Tuesday 16 November 2010

Sharp Relief

The fate of the Iraqi Christians throws into sharp relief, as so many things do, the split between Whigs and Tories, between Gladstonians and Disraelians, between anti-Marxist Old Labour and neo-Marxist New Labour.

To us Tories, to us Disraelians, to us Old Labourites, our social democracy is specifically in order to conserve against capitalism and Marxism everything that conservatives exist in order to conserve, and nothing could be less conservative than the attempt to make the world anew, in accordance with some academic blueprint, by means of global war: sex, drugs and rock’n’roll at the barrel of a gun.

To us Tories, to us Disraelians, to us Old Labourites, the West is the recapitulation in Jesus Christ and His Church of all three of the Old Israel, Hellenism and the Roman Empire. We would die to protect it, on whatever shore it found itself, and it now finds itself on every shore. But if by “the West”, you mean the rootless, godless, globalised, hypercapitalist, meterosexual wasteland of usury, promiscuity and stupefaction, then we hate it as much as does any Islamist. Including the Islamists to whom, whatever they may pretend, the Whigs, the Gladstonians, the New Labourites have been allied from 1980s Afghanistan through 1990s Bosnia to today’s Turkey, Kosovo, Chechnya, Saudi Arabia (whence came the 9/11 attacks), Xinjiang and elsewhere. Including by taking out the bulwark against them in Iraq. Including in the form of Jundullah, their favoured Islamist terrorists against the present government of Iran. And including by means of the capitalist system that cannot function without unrestricted global migration.

To us Tories, to us Disraelians, to us Old Labourites, the Slavs in general, and Russia in particular, are the age-old gatekeepers of our Biblical-Classical civilisation, whether against Islam, against Far Eastern domination, or now also against the pseudo-West of the Whigs, the Gladstonians, the New Labourites; the pseudo-West of which they hold up Israel, Georgia and Taiwan as supposedly plucky and inspiring outposts.

To us Tories, to us Disraelians, to us Old Labourites, Lebanon is a country where one of the official languages is European, and the President and half of the Parliament have to be Christian. Syria is a country which has Christian-majority provinces and Christian festivals as public holidays. Iran is a country where the Assyrians and the Armenians are a lot better off than in “liberated” Iraq or in NATO Turkey, even to the extent of having reserved parliamentary representation. There is more to Western civilisation than McDonalds, Starbucks and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Each of those countries is at the very least as much a part of our civilisation as is any nearby state of which none of these things can be said. Never mind one quite lately created by the ultimate globalist institution in surrender to anti-British Marxist terrorism, and built up by evicting people who had lived there for many centuries in favour of those shipped in from every corner of the earth. By contrast, the world’s second-oldest continuous civilisation is self-evidently entitled to a very particular respect.

As, to us Tories, to us Disraelians, to us Old Labourites, is the world’s oldest continuous civilisation. Just as pre-Communist Russia always remained the country’s true character, so very pre-Communist China remains the country’s true character. That character reveres tradition and ritual, upholds government by moral rather than physical force, affirms the Golden Rule, is Agrarian and Distributist, and has barely started an external war since China became China five thousand years ago. It is especially open to completion by, in, through and as classical Christianity. China has already moved from Maoism to the equal repressiveness of unbridled capitalism. The reassertion of her own culture is to be encouraged by every means of “soft” (in reality, truly hard) power, and the same is true of the wider Confucian world. But economic, or any other, dependence on a foreign power remains totally unacceptable.

This split within and across the self-identified Left and Right is greater than any split between them.

5 comments:

  1. David,

    It's an interesting attempt to cut across Left and Right, but I just wanted to probe it a little.

    "the attempt to make the world anew, in accordance with some academic blueprint, by means of global war: sex, drugs and rock’n’roll at the barrel of a gun"

    I'm really not sure that the Bush-Blair-Hitchens axis wants to spread sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. On what basis do you distrust the way they would state their own make-the-world-anew doctrines - i.e. spreading democracy against despotism, because no two democracies have ever gone to war, etc (quite different from some fervency in favour of hedonism and shopping). Still a failure in Iraq, to be sure, but not quite what you say it is. People of Marxist influence tend, I think, to have a distrust of the liberal fetish of rights pertaining to hedonism, and traces of that are clear even among the former Marxist neocons. But maybe I'm missing something?

    ReplyDelete
  2. "quite different from some fervency in favour of hedonism and shopping"

    Really? How? It's just a tarted up, intellectually and politically respectable-sounding way of saying the same thing. They are forever in some late Sixties/early Seventies student garret.

    "People of Marxist influence tend, I think, to have a distrust of the liberal fetish of rights pertaining to hedonism, and traces of that are clear even among the former Marxist neocons"

    Where? Who? When they say "the West", or "our values", or whatever, then that is what they mean.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Well, if rights protect citizens from the arbitrary will of governments, say. Or if democracies are more peaceful agents in the world than despotisms. How is this just a 'tarted up' version of the view that the West is great because of metrosexuality etc?

    Again, let me be clear, there don't seem to be many gains in Iraq on either front.

    As to who. Well, my understanding is that the neocons socially reacted against all the heady sixties hedonism, didn't like drug use, hated Woodstock, thought Christianity should underpin the West even if it's false? Noble lies, etc. Maybe I have it wrong, I guess it's pretty second hand knowledge on my part.

    I'm sure I've heard Peter H, who you seem to like to quote, complain that his brother's morality must be derived from Christianity. How could he believe that if his brother, who you've said works from the military-industrial complex, didn't take a dim view of the whole Western postmodern nihilistic tendency, disdaining drugs, disliking abortion, etc?

    For my sins, I read the Blair memoir. He describes taking offence at anti-social behaviour, in a particular case challenging a man pissing against a wall. I don't see any reason to doubt that he feels that way. I don't see him as a hippy. He after all seems to like religion quite a bit.

    By 'our values', why can't they just mean rights, freedom of speech, tolerance, open societies?

    Seems to me like the more clear criticism of the whole mentality is John Gray's. That blood is shed in the name of utopia. But the utopia doesn't really look like Woodstock for these people.

    ReplyDelete
  4. "How is this just a 'tarted up' version of the view that the West is great because of metrosexuality etc?"

    It is coming from them. Their archetypal despotism is the Soviet Union, but their hostility towards that was a Trotskyist one, which lies behind their attitude to Russia and China to this day.

    "Well, my understanding is that the neocons socially reacted against all the heady sixties hedonism, didn't like drug use, hated Woodstock"

    Really? They were right in the thick of it at the time, and they have never recanted it. Classic Thatcher/Reagan supporters. That's fundamentally what is "neo" about them. I don't know what's "con", though.

    "thought Christianity should underpin the West even if it's false"

    Their own version of it is false: false to present itself as Christianity, simply as a matter of fact.

    "I'm sure I've heard Peter H, who you seem to like to quote, complain that his brother's morality must be derived from Christianity"

    Oh, yes, it must be.

    "who you've said works from the military-industrial complex"

    I have never said that. He doesn't need to be paid.

    "didn't take a dim view of the whole Western postmodern nihilistic tendency, disdaining drugs, disliking abortion, etc"

    But he doesn't. His morality is defined by Christianity; in the West, whose isn't? But not in those terms. Quite the reverse, in fact.

    "He after all seems to like religion quite a bit"

    Blair's religion is of his own invention. I mean that purely objectively. And it is fully consistent with being an old hippy.

    "By 'our values', why can't they just mean rights, freedom of speech, tolerance, open societies?"

    Now you sound like Blair. Oh, dear.

    "But the utopia doesn't really look like Woodstock for these people"

    It looks like Woodstock forty years on, after the Eighties, which were the logical continuation of the Sixties.

    ReplyDelete
  5. A lot of ex-Hard Leftists have jumped on the “spread capitalism by the sword” bandwagon precisely because they recognize the power of capitalism to destroy traditional societies. These people were never genuinely concerned with the working class to begin with.

    Rather, they just wanted to destroy traditional Christian culture. This applies equally to people like Christopher Hitchens and to the neoconservatives, even if on the surface they seem to disagree about many things, especially religion and social issues.

    Indeed, I think I can respect Hitchens more because he is at least honest about his antipathy towards religion and does not tried to hide behind Christianity like the neocons do.

    As for sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll, it is really all just consumerism. As I believe Mr. Lindsay notes (correct me if I am wrong), many of the Sixties hippies just traded in their tie-dye shirts for business suits and became the yuppies of the 1980s.

    For all of their talk about traditional values, the neocons and their allies are actually supportive of the destruction of conservative culture. For example, just look at the way the neocons and their allies in the media react to real populist movements versus fake ones like the “Green Revolution” in Iran.

    ReplyDelete