Since the purloined election of 2020, there has been NO ONE in charge of the country.

How then does the executive carry on? Easily. The agencies keep running on a fuel that is free and in inexhaustible supply – habit.

The White House is Liberty Hall. Clowning is what goes on in it. Adolescent pranks. Giggling. Everybody on the staff knows that the putative head, “Joe” Biden, is senile and unaware of what’s happening – and that he wouldn’t care anyway. He does what clowning he can himself, when he musters enough energy. Blood-red lighting, soldiers on guard, as a background to a rant of his, was his own idea.

The Cabinet and their highest offices are “manned” by freaks. Preferably women and weirdos and perverts. Preferably not white. A Health Secretary, “Admiral” Richard Levine, the biological father of two children, calls himself Rachel and wears long blond hair, frocks and jewellery. A couple of ministerial transvestites with mustaches, and make-up caked on their faces, wear showy dresses. (One of them steals women’s luggage at airports).

Those “trannies” who disported themselves in the spring on the White House lawn with an “LGBTQ” rainbow flag draped across the front of the grand building (intended originally to be a visible sign of its exalted purpose – to house the headship of the United States’ executive branch of government, the Head of State, representative of the nation), were enjoying a puerile iconoclasm, men showing off bare breasts artificially created to help them pretend they are women.

More freaks in huge wigs, clownish make-up, glittering dresses and high heels – blatantly mocking women – read to small children, in schools and libraries, graphic descriptions of perverse sexual acts. And children are encouraged to demand that their bodies be abused and mutilated with chemicals and surgical operations so that they too can pretend to be the sex they are not. The fact of biological sex is denied. Human beings, the “Democrats” say, are “assigned” a sex at birth and they can change it if they want to.  It is another lie. They traffic in lies.  The Transport Secretary, “Pete” Buttigieg, son of a devout Communist, had himself photographed sitting up in bed with a gadget strapped onto his chest which is filled with milk or baby formula so his adopted child can suck at a “nipple” and “Pete” can feel like a real mother.* To the same ridiculous end he probably has tampons prominently displayed in his bathroom. He is “married” to another man.

Young visitors to the Oval Office turn up in crumpled jeans and sweaty T-shirts. No “bourgeois formality” for them! And as the mood of the White House – turned into a carnival palace at the same time as a sty – spreads wherever “Democrats” are performing, the Senate too has become a playground. Why not – thought one young man – use the Senate building for sexual adventures? He stripped naked, knelt on all fours in a chamber used for solemn meetings and enjoyed a sodomy session which his partner filmed so that it could be – and was – shown to the nation, to the world. (Still the young pervert insists that he would “never disrespect” his workplace. Democrats not only work by habit, they lie by habit too.) Such fun! No stuffy old inhibitions allowed to restrain their liberty. To them liberty is license. Let license ring!

A packet of cocaine was found in the White House. “Joe” Biden’s son Hunter, the depraved  addict, was living there at the time. But dosing himself with illegal substances is the least of his criminal activity. The criminal corruption of the Biden family is public knowledge. Hunter did the hunting; his father the President and other relations shared the catch.

“Joe”, bribed by China, allowed its spy balloon to float all over the USA, sending pictures of military facilities, roads, railways, fields and farms, back to Beijing. Dear old Joe!  He sent billions of dollars to the tyrants of Iran while they screamed “Death to America!” He invited teeming masses from anywhere in the world to walk into the USA from Mexico, and they do. He and his Secretary of Homeland Security continue to assure the nation that the southern border is “secure” while  enemies, petty criminals, slavers, drug dealers, human traffickers, lunatics, blood-thirsty gangs, mass murderers, kidnappers, rapists, from every inhabited continent, pour unhindered into the southern states and thence into every state. Not one of them “vetted”. Millions of them must have infectious diseases, but pour in they may – and did even when US citizens were forced to distance from each other, wear masks, stop going to clinics, churches, school, rallies, sports , restaurants, theaters, shops, hairdressers, clubs … for fear of catching a “new” flu launched across the world  by Communist China.

The United States is again a country of slavery. Hundreds of thousands of kidnapped alien children, brought over the “secure” southern border by slave traffickers, are exploited as forced laborers and sex slaves.**

“Joe” said it was okay for Russia to make a small invasion of Ukraine, so Russia invaded Ukraine. “Joe” sends Ukraine enormous sums of taxpayers’ money so it can keep the war going. At the same time, while he assures Israel that his backing of its security is “iron-clad”, he goes on directly and indirectly paying Muslim terrorists to capture, torture, and kill as many Israelis as they can.

To save the world from burning up (but knowing that it will not) as a result of human beings “polluting the air” by simply carrying on with their lives, “Joe” gave notice of coming bans on gas-powered vehicles, gas stoves, oil-fired heating and cooling systems …

Everyone with any common sense knows that these decisions and actions are not really President Biden’s; they come out of the utopian dreams of his ever more demonic Democratic Party. Its aim is to reduce the population of the world from some 8 billion to 1 billion, by means of abortion, infanticide, “transgendering” treatments including mutilating surgery, homosexual marriage, euthanasia, murderous riot, extortionist taxation, surging national debt.

The outlook is dire, but roughly half the electorate votes for it. Shrinking police forces; permitting theft from stores; releasing prisoners convicted of – or deliberately not charged with – murder, rape, assault, shop-lifting, abduction, torture; tolerating encampments of lunatics and addicts on city streets – even supplying the addicts with free drugs – this is the “Democratic” program to make life for normal citizens intolerable.

The same gleeful destroyers, envious and cruel, run campaigns of anti-Semitism. They label conservatives as terrorists, peaceful protest as insurrection. Real insurrection by their own hordes of arsonists, rapists, murderers, torturers, kidnappers, thieves, they call “peaceful protest”.

Everything they touch, they ruin: education, the media, the arts, the family, childhood, health care, even the military …  At least Secretary of Defense Austin did not join in the danse macabre of ruination. When in this summer of 2024 a gang of lawyers promised the Muslim organizers of mass-murder (some 3,000 killed by Muslim plane hijackers flying into New York buildings and the Pentagon and crashing in a field in Pennsylvania on 9/11/2001) that in return for confessions of guilt they would be spared the death penalty, Austin asserted his authority and cancelled the deal. Appointed all too probably because he is black, he had been ignored and discounted by the (no doubt passionately “anti-racist”) lawyers who did not even consult him about the deal; but he refused to be overlooked. (Will he abide by that decision? Can he redeem the military from “woke” impotence? Does he want to?)

The “Democrats” don’t give a fig for democracy. They suddenly threw away millions of primary votes cast for Biden to be their nominee in the coming election and arbitrarily appointed a black woman, his Vice-President, instead of him. She’s a person of low intelligence, loose morals, alarming ignorance, and a hideous wide-open-mouthed cackle that even they formerly deplored but now – since she’s become their candidate – praise as an expression of  “joy”.  While they insist that they don’t  know what a “woman” is (except as the correct term for “transgered “ men)  they like to appoint women – preferably black – as figureheads: cabinet members, directors of agencies, prosecutors, police chiefs, ambassadors, military top brass, presidents of universities, principals of schools … so why not now one of them – the more ill-informed and incompetent the better since she mustn’t actually make decisions or do anything – as Head of State, Commander-in-Chief, Keeper of the Nuclear Codes?

Will the People let that happen? As former President Trump often says, “We must wait and see.”

And we must vote for him to be our 47th. president.

Notes:

*I’ve been told that this photograph was a fake. Okay, but I maintain it told the truth about Buttigieg the way fiction can tell the truth about reality.

**From the New York Post, August 21, 2024:  “The Biden-Harris administration has lost track of more than 320,000 migrant children who crossed the border without parents, according to a shocking new report.”

Jillian Becker   August 26, 2024

The Sickness Unto Death is the title of a book by the nineteenth century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855).* He diagnosed the sickness as despair – the despair of individuals. An individual despairing of himself is sick with a psychological disease. “Psychological” is the author’s word for it. Kierkegaard was a Protestant Christian – but opposed to the established Lutheran church of Denmark – and the cure he prescribed was Christian faith.

In the twentieth century the French writer Jean Raspail (1925-2020) published a novel titled The Camp of the Saints. The story diagnoses guilt as the lethal sickness of the pan-European community called the West. Its guilt is a political disease, making it impotent and moribund. Raspail was a Catholic – but angry with the Catholic Church – and the cure he prescribed was Christian faith.

In May 2023, First Things published an article by Nathan Pinkoski on The Camp of the Saints. These are extracts from it:

The most important dystopian novel of the second half of the [20th] century is Jean Raspail’s Le Camp des Saints (The Camp of the Saints, 1973). Its central plotline concerns an armada that transports one million migrants from India to the shores of France. It’s an invasion, an occupation of the Global North by the Global South. As the migrants land, France is thrown into chaos, along with the rest of Europe, and Western civilization dies.

Yet The Camp of the Saints is not a disaster novel. The book’s significance does not hinge on whether Raspail was correct to predict mass immigration or describe it in catastrophic terms. Rather, the novel’s genius lies in the depiction of an apocalypse in the original sense of that term. Properly translated, apocalypse is rendered as revelation, disclosure, literally an “uncovering.” The Camp of the Saints unveils the perverse logic that pervades late Western civilization, and throws into sharp relief the nihilism of guilt whereby the West welcomes its own destruction. …

Raspail will not allow the migrants to be idealized. Throughout the novel, he emphasizes their vulgarity by providing lengthy descriptions of their crudeness, sexual promiscuity, and repellent hygiene. … [T]he migrants are materially and culturally destitute. That is why they find the West attractive. They do not have a mission to redeem sinful Europe; they are seeking deliverance from poverty and from the sometimes-brutal oppression and inequalities of non-Western cultures.

They will not obtain what they seek. In discussing what to do about the armada, the French authorities persuade themselves of their own ­illegitimacy. At the climax of the novel, the French president delivers an emergency speech meant to authorize the use of military force against the migrants and prevent them from landing. But he ­cannot bring himself to deliver the order. France will not defend itself. When the migrants alight from their boats and wade ashore, the West has already capitulated.

European governments fall as the migrants arrive, and European citizens withdraw from public life. Civil society collapses; as a result, the migrants enjoy no real improvement in their condition. They bring their bad rulers with them, replacing European regimes with the very regimes they have fled. ­Dictator-generals and Brahmins take up positions in French government, ruling as they did in their own lands. The migrants and their supporters do not “include” the Rest into the West. They expand the scope of the Third World, and wretchedness goes global. The purported blessing of the arrival of the wretched, so cherished by progressive voices in the novel, does not come about. What emerges is not a particularly harsh despotism—there is only the occasional boot stomping on the human face—but the pain of the survivors is great, because of their vivid memories of what they have lost. …

The left-wing intelligentsia herald the coming of the migrants as the dawn of a new age of multiculturalism, but they stoke a media frenzy and deploy the tools of cancel culture against those who demur, ostracizing or punishing them. …

Raspail is unsparing in his depiction of the betrayals urged by left-wing intellectuals, but he reserves his most scathing passages for the treason of the Catholic Church. In the novel, the previous pope has sold the treasures of the Vatican in a failed bid to win the approval of the Third World. The sitting pope, a Latin American, spends his time flying around on humanitarian missions and selling off whatever Vatican assets remain. He sees himself as a champion of the Third World. As the migrants arrive and the native French abandon their lands, priests go down to the beaches to cry, “Thank God!” They turn their backs on their countrymen, imagining they see Christ in the migrants.

In Raspail’s telling, Catholic Christianity has for some time been in thrall to humanitarian universalism. The novel satirizes a left-liberal Catholicism that disdains national and civilizational particularity and renders the faith indistinguishable from the moral universalism of non-believers. Under the banner of “charity, solidarity, and universal conscience”, progressive clerics abandon their neighbors for the sake of the stranger. They practice the religion of humanity, a Christian heresy …

The First World must be taught to be ashamed of itself, to believe that its death will be its greatest gift to the future of humanity. The new civic liturgy of Western nations must express submission to the morally superior non-Western “other”. Those in the West need to be trained to take the knee …

Again and again in the novel, cowardice and self-hatred are masked and moderated by the conviction that mass immigration into Europe and the deconstruction of European identity will somehow take away the sins of the West. But Raspail knows the truth: Third World immigrants do not have the power to deliver Europeans from their sense of worthlessness. Once one embraces the logic of civilizational repudiation, the endpoint is nihilism and cultural death. …

The West is responsible for its own fate. Raspail is right. God will not deliver us from the consequences of our guilty self-­hatred. It is up to us to decide whether we will reject […] atonement through occupation and turn instead to the Lord.

Contrary to Pinkoski’s opinion, ours is that the really interesting thing about The Camp 0f the Saints is the accuracy of its prediction of what is happening in the 21st century: the non-violent invasion of the First World by a vast number of immigrants from the Third World; the failure of First World Governments to prevent it or turn it back; the sabotaging reaction to it of leftist intellectuals; clerics of the great churches – the Catholic priests following the lead of a Latin American pope –  passionately encouraging the shattering, the befouling, the abandonment of Western civilization.

What accounts for the capitulation of the rich and mighty law-governed civilized West to poor, weak, ignorant hordes from (in our case) the dark continent of Africa, corrupt republics of Latin America, cruel khanates of the Middle and Far East, hellholes of vicious Communist dictators?

Pinkoski declares, in apparent agreement with Raspail, that the big mistake which allows such a fatal tragedy to happen, is the embrace by Western political, intellectual, and religious leaders of  a “perverse logic” that “throws into sharp  relief the nihilism of guilt”.  The guilt is for Europe’s erstwhile imperialism, its colonizing and alleged oppressive exploitation of Third World countries. It arises, even in “Catholic Christianity”, out of an enchantment with  “humanitarian universalism”. That, Pinkoski tells us, is a “religion of humanity” and “a Christian heresy”.

The expression “humanitarian universalism” is no doubt intended to imply Marxism, but also more than that: global brotherhood, the family of man, humanism; an ideology of moral values, but essentially secular, and so “heretical” because it omits God. To the Christian mind, such an ideology is invalid because morals can only be decreed by God.

In reality, humanism, which purports to be concerned with individuals, is a very unlikely source of guilt and shame for a communal “sin”. The “sin” in this story is so bad that it calls for extreme punishment – nothing less than the destruction of our entire civilization, the peak achievement of humankind. The notion that humanism, or “humanitarianism”, is the source of such a shame could only arise in the religious mind – a mind furnished with inherited antiques: sin, guilt, atonement, penance, redemption through suffering, subordination of one’s own interests, apocalypse. And only one Western religion demands atonement by self-abasement, self-sacrifice, annihilation of achievement, willing submission to suffering.

Humanism began its resurrection with the anthropocentrism of  the Renaissance, and rose to its full height when Reason dethroned Faith at last in the Enlightenment. After a millennium of Christian oppression, Reason set Western man free to think, explore, experiment, discover, invent, hypothesize, be right and wrong; and be free to choose law instead of mystic revelation as a setter of ethical rules. (It is unfortunate – worse, it is disastrous – that most humanists have by now embraced the secular religion of socialism which again is inimical to freedom.)

The Enlightenment broke the power of the churches to terrify and oppress, but it did not change the essence of Christianity, which is masochistic. Doctrinally self-accusing. An ideology of  guilt, shame, abasement, and morbid reverence for martyrdom. For as long as its institutions were  powerful enough, it was an oppressive, torturing, property-confiscating, murdering tyranny; as totalitarian as it could be in the ages in which it ruled – no matter whether in the name of Catholicism or Protestantism. The secular heir to its tyranny is Marxism-Leninism-Maoism-Wokeism – no matter which of those labels it wears.

Christian faith, far from being the cure for the West’s sickness unto death, is its cause.

***

*Kierkegaard’s works are fascinating and often intentionally funny. He was witty and dryly humorous. His wit and humor are on fullest display in his book Either/Or.

The naked human.

That’s the Great Idea of Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive President of the World Economic Forum, would-be Architect of the future of humankind which he describes as the Great Reset.

The richest people on earth fly their private jets up, up, to Davos on its alp. There among the clouds they dream together of how beautiful it will be when no one except themselves owns anything.

It is a dream of global totalitarian Communism with them and their heirs in power over everyone else forever.

They promise the rest of us:

“You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy.”

“And if you dare not to be happy, we will exterminate you. Resistance is futile.”

You will be assigned food, drink, clothes, bed, transport, schooling, job, duties, leisure, sex sessions (diverse, inclusive, and equitable), health care, vacation, friends, entertainment, opinions, values, death.

Of what type, they will decide. By means of algorithms.

In my prescient book L: A Novel History (first published 2005, new edition 2012), I describe what happens when a totalitarian Communist regime – led by the eponymous hero L – that has come to power in England in the 1980s, brings about, as it must, the day when there is nothing for people to own or to eat.

Here are some passages from it:

To help us learn what many citizens must have felt at that moment when civil life broke down, we have this recollection by a tobacconist and newsagent, a Mr Bruce Waughs, a staunch Conservative by his own account, who had run his own small shop in Brixton until the revolution, and then carried on working in it when it was expropriated like all other businesses big and small, as a licensed distributor of the RED TIMES. It tells what is surely a most surprising anecdote.

My wife Stella appeared at the door, and she just stood there, looking at me with her eyes wide open and saying nothing, like someone who had just seen something happen that could not happen. I said, “What is it?” And she said, “There’s nothing! Nothing to eat. Everything’s just stopped.” It took some time for me to get the story out of her. When I did it took me even longer to grasp what it meant. Then I walked out of the shop, shut the door behind me, and was about to lock it, when Stella said, “What are you doing that for? Who are you going to lock it against?” And then it really came home to me. Well, I pushed the door open again and left it gaping wide, and I took her hand – something I hadn’t done for years − and we started walking along the street. And suddenly I felt − terribly, terribly happy. I can’t explain it. I can only say that I had never felt so happy in my whole life, not even when I was a child. And at that moment I looked at Stella, and she looked at me, and we began to laugh, and we couldn’t stop, we walked along the street laughing and laughing, and then we joined hands and began to dance, skipping round, like children, and if anybody had asked us what we were laughing at we couldn’t for the life of us have told them, not then. And all at once we weren’t alone, not alone in the street and not alone in our happiness, there were others, several others, many others, and then hundreds of others, the streets were full, and everyone was laughing, and dancing, we had seen nothing like it since the day we stood outside Buckingham Palace in July 1981 and cheered the Prince of Wales and his bride. And that was the same month our shop had been broken into and our stock looted by a mob in a riot, and Stella had cried. And I think the royal wedding had been a tonic for us, and Stella felt much better afterwards. But now what were we celebrating? The moment when we knew we might starve? It was only afterwards I could put a name to that feeling. Freedom. Somehow, in the twinkling of an eye, we had been set free. Free of what, you might say, when we were living under a tyranny, and had no notion of how we were going to go on living at all. Exactly. It was irrational. But somehow it happened. It wasn’t just having no more living to earn, no more mortgage to pay, no more bills, no more saving and budgeting, no more being told how much better Stella’s brother was doing with his furniture stores and garages than I was with my corner shop – all those sorts of worries had been lifted one by one when the revolution came eight months before, and other worries had come to replace them, heavier too, by far. Worries about the grandchildren and were they getting enough to eat, and about Stella’s mother who not only had her teeth taken away but even her wheelchair so that she just stayed indoors and we had to carry her from the bed to the chair and back again, and generally worries about whether life would ever again be comfortable and pleasant – as it had been when we had only the mortgage and things like that to worry about. And so what kind of happiness was this, what kind of freedom was it? I can tell you now – it was freedom from hope! Stella and I and all those other people made a strange discovery that day. We discovered that when you truly despair − there’s nothing to do but laugh.

It is perfectly true that on that day many people danced in the street. The New Police, mounted and on foot, descended on crowds wherever they found them, and broke them apart and sent them home. They rode or marched up, thinking that these must be the beginnings of the first genuine and justified demonstrations against a government since the 1930s, after all these years, even before the revolution, of groups playing at protest, playing at suffering, playing at reaction to pretended oppression and pretended deprivation. And the New Police were themselves so surprised at the carnival mood they found in borough after borough, that they were caught by the television cameras smiling, chatting to people in a friendly way, as they asked rather than ordered them to get off the streets. …

Bruce Waughs, the man who had laughed the day civilization stopped, was to write, in after years, this evaluation of L’s “precious gift of anarchy and dissolution”:

I soon enough found that this was not “freedom” after all. It was the extremest form of slavery – slavery of your entire being to the labour of keeping alive, supplying the simplest and most fundamental needs of life, exhausting the body and soul to keep body and soul together, in constant fear of starvation, dread of your fellow man, and a desperate urge to seize and devour whatever you can, by whatever means. For a hunk of meat you would happily kill any man or woman who stood in your way. We descended lower than savages. We became beasts.

*

Citizens’ lives had been getting increasingly difficult for some time before the day of hunger arrived.

At first the Winsomes had rejoiced in the revolution. It was what they had hoped for, worked for, and, as long as they could, voted for. “I don’t mind not owning my own house if nobody else does,” Ted Winsome had written cheerfully in his Revolution Issue of the NEW WORKER* (which came out six weeks after Republic Day, as his paper, like most others, had been ordered to suspend publication until all newspapers that were to continue had been nationalized, and permits granted to their editors). Had not his wife, in her capacity as Housing Committee chairperson on Islington Borough Council set an example, by compulsorily purchasing more private houses for local government ownership than anyone before or after her (until the revolution made purchase unnecessary)? He was proud that she had been an active pioneer, one of the avant-garde of the socialist revolution.

However, he was less pleased when three families were quartered in his house. And then another was sent by the Chief Social Worker (a sort of district commandant) when his own children, delighted to drop out of school, had left home to join a WSP [Workers Socialist Party] group and vent righteous indignation on landlords, capitalists, individualists, racists and speculators. All of his fellow lodgers were, in his view, “problem-families” – drunken, noisy, filthy, careless, inconsiderate and rude. (“That,” said the Gauleiter, “is why they were chased out of their last lodgings by angry co-residents on a former Council estate.” She had thought the Winsomes would be “more tolerant”.) Before he could hand over his stereophonic record-player to the local community centre – as he assured those he complained to that he had fully intended to do – one of the problem-children broke it, threw his classical records away, and also deliberately smashed his high-speed Japanese camera. His furniture was soon broken too. Precious antiques which he had restored with his own hands in hours of patient labour, were treated like fruit-boxes, to be stood on, and spilt on, and thrown about. When cups and glasses were smashed, it was he who had to replace them if he was to have anything to eat or drink out of; which meant recourse to the black market, against which he had so often fulminated in his editorials in the NEW WORKER. He started hiding things away in his room, taking special care to keep his carpentry and joinery tools from the hands of those who would not understand how he had cared for them, valued them, kept them sharp, adapted some of them to his particular needs. One of the problem-fathers accused him of “hoarding private property”, and threatened to go to the New Police with the complaint, or call in “some RI people” [Righteous Indignation – a violent Antifa-type group].

He confided to a woman journalist at his office how he had begun to suspect that “when a thing belongs to everybody, it belongs to nobody”. And he even went so far as to suggest that “as people only vandalize things they don’t own themselves, there is something to be said for private ownership after all”.

*

All industry failed after a few months of central communist management.

The bewildering fact was that the first country in the world to have become industrialized, the very home of the Industrial Revolution, the country which had once led the world in manufacturing industry, the erstwhile hub of the greatest empire in history, had become one of the poorest states in the world; a people surrounded not by wild tracts of unused land, with isolated constructions which signify the first frantic efforts to build mills, factories and mines in undeveloped countries, but by the decaying ruins of industrial might, of mills and mines and factories fallen into disuse and decay, rusting machinery, the vast wreckage of a once great industrial civilization, dilapidated monuments of human ingenuity and at the same time to human idiocy; acres of towns and cities deserted, tumbling into rubble, and all this devastation brought about not by war, not by any external enemy, but by a faction among the people treacherous out of intellectual blindness, guilty of a shallow moralistic idealism and economic folly; of a desire to be good, and a failure to be intelligent.

For it was those who had freedom and decried it, pretending they were oppressed; those who had material plenty and despised it, pretending they were poor; those who thus secreted a worm in their own hearts, and so at the heart of civilization – envy: the amazing unforeseen and unforeseeable envy, by the free and comfortable,  of the unfree and wretched of the earth: it was these self-deceiving, would-be lovers of mankind, the Ted and Marjorie Winsomes, the affluent children who squatted in the communes and protested against freedom calling it “repressive tolerance”, and those they elected, who were caught in the trap of their own lies, and brought an end to liberty in the name of liberation; an end to plenty in the name of humanitarianism; and an end to the impersonality of the law before which all were equal, and the impersonality of the market in which all were equal, and created legal discrimination and class elitism, in the name of equality.

Jillian Becker   October 12, 2021

(From New English Review, November 2022)

It is not easy to make out what Slavoj Zizek means to say. While he comments interminably on everything under the sun, he is barely intelligible. Yet, paradoxically, it is he who makes plain what we urgently need to know about our bewildering and frightening world: that our world is meant to be bewildering and frightening.

At home in Slovenia, where he lives on state welfare support, he is no more than a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana’s Institute of Sociology, but further west he is more highly valued. He is a professor at the European Graduate School and international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London. Despite the extreme hostility he expresses towards the United States—or because of it—he is Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University and has been a visiting professor at Princeton and numerous other American universities including Chicago, Columbia, Minnesota, Michigan, and UC Irvine. His many prestigious appointments, TV and speaker engagements must bring him a respectable income, but it is apparently not enough for quality replacements of the slovenly T-shirts he habitually wears and continually tweaks and plucks as if for relief from discomfort.

He ran for the presidency of Slovenia in 1990, unsuccessfully. He does not, however, need to be active as a politician to have a political effect. He is one of those intellectuals whose pernicious influence on fellow academics, and consequently on rising generations of students, do profound harm by denigrating freedom and commending tyranny. Typically, he derives pleasure from rebelling and shocking, in the irresponsible spirit of adolescence, though he is now seventy-three years old. His fans applaud him with the hideous glee of spoilt children. He is the darling of television chat shows and organs of the left such as The Guardian newspaper and the New Yorker. A characteristic “look at me how daring I am” statement he made on TV in New York was: “Everybody in the world except US citizens should be allowed to elect the American government.”

In the style of the enfant terrible, he likes to shock by inverting conventional values. What to most of us is good he denounces as bad, what is abhorred he praises as good. This, to his admirers, proves him witty, brave, original and profound. What he really is, is an intellectual clown, partly by intention (he does have a sense of humor) but compulsively anyway because that is his nature. He is uncouth, uncivil—again most likely by both will and character. “Do you want some f*cking  fruit-juice?” he asks an interviewer in a video.

When he appears personally before an audience or a camera he is entertaining, even fascinating. He creates an atmosphere of excitement and drama, which makes him a popular participant in panel discussions. He waffles and rambles with magisterial conviction. The word “precisely” crops up repeatedly in his imprecise statements like a decorative motif. He gestures, he snuffles; he swipes and pulls his nose again and again as if it is from there that he derives his ideas and it is his nose that is the paradigmatic philosopher of the age. Audiences are charmed, so they allow him his arrogance, his show-off iconoclasm.

When he is read rather than watched and heard, his reckless assertions are less likely to be indulged—if they can be deciphered. He writes in the customary opaque language of the left. For example: “To put it simply [sic]: If we make an abstraction, if we subtract all the richness of the different modes of subjectivization, all the fullness of experience present in the way individuals are ‘living’ their subject-positions, what remains is an empty place which was filled with this richness; this original void, this lack of symbolic structure, is the subject.” [1]

The only meaning I can extract from this is that if you take everything out of something, it will be empty. For this we need a philosopher?

He declares himself to be a communist. His heroes are Marx, Hegel, and Lenin. He acknowledges the intellectual influence of Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault. Their repulsive ideas, enthusiastically endorsed and handed on by academics in America, were given a new lease of life by late-comer Zizek, whose country had been sleeping for decades under the spell of communism. Most East Europeans woke happily in the dawn of freedom after the fall of the Soviet Union, and many of them brought new vigor to the decadent spirit of the West. But here comes one who lived under the oppression of communism and yet is nostalgic for it; who idealizes cruelty and suffering; who abominates freedom—while making use of it to build a lucrative reputation as its implacable enemy.

His stardom among leftist academic peers is due to his wishing even worse evils upon us than did Lacan, whose psychoanalytic therapy consisted of trying to drive his patients insane; or Foucault, who wrote of “the joy of torture,” longed to carry out human sacrifice, and taught that cruelty should be a perpetual condition of existence, so that life would be the experience of unmitigated pain, hate and aggression. Zizek praises extreme sadism, terrorism, motiveless murder, and delights in crime. Only crime, he declares, is “authentically ethical” because it subverts the coercion of law. He revels in the suffering of other people, so the more horrific the crime is, the more pleasure it gives him. He adores suicide bombing. He loved the planes crashing into the Twin Towers on 9/11; they gave him an aesthetic thrill. America he calls “the enemy.” Anyone—any state, any terrorist, any traitor—who acts against America is laudable. (While he maintains that torture is good, he reviles the American soldiers who—he says—tortured Iraqi military prisoners at Abu Ghraib.) He wants all people everywhere to live in fearful obedience to totalitarian despotism. Voluntary subordination to an “authentic Leader,” he preaches, is “the highest act of freedom.” [2] So if you are free, the best use you can make of your freedom is to choose to be unfree.

Most political philosophers on the left now perceive Western civilization not as a protector of liberty but as a patriarchal tyranny. They want us to believe that they are humane revolutionaries; that the subversion they applaud, the insurrection they encourage, the injustice they excuse, are to liberate the wretched of the earth: the enslaved, the oppressed, the poor, the colonized, the dispossessed, the persecuted; slaves, workers, women, lunatics, prisoners, aborigines … They want us to trust that they are striving for the eventual freedom, prosperity and happiness of the entire human race; that their apparent heartlessness is disguised compassion. Schools and universities teach their ideology with its utopian claim, and generations grow up believing in it. So Europe lets itself be invaded by Islam; the Biden administration permits black racists and their white abettors to riot and burn and murder in American cities for months on end; the Greens impose impoverishing conditions; universities oppose free speech.

Slavoj Zizek neither offers nor predicts utopia. He is volubly against freedom, prosperity, and happiness. He wants us all to be in perpetual anguish. He wants us to be in chains. He propounds atrocious ideals of subjugation and suffering without end. And the universities embrace him for it.

“Don’t take him seriously. You know he is a clown. He doesn’t really mean it,” his apologists may say. But we must take him seriously, because Zizek the Clown is the spokesman of our ruin.

Notes

[1] The Sublime Object of Ideology by Slavoj Zizek, Verso, London 1989, pp.174-175
[2] Did Somebody say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions on the (Mis)use of a Notion by Slavoj Zizek, Verso, London 2001, pp.246-247

Jillian Becker

The radical Ethnic Studies addition to Minnesota’s proposed social studies standards encourages students to disrupt and dismantle America’s fundamental institutions.

Katherine Kersten writes at American Experiment about public education in Minnesota becoming nothing more than Marxist indoctrination, and how it is a model for the whole of America. (We quote a large part of her article, but recommend that it be read in full.)

Minnesota’s proposed new social studies standards have sparked controversy since the first draft was released in December 2020. What’s grabbed public attention in the final draft, now in the rule-making process, is Ethnic Studies. The Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) has added this highly politicized “fifth strand” — unauthorized by statute — to the four content areas named in law: history, government and citizenship, geography and economics.

The inclusion of Ethnic Studies marks a victory for forces seeking to radically remake Minnesota’s public schools. Ethnic Studies goes beyond the standard “anti-racist” Critical Race Theory (CRT) focus, especially in its stress on student political activism: “disrupting”, “dismantling” and “transforming” our nation’s fundamental institutions. It imports the whole ideological thought world from which CRT sprang, and serves as a vector for the activist network that is driving it nationally.

In short, Ethnic Studies is the spider at the center of the web that MDE is spinning.

How did this extremist ideology — born of the “Third World Liberation Front” that grew out of the 1968 student strikes and riots in California — make its way from San Francisco and Berkeley to elementary classrooms in Litchfield and Faribault, Minnesota?

It’s a scandalous story. When MDE appointed the standards drafting committee, it took the unprecedented step of excluding academic subject matter experts in history, civics, geography and economics. Instead, it stacked the committee with political activists, community organizers and their allies, who dominated the process.

These activists’ goal was not to revise and improve “rigorous standards” in “core academic subjects” in our state’s K-12 public schools, as law requires. On the contrary, they view Minnesota’s public education system … as a “white supremacist puzzle that must be taken apart and exposed for the lie it is”. 

Activists’ weapon of choice in taking our schools apart is Ethnic Studies. Forget about teaching students about the historical leaders and events that shaped our democracy, like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and America-led victories in World War II. MDE’s new “fifth strand” trains K-12 students to view our nation’s social and political institutions with suspicion and hostility and seeks to enlist them in … a “political struggle” to change the social, economic, and cultural system that underlies our polity.

When the Minnesota Legislature adopted our state’s social studies standards in 2004, it authorized MDE to revise them every 10 years to “raise academic expectations for students, teachers and schools”. By law, state standards must be both “objective” and “measurable”, and “consistent with” the U.S. and Minnesota Constitutions.

But MDE’s proposed standards fail on all these fronts. Under the new Ethnic Studies standards, one of which is entitled “Resistance”, for example, students are instructed to “organize” to resist America’s “systemic and coordinated exercises of power against marginalized”oppressed groups”.

How will this play out in Minnesota’s classrooms? Here’s an example: Students will study our police departments and justice system in connection with an Ethnic Studies standard that requires them to “understand the roots of contemporary systems of oppression” and “eliminate injustices”.

To this end, fifth graders will first “examine contemporary policing” and its alleged “historical roots in early America”.  The claim is that our police departments sprang directly from slave patrols of the Old South.

Sixth graders will describe the “impact of Minnesota’s juvenile justice system” on “historically disenfranchised groups”. High school standards suggest the notion of criminality itself is racist: “explore how criminality is constructed and what makes a person a criminal.”

Biased, misleading instruction of this kind will likely convince many young people that policing and the very idea of criminality are oppressive, racially “constructed” and among the many things schools are instructing them to “resist”. …

The campaign to highjack the revision of Minnesota’s social studies standards may look homegrown, but it is nothing of the kind. EdLib MN [Education for Liberation Minnesota] is a state chapter — indeed the only state chapter — of a national extremist organization called the Education for Liberation Network.

The EdLib Network makes no secret of its revolutionary agenda: to dismantle and replace America’s fundamental institutions. Or in its own words, it “promotes the transformation of existing institutions and the creation of new ones that reflect the values of Education for Liberation”.  The network’s strategy to achieve this objective is “wholesale K-16 implementation” of Ethnic Studies in schools across the nation.

Two 20th-century Marxist thinkers, Paulo Freire and Antonio Gramsci, are central to the Ed Lib Network’s worldview. …

The name and concept of “Education for Liberation” are drawn from the ideology of Brazilian Paulo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published in 1968. Freire maintained that education’s purpose is not to pass on knowledge, but to build revolutionary consciousness among the “oppressed” to achieve “liberation” by overthrowing the system. For decades, his book has been one of the most widely assigned texts in many colleges of education.

Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Communist [a founder of the Italian Communist Party – ed) has been called the godfather of cultural Marxism. … He proposed that activists infiltrate and gain control of key institutions of civil society, like schools and political parties, to shape a new ideological consensus and organize opposition to the existing social order. This strategy has become known as “the long march through the institutions“.

According to its website, the EdLib Network has worked since 2012 to promote Ethnic Studies in California, the epicenter of the movement. In March 2021, California’s board of education approved the state’s new Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum.

The model curriculum’s “guiding principles” call for “transformative resistance” and repudiate “forms of power and oppression” that include “cisheteropatriarchy” and “anthropocentrism” (the belief that human beings are superior to animals). The curriculum originally incorporated student chants to bloodthirsty Aztec gods, but recently dropped these following a legal settlement.

Now the EdLib Network is going state-by-state, “building power from the ground up” and creating “regional assemblies” to help “educators and grassroots organizers to implement Ethnic Studies in their own communities”.  …

The curriculum begins by declaring its support for political revolution: “System changes occur when people unite, mobilize and organize in coordinated resistance to disrupt and dismantle inequitable systems.”  

Lessons are saturated with the concepts and lingo of Antonio Gramsci’s Marxist ideology. Starting in pre-K, for example, students are taught to reject “normalization”. Older students are repeatedly instructed to question “common sense” and refuse to “consent” to “hegemony”— i.e. the power “white men use to dominate others”. In grades 7-12 lessons, Gramsci is invoked by name. “We need to understand common sense the way that Antonio Gramsci, an Italian philosopher, understood it,” students are told. They are asked, “What hegemonic beliefs do you plan to disrupt?” and assigned to “create counter-hegemonic stories.”

Throughout, instruction is cult-like and highly manipulative, and the pressure to conform is overwhelming. Elementary pupils are assigned to rewrite popular songs to reflect Ethnic Studies ideology, and to recite Gramsci’s ideological tenets in “choral readings”.  Overall, these mind-numbing lessons conjure images of youthful Red Guards being groomed for China’s Cultural Revolution. …

The new field of “Ethnomathematics” teaches that math began in ancient “empires of color”, was appropriated by the West to oppress BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color), and should be taught, in part, through racial and ethnic storytelling. In science class … students may study Ojibwe architecture.

[In Minnesota] legislative proposals [include] one bill that would require MDE to establish an Ethnic Studies Task Force, with “input” from the Minnesota Ethnic Studies Coalition. This task force would be charged with developing K-12 Ethnic Studies standards in a range of subject areas, which MDE (the Minnesota Department of Education] would be required by law to adopt and to do so using an expedited process allowing minimal public input. …

Meanwhile, many young people — especially minority children — lack the basics in history, reading, science and math, as class time spent on fundamental knowledge shifts to indoctrination in extremist ideology.

Brave parents are stepping up to demand that our schools be returned to the people of Minnesota. But so far others — including the business community, civic organizations, and school boards and administrators — have been silent. Unless we all raise our voices, our state’s and our children’s futures will soon be in the hands of forces determined to transform our nation beyond recognition.

Will America allow Communism to win the Cold War after all?

Has it already won?

See and hear the most dangerous person in the world – next to the senile crook who has nominated her for a position of power to ruin us all.

Listen, if you can bear it, to the unintelligible language in which Stalinists talk  – or grunt – to each other. The woman in specs who keeps saying “Right?” is “President” Biden’s pick for chief organizer of your financial ruin:

Breitbart reports:

Saule Omarova, President Joe Biden’s [Stalinist] nominee for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), called during a March 2021 virtual conference TO ELIMINATE ALL PRIVATE BANK ACCOUNTS AND DEPOSITS. 

Omarova spoke at the Law and Political Economy (LPE) Project’s “Law & Political Economy: Democracy Beyond Neoliberalism” conference in March.

Omarova discussed one of her papers, “The People’s Ledger How to Democratize Money and Finance the Economy,” which would help “redesign” the financial system and make the economy “more equitable for everyone.”

She said it would change the “private-public power balance” and democratize finance to a more systemic level.

During her explanation of her paper, she said that the Federal Reserve, the nation’s central bank, can only use “indirect levers” to “induce private banks to increase their lending”.

Her paper calls for eliminating all banks and transferring all bank deposits to “FedAccounts” at the Federal Reserve.

During her conference speech, she said, “There will be no more private bank accounts, and all of the deposit accounts will be held directly at the Fed”.

Only the thugs in power will have control of their own enormous fortunes acquired by robbing the people.

A former senior government official told Breitbart News that if the Senate were to confirm Omarova, she would have the “most powerful, least accountable” position over America’s banking system.

When talking about FedAccounts, the former senior government official said, “The Democratic Party over the last couple of administrations, they want the government to essentially take over a lot of financial functions from banks.”

Here’s the typical Lefty gobbledygook that “explains” their intention:

The LPE serves as a platform to discuss the role of law and legal discourse in the creation and maintenance of capitalism and in mediating tensions between capitalist order and democratic self-rule. Scholars in our network work to understand the relationship between market supremacy and  racial, gender, and economic injustice; to articulate the relationship between capitalism and devaluation of social and ecological reproduction; and to explore the distinctive ways that law gives shape to and legitimates neoliberal capitalism, ranging from dynamics of financialization to the relation between the carceral state and capitalism. We also seek to offer concrete legal reforms designed to move beyond neoliberalism and toward a genuinely responsive, egalitarian democracy, with critical attention to the need for power and movement-building as part of any such transformation. 

At least there is this:

Omarova’s radical views led to 21 state financial officers calling for Biden to withdraw Omarova’s nomination for the U.S. comptroller. 

[Some] Republicans have already moved to oppose Omarova’s nomination.

Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) said Omarova’s support of Communist ideals” disqualifies her for the position.

“Republicans will overwhelmingly oppose this self-described radical,” Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) told Axios.

Why did this Russian hellcat come to live in America? Not to be free but to work to make America unfree.

The time has come for total dedicated single-minded opposition.

To pay any price now for freedom.

*

Update December 7, 2021: Good news. Saule Omarova is no longer an imminent danger to the human race. The “Biden” administration has withdrawn her nomination.

L: A Novel History is an easy and stimulating read for anyone who is interested in politics and the condition of government oppression prevailing now in almost every country in the West and its sphere of influence.

You may be astonished at how closely the story – though set in another country at another time – reflects what is happening now in America.      

Terrible crimes are committed. But criminals are not punished – only those are arrested and tried who dare to express opinions not sanctioned by the regime, or are critical of it.

From mid-December 1987, for the duration of the regime there were no criminal trials held except for “political crimes” (which were often televised). Theft and burglary were no longer considered possible, as all goods were held in common. This meant that those best able to defend what they gained possession of by whatever means, kept it.

As no one, except a political criminal, could be accused of having done something wrong, since guilt was collective, the vocabulary of the courts had to change. If the old police arrested a lone youth for a violent attack, and brought him before the court, they could not say that they had seen him mug, assault, rape or murder his victim; they could only say that he was “involved in a mugging situation”, “an assault situation”, “a rape situation”, “a murder situation”. This turn of phrase hinted that he was not an individual responsible for deciding to do a certain deed and carrying it out, but only one of a group – two people at least – who had been present when something had happened. The victim was as much “involved in the situation” as the attacker. The nature of the incident was “social”, its diagnosis “anti-social behaviour”, its remedy lay in more group participation, the method of  remedy was counselling.

Judges and magistrates were abolished in January 1988. All political trials, as well as all “enquiries” − the name given to civil and “old crime” trials − were heard by a jury. The highest court of appeal was the Council. Top Party officials had direct access to the Council for an “enquiry”. Both prosecuting and defending counsel were appointed by the state. For all important trials they were chosen from among the few dozen members of the League of Leftwing Lawyers. This, the League asserted, helped to guarantee “genuinely unbiased judgment”.

What judges were expected to do was “manifest heart”. The important thing in what had once been called a criminal case was to “arrive at an understanding of the quality of the man” they were judging. If the pursuit of his own ends were perceived to be more important to him than “co-operation with the community”, he was “suffering from a condition of false consciousness” and must be sent to a psychiatric hospital for as long as it took to cure him. Many − the incurable − never returned. Defendants quickly learned to claim motives of the politically-moral kind that the BBC had been drumming into its listeners for years: “I wanted to help the young / old / handicapped”; “I heard this person make a racist / sexist / ageist / faithist remark”, and so on. It was a variation  of the “righteous indignation” ennoblement of violent deeds, held as the highest principle of justice by the state itself. Whether the explanation was accepted or not depended mainly on the political status of the defendant. If he was a “special reservist” of the New Police, he would be acquitted. If he was an official of a trade union, he stood a good chance of acquittal. If he was a member of the Party, he was almost certain to be revealed as a benefactor of society.

In a civil case the rule was that wherever the litigants derived from different classes, the “underdog” had the “right to justice”. …

*

L insists:

The issue of race is the most important moral issue confronting us.

*

Early in his reign, L emptied the lunatic asylums and hospitals of mental cases, even before he emptied the prisons of criminals condemned in “the last era”. Henceforth the only madness − or crime – was opposition to, dissent from, criticism of communism and the regime: or so it was officially. In actuality many of the former inmates were returned to the wards and cells.

In televised and broadcast speeches delivered by various of the Ministers but written by L, it was frequently explained that madness was simply the clear manifestation of alienation, for which capitalism was responsible. Now that capitalism was abolished, and society was “being treated” and “undergoing therapy”, “true madness”, which is false consciousness, would disappear. And that state of “heightened awareness” which used to be called madness could be turned to creative purposes, for it was no longer needed as a “device of escape” from “the unbearable world of the male-dominated authoritarian family”. Self-healing from alienation and false consciousness was easy enough. One had only to “give oneself wholly to the power and the glory of the new order, become part of it without any reservation, without the least atom of the old self being held back: to choose it because there was no other way to free oneself from the torturing blinding crippling responsibility of choice.” The “victims had become the masters.” The cause of the old mental maladjustments had been cured by the revolution. And L announced the appointment of erstwhile patients to positions of authority in the “mental hospital” prisons, in schools, civil administration and the law-courts, which “proved his faith” in their “essential sanity”.

*

L wrote in one of the permitted newspapers:

In this country the masses do not choose opulence for themselves in a world of poverty. A man with a social conscience wants the happiness of knowing that he consumes no more than his neighbour consumes. This is moral beauty. If its appearance upsets a visitor from the cruellest nation on earth, a nation of capitalists, exploiters, imperialists and racists, then we shall make no apology for our preference for a log fire over central heating, for a little bread over a superfluity of luxury provisions. As socialists we shall continue to comprehensivize our schools. To take all land into public ownership. To employ every man and woman. Our aim must be to house them all, clothe them all, feed them all, teach them, heal them, organize their leisure. None shall be underprivileged, all shall be made equal. The underprivileged must be freed from all oppression, the oppression of being less lucky, less successful, less energetic or healthy than others. Positive discrimination will liberate women, youth, blacks. Especially the immigrants from those parts of the world which we exploited, raped, robbed and pillaged, who have come to share with us our greater good fortune must be liberated from their oppression. The first duty of the state is redistribution. There is no question of one man earning a reward greater than another. All must be balanced. If one man has a clean job, he must get less money than one who has a dirty job. The state must equalize with due regard not merely to externals but to inner feelings. There must be no prizes for one man to win who was better endowed by the accident of nature with stronger limbs or some fortuitous talent. No one can take credit for anything he does, and no one is to blame for anything he does. As Professor L teaches us, neither achievement nor guilt are individual. Society achieves, society is guilty. …. No man can decide his needs for himself. What he feels are wants and to indulge them is selfish, anti-social. But what others diagnose as his needs, those are his needs. And as his needs are shared with others, the problem of supply is a community problem. …. The state alone must be the source of the satisfaction of all needs. The state must give all, and command all. Nobody must suffer the pangs of doubt as to whether what he is doing is right or wrong. Everyone will have the pleasure of knowing that he is being used. That what he does is what he must do. That therefore he is necessary, and has purpose. And he will be saved too from any temptation to disobedience which could destroy his happiness. For what the state bestows, the state can withhold. He will belong to the state and the state to him, he will be attached to the state as a babe to its mother’s breast. Until the state gives him everything he is not free of purposelessness, he remains alienated, he longs for community and cannot find it. When the state gives him all he has, he will be ready for the last and final stage on earth, the stage of history for which all history has been preparing. He will not rebel. His need to rebel will be gone. But the state has first to conquer the rebel in him. And that it will do. For what the state gives, the state can take away. The state must put them in houses, bring them to school, tempt them with pensions, lure them with kindness. When all have been received inside the shelter of the state, and they know that there is nothing else outside the state, then they will be redeemable. What a harvest will then be promised of men and women for the New Age, the Third Millennium and beyond. But the process of redemption will not be as easy as the gathering-in. They have yet to learn that beyond their material needs there are others, which they have first to discover and then to understand and then to satisfy before they are fit for the absolute community of the human spirit wherein no individual shall have an existence outside of the community, and each will joyfully give up his life at any moment for the preservation of the Greater Life of Universal Man. ….

And –

L wrote in the weekly journal REALITY UPDATE:

There is a reactionary tendency among the working-classes, especially women, and even among blacks who have not yet organized around their own oppression, to try to maintain an anti-social and outdated institution, the Family, one of the chief sources of oppression to women and the young, as a centre of moral indoctrination and the kind of selfish inward-looking support-system which mitigates against the liberation of the community as a whole. The family is a reactionary institution, and only a reactionary will defend it. A radical involved in the struggle will be committed to opposing it as a major hindrance to liberation.

Children could be taken from foster-parents and is [soon after that]  from adoptive and even natural parents, by social workers (who had a statutory right of entry into every home), on the grounds that they were too happy!

But no one should  spend any part of their waking hours alone:

If someone kept to himself to write a book or compose a piece of music he was accused of  “extreme selfishness”.

And where did he get that musical instrument, that pen, that paper ? Did he formally apply for it? For how many hours of use? And who gave him permission to shut that door and take sole possession of that space?

*

There had never been such feast-days for spite. In the first week of the Red Republic three people died in the streets of London as a result of being assaulted by an L-ite “RI” (Righteous Indignation) group. No charges were brought against these “avengers of the people”, as the RED TIMES described them, and this immunity was a green light to other avengers. Over a hundred thousand people were “executed” by RI mobs in the fifteen months of the interregnum.

*

Read it if you love liberty. It will not disappoint you.

Jillian Becker    October 14, 2021

The naked human.

That’s the Great Idea of Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive President of the World Economic Forum, would-be Architect of the future of humankind which he describes as the Great Reset.

The richest people on earth fly their private jets up, up, to Davos on its alp. There among the clouds they dream together of how beautiful it will be when no one except themselves owns anything.

It is a dream of global totalitarian Communism with them and their heirs in power over everyone else forever.

They promise the rest of us:

“You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy.”

“And if you dare not to be happy, we will exterminate you. Resistance is futile.”

You will be assigned food, drink, clothes, bed, transport, schooling, job, duties, leisure, sex sessions (diverse, inclusive, and equitable), health care, vacation, friends, entertainment, opinions, values, death.

Of what type, they will decide. By means of algorithms.

In my prescient book L: A Novel History (first published 2005, new edition 2012), I describe what happens when a totalitarian Communist regime – led by the eponymous hero L – that has come to power in England in the 1980s, brings about, as it must, the day when there is nothing for people to own or to eat.

Here are some passages from it:

To help us learn what many citizens must have felt at that moment when civil life broke down, we have this recollection by a tobacconist and newsagent, a Mr Bruce Waughs, a staunch Conservative by his own account, who had run his own small shop in Brixton until the revolution, and then carried on working in it when it was expropriated like all other businesses big and small, as a licensed distributor of the RED TIMES. It tells what is surely a most surprising anecdote.

My wife Stella appeared at the door, and she just stood there, looking at me with her eyes wide open and saying nothing, like someone who had just seen something happen that could not happen. I said, “What is it?” And she said, “There’s nothing! Nothing to eat. Everything’s just stopped.” It took some time for me to get the story out of her. When I did it took me even longer to grasp what it meant. Then I walked out of the shop, shut the door behind me, and was about to lock it, when Stella said, “What are you doing that for? Who are you going to lock it against?” And then it really came home to me. Well, I pushed the door open again and left it gaping wide, and I took her hand – something I hadn’t done for years − and we started walking along the street. And suddenly I felt − terribly, terribly happy. I can’t explain it. I can only say that I had never felt so happy in my whole life, not even when I was a child. And at that moment I looked at Stella, and she looked at me, and we began to laugh, and we couldn’t stop, we walked along the street laughing and laughing, and then we joined hands and began to dance, skipping round, like children, and if anybody had asked us what we were laughing at we couldn’t for the life of us have told them, not then. And all at once we weren’t alone, not alone in the street and not alone in our happiness, there were others, several others, many others, and then hundreds of others, the streets were full, and everyone was laughing, and dancing, we had seen nothing like it since the day we stood outside Buckingham Palace in July 1981 and cheered the Prince of Wales and his bride. And that was the same month our shop had been broken into and our stock looted by a mob in a riot, and Stella had cried. And I think the royal wedding had been a tonic for us, and Stella felt much better afterwards. But now what were we celebrating? The moment when we knew we might starve? It was only afterwards I could put a name to that feeling. Freedom. Somehow, in the twinkling of an eye, we had been set free. Free of what, you might say, when we were living under a tyranny, and had no notion of how we were going to go on living at all. Exactly. It was irrational. But somehow it happened. It wasn’t just having no more living to earn, no more mortgage to pay, no more bills, no more saving and budgeting, no more being told how much better Stella’s brother was doing with his furniture stores and garages than I was with my corner shop – all those sorts of worries had been lifted one by one when the revolution came eight months before, and other worries had come to replace them, heavier too, by far. Worries about the grandchildren and were they getting enough to eat, and about Stella’s mother who not only had her teeth taken away but even her wheelchair so that she just stayed indoors and we had to carry her from the bed to the chair and back again, and generally worries about whether life would ever again be comfortable and pleasant – as it had been when we had only the mortgage and things like that to worry about. And so what kind of happiness was this, what kind of freedom was it? I can tell you now – it was freedom from hope! Stella and I and all those other people made a strange discovery that day. We discovered that when you truly despair − there’s nothing to do but laugh.

It is perfectly true that on that day many people danced in the street. The New Police, mounted and on foot, descended on crowds wherever they found them, and broke them apart and sent them home. They rode or marched up, thinking that these must be the beginnings of the first genuine and justified demonstrations against a government since the 1930s, after all these years, even before the revolution, of groups playing at protest, playing at suffering, playing at reaction to pretended oppression and pretended deprivation. And the New Police were themselves so surprised at the carnival mood they found in borough after borough, that they were caught by the television cameras smiling, chatting to people in a friendly way, as they asked rather than ordered them to get off the streets. …

Bruce Waughs, the man who had laughed the day civilization stopped, was to write, in after years, this evaluation of L’s “precious gift of anarchy and dissolution”:

I soon enough found that this was not “freedom” after all. It was the extremest form of slavery – slavery of your entire being to the labour of keeping alive, supplying the simplest and most fundamental needs of life, exhausting the body and soul to keep body and soul together, in constant fear of starvation, dread of your fellow man, and a desperate urge to seize and devour whatever you can, by whatever means. For a hunk of meat you would happily kill any man or woman who stood in your way. We descended lower than savages. We became beasts.

*

Citizens’ lives had been getting increasingly difficult for some time before the day of hunger arrived.

At first the Winsomes had rejoiced in the revolution. It was what they had hoped for, worked for, and, as long as they could, voted for. “I don’t mind not owning my own house if nobody else does,” Ted Winsome had written cheerfully in his Revolution Issue of the NEW WORKER* (which came out six weeks after Republic Day, as his paper, like most others, had been ordered to suspend publication until all newspapers that were to continue had been nationalized, and permits granted to their editors). Had not his wife, in her capacity as Housing Committee chairperson on Islington Borough Council set an example, by compulsorily purchasing more private houses for local government ownership than anyone before or after her (until the revolution made purchase unnecessary)? He was proud that she had been an active pioneer, one of the avant-garde of the socialist revolution.

However, he was less pleased when three families were quartered in his house. And then another was sent by the Chief Social Worker (a sort of district commandant) when his own children, delighted to drop out of school, had left home to join a WSP [Workers Socialist Party] group and vent righteous indignation on landlords, capitalists, individualists, racists and speculators. All of his fellow lodgers were, in his view, “problem-families” – drunken, noisy, filthy, careless, inconsiderate and rude. (“That,” said the Gauleiter, “is why they were chased out of their last lodgings by angry co-residents on a former Council estate.” She had thought the Winsomes would be “more tolerant”.) Before he could hand over his stereophonic record-player to the local community centre – as he assured those he complained to that he had fully intended to do – one of the problem-children broke it, threw his classical records away, and also deliberately smashed his high-speed Japanese camera. His furniture was soon broken too. Precious antiques which he had restored with his own hands in hours of patient labour, were treated like fruit-boxes, to be stood on, and spilt on, and thrown about. When cups and glasses were smashed, it was he who had to replace them if he was to have anything to eat or drink out of; which meant recourse to the black market, against which he had so often fulminated in his editorials in the NEW WORKER. He started hiding things away in his room, taking special care to keep his carpentry and joinery tools from the hands of those who would not understand how he had cared for them, valued them, kept them sharp, adapted some of them to his particular needs. One of the problem-fathers accused him of “hoarding private property”, and threatened to go to the New Police with the complaint, or call in “some RI people” [Righteous Indignation – a violent Antifa-type group].

He confided to a woman journalist at his office how he had begun to suspect that “when a thing belongs to everybody, it belongs to nobody”. And he even went so far as to suggest that “as people only vandalize things they don’t own themselves, there is something to be said for private ownership after all”.

*

All industry failed after a few months of central communist management.

The bewildering fact was that the first country in the world to have become industrialized, the very home of the Industrial Revolution, the country which had once led the world in manufacturing industry, the erstwhile hub of the greatest empire in history, had become one of the poorest states in the world; a people surrounded not by wild tracts of unused land, with isolated constructions which signify the first frantic efforts to build mills, factories and mines in undeveloped countries, but by the decaying ruins of industrial might, of mills and mines and factories fallen into disuse and decay, rusting machinery, the vast wreckage of a once great industrial civilization, dilapidated monuments of human ingenuity and at the same time to human idiocy; acres of towns and cities deserted, tumbling into rubble, and all this devastation brought about not by war, not by any external enemy, but by a faction among the people treacherous out of intellectual blindness, guilty of a shallow moralistic idealism and economic folly; of a desire to be good, and a failure to be intelligent.

For it was those who had freedom and decried it, pretending they were oppressed; those who had material plenty and despised it, pretending they were poor; those who thus secreted a worm in their own hearts, and so at the heart of civilization – envy: the amazing unforeseen and unforeseeable envy, by the free and comfortable,  of the unfree and wretched of the earth: it was these self-deceiving, would-be lovers of mankind, the Ted and Marjorie Winsomes, the affluent children who squatted in the communes and protested against freedom calling it “repressive tolerance”, and those they elected, who were caught in the trap of their own lies, and brought an end to liberty in the name of liberation; an end to plenty in the name of humanitarianism; and an end to the impersonality of the law before which all were  equal, and the impersonality of the market in which all were equal, and created legal discrimination and class elitism, in the name of equality.

Jillian Becker   October 12, 2021

Is it all over for America as the world’s one-and-only, unchallengeable, superpower?

Despairing thinkers on the Right think so.

Roger Kimball writes in part at American Greatness:

“Never forget [9/11].” “We remember.”  The sentiment [is] invariably bolstered with reminiscences of loss and heroism.

The loss and the heroism are real, no doubt, but I am afraid that admonitions about remembering seem mostly manufactured. How could they not? Clearly, we have not remembered …

We spent 20 years and trillions of dollars in Afghanistan—for what? To try to coax it into the 21st century and assume the “woke” perspective that has laid waste the institutions of American culture, from the universities to the military?

Certain aspects of that folly seem darkly comic now, such as our efforts to raise the consciousness of the locals by introducing them to conceptual art and decadent Western ideas of “gender equity”. The explicit cost for such gender programs was $787 million; the real cost was much higher because “gender goals” were folded into almost every initiative we undertook in Afghanistan. …

The dissolution of the British Empire—one of the most beneficent and enlightened political forces in history—took place for many reasons … Part of the reason for its dissolution was inner uncertainty, weariness, a failure of nerve. By the middle of the last century, Britain no longer wished to rule: it wanted to be liked.

The promiscuous desire to be liked, for states as much as for individuals, is a profound character flaw. …

When we ask what nurtures terrorists, what allows them to flourish and multiply, one important answer concerns the failure of authority, which is the failure to live up to the responsibilities of power.

Christopher Bedford writes at The Federalist;

How many are willing to confront the deep, decades-long rot that is the actual reason we lost in Afghanistan?

America is sick. …  If we don’t make the choice to confront [that fact] directly, it will kill us.

In his view the decline has been recent and rapid:

If all of these things — that riot and that disease, and the ever present specter of racism — were to disappear right now never to be seen again, this country would still be very, very sick. The United States — our home — would still be feeble compared to five years ago, let alone 10, 15 or 30.

Mark Steyn said in an address to the Gatestone Institute that China’s “moment” has come, and the “transfer” of superpower status has already begun:

We were told a generation or two back that, by doing trade with China, China would become more like us. Instead, on issues such as free speech, we are becoming more like China.

American companies are afraid of offending China. American officials are afraid of offending China. We are adopting Chinese norms on issues such as free speech and basic disagreements with the government of China. …

Everything we need comes from China. China not only gives us the virus, we are also dependent on China to give us the personal protective equipment ‑ all the masks and everything ‑ that supposedly protect us from the virus. …

We’re living in the early stages of a future that is the direct consequence of poor public policy over the last couple of generations. …

Right now, we are witnessing a non‑stop continuous transfer of power to a country that is serious about using that power. This is China’s moment. My great worry is that actually, the transfer to China has already happened. The baton has already been passed. We just haven’t formally acknowledged that yet.

America has been a benign superpower, as was Britain in the nineteenth century.

Communist China will not be benign.

If America’s decadence, its putrid sentimentality, its self-abasement, its effeminization allow China to become the next world-dominating power, the Leftists, the anti-white racists, the “woke” liars and cheats who now rule America will learn too late what “systemic” oppression really is.

Will the rest find that sufficient compensation for the loss of freedom?

What has happened?

What can be done?

We quote parts of a column by Thomas D. Klingenstein at American Greatness in which he describes what has happened as cold civil war, and looks for signs that our side might win.

We find ourselves in a cold civil war. But we have no real generals. A war without generals is no war at all. There is no liberty or death, only death, the death of our once cherished republic. …

This is a war not over the size of government or taxes, but over the American way of life. The war is between those who salute the flag, and those who take a knee. Those who believe that America is built on freedom, and those who believe America is built on racism. Those who are convinced that America is good, and those who are convinced America is bad. These differences are too large to bridge. This is what makes it a war. In this case, a cold civil war.

Winning a war requires two fundamental understandings. First, you must understand that you are, in fact, in a war. Wartime requires very different rhetoric, strategy, and people than peacetime. Trump is a wartime leader. Second, you must understand your enemy, what it wants and how it goes about getting what it wants. What our enemy wants is the destruction of the American way of life. It goes about it by trying to force everyone to say, “America is systemically racist.” If it can convince us of this falsehood, it will be well on its way to overturning the American way of life.

Every time Joe Biden accuses America of being systemically racist, he is, though he doesn’t know it, calling for the overthrow of the American way of life. In a war, you must play to win. But you cannot win against an enemy that has no name, or has many names—identity politics, multiculturalism, anti-racism, wokeism, and more. My entry for a name is Woke Communism, Woke Comm for short. Whatever the name, I think it should communicate totalitarianism because this is what the enemy seeks to impose.

In a traditional totalitarian regime, the government uses arbitrary violence to control every aspect of public and private life, all the way down to Little League. In America, the government does not control everything, but today, through the power of the purse and the courts, the government influences a lot. And where the government leaves off, the cultural business complex takes over.

Education, corporate media, entertainment, big business, and especially Big Tech, are to varying degrees aligned with the Democratic Party, which is now controlled by the Woke Comms. These institutions together with the government function as a totalitarian regime, crafting narratives that advance their agenda and suppressing those that do not. Instead of violence, there is canceling.

This may not look like a totalitarian regime, but it acts like one.

Last summer’s riots are a case in point. Woke Comm agitators sparked the flame that lit the riots. Their intellectual leaders justified the riots, their corporate donors gave billions to the Black Lives Matter network, their media looked the other way, and their politicians—from Joe Biden on down—fanned the flames.

What is Woke Communism? Like any regime, Woke Communism is built on a particular understanding of justice. For the Woke Coms justice is outcome equality. That is, the proportional representation of all identity groups in all aspects of American life. So for example, the Woke Communists believe that blacks, who count for about 13 percent of the population, should have 13 percent of the nation’s chief executive officers, prisoners, heart attacks, wealth, top test scores, homes, corporate board seats, school suspensions, and everything else you can think of. Equal everything is what Woke Comms call social justice. Any disparities, say the Woke Coms, are due to racism and nothing else.

If, as the Woke Communists contend, racism has insinuated itself into every nook and cranny of the American way of life, then quite obviously, it is necessary to throw out that way of life. This is why there simply can be no peace between Woke Communism and America. In a free society like America there will always be group outcome differences, particularly between men and women. Eliminating such group outcome differences, as the Woke Coms aim to do, can only be achieved at the expense of freedom. …

In totalitarian regimes, there can be no institutions of moral authority that compete with the state. Of course, the institution that the Woke Comms [as the state] must completely control is education. The Woke Comms must no longer teach our children about an America striving, however imperfectly, towards its noble ideals. Instead, they must teach about an America conceived in oppression and dedicated to racism. In short, Woke Communism will replace American justice with social justice, and destroy law and order, the rule of law, and both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Successful implementation of the Woke Communist agenda, above all, requires convincing American citizens of a series of lies. The first and most important lie, as I have said, is “America is racist”. That is the big lie. We hear it from every direction from morning to night, but endless repetition does not make it true. It isn’t true. The corollary to the big lie is another lie. America is about to be overrun by white supremacists. This is pure nonsense.

What the Woke Coms mean in perpetuating this lie is to suggest that anyone unwilling to kneel before Black Lives Matter is a white supremacist.

“Police target blacks.”  That is another lie. Blacks commit 50 percent of the violent crimes in America. Should we be surprised that the blacks account for about 25 percent of those killed by the police. Before we start talking about defunding the police, perhaps we should face the facts.

“Trump endorsed white culture.” This is a lie. Trump endorsed not white culture but American culture, which is open to anyone, of any color, willing to embrace it….

We are told that moderate Joe Biden is in charge. Biden is neither moderate nor in charge.

“Black Lives Matter care about black lives or righting past injustices.” These are among the biggest whoppers. But we should pay attention to BLM because, as we learned during the riots, BLM represents the leading edge of the Democratic Party. Any doubt about the prominence of BLM should have been dispelled by the Biden-Harris Administration encouraging American embassies to fly the BLM flag. Think about that. Our embassies, beacons of American freedom, are flying the flag of an organization committed to the destruction of American freedom.

“January 6 was an insurrection.” Every bit a lie. …

“Election fraud is baseless.” This is a lie repeated with such determination that it is forbidden to question it. But the fact is, there is enough evidence of fraud to warrant investigations and now enough obstruction of investigations to warrant further suspicion.

The Woke Coms also lie with language. Racism, they call “equity.” Anti-white, they call “diversity.” The 20th century is piled high with corpses from regimes that falsified language in just this way. 

In totalitarian regimes, it is necessary to silence those who challenge the lies. We see this with increasing regularity. American citizens getting canceled, fired, denied access to social media, even deprived of banking services. Woke corporations punish states that don’t comply with the woke agenda. Information unsanctioned by the regime is becoming increasingly difficult to find. Opinions that contradict Dr. Anthony Fauci, praise the police, or question sex changes or election integrity… don’t get past the tech censors.

More terrifying still, we’re getting used to censorship. Censorship has become a fact of life.

But there is much more than censorship. The rule of law is breaking down. Rioting is sanctioned. Immigration and other laws go unenforced. The Woke Coms said to the Derrick Chauvin jury, convict Chauvin of murder or we will give you a riot the likes of which you have never seen. This is mob rule. …

We are no longer a nation of laws.

Top scientists and airline pilots are now being hired based on skin color and gender.

Same with the United States military, which says it is looking not for warriors, but for women with two moms. Other than the Woke Communists, how many of our young men and women will be prepared to die for a country that puts diversity over life? Such a country has a death wish.

China is licking its chops, watching us commit suicide. Statues which help define and inspire us are being toppled. The Statue of Liberty is safe for the moment because the Woke Coms believe it stands for open immigration. But one day, the Woke Coms will discover that immigrants come to America not to be members of their ethnic group, but to be free individuals. When that day comes, Lady Liberty could find herself at the bottom of New York Harbor.

The election of 2020 was stolen. Leave aside fraud, last minute unconstitutional changes to election laws, bogus investigations, even the pandemic. Trump could have survived all these. But what he could not survive was four years of unrelenting, deliberately dishonest media slander. When the media takes pride in bringing down and silencing a sitting president, brace yourself for a long fall.

How should Republicans respond? What should we do about all this? The essential thing, as I’ve tried to stress, is for Republicans to understand we are in a war and then act accordingly. War is not a time for too much civility, compromise, or for imputing good motives to the enemy. Our generals must fight as if the choice were between liberty and death. This is no time for sunshine patriots.

We agree with all that, but ask –

Fight how? Tell us how, Mr. Klingenstein.

He ends with this:

I am not without hope. There are many pockets of resistance bubbling up around the country. Parents are pushing back against “America is racist” curricula. Even San Francisco had a rare moment of sanity when it decided not to remove Abraham Lincoln’s name from a high school. The manly “don’t tread on me” ethos remains part of the American spirit. Many Americans still salute our flag, honor our military dead, and ask God to bless America.

Such citizens are part of the huge army that Trump has mobilized. This army is raring to go, but it needs direction.

If Republican leaders start speaking the truth, loudly and passionately, the army will follow.

Perhaps one of the people who voted to keep Lincoln’s name on that San Francisco High School remembered that Lincoln, at age 30, unknown beyond Central Illinois, wrote about an aspirational fantasy, which was, I suspect, inspired by his heroes, George Washington and Henry Clay. If ever I feel worthy, Lincoln once said,

It is when I contemplate the cause of my country deserted by all the world . . . and I standing up boldly and alone, . . . hurling defiance at [our] victorious oppressors. Here, without contemplating consequences, . . . I swear eternal fidelity to the just cause . . . of the land of my life, my Liberty, and my love. . . . But if after all, we shall fail, be it so. We still shall have the proud consolation of saying to our consciences, . . . we never faltered.

We are, I think, in a perilous moment such as the one Lincoln imagines. It is time for our leaders, without contemplating consequences, to swear eternal fidelity to the just cause of the land of our liberty, and our love, the land which remains the last best hope of Earth. If after all, we shall fail, be it so. We shall have the proud consolation of saying that in defending America, we never faltered.

Those feeble Republican leaders need only to shout “the truth”? Resistance is “bubbling up”? Some parents are “pushing back” against racist indoctrination? Some citizens are asking “God” to “bless America”?  If we fail we can take pride in not faltering?

These are the remnants we can shore against our ruin?

Better look to Trump to be the general we need. To direct us – the army he mobilized.

If anyone can help us win this war, he can. That’s why the totalitarians fear and hate him.