think explains his thoughts quite clearly. It think it would be pertinent to quote Vic Gerhard first.

Anti-Semitism is saying or doing anything a Jew does not like; whether the statement was true, or the act perfectly justified. That is the real de finition. How can you even pretend otherwise when Jews call someone who defends Arabs (Semites) against Jewish tyranny an 'anti-Semite'?

It's great that you are pecking around the edges of the problem. I'm just not sure what more proof you need to see that Jews are directing American foreign policy; that Culture of Critique and its mind-boggling account of facts is completely true; that to rail against blacks and hispanics without mentioning Jews is like complaining about symptoms but not the disease.

Maybe this sounds cruel and racist; and yet it is true isn't it? Personally, I've read enough of your writings, heard you speak enough times, and even talked to you on occasion, so that I am convinced you recognize the Jewish problem. It would be an immense help if you could now take off the gloves and let the Jews have it. They have it coming. They are the true enemy of Middle Americans. "Oil" is not the justification for this war but a laughably transparent Jewish hedge, nor are the Christian fundamentalists to blame; if they were not supporting Israel we would barely, as before 9/11, realize they existed.

My friends are going to jail for speaking their minds; every day another one is arrested or visited by the FBI, or raided by the Terrorism Task Force. Now is the time, name the Jew, put THEM on the defensive for once. Otherwise, Middle America is doomed; its sons' dying in Central Asia, its jobs moving out of the US, its population increasingly non-White and hostile. We need you to act now; a few months from now may be too late.
Your columns could make an immense difference at this crucial moment. We are watching history, and if the Jews triumph here there may be no stopping them, ever. Goodbye White race.

Vic Gerhard
Wilmington, N.C.

To which Francis replied;

I just wrote a column on Moran in which I was fairly explicit about this matter. I have another today that is also pretty explicit about the role of neo-cons (not all Jews) in getting us into the war. What more do you want? Peter Brimelow at Vdare told me the first column probably would not be published by any newspaper in this country (we'll see; my column last year supporting what Billy Graham said to Nixon was not published by my three best outlets), and without my authority or knowledge he changed a key line that altered my meaning. You simply cannot go much further than I have already gone and expect to be published at all in anything like mainstream media, and anyway, aside from the current war, I think there are other problems besides the Jewish role in stirring up blacks and pushing immigration. Both blacks and Hispanics have now acquired their own racial consciousness and are not necessarily under Jewish control.

Further on;

Well, I'm sorry I'm such a disappointment to you. The fact is that I have read the Culture of Critique, as well as the other two volumes, know MacDonald personally, and agree with much though not all of what he says. My entire body of writings over the last 20-25 years is an explanation of how I disagree and and have a somewhat different view of the world than what is frankly a monomanical obsession with an omnipotent Jew.[ED] There are reasons why neo-conservatism exists other than Jewish power, and these should be obvious to any one actually involved in politics. I was a witness to many of them. Just one, for example, is the greed and ambition and shallowness of many orthodox non-Jewish conservatives fro the "respectability" they thought Jews could give them. You and critics like you always assume that because others don't say what you demand they say, they must be afraid to say it. The fact is, as I just told you, I have just written two columns that will probably harm me more than they help me, so it is not fear on my part. Can you even imagine that maybe I don't agree with your view of the Jews, that the Jews and the Jews alone are solely responsible for everthing bad that has happened and is going on? I really don't think you can. Moreover, as I was trying to tell you indirectly, I depend on outlets like Vdrae and Rockford; if they don't publish me, I don't get published, and they would not publish me if I write what you want me to write (which I do not agree with anyway). Sobran does not get published outside of his own newsletter and maybe the Wanderer. The American Conservative won't publish him. Chronicles won't publish him. His syndicate dropped him. So don't tell me about things I know about more than you. It's fine to publish on sites like VNN., but no one -- non one --reads them or takes them seriously outside a handful of people. Sure I'd like to be rich, but do you imagine I thought I would ever get rich writing what I write? I really just don't know how to explain to people like you what the real world is like, because the truth is -- take it form someone who went through graduate school, worked in a think tank, in the US Senate, and at a nationally distrubuted newspaper for 9 years -- you and your pals do not have a fucking clue.[ED]

Gerhard continues to goad and Francis replies;

I had thought that you, unlike several of the others who like to rant about my "cowardice," "treachery," "phil-Semitism," etc., had a little more sense, but apparently I was misguided. Let me try to explain once more in some detail what I am trying to tell you.

1. What you said in your last communication was insulting because it at least indirectly and perhaps directly questioned my integrity, accusing me of cowardice or ignorance or dishonesty or greed or ambition as the only plausible reasons I do not write what you want me to write as you want it written. I have to say that I have received many criticisms as a columnist but this -- from the professional (and usual anonymous) anti-Semites -- takes the cake. No one else presumes to tell a writer what to write or how to write, even as they insult his character and intelligence -- not religious nuts, not racial nuts, not libertarian nuts -- except maybe the Jews themselves. But leave all that aside.

2. Vdare, Rockford, etc won't publish openly anti-Semitic pieces because (a) they like most gentiles are irrationally afraid of Jewish power and (b) they also have rational concerns over Jewish power. Both have Jewish "friends" who give them money, publicity, support, etc. and they are afraid -- I believe not entirely without cause but in an exaggerated way -- of losing that. Also, like most people they would like to do something else besides attack Jews and sometimes there are Jews with whim they need to work in order th do those things. (Rockford just held a conference in the Middle East on a prospects for peace there; it wasn't my idea and I don't see the point, except that some donors (non-Jewish ) gave them money to do it.) Therefore, they are very careful about antagonizing Jewish supporters. As you may know, they were virtually destroyed in the late 1980s by neo-con defunding because of positive remarks they made about Gore Vidal and because of their opposition to immigration. Nevertheless, they have consistently published pieces critical of Zionism, including several of my recent columns on the Iraq war and Jewish neo-con- Israeli power, and of foreign entanglements, perpetual wars, etc. Chronicles also published a review of MacDonald by Paul Gottfried which I strongly disagree with but they allowed MacDonald to write a long response, more than the American Conservative allowed. I do not control either RI or Vdare and often disagree with how they are run, but essentially they do not attack the Jews because they are more interested in other problems.

2. Unless you really do believe that Jews are the causes of all problems, which you deny, you have to admit there are other problems. You ask what I disagree with in MacDonald. I can't really comment on the general evolutionary theory since I'm not an expert, but I have no problem with it. Nor do I have a problem with his characterization of Jews in general, though some people tell me it's less true of some Jewish groups (Sephardic) than others (Ashkenazic) or at some periods of history than at others. What I do not agree with Kevin on is that while he's right about the way Jews are, that doesn't mean they are always successful. They may have pushed open borders as a means of undermining what they saw as a hostile host society, but that doesn't mean their efforts were the reason we have open borders or that other groups didn't want open borders for their own reasons. I dealt with immigration partly when I was in the Senate and frankly the role of the Jews was not at all apparent, as it was in foreign policy, and many social issues. The main enemies of immigration control on the right are (1) libertarians and (2) Catholics; the same was true at the Wash. Times, and I knew Jews who were opposed to more immigration at both places.Libertarianism tends to be Jewish-led, but it exists as an independent force in its own right among gentiles. I recall in 1995 or 95 Bill Gates visited Sen. Alan Simpson to lobby him on H1-B visas; Simpson caved. Neither is Jewish and neither did what he did because of Jewish power or influence but because of business and political interests. Business interests have been the main reason we have immigrant workers pushing out American workers in meat packing, textiles, poultry processing, etc. The Jews may serve as lawyers or lobbyists for these groups but Jewish groups per se have had little to do with immigration policy in recent years.

3. I don't deny that Jews have power -- certainly in the media and cultural centers generally and in politics through funding, staffing etc. But Jews are not the ruling class in this country (at least not yet). As in many other societies they form a subelite that provides services for the ruling class (tax collecting in Poland, e.g.), but I think they have little interest in becoming the actual ruling class because they have no interest in that as long as their interests are secured.[ED]

4. Your line about standing on street corners getting attacked by Jews is frankly childish. No I didn't. I just lost my job and my career for what I wrote about race (and I can tell you Jews appear to have had something to do with that and have certainly used it against me ever since). I'll bet Kevin MacDOnald never did either. I have a clue for you: Standing on street corners and yelling anti-Semitic slogans isn't a very effective way to Challenger much of anything. Hyde Park is full of characters like that. What I have tried to do -- explicitly at the Times and later as well -- has been to make explicit and serious discussion of race respectable. That means picking your shots and not saying everything you'd like to say because you know it will simply baffle or alarm many readers, but it does mean that you can tell many, many people a lot of things they didn't know or hadn't thought about. I think I was beginning to succeed when I was fired, and that may have been the real reason I was fired. Last summer when the National Alliance had its march on the Israeli Embassy I asked a friend who was planning to attend why and what good it would do? I told him all you will accomplish is give the Post the chance to portray all of you as a bunch of Nazi goons at a time when some opinion sectors were starting to turn on Israel. That's exactly what happened -- pictures of swastika flags, jack boots, etc. that understandably frighten and alienate most Americans and allow the Jews to say, "See, we told you what all those critics of Israel were like!"[ED] The idea that people like Linder and VNN accomplish much of anything outside of mutual masturbation is ludicrous. Frankly, I had never heard of Linder until he started attacking me and some people told me about it. With all due respect, I had never heard of your column until you told me you write one.

Finally, I have been gratified (one of the few gratifictaions I ever get in my profession) by being told by dozens of young people that I had taught them something they would not have known otherwise. No one but you and your friends have ever denounced me for being a hypocrite, a coward, a liar, a traitor, etc. I would have thought that you would have expressed some appreciation for what I have done, but the fact the you don't and can find only the most hateful things to say about me tells me all I need to know. As I told one of your colleagues recently, from now on I can only regard the whole bunch of you as my enemies and as enemies of the cause for which I am working. [ED]

What I now find most intriguing is that the alt-Reich brigade are now trying to claim Francis as their ally. If you google around on the internet, you'll see some of the sites try to represent this conversation along the lines of what Francis "really" meant. Meaning that Francis couldn't say what he wanted to say because of the Jews.  I'll let you look it up. I think it would be safe to say that if Francis was still alive he'd give these sites the finger.

Francis was also critical of Buckley, but he wasn't critical of him for purging the National review of its more lunatic elements. His main critique was that Buckley was aiming for "respectability" among the people that mattered instead of preaching the truth. Unlike the alt-Reich, Francis could do nuance and distinction.