Gab@StFerdinandIII - https://unstabbinated.substack.com/
Plenty of cults exist - every cult has its 'religious dogma', its idols, its 'prophets', its 'science', its 'proof' and its intolerant liturgy of demands. Cults everywhere: Corona, 'The Science' or Scientism, Islam, the State, the cult of Gender Fascism, Marxism, Darwin and Evolution, Globaloneywarming, Changing Climate, Abortion...
Tempus Fugit Memento Mori - Time Flies Remember Death
Are the End Times for Western Civilisation close at hand? Consider:
1. CV-19, lies, exaggerations, and unbridled fascism to combat what can only be described as a bad flu with ‘cures’ which are now worse than the disease
2. Unfettered Muslim and non-White immigration into Western states, accompanied by an endless set of apologia for Muslim rapes, crimes, unemployment, Jihad, public attacks, FGM, child-bride marriages, Christophobia, Church attacks and anti-Semiticism
3. Mainstreaming of pornography, drugs, anti-culture and violence
4. Decimation of ethics, faith, conservative ideals, and the ethos and culture which built civilisation, in all state institutions and processes
5. An obviously stolen US Presidential election with a 30 million vote fraud performed openly with nary a dissent from the elites or media
6. Deep States in every nation controlling political-economies
7. BLM, Anti-fa and other anti-White racist groups portrayed by a Fake Media as peaceful protestors
8. Rewriting of history using the lens of Cultural Marxism in which Whites are now evil, non-Whites angels
9. Financial fraud with negative interest rates, massive cost escalations, stock market manipulation by Central Banks
10. A Global Elite intent on One World Governance
Edited and redacted from a very good article to read and ponder. Source is American Thinker, ‘Are the End Times Near?’ by David Solway, whose books are blacklisted by Amazon.
Spengler (a must read)
Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of The West, published 1918-1922, laid out the trajectory of the enfeeblement and decay that awaited us, developing a theme that went as far back as the Greek historian Polybius, but that, in the wake of a war that wiped out a generation, seemed less a “theme” than an historically imminent reality.
Yeats (a must read)
The greatest poet of the modern age, William Butler Yeats, felt it in his bones, working out a visionary schematism in his prose volume A Vision and reflecting on the inevitable in his timeless poem “The Second Coming,” written one year after the end of the Great War: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last/Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”
Robert Bork (a must read)
…Slouching Towards Gomorrah hammers out Yeats’s vision in lurid contemporary detail, pointing toward a “syndrome” of collectivist attitudes dominating the culture, the debilitation of the family structure, and a “left-liberal moral consensus” diluting the text of the U.S. Constitution.
O’Brien and Michelet
In his master volume On the Eve of the Millennium: The Future of Democracy in an Age of Unreason, published in 1995, Irish historian Conor Cruise O’Brien was not sanguine about the prospects for Western civilization in the coming years. Civilizations have term dates and ours is fast approaching, O’Brien felt. He quotes French historian Jules Michelet’s History of France, who speaks there of “this vast concert of naïve and barbarous voices” with its “strange accents [and] fantastic and bizarre harmony,” signalling the end of a customary world. The dissolution is abetted by common lassitude, self-indulgence and studied ignorance, by those, O’Brien writes, “who are indifferent to politics, religion, virtually anything.” We watch “history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation,” almost, we might say, as if we do not believe that history can happen here.
Toynbee (a must read)
Arnold Toynbee in his twelve-volume A Study of History, among my prize collections, articulated a theory of recurrence -- owing in part to The New Science of the 18th Century Italian political philosopher Giambattista Vico -- in which he saw patterns or cycles of growth and decay common to all civilizations, of which he isolated more than twenty-six exemplars. Though maintaining a guarded optimism that correlation is not infallibly causation and that Western Civilization might survive an otherwise inevitable debacle, he posited that once psychological devastation had gone too far, recovery would be impossible. Perhaps it was from reading Toynbee that O’Brien speculated about the onset of apathy and indifference leading to civilizational collapse. He believed we were already there.
Burnham
Burnham’s magisterial 1964 Suicide of the West, in which Burnham writes of a “morphological pattern,” an unmistakable trend or curve. “Over the past two generations Western civilization has been in a period of very rapid decline, recession or ebb within the world power structure.” What we call liberalism is “the ideology of Western suicide,” permitting Western Civilization “to be reconciled to its dissolution.” Although he holds out hope for a transition to a higher order above the parochial divisions of the past, which seems touchingly romantic, his analysis of the liberal virus has rarely been bettered.
On Feminism and Cultural Marxism
….culture-wrecking movement and socially destabilizing factor confronting the Western world: identity politics, neo-Marxism, political correctness, radical environmentalism, “climate change,” “social justice,” outcome egalitarianism, information censorship, trans-national authoritarianism, abortion on demand, anti-meritocracy, chain immigration, “white supremacy” -- the list goes on. … Feminism was no doubt a critical issue, a socially destructive and culturally malignant phenomenon, but only one of many indices of something of far greater import: the approaching disintegration of Western civilization.
Great Reset
As Kenneth Minogue writes, wish to “acquire power in the service of transforming the order of human life.” (Today we would call it the Great Reset.) Rather, I believed, and still believe, that every manifestation, every symptom of the sickness of our time, the self-destructive corruption, the lies and hypocrisies and weakness of spirit, the coordinated attack on the institutions and traditions that have sustained Judeo-Christian civilization, the digital surveillance project of billionaire Globaliers -- these must be resisted and fought, for there is no other choice but feckless and dishonorable surrender.
Conclusion based on Realism
The conclusion is foregone, but not yet. In Michael Walsh’s terms from his new book Last Stands, manly virtue fights to the foreordained end. The issue is this: We cannot deter, but we can defer.
What we are really doing, whether we know it or not, is buying time. Western civilization and its constituent nations are too far gone to be retrofitted; our internal enemies have seen to that. As Bork writes, a “soft and hedonistic culture…faces a continuing assault from within.” The prospect is grim.
Apathy, indifference, psychological devastation, envy and self-hatred are the norms of our present moment. America, the guarantor and bellwether of the West’s survival, has been hollowed out by its Olympian classes, the political, juridical, informational and fiscal elites -- this was Founding Father and second president John Adams’ deepest fear. In his important 2018 study John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy, Luke Mayville parses Adams’ conclusion that “republican governments had always been threatened by elite domination and that America would be no different.”
It is not an exaggeration to state that Churchill-Reagan-John Paul II and Thatcher were the giants of the last quarter of the 20th century in geo-politics. The big 4 did more than any other 'quadrumvirate' to save and expand Western civilization. Arguments to the contrary are unconvincing, premised on ad-hominems and a-historical and rather absurd Marxist rewriting. The world would be far worse off without these 4 leaders. It tells a lot about a person whether or not they support these 4 and admire them for their skill and leadership - or detest them.
Paul Johnson a British historian and former Thatcher speech-writer, calls her the most trans-formative female leader since Catherine the Great [link]. This is undoubtedly accurate. Oddly feminists, 'progressives', and those who detest old-white [especially Christian] men, loathe Thatcher. Her reforms saved Britain from bankruptcy, and she was able to keep the clutches of the [z]Euro zone and its self-imploding currency off of the UK.
“Thatcher reinforced this essential improvement by a revolutionary simplification of the tax system, reducing a score or more "bands" to two and lowering the top rates from 83% (earned income) and 98% (unearned) to the single band of 40%.
She also reduced Britain's huge and loss-making state-owned industries, nearly a third of the economy, to less than one-tenth, by her new policy of privatization—inviting the public to buy from the state industries, such as coal, steel, utilities and transport by bargain share offers. Hence loss-makers, funded from taxes, became themselves profit-making and so massive tax contributors.
This transformation was soon imitated all over the world. More important than all these specific changes, however, was the feeling Thatcher engendered that Britain was again a country where enterprise was welcomed and rewarded, where businesses small and large had the benign blessing of government, and where investors would make money.
As a result Britain was soon absorbing more than 50% of all inward investment in Europe, the British economy rose from the sixth to the fourth largest in the world, and its production per capita, having been half that of Germany's in the 1970s, became, by the early years of the 21st century, one-third higher..”
All true. It was a remarkable resurgence. Britain in 1980 looked to be on a sure path to insolvency. 20 years later the City of London was a financial centre akin to New York, and by 2000, British firms were again competitive. Thatcher's peace-time transformation of Britain was as important as Churchill's war-time leadership. Even in war she was decisive. The Falklands War saved 2000 British subjects from the miserable tyranny of a morally repulsive and culturally degenerate Argentina. Today the UK would probably not fight the Falklands, preferring to pen furious letters of indignation at the Useless Nations Assembly, or protest in the op-ed pages of the MSM. Hot air and verbal-vomit cum rhetoric is so much easier than the hard work of action.
Thatcher made many mistakes as does any human. She handed over Hong Kong to the Chinese Communist Party without proper safeguards for its democracy or citizens – a wrong she never admitted to. She supported and funded the cult of globaloneywarming, later recanting and apostasizing but the damage has been done. This cult is now trying to take over political and economic processes in every major state. Insiders said that near the end of her career she was somewhat imperious and too dominating. Power does indeed corrode if not corrupt. The poll tax on over-taxed Britons was a fiasco. But on the big issues – freedom, responsibility, private charity, removing the curse of UK socialism, destroying the power base of Communist supporting Unions, avoiding the rank hypocrisy and communalization which swept Europe, eschewing the Euro, building up the military, forming a positive and mature relationship with the US, projecting force and power abroad, standing up for Western and British virtues – she was right and that is why she is great.
I couldn't help but wondering what Niall Ferguson, whose 'modest, unpretentious' book I am reading is called 'Civilization', and who makes the often, implausible and unsourced claim that the Chinese invented pretty much of everything, would make of the following phrase by Crocker, in his 'The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire', [reviewed here]:
“The irony of the British Empire in Africa is that while it started with slave ships tapping into the millennium-old slave trade of the Dark Continent, Britain became the most powerful force in the world for ending slavery and the slave trade, and the anti-slaving campaign drove the expansion of the British Empire.” [p. 189]
Rather obvious. This fact sends the cultural self-loathing Obamatrons into limp wristed hissy fits of spitting and self-flagellation. How dare the British Empire do anything right? Ending slavery! Oh please didn't the Chinese do that first pace Ferguson?
The British conquered Africa because they had better technology, vaccines, medicine, modern organizational methods, private capital, a market system, independence of character and initiative; a cultural superiority and a supremacy in institutions and political-economic governance. Not to mention self-confidence and a modernizing, industrializing economy. If Ferguson's list of apocryphal Chinese inventions [the usual tired list, blast furnaces circa 10.000 B.C., iron smelting (he might have forgotten about the iron age in Europe), printing, toilet paper, golf....] was really true, it would have been the 300 foot junks of Admiral He and not the literally hundreds of British ships and sea captains, which would have mapped and then quested to conquer a huge, forbidding land-mass. Something in Ferguson's narrative does not make sense. Any society that created 'everything' would also be the first to explore and develop Africa. It is a lot simpler given the monsoon rains and winds to sail from east to west to reach Africa, then to brazen it out going north south and then south to north east to reach the Zanzibar coast, the most hospitable landing point on the Dark part of that Continent.
It wasn't the Chinese 'mining' genius which unearthed diamonds and gold, it was the British who began to use their technology and techniques to turn the African backwater hinterland, into a part of civilisation:
“In addition, in southern Africa the British unearthed diamonds and gold; in eastern Africa they established farms and ranches; in northern Africa they took command of the Suez Canal; and everywhere in Africa they were motivated by something else: a desire for discovery – most famously, to find the source of the Nile.”
Fancy that. Self-confident men and women searching for profit, adventure, personal and social gain; to convert the 'natives' to cvilisation; and to find out truth and reality, such as the main spring of the Nile. According to Ferguson the Chinese had already done this is Africa, at least 2500 years before the hairy, stupid Briton, in his small raft stumbled on the beach at Cape Town gaping in stupidity at the cultural magnificence of local Zulu society.
Crocker goes through a small list of British individuals who changed the course of history and brought a superior civilisation to Africa. A fact which offends everyone who 'knows' that the British Empire was nothing but an evil imposition of an inferior form of social development on superior native customs and mores:
-Wolseley in 1873-4 leading a small force of British regulars and defeating the Ashanti along the poorly named Gold Coast or West Africa securing naval bases, free trade with the Ashanti and access to the Niger. The Gold Coast was formerly annexed in the 1890s.
-Lugard brought serious and honest Victorian governance as well as investment to the Gold Coast. Hospitals, roads, railways and mines were developed under Lugard and the British greatly benefiting both the ruled and the rulers. The area was governed through local councils and elections – something unique to the West African experience.
-Livingston in central Africa, preaching the gospel of commerce, Christianity and civilization. One of the most interesting and avid of Britain's cultural heroes in Africa.
-Chelmsford destroying the Zulu state which had preyed upon both Dutch and British farmers and possessions and had engaged in a long litany of unprovoked and savage attacks on both civilian and military targets. Chelmsford's victory removed the only obstacle between a Dutch and British clash in Southern Africa.
-Cecil Rhodes and others who both forced Britain into the Boer war, and helped her win it. Rhodes was the quintessential imperialist who believed in Britain's divine right to rule and in her civilizing mission. I doubt he is taught anymore in school.
-General Gordon stopping slavery in Egypt and the Sudan. He was murdered by Moslems in Khartoum. A crime paid back by the decisive British victory in 1898 at Omdurman by Kitchener against the Moslem Dervishes [the Dervishes were Sufists who followed a 12th century Afghan-Moslem cult of superstition and mysticism which included dancing in a trance].
Most don't know that in Southern Africa Britain defended the rights of Blacks to both own land and vote in Dutch and British territory. This was something that the Dutch Boers wanted no part of. The British were great agriculturalists which benefited the local population, many of whom worked as free men on the estates and would later become proprietors. In Kenya and Rhodesia, for the first time in African history, large well managed and irrigated plantations started to produce a variety of saleable and even exportable crop. Tea, coffee, vegetables, fruits and other products were grown en masse.
Throughout Africa the British invested about 5% of their GDP annually into infrastructure. Schools, hospitals, roads, rail-lines, government buildings, law courts, and the infrastructure of a modern political-economy slowly developed on the Dark Continent. One supposes that the Chinese had done this long before the era of Rome. After all they must have invented the infrastructure of the modern world.
Crocker goes into some detail about the British involvement in Africa. It is hard to make the claim that Africa is better off without Britain has the colonial master of must of its territory. Moslem 'extremists' are now in power in North Africa and Egypt. Arab Moslems slaughter darker-skinned non-Moslems in the Sudan – something a modern day Gordon would not tolerate. Somalia is a Moslem wasteland as are vast tracts of Nigeria, Mali, and central Africa.
Only a few states in Africa are 'normal' and function to modern standards. African troubles have little to do with Western or whitey-imperialism. Corruption, the wrong culture, violence, intolerance, tribal hatreds, Islam and other distortions have wasted the $2 Trillion sent by the White world to the Dark Continent. This is the fault of Africa post colonialism.
The post-modern paternalistic racism namely; send Blacks money out of guilt and because 'we' the Western elite feel that they are too ignorant to understand how to build a modern political-economy, has no echo in British imperialism. The Victorians had a mission but not a racist theology. They ended slavery, had a belief that Africans were just as good as anyone else if given a chance at civilization, and developed Africa as much out of a mission to bring a better world to the Dark Continent, as from the baser motives of profit, greed, blood-lust and power. Africa since 1965 has not improved. Witness Zimbabwe or Rhodesia. Maybe there is something good in imperialism after all. Even Niall Ferguson might agree with that. This is why Crocker's book is such a good read.