Friday, August 16, 2024

"The expedited arrests, trials, and convictions of those who spoke wrongly": England is a country where the regime loathes its people and labors quietly to end them


From south Texas near Mexico and from his online magazine Armas, Joshua Treviño offers profound Reflections on the revolution in England (gracias por el Señor Glenn Reynolds):

 … the American grasp of European affairs is generally poor, a quality amplified by orders of magnitude when discussing the European grasp on American affairs, which is simply abysmal — but the former, the putatively free press of Great Britain, illuminated a truly distressing state of affairs in a nation nearing a full century of decline

 … We [Americans] care about `britain because we see it as a font, and so it is — although it is really England that is the font. We can understand American history as an extended re-litigation of the English Civil War of the mid-seventeenth century, and there is no comparable template in Scottish, and still less in Welsh or Irish, history. America is rooted in England, we feel Aristotelian philia for it — that civic friendship, united in a noble and common purpose, that is the indispensable prerequisite of nationhood — and so England becomes surpassingly important for us. We do not understand ourselves without understanding it. We also do not understand the universality underlying American propositionalism without grasping England and its achievements.

 … the tragedy of Britain of our time is to regard [This sceptred isle] as a positive evil, with the proclamation of Civis Britannicus Sum the assertion of a madman, a slogan of the demented.  

This is the truth, and the sorrow of England now is that its regime — its British regime, let us call it that, because Britain and England are not synonyms — manifestly believes that Duer Miller’s English seed was poisoned. Partly this is a consequence of the British adoption of American thoughts and narratives (they feel Aristotelian philia for us too, after all) even unto their own ruin. The effort to transplant American civic narrative on race and oppression onto English history is morally and intellectually deranging: from the American perspective, England possessed lesser virtues and lesser vices alike versus its American descendants. Partly too it is a consequence of the proximate cause of the civic violence that swept the United Kingdom across the past two weeks: its regime’s determination that the people of England be subjected and subsumed by the importation of millions of foreigners with whom no philia is possible. 

There is a regime narrative undergirding this iron fixation. You see it in the outlets for elite-approved materials at their expositions of history and its interpretations. The regime functionaries administering the British Museum, for example — arguably the single greatest museum of any kind in the world, with only Madrid’s extraordinary El Prado standing in real rivalry — make known their interpretive preferences in the capacious gift shop. There we find shelves upon shelves of books on offer detailing the evils that England has inflicted upon the world. 

 … The British Museum apparatus of commerce also, it so happens, has two sections purveying for purchase materials helpful in ushering the purchaser into the occult. As for the single most-important influence on all British history, which is to say Christianity, it has nothing in particular. This too is a regime choice. 

 … That is in fact happening — it is notable that a mosque is the only religious structure seen on the train from London to Oxford — but it is consequence rather than cause. Islam did not eradicate Christian England: that was the work of the English themselves, who at some point in the twentieth century decided to adopt wholesale American-style propositionalism as the basis of the nation — even unto their own ruin — and thereby cut themselves off from all they had been and meant. Surrendering the past is surrendering the future for which past is prerequisite. 

 … The new religion clambers upon the ruined edifice of the old and apes its forms 

All this is tutelage, of course. The images of Fotis the Ve / Vir and the like pervade the public square in London for instructional purposes. They teach the English their new narrative, their new understanding of self, and their new permitted ambit of thought and belief. In Trafalagar Square, after telling my son about Nelson, I noted that the crossing lights throughout the busy intersections were not the usual green-and-red walking men. Instead they were sex symbols: literally so, two male symbols intertwined on some crossing lights, two female symbols interlocked on others, and (less common) a male symbol and a female one paired. The regime narrative is that this is intrinsically British, and therefore belongs in a quintessentially British space

 … the argument is impossible: to paraphrase Rod Dreher, we have lost our reason and can no longer discern.

This too is a regime choice. 

 … at the rear of the chapel [at Oxford’s Exeter College], behind the golden crucifix, is a large LGBTQIA+ flag.

 … England still exists. The English are still here. But they are well into the long defeat, having saved the world more than once and in more than one way, with nothing to save them but their own twilight struggle. 

 … [Today, London belongs not to the English but] mostly to the regime that propagandizes to [them] that [their] ancestors were evil and the structures that might have ordered [their lives] are mere restraints to be overcome; and it belongs increasingly to the Islamic population of the city that — unlike the English ruling classes — have the confidence and cohesion to assert and defend their own mores and folkways and traditions. That many of those civics, a term I use very loosely here, are inimical to the English is irrelevant, because they know very well that the regime will protect them in those cases, and they know they have superior Aristotelian philia among themselves. Londonistan as a phenomenon is quite real: I had not seen this many women in hijabs since a brief stint working in Jordan decades ago, and I had never seen this many women in a niqab, ever. We should understand clearly what this signifies. The deliberate process that turned London across the past generation into a city in which the native-born population are a minority — for the first time, it should be noted, in two thousand years — is not malign because of any specific characteristics of the non-native population. 

 … I saw a datum asserting that more British Muslims have joined ISIS and al-Nusra in the past fifteen years than have joined the British Army, and this is a massive problem if true, but ultimately one emergent from the flaws in host society, which fails to insist upon itself and its own values. That deliberate process of societal importation is malign, fundamentally, because the process is one in which the regime literally executes what Brecht proposed as mere satire in 1953’s Die Lösung:

After the uprising of the 17th June

The Secretary of the Writers Union

Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee

Stating that the people

Had forfeited the confidence of the government

And could win it back only

By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier

In that case for the government

To dissolve the people

And elect another?

The people are dissolved. Understanding themselves close to dissolution, and instinctually grasping that they are thrust into existential crisis and denied all but pre-political means — they’ve voted time and again against this, and the party institutions of conservatism in Britain have shown themselves worthless at best, antipathetic at worst — they have asserted their Lockean right to appeal to heaven. 

Their numbers are however not large, and they will lose to the regime. The prim horror of it was visible across U.K. media, whose figures positively delighted in reporting the persecution and jailing, not just of those who actually committed property destruction and assault, but of those who expressed disallowed opinions on social media. The Home Secretary appeared on the BBC and reassured viewers that Britain remains a free-speech society, while presiding over the expedited arrests, trials, and convictions of those who spoke wrongly. A father of small children got more than three years for a tweet. A middle-aged woman in Cheshire had her arrest announced by local authorities: she posted incorrect information on Facebook. The list is extensive and growing, each destruction of a wrongthink-posting nobody’s life amplified by the regime pour encourager les autres. The 1381 rebellion of English peasants under Wat Tyler ended with the victorious Richard II, having prevailed in part through a double-cross of the credulous rebels, sneering to them that “villeins ye are still, and villeins ye shall remain,” and this is still the message of the regime in 2024

Like the Canadian state ruthlessly prevailing against the protesting truckers of 2022, and like the American state hunting down the its own dissidents — for example California Attorney General Kamala Harris persecuting the enemies of Planned Parenthood — the British state will relentlessly crush its opposition now. Its functionaries have already persuaded themselves that they are victims of a conspiracy — this too was widely discussed on U.K. regime media — and though Americans have lately mocked their pretensions to reach into the United States and extradite the purported instigators of the recent unrest, our own countrymen ought to consider that a left-leaning regime in Washington, D.C., has every reason to cooperate in that process. This is where the Anglosphere is now, each of its great nations gripped by two-tier and dual-track law and justice. Arsonists who burn Catholic churches are unpursued in Canada; rioters who terrorize communities in the name of racial equity are let go in America; and Muslims wielding weapons are unmolested by the British state. The commonalities are not coincidental. 

Regimes have philia too. 

One of the heartbreaking pleas of the dissident English that did make it through the regime-media barricade was for equal justice under law, for as much police protection for little girls in Southport as for mosques in Birmingham. But this isn’t what policing is for in the United Kingdom. 

We saw an advertisement for Metropolitan Police recruiting in London … this is a mindset tell. This isn’t policing to protect and serve the community: it is quite explicitly a recruitment pitch for those who will best serve criminals. (In a rare bright spot for the native population, the criminal portrayed in the ad was visibly English.) Drug dealing simply does not threaten the regime and its practitioners therefore receive lenient treatment. That the preceding sentence also characterizes the Mexican state ought to place British governance in its proper context. If on the other hand that exhausted and scared teenager posted a meme about immigration, well he can just say goodbye to freedom. If the purpose of a system is what it does, then this is what British law enforcement does: it protects the regime. The English pleading for equal treatment and equal protection thereby betray the fatal flaw in their strategic insight, in that they believe they live in the country they deserve.

The country they actually have is nothing like it. It is a country where the regime loathes its people and labors quietly to end them. It is a country where the apparatus of law and order does not see its writ run throughout the land, which is why it cedes space — and therefore sovereignty — to both Muslim militias in England and Protestant militias in Northern Ireland, while pleading with both cohorts for aid in its mission. It is a country where the armed forces are no longer meaningfully capable of executing their core mission of defending the national territory, with the Royal Navy at a near-five hundred year nadir in real capability.It is a country in which it is possible to walk down particular streets, as indeed we did, and see about as much English-language signage as one might see in Cairo, or Tunis, or Khartoum. …

Thursday, August 15, 2024

One day we woke up and found the art world, and even the formerly staid world of museums, was awash in sexualized garbage, postmodern inanity, and race worship

The idea that poetry, that art generally, should serve as a source — perhaps the primary source — of spiritual sustenance in a secular age is a Romantic notion that continues to resonate powerfully.

In What the Right Gets Wrong About Art (merci à Glenn Reynolds), Roger Kimball writes about an era

in which ugliness has not only triumphed in our culture but is everywhere held up as something one must embrace as attractive? How many more fashion ads featuring hideous “fat positive” females do we need? 

 … Conservatives in the West long ago ceded culture to the Left.

 … Back in 1973, Irving Kristol wrote an essay called “On Capitalism and the Democratic Idea.” In the course of that essay, Kristol touched upon the conservative indifference to the claims of culture. “For two centuries,” he wrote,  

the very important people who managed the affairs of this society could not believe in the importance of ideas—until one day they were shocked to discover that their children, having been captured and shaped by certain ideas, were either rebelling against their authority or seceding from their society. The truth is that ideas are all-important. The massive and seemingly solid institutions of any society—the economic institutions, the political institutions, the religious institutions—are always at the mercy of the ideas in the heads of the people who populate these institutions. The leverage of ideas is so immense that a slight change in the intellectual climate can and will—perhaps slowly but nevertheless inexorably—twist a familiar institution into an unrecognizable shape.

 … one day [“the very important people” who manage the affairs of our society] woke up and found the art world, and even the formerly staid world of museums, was awash in sexualized garbage, postmodern inanity, and race worship. Their indifference mutated first into outrage. Then, as they took note of the prices fetched by the garbage, it mutated into capitulation.

This process did not take place in a vacuum. It was part and parcel of a larger cultural rebellion against bourgeois values that got going in earnest with the advent of modernism. In art, as the Australian philosopher David Stove observed, 

Western Europe found that its anti-academy had become its academy ‘even in the twinkling of an eye.’ The galleries were suddenly full of the art of African societies formerly the most despised. Victorian architecture was all at once the object of a universal detestation, or rather horror. Black music began its long and excruciating revenge on the white man. The Jazz Age, in short, had arrived.

Today, we are living in the aftermath of that avant-garde: all those “adversarial” gestures, poses, ambitions, and tactics that emerged and were legitimized in the 1880s and 1890s, flowered in the first half of the last century, and that live a sort of posthumous existence now in the frantic twilight of postmodernism. Establishment conservatives have done nothing effective to challenge this. On the contrary

 … it is worth noting that great damage has been done — above all to artists, but also to public taste — by romanticizing the tribulations of the nineteenth-century avant-garde. Everyone is brought up on stories of how an obtuse public scorned Manet, censored Gauguin, and drove poor Van Gogh to madness and suicide. But the fact that these great talents went unappreciated has had the undesirable effect of encouraging the thought that, because one is unappreciated, one is therefore a genius. It has also made it extremely difficult to expose fraudulent work as such. For any frank dismissal of art — especially art that cloaks itself in the mantle of the avant-garde — is immediately met by the rejoinder: “Ah, but they made fun of Cézanne, too: they thought that Stravinsky was a charlatan.” 

This is the easiest and also the most shallow response to criticism. It has been adopted as much by the Right as the Left. To quote David Stove again, it is yet another version of what he called “The ‘They All Laughed at Christopher Columbus’ Argument.” … If the Columbus Argument is puerile when applied to politics and morals, it is equally puerile when applied to art. In the first place, most artists whom we now associate with the nineteenth-century avant-garde did not set out to shock or “transgress” moral boundaries: they set out to make art that was a true articulation of the world. Today, the primary — often, it seems, the only — goal of many so-called “cutting edge” artists is to shock and transgress. The art is secondary, a license for bad behavior. 

There is also the uncomfortable and inegalitarian truth that in any age most art is bad or failed art. And in our time, most art is not only bad but also dishonest: a form of therapy or political grumbling masquerading as art. Like everything important in human life, art must be judged on the basis of first-hand experience: no formula can be devised prescribing its assessment, including the formula that what is despised today will be championed as great work tomorrow. The art world today retains little of the idealism that permeated Romanticism, but it remains Romantic in its moralism and hubris about the salvific properties of art.

On second thought, though, I realized that I could give an abbreviated answer to the question implicit in my title in just three words: indifference, capitulation, kitsch. 

[The] familiar but exemplary episodes from the annals of contemporary art [that Roger Kimball mentions regarding the Dada movement, Marcel Duchamp, Pierre Pinoncelli, etc] illustrate the cynical truth of Andy Warhol’s observation that “Art is what you can get away with.” Warhol’s own career, and, indeed, a large part of the contemporary art world testify to the power — if not the truth — of that observation. The sad fact is that today, anything can be not only put forward but also accepted and celebrated as a work of art. 

How Did We Get Here?

What had to happen such that a bisected cow in a tank of formaldehyde is accounted an important work of art? That is a complicated question to which there is no short answer. But if one had to sum up volumes in a single word, a good candidate would be the word “beauty”: What the art world is lacking today is an allegiance to beauty. … But art without beauty was, if not exactly a contradiction in terms, at least a description of failed art.

But if large precincts of the art world have jettisoned the traditional link between art and beauty, they have done nothing to disown the social prerogatives of art. Indeed, we suffer today from a peculiar form of moral anesthesia: an anesthesia based on the delusion that by calling something “art” we thereby purchase for it a blanket exemption from moral criticism — as if being art automatically rendered all moral considerations beside the point.

George Orwell gave classic expression to this point in “Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dalí.” Acknowledging the deficiency of the philistine response to Dalí’s work — categorical rejection along with denial that Dalí possessed any talent whatever — Orwell goes on to note that the response of the cultural elites was just as impoverished. Essentially, the elite response to Dalí was the response of l’art pour l’art, of extreme aestheticism. “The artist,” Orwell writes,

is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word “Art,” and everything is O.K. Rotting corpses with snails crawling over them are O. K.; kicking little girls in the head is O. K.; even a film like L’Age d’Or [which shows, among other things, detailed shots of a woman defecating] is O.K.

A juror in the obscenity trial in Cincinnati in 1990 over Robert Mapplethorpe’s notorious photographs of the S&M homosexual underworld memorably summed up the paralyzed attitude Orwell described. Acknowledging that he did not like Mapplethorpe’s rebarbative photographs, the juror nonetheless concluded that “if people say it’s art, then I have to go along with it.”

“If people say it’s art, then I have to go along with it.” It is worth pausing to digest that comment. It is also worth confronting it with a question: Why do so many people feel that if something is regarded as art, they “have to go along with it,” no matter how offensive, foolish, or corrosive it might be? Part of the answer has to do with the confusion of art with ‘free speech.’ Another part of the answer has to do with the evolution, and what we might call the institutionalization, of the avant-garde and its posture of defiance.

You know the drill: black-tie dinners at major museums, tout le monde in attendance, celebrating the latest art-world freak: maybe it’s the Chapman brothers with their pubescent female mannequins festooned with erect penises; maybe it’s Mike Kelley with his mutilated dolls, or Jeff Koons with his pornographic sculptures depicting him and his now-former wife having sex, or Cindy Sherman with her narcissistic feminism, or Jenny Holzer with her political slogans. The list is endless. And so is the tedium. Today in the art world, anything goes but almost nothing happens. As with any collusion of snobbery and artistic nullity, such spectacles have their amusing aspects, as Tom Wolfe, for example, has brilliantly shown. In the end, though, the aftermath of the avant-garde has been the opposite of amusing. It has been a cultural disaster. For one thing, by universalizing the spirit of opposition, it has threatened to transform the practice of art into a purely negative enterprise. In large precincts of the art world today, art is oppositional or it is nothing. Celebrity replaces aesthetic achievement as the goal of art. 

The right, especially the libertarian right, has been complicit in this development, first in its indifference, second in its capitulation, third by its embrace of kitsch.

 … The novelist Milan Kundera … noted that “Kitsch is the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling.” Kitsch is histrionic, self-dramatizing. 

 … it is no secret that much if not most art in recent decades has abandoned beauty, abandoned the ambition to please the viewer aesthetically. Instead, it seeks to shock, discommode, repulse, proselytize, or startle. Beauty is out of place in any art that systematically discounts the aesthetic.

But “beauty” is by no means an unambiguous term. In degenerate or diluted form, it can mean the merely pretty, and in this sense beauty really is an enemy of authentic artistic expression. But beauty is not always the “merely pretty” or agreeable. One thinks, for example, of Dostoyevsky’s observation, in The Brothers Karamazov, that “beauty is the battlefield on which God and the devil war for man’s soul.”

The point is that, in its highest sense, beauty speaks with such great immediacy because it touches something deep within us. Understood in this way, beauty is something that absorbs our attention and delivers us, if but momentarily, from the poverty and incompleteness of everyday life. At its most intense, beauty invites us to forget our subjection to time and imparts an intoxicating sense of self-sufficiency. Our art closes us to the experience of the beautiful. 

 … Art today is enlisted in all manner of extra-artistic projects, from gender politics to the grim linguistic leftism of neo-Marxists, post-structuralists, gender theorists, and all the other exotic fauna who are congregating in and about the art world and the academy. The subjugation of art — and of cultural life generally — to political ends has been one of the great spiritual tragedies of our age. Among much else, it has made it increasingly difficult to appreciate art on its own terms, as affording its own kinds of insights and satisfactions. This situation has made it imperative for critics who care about art to champion its distinctively aesthetic qualities against attempts to reduce art to a species of propaganda.

 … . By the nineteenth century, art had long been free from serving the ideological needs of religion; and yet the spiritual crisis of the age tended to invest art with ever greater existential burdens — burdens that continue, in various ways, to be felt down to this day. The poet Wallace Stevens articulated one important strand of this phenomenon when he observed that “after one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.” The idea that poetry, that art generally, should serve as a source — perhaps the primary source — of spiritual sustenance in a secular age is a Romantic notion that continues to resonate powerfully. It helps to explain, for example, the special aura that attaches to art and artists, even now

 … This much, I think, is clear: without an allegiance to beauty, art degenerates into a caricature of itself; it is beauty that animates aesthetic experience, making it so seductive; but aesthetic experience itself degenerates into a kind of fetish or idol if it is held up as an end in itself, untested by the rest of life. As I have put it elsewhere, the trivialization of outrage leads to a kind of moral and aesthetic anesthesia not the least of whose symptoms is the outrage of trivialization.

Tuesday, August 13, 2024

America at the Crossroads: Debate on Radio Courtoisie

Dans le Libre Journal de Géopolitique profonde du 10 août, Nicolas Stoquer reçoit :

• Raphaël Besliu, directeur de la publication de Géopolitique profonde

• Paul Reen, Président de
Republicans in France 

Thème : “L’Amérique à la croisée des chemins” 

Références

Découvrez la revue mensuelle stratégique papier de Géopolitique Profonde :

Allez plus loin en contactant les équipes de Géopolitique Profonde : Solutions | Géopolitique Profonde (geopolitique-profonde.com) 

Monday, August 12, 2024

The Walz Pick: Was the Democrat 'deep bench' nothing but bottom scrapings? And will Tampon Tim be Eagleton-ed?

Damien Bennett can't figure out the Walz pick. 

Honestly, I can't. The Democrat 'deep bench' was nothing but bottom scrapings apparently. Can someone help me out here?

There are quite a number of stories about his politics and record, a lot of gush but also a lot of onions -- actually bushels of onions, which are being reported on both defensively and also aggressively. That's a surprise. It's not one Walz hymn book.

Other than baggage Walz doesn't bring much to the ticket.
  • Poll: Only 17% Of Americans View Tim Walz Positively August 6, 2024
    The 17 [favorable] and 12 [unfavorable] percent marks appear to be so low because many Americans (71 percent) have never heard of him before or are unsure how to rate him.
  • Tim Walz Fails To Inspire Swing State Voters: ‘He Makes Tim Kaine [!] Look Exciting’ August 6, 2024
  • MSNBC Data Guru Delivers Brutal Reality Check To Dems After Walz Pick August 6, 2024   
    MSNBC data analyst Steve Kornacki: “When you look at what Tim Walz actually pulled off to get elected, to get re-elected in 2022, it’s the Biden model, demographically, regionally. You go county by county, there’s not much variance between how Walz did and how Biden did. ... Now go into greater Minnesota, let’s take a look at, like, Stearns County here. Look, Walz lost this by 23 points. What did Biden lose it by? 23 points. And this is the kind of county, by the way, in Minnesota and across the Midwest here, that Democrats are hoping Walz will help them with. ... So, the Walz victory in 2022 looks like what is now a standard Democratic victory in Minnesota: Heavy reliance on the Twin Cities metro area and taking big losses in greater Minnesota. The Democrats’ hope is that he’s going to appeal to the blue-collar areas in these other three states [i.e., Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania.], maybe he will, but when you look at what he’s done in Minnesota, you don’t quite see that."
  • NBC Analyst: Walz Doesn’t Broaden Democrat AppealTo Blue-Collar Voters August 7, 2024
Low-to-no name recognition; no pull with vanishing key black, hispanic, Jewish, and youth demos; no base beyond metro Minnesota; no star power, no eye candy, no charisma, nothing compelling but his negatives.   

I don't get it. One theory is that Walz is so obviously the wrong choice that KA-mala easily made the pick.


I don't get it. Help me out. 

Let me close with a couplet of election year shit polls:
Fuck off, polls!
Trying to help Duncan out, Duncan answers as follows:

I'm in complete agreement with your assessment of Tampon Tim. However, the MSM has strong counter-narratives working full-time.

For example, CNN (sorry for the vulgarity) suggests the attacks on Walz's military service is just "Swift Boating" a la the anti-Kerry campaign.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/09/politics/tim-walz-service-swift-boat-attacks/index.html

When I ask my Lefty friends about Walz, they are mostly unaware of all the dirt this guy drags around. Narratives work until they don't (sharp as a tack Biden). So, a politically astute friend of mine thinks Walz will be Thomas Eagleton-ed...not necessarily for the same reason but something that is both sympathetic and disqualifying.

He suffered from bouts of depression throughout his life, resulting in several hospitalizations, which were kept secret from the public. When they were revealed, it humiliated the McGovern campaign, and Eagleton was forced to quit the race.

When you compare the MSM efforts to prop up the Harris/Walz campaign to your extensive collection of real Walz negatives just in this email, I too wonder how can people choose to be so stupid?