Politics

Weaponising Our Weaknesses

kissing ringThat a profound malaise has struck conservative thought throughout the contemporary West, particularly across the Anglosphere, is an axiom of the political zeitgeist. Strong circumstantial evidence of this is the peculiar situation in which political outsiders – sometimes obvious non-conservatives such as Wilders in the Netherlands or Trump in the United States – successfully express anxieties that would ordinarily define the fears and aspirations of the electoral centre-right, but which are systematically censored from the political debate by the candidates of more ‘respectable’ parties in the so-called ‘moderate’ centre.

Recent attempts to revitalise opposition to the ‘progressive’ behemoth have obtained mixed results:  Despite receiving almost 13 per cent of the popular vote at the last general elections, UKIP won one seat while losing another, and thus failed to increase its strength in the House of Commons beyond a single MP. Even as the third largest electoral force in British politics, the party’s recent and decisive defeat in the Oldham West and Royton by-election dampened any enthusiastic predictions of an imminent shift in the party-political culture of Albion. Meanwhile, faux-conservatives in Canada have been vanquished by the son of an iconic ’60s progressive statesman, New Zealand’s conservative government has assimilated leftist policies for the sake of perceived electoral ‘relevance’, less than impressive candidates for the US Republican presidential elections have been consistently overshadowed by an outsider whose political future remains hotly debated, and Australia’s maverick Senator Cory Bernardi, despite being widely popular among core constituencies of the popular centre-right, remains largely isolated form his governing party’s power centre (for now).

Conversely, the recent elections in Poland have seen the literal eviction of all explicitly leftist parties from its houses of parliament, ushering in a new era in which ex- and post-communists have been wholly ejected from the country’s executive and lawmaking branches for the first time in history. The President and Premier (Andrzej Duda and Beata Szydło respectively) have wasted no time in preparing sweeping reforms, appointments and changes to the administrative sector, security apparatus and the nation’s Constitutional Tribunal, perhaps paving a way to a national renovation similar to that of its southern neighbour, Hungary.[1] With the earlier victory and consolidation of Budapest’s conservative government under Viktor Orbán, this represents an interesting trend towards a nationally assertive right at least in Central Europe, where a genuine third way seems to be gaining popular traction against the cultural imperialism of Brussels and the political imperialism of a revanchist Moscow.

Given the different social background to each of these electoral phenomena, immediate comparisons can only be superficial, necessarily reductionist and may therefore lead a policy analyst to error when attempting to devise a unified theory of how best to confront the political left at the ballot box. No such unified theory exists because local politics are always a function of the local people, their specific history and particular culture. However, glimmers of reactionary success anywhere across the turbulent social landscape of the West can illustrate that, to borrow from the parlance of the revolutionary agitators of decades past: another world – is indeed – possible.

These reflections follow the predictable – and indeed predicted – events in Paris of 13 November 2015. Cultural elites from across the Continent through to London, New York and Canberra, those who set the tone for ‘polite’ discourse on topics such as immigration and citizenship need to be incessantly reminded that what occurred in France was entirely avoidable; had they only heeded the warnings of those they were instead busy denouncing as unworthy of political acknowledgment, as embarrassing affronts to the enlightened sensibilities of a post-Cold War universalist, end-of-history ‘consensus’, and routinely defamed as ‘nativists’, ‘extremists’, ‘bigots’, and the like.

And yet, despite the obvious and evident failure of leftist social theory, so-called ‘mainstream’ or ‘establishment’ conservatives on the whole are incapable of shaping what one might expect to be a popular culture in desperate search for an alternative to the status quo.

One explanation for this – but undoubtedly the most important – is that these ‘establicons’ seem to accept the moral authority of the principles and ideas upon which their ostensible opponents’ ideology is founded. This acceptance creates mental reflexes that are indistinguishable from linear Whiggish historical determinism, and which necessarily leads to putatively ‘conservative’ positions that are, on closer inspection, merely a rearticulation of fundamentally leftist concepts or ideals. Occasionally one can see the liberal pathogen infect the thought-lines of purported critics of the establishment, even those who identify with the academic right itself. When these are encountered, it is important to illustrate how they fail to offer a viable counter to the encroaching steamroller of ‘progress’.

In “Turning the West into a Wasteland” (Daily Telegraph, 1 October 2015) Dr. Kevin Donnelly of the Australian Catholic University acknowledges the oppressive hegemony of left-liberalism in Australia’s cultural and political discourse. However, he makes the fatal mistake of relying on Somali anti-Islam activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali in support of his appeal to defend the intellectual legacy of the West. Ali’s advice is to “inculcate into the minds and hearts of young people an ideology or ideas of life, love, peace and tolerance.” In a fatal blow to his own argument, Donnelly concludes that “these are the very attributes that define Western civilisation, which is why it must be defended.”[2] (emphasis added)

Of course Donnelly is dead wrong. Ali’s “ideology or ideas” are precisely what have enervated Western political culture in the face of a robust and self-confident albeit primitivist opponent beyond our borders, and a disingenuous champion of deracinated radical egalitarianism within. While the West’s vulnerability is correctly blamed on cultural relativism, Donnelly does not seem to appreciate that appeals to “love, peace and tolerance” all too often translate into doctrinaire non-discrimination in policy and law, wholesale acceptance of the Other in cultural discourse (indeed, the more Other, the more she is accepted) and provides the sentimentalist impulse towards the very relativism which is identified as the root of the problem: from ‘all love is equal’ to ‘refugees welcome’.

Let us recall that Angela Merkel’s risible contribution to the global hand-wringing post Paris 13/11 was to reemphasise “compassion”, “charity”, “the joy of the community” and of course “tolerance” as a response to the terrorist attacks.[3] These are the attributes of an ideology that has paralysed the West into impotence before a medieval aggressor, not the defining qualities of a particular civilisation that appears to be under constant attack from without and within. Effeminate abstracta are the reason for the reflexive patheticism that characterises public responses to entirely avoidable catastrophes, from the New York World Trade Centre and London tube attacks, the Bali and Madrid Bombings, and onwards: public weeping, mind-numbingly vacuous sloganising, and the sub-juvenile belief that “flowers and candles will protect us”[4] from Islamist AK47s and exploding vests.

More importantly – and returning to the malaise in modern rightist thought – it also blinds conservatives by sentimentalising tragedy and therefore making genuine reaction to its underlying cause largely impossible: pace the liberal status-signalling grief-stricken mob, we are not Charlie Hebdo. It is more than a little ironic that a militantly secular republic has been targeted by a religion whose vendetta against the People of the Cross dates back to the seventh century. It is perhaps a kind of perverse poetic justice that Islamists see what Western liberal secularists refuse to for their hatred of Throne and Altar: that enlightenment values would not exist were it not for the Christian cultural bedrock from which they sprung.

Nevertheless, to the conservative who sees Europe as inseparable from its Christian history, we are not Paris circa 2015 either. An overdose of “love, peace and tolerance” renders the defenders and advocates of Western civilisation incapable of discerning with what and whom they should declare their solidarity in times of crisis. Conservatives of any description embarrass themselves when they stand shoulder to shoulder with an ideology that has not only paved the way towards its own self-destruction, but has demonstrated no “love, peace and tolerance” towards Christians or cultural traditionalist themselves.

Thus cultural Marxists and local Jihadi sympathisers alike have effectively weaponised our weaknessesby turning what the generation of ‘68 erroneously believes is our civilisational ‘essence’ against us. It is counterproductive to pretend that these weaknesses represent the fundamentals of who and what we are, as Ali, Donnelly and countless others in the mainstream parties of the self-described centre-right routinely do. Stressing the ‘softer’ aspects of Western society in the face of those who reject their underlying liberal assumptions or refuse to ‘play nice’ becomes a kind of thought retarding auto-immune deficiency. Decontextualized calls to mercy without a sense of cultural fortitude or national identity eventually beget the politics of surrender. It leads to what is sometimes described as pathological altruism, a selective moral outrage, willing blindness and the inability to take one’s own side in a conflict of competing group interests, all under the impulse of compassion über alles. Why else is it that the names Trayvon Martin and Aylan Kurdi are globally recognisable but not Jonathan Foster or any of the ‘Rotherham 1400’?

What Donnelly appeals to is therefore part of the oppressive liberal hegemony that he otherwise rightly decries and denounces. This is the political theology of the Australian uterati, from Penny Wong to Peta Credlin; its presence within ‘conservative’ ranks has proven to be an utter disaster and it ought to be wholly rejected in favour of another model, more appropriate for the times. Conservatives who have systematically suffered defeat in the Culture Wars should have learned by now: you can’t nice you way out of the present mess. How often do they need to be crash tackled in the field before they recognise that we’re no longer playing cricket, and haven’t been for a number of decades?

This essay appears in the July-August edition of Quadrant.
Click here to subscribe

It is a self-evident fact that the era of ‘soft power’ is over, unless we are bargaining with people who share the same virtues as we. Otherwise, we cannot afford an infantalised political culture, one focused on ‘social justice’ instead of (actual) justice at home, foreign policy by tweeted emoticon, a belief that diversity is more important than not living in a police state, a political elite obsessed with exporting ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ thus reducing North Africa and the Middle East to a Breugelesque nightmare, or a naïve internationalism that has imported it onto the capitals of Europe and her settler nations abroad. This leftist stupidity simply cannot be survived, and the sentimentalist cult on which it is based is at its very heart.

What we need is less “love, peace and tolerance” and more responsible governance, sobriety of thought and a re-acknowledgment of concepts that were obvious to our forefathers but which our present political betters, in their ‘enlightened’ pretentions, feel can be ignored without consequence. And here we come to a compounded error of relying on intangible abstracts as definitive “attributes” of the West: conceiving civilisation in these terms creates a mental framework that is not readily capable – or indeed rejects outright – any particularist definitions of community. This too is identical to the progressive worldview and only reinforces the social pathologies that logically arise from it: the denial of reality and the cult-like doubling-down of cultural commissars to ensure ideological conformity in the public square.

Thus Lawrence Auster’s first law of minority-majority relations has it that “the worse any designated minority or alien group behaves in a liberal society, the bigger become the lies of Political Correctness in covering up for that group.”[5] Similarly, Takuan Seiyo identifies the “quadruple blindfold” of how liberal society manages minority-majority relations, the last of which states that “cuddly feelings” about the hostile group “or implanted feelings of guilt relative to it” trump any observable evidence of its incompatibility with the host’s cultural norms or standards.[6] Political correctness, cuddly feelings, guilt, love, peace and tolerance: the poison cocktail our present leaders imbibe, from left to so-called ‘right’.

The West can no longer tolerate wishful thinking turned into social policy; the risk of public attachments to the childish fantasies of yesteryear are unacceptably high and the future of Western politics requires an underlying attitude more virile and self-confident if it is to survive. That this new model will likely resemble an older paradigm should be no cause for shock or surprise. As Michael Tung emphasises in the 2015 Symposium of the Sydney Traditionalist Forum:

“This is because the State and the political sphere are inherently masculine. To deviate from this is to feminise politics and detach the State from its higher, supra-individual aims […] it is precisely since the Hearth of Vesta has encroached upon the altars and debating chambers that these institutions have taken such a turn for the worse.”[7]

Reflecting on the ethos of the Australian and New Zealand military tradition, Tung identifies particularly fraternal camaraderie as the essential foundation upon which “the decisions and sacrifices that only men can make, and are expected to” can flourish:

“The Australian and Kiwi tradition of ‘mateship,’ encapsulating stoic ideals of solidarity, peer equality, and irreverent respect – consecrated by the Männerbund of ANZAC – springs from the same taproot as the Spartan Ὅμοιοι.”[8]

Note well that the “equality” and “solidarity” referred to here is experienced in a framework of a particular culture and community. Contrary to Donnelly, Ali et al, lofty notions are not “attributes that define Western civilisation” because culture and nationhood is no epiphenomena. Instead, it is the product of a particular people with an intimately shared history, going back many generations within a broadly defined geographic region (and in the case of the Anglosphere, extended by colonial settlement or conquest). The ethos described by Tung is antithetical to the politics of “peace, love and tolerance” and the indiscriminate openness, acquiescence and passivity that it naturally engenders in the face of hostile competitors for geographic or political space.

Likewise, any focus on “ideology or ideas” will not only lead towards the dangerous emotionality of the liberal status quo, it also makes advocacy for the particularist definition of a people practically impossible. Compare this to Poland’s Mariusz Błaszczak, who recently declared that his newly elected government’s decisions will be uncompromisingly steered by considerations of national security. In relation to the incessant demands of Eurocrat elites, namely that the flood of ‘refugees’ from ‘Syria’ must be spread across all EU member states in the spirit of ‘solidarity’, he asks rhetorically: “is distributing the infected a solution to an epidemic?”[9] In a similar tone, Orbán warns that the present crisis “could change the face of Europe’s civilisation.”[10]

Though this may strike a distant onlooker as somewhat indelicate by present sensibilities, it is those sensibilities that are the problem and not what is being said by these Central Europeans. Given the gravity and proximity of the crisis, Orbán’s and Błaszczak’s words are entirely understandable and apt. Far from being heartless, their attitude actually manifests an “equality” and “solidarity” that is couched in notions of community and public service – their community, their public. Assuming that democratic mandates and national interest means anything in the context of conservative electoral victories, no other policy could be more politically legitimate for an elected parliamentarian facing unprecedented demographic (and therefore cultural-political) catastrophe on his continent. It is only a pity that our own national leaders, Abbott[11] or Turnbull alike, haven’t taken a stand similar to the Visegrad Gorup’s.

Instead, in their attempts to build a society on the politics of “love, peace and tolerance”, the utopian ideologues of yesteryear are clearing the path for the growth of eventual totalitarianism at home. France, as well as the rest of the continent in the near to nearer future, is in the process of painfully learning one important lesson that will likely characterise the internal political development of multicultural states over the next century: one can live in a secure community with high levels of interpersonal trust, or one can have laissez faire ‘diversity’. Presently, our moral and political betters have chosen the false security of an eventual police state whose coercive apparatus is necessary to keep the babbling colossus forcefully together. There is a term for this, anarcho-tyranny: tyranny from above to keep the anarchy below from spilling over into the streets.

If the reader believes that Australia will somehow be an exception to this degenerative ratchet, he should ask himself why Section 18C is still on the books, and why police and prosecutorial powers seem always to expand, never contract. There will come a time when blind ideological commitments to Orwellian mantras or fatuous conceits such as ‘subscription identity’ (a.k.a. ‘magic dirt theory’) will almost certainly be remembered as the political equivalent of phrenology and flat-earthism. Why? Because if identity is reduced to a list of ephemeral criteria it becomes wholly intangible, and in the context of a modernist culture of banality and permissivism, ultimately meaningless. Inculcating into the minds of young men an ideology of “love, peace and tolerance” will hardly inspire the virtues necessary to defend the hearth and all the secondary luxuries so dear to the apostles of secular liberalism. Instead, it will serve only to reinforce the culture of self-effacement.

Is it any wonder therefore that talking-heads of what Paul Gottfried refers to as the “alternative left”[12] rarely if ever speak about anything concrete and therefore real? Modern mainstream conservatism has thus become anonymous by way of its appeals to abstract universals which are – at their core – indistinguishable from the political theology of its declared opponents. Sadly, these are all self-inflicted wounds; mainstream conservatives petrified of offending their opponents can blame no one but themselves for the hopelessness of current attempts at political reaction against the bitter fruit of progressives’ cultural and political hegemony.

Romantic Utopians of the twentieth century were once drawn to the magnetic promise of secular salvation that the ideological left offered its acolytes and subscribers. But today it is the universalist, anonymous and uninspiring mainstream of the nominal ‘right’ itself that has assumed the mantle of abstract, materialist and sentimentalist utopianism. By having nothing tangible or rooted in historical experience to offer the hearts and minds of Western Men, there is no reason to doubt that it too will go the same way as the morally bankrupt Cold War Left. The question is, what will replace it: The so-called ‘Kalifat’? A Rainbow Soviet? Or something else? Whatever it might be, it does not appear that the present conservative establishment has the competence or courage to provide a genuine alternative to the dominant worldview. Unless it starts thinking for itself – and on its own terms – it will remain but another obstacle that sincere defenders of the West will need to traverse and overcome.

Edwin Dyga last wrote about the future of Conservative politics in Australia in the October issue of Quadrant, 2014. A footnoted version of this article is available at Quadrant Online.



[1]     For a recent elucidation of political developments in Poland: see Ryszard Legutko, “Letter from Warsaw” Quadrant Vol. 60 issue 1-2 (No. 523) (January February 2016) pp. 70-72.

[2]     Kevin Donnelly, “Turning the West into a Wasteland” Daily Telegraph (1 October 2015) p. 25.

[3]     “Merkel: Antwort auf Terror müssen Nächstenliebe und Toleranz sein” [“Merkel: response to terror must be charity and tolerance”] Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten (online) (14 November 2015 @ 13:19 DST) <deutsche-wirtschafts-nachrichten.de> (accessed 23 December 2015) at ¶ 6 of block quote therein.

[4]     Nicola Oakley, “How do you explain the Paris terror attacks to a child? This father found the most beautiful way” Daily Mirror (online) (17 November 2015 @ 11:37, updated 17:18) <mirror.co.uk> (accessed 23 December 2015) passim.

[5]     Lawrence Auster, “Clarifying the First Law” View from the Right (blog) (14 November 2007) <www.amnation.com/vfr> (accessed 23 December 2015) passim.

[6]     Takuan Seiyo, “Oppression Instead of Admission: Part II” Gates of Vienna (blog) (23 January 2015) <gatesofvienna.net> (accessed 23 December 2015) at § 1 under second sub-heading.

[7]     Michael Tung, “Ride That Tiger; or The Party’s an Ass” SydneyTrads – Weblog of the Sydney Traditionalist Forum (17 October 2015) <sydneytrads.com> (accessed 23 December 2015) at ¶ 10.

[8]     Ibid.

[9]     K.G., “Ostra reakcja Błaszczaka na słowa Schulza: Jest oderwany od rzeczywistości” [“Błaszczak’s blunt reaction to (President of the EU Parliament, Martin) Schulz: he is divorced from reality”] Onet Wiadomości (online) (17 November 2015 @ 8:24 CEST) <wiadomosci.onet.pl> (accessed 23 December 2015) at ¶ 6.

[10]    “Migration threatens European civilisation, says Hungary PM” The Telegraph (online) (2 June 2015 @ 3:51 BST) <telegraph.co.uk> (accessed 23 December 2015) at ¶ 2.

[11]For a rightist critique of the Abbott Government, see this writer’s “Reflections Over a Political Wasteland” The European Conservative No. 13 (Winter/Spring, 2016).

 

[12]    For a justification of this term in the European and US contexts, see generally: Paul Edward Gottfried, The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005); also by the author, Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right (New York: Palgrave, 2007) Chapter 6 passim.

19 thoughts on “Weaponising Our Weaknesses

  • Jim Campbell says:

    Bravo! A brilliant article!!

    I fear that the essence of the problem so aptly described is that so many strands that make up the whole of a person and therefore a society have been irreparably broken. I am thinking particularly of the following in no particular order; discipline, education, procreation, technology, respect and manners, family, law and order, beauty, health, moral and spiritual values. One could add more, but the point is there is no silver bullet that will restore the whole. And worse, the degradation of each element is fed by the degradation of the others. It’s a mess that has been building steam over the past 50 years. Unfortunately a solution is nigh impossible as those with the skills to redress the problem pretty much gone. In a sentence, we are approaching the point where there will not be enough collective intelligence to run the world. By way of a trite example: I have been told that the markets in Melbourne will not employ anyone under 50 as they cannot perform mental arithmetic and percentages so necessary in that business.

    There is one, and only one hope, heretical as it may sound. Mankind must recognise it has made a mess of things, admit its mistakes and return to the simple truths embodied in Christianity. As G K Chesterton’s character said, ‘the first effect of not believing in God is that you lose your common sense’. That we have done in spades.

    • Warty says:

      The effects arising out of the deliberate dismantling of our Christian heritage is this loss of a moral compass (something that Rob Ellison would ridicule, every time I mentioned it), but, at the low ebb at which Christianity finds itself now, it is hardly going to resurrect itself: there needs to be some sort of massive social upheaval before any ground can be regained. God invariably stands back, but human agency precipitates good or its opposite.

      • ianl says:

        > “The effects arising out of the deliberate dismantling of our Christian heritage is this loss of a moral compass (something that Rob Ellison would ridicule, every time I mentioned it) … ”

        As do I. This opinion, that only Christians have a “moral compass” is as insulting as the leftoid nostrums about “social justice”. In fact, both these two terms merely describe variants of moral vanity.

        And no, Islam has no more legitimacy to “moral” nostrums than do Christians or lefties or atheists or …

        There is no contemporaneous answer to the issue of terrorism. That’s why this article wisely avoids attempting it, although I agree that yet another definition of the problem is a somewhat flat read.

  • bemartin39@bigpond.com says:

    An excellent analysis of the perilous situation. However, while it details the social malady of “progressivism” and its conservative counterpart of “compassion at any cost”, it refrains from prescribing the policies western nations should adopt and put into practice to ensure the survival of civilisation. This article is the diagnosis of the problem and the prognosis if the disease remains untreated. What is sorely needed is an effective treatment plan.

  • Warty says:

    Phew! A five course meal. Indeed this is the sort of article one would have hoped for in the Quadrant, and without the need to rush to the vomitorium afterwards, propelled by ungrateful, victim-card-bearing Atolls.
    It is surely not surprising that the rear-guard action should come from Poland and Hungary, as they had first hand knowledge of an entrenched socialist system that so influenced the progressive moment in the rest of Europe. Viktor Orban’s speech in March this year, was uncompromising in its rejection of EU’s refugee quotas, as well as the EU itself. It was nationalistic to its core.
    For the rest of us, as Dyga intimates, we need to find our own way of undoing the damage of the Marxist ‘Critical Theory’, which drives political correctness and ‘progressiveness’. Islamic attacks, though hideous, may go some way towards nudging us out of our torpor (just don’t quote me on it though).

  • denandsel@optusnet.com.au says:

    Thank you Edwin, well written and very logically presented. One sentence stuck out for me in that part where you were discussing ‘multiculturalism’ – “one can live in a secure community with high levels of interpersonal trust, or one can have laissez faire ‘diversity’.” That is a brilliant observation, laissez faire should apply to economic matters only, not ‘culture’. Laissez faire economies are characterised by ‘high levels of interpersonal trust’, unlike any multicultural country.
    To add to your ‘laissez faire diversity’ thesis – I have long thought, believed and said that Australia should have only ONE culture – OURS – and that culture should be as free market/laissez faire economically as is possible. We are a multi-racial country, and maybe we should/could be even more multi-racial. But that said, in a true democracy that is something that we all should be allowed to have some sort of meaningful say on and not have it imposed on us by the un-elected elites in the ABC, media and academia.
    To finish – the opposite of diversity is University – that is even much more marked now than it was when I was Uni almost half a century ago.

    • ian.macdougall says:

      – the opposite of diversity is University – that is even much more marked now than it was when I was Uni almost half a century ago.

      I think you will find that the meaning is derived from the word ‘universe’: where we find everything known collected all together in the one place.

      • denandsel@optusnet.com.au says:

        Thank you Ian, I did know the [reputed] origins of the word University. My grumble was, and still is, the lack of diversity [especially of opinions] at University, I was being sardonic. Those ‘radical’ [Marxist] arts students who had the time to heckle and harass, we ‘reactionary’ hard science students while I was at Uni are now in the process of retiring from the Education Department, some of them from the very top echelons of it. Many of the arts students had only 12 hours lectures and tutorials per week. At the Vet school in our busiest year we had 41 hrs per week of lectures, tutorials and prac sessions.

  • Bwana Neusi says:

    Bill Martin – so succinctly put.
    The tragedy is that a series of “Right Wing Extremist” cohorts, who understand and see the terrible direction is heading, will be shut down by the very conservatives that need the preservation of society that they seek.

  • Keith Kennelly says:

    The great philosophers, Barzun and Russell believed all philosophy is based in emotion and comes from the community and is not the preserve of learned people.

    This is the problem today. Our university educated elites believe only they have a right to construct and force their philosophy onto the community.

    Trump et al are the community expression of the philosophy the wider community lives.

    The elites are a minority… A minority who talks to itself, about issues it sees as important in a voice only they understand. When confronted with alternate views they can only name call and attempt to isolate those who dare voice alternate views.

    The experiment with government by the educated but not so learned is ending. University educated experts are being seen as limited by and to the body of knowledge they have been taught.
    Keith Kennelly

  • Rob Ellison says:

    I have been writing poetry instead of hanging out here – and this most horrid sort of faux academic effluvium is the reason. Sometimes one finds a depth of charm and erudition that rises naturally above the utilitarian. I would in fact cite Einstein as the paramount poet of the 20th century and the special theory his masterwork. But this turgid essay is a travesty that has no utility, no charm and little learning. Rather like Warty who mistakes yet again disdain of his moral compass for the lack of Christian charity. Let he who is without sin.

    Try as I might – I can’t get past a polity that is more virile. What is gained and what is the positive alternative posited? Removing women from politics because there is too much peace and love? How did this nonsense – which could only come about in a fascist enterprise – come to be printed? This seems more to reflect an increasingly demented fringe talking only to themselves and delusionally imagining that they are part of a majority?

    • bemartin39@bigpond.com says:

      We would all benefit, including yourself, if you were to stay with your poetry, thereby saving yourself from the distress of reading material that is so hopelessly inferior to your exalted sense of ultimate superiority and leaving us poor wretches to wallow in our miserable ignorance.

  • a.crooks@internode.on.net says:

    What we have in the West is a Unity ticket of the Gramscian Marxists and the “useful idiots” of the progressive centre/centre-left/left. The only hope is to use Alinski’s Rules against them.

  • ian.macdougall says:

    Instead, in their attempts to build a society on the politics of “love, peace and tolerance”, the utopian ideologues of yesteryear are clearing the path for the growth of eventual totalitarianism at home. France, as well as the rest of the continent in the near to nearer future, is in the process of painfully learning one important lesson that will likely characterise the internal political development of multicultural states over the next century: ONE CAN LIVE IN A SECURE COMMUNITY WITH HIGH LEVELS OF INTERPERSONAL TRUST, OR ONE CAN HAVE LAISSEZ FAIRE ‘DIVERSITY’. [caps mine – IM] Presently, our moral and political betters have chosen the false security of an eventual police state whose coercive apparatus is necessary to keep the babbling colossus forcefully together. There is a term for this, anarcho-tyranny: tyranny from above to keep the anarchy below from spilling over into the streets.

    There is a specifiable confusion here on Edwin Dyga’s part. It arises from the fact that just as freedom is indivisible, so too are liberalism and democracy. One cannot be truly free to speak, if that freedom does not extend to freedom to converse and publicise one’s thoughts as one wishes. (The only limits people generally accept are those set by the cultural environment: decency; not in front of the children; that sort of thing.)

    Australia has been multicultural ever since the Gold Rushes which began in 1854 made it so. Nor can I see any liberal-democratic alternative to it. As Australia’s great poet and song-lyricist Henry Lawson said of the gold-rush days:

    … Oh, they were lion-hearted
    Who gave our country birth,
    Stout sons, of stoutest fathers born,
    From all the lands on Earth!

    However we might prescribe what is off-limits in a demulticultied Australia, the next inescapable step is appointment of an army of Orwellian thought police to maintain it, and prosecute any and all who step over the monocultural line.
    Any volunteers?

    • bemartin39@bigpond.com says:

      Ian, “multiculturalism” is a howling oxymoron. While a culture, any culture, changes over time, it always remains a unique entity. One of the main causes of the change is the absorption of elements from other cultures, which blend into the original home culture, thereby altering it. Much like different colours dripping into a pot of paint being stirred. The colour in the pot is constantly changing to different shades and hues but it will always be one unique color, provided the blending is not actively hindered. (Government subsidising cultural activities of migrant groups.) The unfortunate true meaning of “multiculturalism” is pockets of different cultures operating in isolation from one another. Think of “no-go” areas in European and British cities and apartheid in South Africa.

      • ian.macdougall says:

        Bill:

        ….While a culture, any culture, changes over time, it always remains a unique entity……
        The unfortunate true meaning of “multiculturalism” is pockets of different cultures operating in isolation from one another.

        Yes, agreed. That is the prospect, and often the unfortunate reality. But how does a government stop the little pockets from developing, even assuming it is desirable to do so? Cultural police?
        My experience of migrants is that the older the adults, the less likely they are to adopt mainstream Australian ways. The children on the other hand, rapidly master the language, ways of thinking, etc, and rapidly blend into the mainstream. Even Muslims: witness Sam Dastyari etc.
        (The danger with Muslims is that ~20% of them privately cheer on the Islamists.)

  • brian.doak@bigpond.com says:

    Edwin Dyga’s item is has so much depth and insight and it prompted to look for it in my Quadrant magazine where I note that it is one of a trilogy with the other items by David Martin Jones and Daryl Mccann. There is so much value here but none that the Grants Commission recognises from their Lefty heights.
    Everywhere one looks the dominant paradigm is Left. Take the [Un]Safe Schools program. Even Conservative governments are offering support when the results of its implementation will be destructive to our traditional society. The same with homosexual marriage, with Mohammedan refugees, deficit budgets, Australian of the Year, outback welfare largess, union untouchability, ABC and SBS running out of control. If all this was not bad enough we have a second do-nothing Malcolm as PM.The ABC pumped up his tyres, and campaigned for him, and now the country deflates with him.

Leave a Reply