unacknowledged wars
“The context and subtext contain the real message. This is true on both sides of today’s political battles. On the one side, we have the remnants–scratched and bleeding, but still partially cohesive–of the old American Christian cultures, largely Protestant but with a strong admixture of Catholics; on the other is the far less numerous but culturally potent Unholy Left, adhering to its own secular religion, although it professes atheism. As with the battle between radical Islam and the West, one side has explicitly avowed war on the other, while the other, more powerful, refuses to acknowledge it or even conceive of it. Which side, under these circumstances, is more likely to be successful?”
Michael Walsh, “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace,” 2015, p. 115.
what works
Faced with overwhelming evidence that markets “work,” Obama’s advice is to go on searching for “what works.” => Denial on stilts.
change back
the leftist experience
[T]he moral destruction of communism was worse because the confusion between common morality and communist morality remains deep rooted. With the latter hiding behind the former, it is parasitical and polluting, using common morality to spread its contagion. Here is a recent example: in the discussions that followed the publication of The Black Book of Communism, an editorial writer at the French communist newspaper L’Humanite’ announced on television that 85 million deaths did not in any way tarnish the communist ideal. They represented only a very unfortunate deviation. After Auschwitz, he continued, one can no longer be a Nazi, but one can remain a communist after the Soviet camps. This man, who spoke in good conscience, did not realize at all that he had just articulated his own most fatal condemnation. He could not see that the communist idea had so perverted the principles of reality and morality that it could indeed outlive 85 million corpses, whereas the Nazi idea had succombed under its dead. He thought he had spoken as a great and decent man, idealistic and uncompromising, without realizing that he had uttered a monstrosity. Communism is more perverse than Nazism because it does not ask man consciously to take the moral step of the criminal, and because it uses the spirit of justice and goodness that abounds throughout the earth to spread evil over all the earth. Each communist experience begins anew in innocence.
Alain Besancon, A Century of Horrors, 2007.
American leftists will ridicule their comparison to communists, however, in moral relativity, in masking harmful policies under good intentions, and in denial over their policies’ historical failures, leftists and communists are a distinction without a difference. [Read more…]
contrived continuity
The psychological state of the militant is distinguished by his fanatical investment in the system. This central vision reorganizes his entire intellectual and perceptual field, all the way to the periphery. Language is transformed: it is no longer used to communicate or express, but to conceal a contrived continuity between the system and reality. Ideological language is charged with the magical role of forcing reality to conform to a particular vision of the world. It is a liturgical language for which every utterance points to its speaker’s adherence to the system, and it summons the interlocutor to adhere as well. Code words thus constitute threats and figures of power.It is not possible to remain intelligent under the spell of ideology.
The most obvious sign that ideological insanity is artificial is that it is reversible: when the pressure ceases and circumstances change, one gets out all at once, as if from a dream. But it is a waking dream–one that does not block motility and maintains a certain apparently rational coherence. Outside the affected area, which is the superior part of the mind in a healthy person–the part that articulates religion, philosophy, and the “governing ideas of reason,” as Kant would say–the comprehensive functions seem intact but focused on and enslaved by the surreal object. When one wakes, one’s mind is empty; one’s life and knowledge must be entirely relearned.
Alain Besancon, A Century of Horrors, 2007.
The Republican mistake of the 2008 election was to embrace a portion of the left’s ideological insanity to bring in moderates, which ended up ratcheting the debate to the left. Whoever concluded that Republicans could score by giving the ball to the opposition should be fired. [Read more…]
blowback
“Because white guilt is a vacuum of moral authority, it makes the moral authority of whites and the legitimacy of American institutions contingent on proving a negative: that they are not racist. The great power of white guilt comes from the fact that it functions by stigma, like racism itself. Whites and American institutions are stigmatized as racist until they prove otherwise. . . . .[T]he larger reality is that white guilt leaves no room for moral choice; it does not depend on the goodwill or the genuine decency of people.” Shelby Steele, White Guilt, 2006.
The moral authority that comes from an absence of moral choice is actually no moral authority. This is a prescription for endless manipulation–by both blacks and whites–which Steele documents at length. He also wrote, [Read more…]
Aprils Fools
