In Germany J6 Comes Early
But we’re seeing the suppression of dissent everywhere in the West. The rationalizations follow a pattern—national security, public health. YOU are at risk from faceless dissidents who must be silenced and removed from public life. All communications must be monitored to identify those who are a threat, gatherings banned, etc. Ironically, in the US this strategy became most apparent—it had been building since Bush’s GWOT—as part of the Covid Regime that Trump himself (now the primary target) helped inaugurate. And the usual “conservative” suspects are stumbling over one another to repeat the Left narrative that Trump is a threat to our constitutional republic. The audacity of the charge, in the context of our own emergent national security state, is breathtaking.
As we saw yesterday, Germany, too, is adopting this strategy—which has precedents throughout the collective West. German commentary:
The ruling globalist class knows they’re at risk, and that the threat to their control was brought on by their mad quest for power, culminating in their war on Russia. They’re starting to lash out. These sorts of things typically end badly, and this is pretty much at the beginning stage:
Last night Steven Hayward posted a thought for the day—a quote from John Marini, one of whose articles I discussed at considerable length recently. The brief quote plays into the emergence of our national emergency state:
Amidst the latest Trumpstorm (“Trumpenkampf“?), let’s revisit one of John Marini’s sage observations from way back in 2016 that is especially useful to keep in mind just now:
It is possible that the Trump phenomenon cannot be understood merely by trying to make sense of Trump himself. Rather, it is the seriousness of the need for Trump that must be understood in order to make sense of his candidacy. Those most likely to be receptive of Trump are those who believe America is in the midst of a great crisis in terms of its economy, its chaotic civil society, its political corruption, and its inability to defend any kind of tradition—or a way of life derived from any kind of tradition—because of the transformation of its culture by the intellectual elites. This sweeping cultural transformation occurred almost completely outside the political process of mobilizing public opinion and political majorities. The American people themselves did not participate or consent to the wholesale undermining of their way of life, which government and the bureaucracy helped to facilitate by undermining those institutions of civil society that were dependent upon a public defense of the old morality. This great crisis has created the need for a Trump, or someone like Trump, and only those who recognize it as a crisis can be receptive to his candidacy.
Just yesterday I referred to our institutionalized political corruption—institutionalized, in the sense that the ruling class passes laws that legalize enough of the pay to play system so that the ruling class can be enriched. Lobbying, consulting, campaign contributions—we’re all familiar with this grotesque reshaping of what was supposed to be government by the people, of the people, for the people (did I get that right?).
Marini is right, of course, to point to the treason of the intellectuals against the traditions that formerly undergirded our society. Formerly we had moral standards, but now the criminal law is the only standard—anything short of a defined criminal act is now OK. A matter of personal choice—personal style, if you will. We see the result of this debasement of ordinary everyday morality all around us. First we had legalization of cannabis in IL, now they’re talking about allowing home delivery. It won’t end well—if not for ourselves, certainly not for the rising generations, who will now be not only uneducated but also drug addled.
Where I disagree with Marini is his tendency to blame this on government and bureaucratic enabling. Of course there’s truth in that charge, but it’s equally true that the formal institutions of our society (including law enforcement and the military, as well as education) tend to fall to the level of the lowest common denominator unless restrained by the ruling class that should be setting the standards. That’s the job of the natural aristocracy that the Founders counted on. But the intellectuals have committed treason, and abandoned the subject population to their own devices, while pursuing their ever more deviant pleasures. This breakdown, I submit, flows from the classical liberal “liberaltarian” ideology that is the basis for the civil ideology of the entire collective West. Underlying our public philosophy has always been the view that human nature is simply what we define it as, much like the word “is”. It simply takes time for the implications of any ideology to work their way out to the logical conclusions.
That’s the top of the slippery slope, and we’re well down that slide at this point. Government didn’t really do this—this ideology has been “in the air” since the Founding of the republic and has filtered throughout American society over the two and a half centuries of its lifetime. Government enabled this because We the People enabled our rulers to do this. A cursory review of American history should satisfy anyone of the truth of this, as well as of the lack of virtue that disarmed a critical mass of Americans, preventing them from mounting effective resistance. We cling to “rights”—free speech, religious freedom. All that is ultimately meaningless, as we are seeing, and have had ample warning already, if it is not enformed by insight into the nature of reality.
The solution is spiritual renewal, but renewal based on true philosophy. The realism of the perennial philosophy that Christian faith handed down as tradition.
I am hardly a religious scholar. All I did was get born into and grow up in a traditional Protestant mainstream Christian home. I have since left this institutional Christianity because over the past few decades, its spokespeople (the pastors in our church) have gone over the top woke, liberal, progressive, self-hating, hypocritical, and meaningless. They have literally driven me and my wife out.
The answer may be a return to Christian faith, but not the 'Christian' faith currently professed by the ministries of affluent, white, suburban America. That, you can have.
If you follow Strauss & Howe's historical argument, America has been through several cycles of spiritual crisis and renewal already in the past 400 years or so. (In Generations, their sources go back well before the events of the 1770s.) That doesn't by itself discount the possibility of long-term trends, but I suspect that much of what we're experiencing at present, we can chalk up to the turning of the Saeculum, in their framework.
Organized religion was, historically, the great counterbalance to our libertarian tendencies. That's what the "separation of church and state" was all about: more balance of powers. Our institutions were never supposed to be entirely subject to the formal government. But so much of popular religion has been displaced by entertainment and academia, themselves long since brought under control and weaponized. Or colonized and subverted by crypto-Marxist and "wokeist" fifth columns, or simply destroyed. Still, when I see organized and effective resistance, it's largely coming from religious people. Often, newly religious.
Russia's bucking the trend. They've just recently outlawed "LGBT propaganda". Jeff Childers commented on it in today's Coffee and Covid post, remarking how the Western media has been strangely reticent to unleash the denouncement apparatus this time. Islamic "homophobia" was fair game in Qatar for the World Cup, but Putin seems to not be getting the same treatment.
https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/stuck-like-glue-thursday-december