“Be glad or sorry, but no kings are coming.
Not Arthur, surely; for now Arthur knows
That I am less than fate.”

Edwin Arlington Robinson, “Merlin” (1917)*

Monarchist fantasies are popular in some corners of the Scowling Right, these fantasies being central to a more basic fantasy that true authority will one day be remade  by the union of absolute right and absolute power.  Fantasists of ecclesiastical authority dream similar dreams.  They say we must simply establish orthodoxy for all to be well. Continue reading →

“A flighty and half-witted man is the very instrument generally preferred by cunning politicians when very hazardous work is to be done.” 

Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England  (1848)*

Macaulay makes this trenchant remark while discussing a deluded wretch named Granville, the doomed patsy in a failed plot to assassinate the English King William of Orange in 1692.  Macaulay tells us that Granville, a Frenchman, was “undoubtedly brave, and full of zeal for his country and his religion,” but that his main qualification as an assassin was that he was “flighty and half-witted.”  By “flighty” Macaulay means both impetuous (overhasty) and given to romantic illusions (i.e. “flights of fancy”).  I trust what he means by half-witted is plain enough.

A flighty and half-witted man is the preferred tool of cunning politicians when their scheme is very hazardous because “no shrewd calculator” will do the deed “for any bribe.”  What cunning politicians require is therefore a romantic simpleton who dreams of glory and cannot calculate the odds. Continue reading →

“As soon as a mystic faith, however absurd, is established, it attracts to itself a crowd of greedy adventures and unemployed semi-intellectuals.”

Gustave Le Bon, The World Unbalanced (1924)*

“The epoch of the epigones is separated from that of Lenin not only by a gulf of ideas, but also by a sweeping overturn in the organization of the party.” 

Leon Trotsky, My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography (1930)**

In scholarship and the arts, academicism is the inexorable process whereby originality devolves into a technique, genius into a school.  The word academicism remembers the intellectual heirs of Plato’s Academy, a degenerate school of frauds and flunkies that was often a parody, perhaps more often a perversion, of the man it professed to revere.  Epigones (or epigoni) is the name given to such frauds and flunkies, and epigones serve as both the staff and the students in any degenerate school. Continue reading →

“I am not sure but a termagant is the greatest blessing a man can have: it teaches him patience, humility, resignation, bearance and forbearance, which are all the Christian charities.” 

Letter of Alison Cockburn to Rev. Robert Douglas (January 5, 1779)*

“It is better to dwell in the wilderness, than with a contentious and an angry woman.”

Proverbs 21: 9

Although many men make it through life without meeting the word termagant, very few make it through life without meeting an illustration of the meaning of that word. Continue reading →

“For many wicked Sodomites
From quarters near and far,
Stood shouting just outside the house
Like demons bent on war.”

J.H. Stevenson, “Lot” (1894)

I recently observed that Onan’s sin was not, as many suppose, self-abuse or solitary vice.  It was spilling his seed on the ground when Tamar, widow of his dead brother, was both hot to trot and ready to hand.  We are told that Onan withdrew from Tamar just before emitting semen because he did not wish to provide his dead brother with an heir, and by so doing perhaps forfeit his inheritance, and that he went into Tamar in the first place (albeit briefly) to obey the letter (while flouting the spirit) of his father’s law. Continue reading →

The world, as we all know, is divided cleanly into oppressors, who have no legitimate interests, and victims, who have no responsibilities. Status as an oppressor is determined by resemblance to white, Christian men. Thus, the only question ever raised regarding the battle between Israel and Palestine, the one issue that determines right and justice, is the following: which of the two sides reminds you more of Europeans? Side #1: “Israel is a wealthy, pale-skinned people colonizing non-whites. It’s just like the British Empire.” Side #2: “Hamas is anti-semitic, and like all anti-semites hates innocent Jews for no reason. It’s just like Nazi Germany.” If you’re like 99% of the people on Earth, which of these two statements makes more sense to you entirely determines which side you support. That there could be other considerations besides victim vs. oppressor status is unthinkable.

There are many downsides to oppressor-victim thinking, not the least is that, since oppressors never have any legitimate interests or grievances, compromise is morally inadmissible.

My position you can guess.

The highest authority in France is the principle of Laïcité, i.e. anti-Catholicism. According to this principle, atheists have an inherent right to rule over Catholics. Catholics may not be ruled in the manner agreeable and natural to us (monarchy) but in the manner agreeable to atheists, Jews, and freemasons (republic). Nor can Catholics be ruled according to our own beliefs and values, but according to those of the ruling sect (atheism). Catholics may participate in the political processes of the republic, but we must always vote not according to our own beliefs and ethical principles but according to theirs. Even to vote for a secular party promoting a position consistent with our own beliefs while giving secular reasons for doing so is heavily suspect if not forbidden. Anti-Catholicism is the one principle of education and civic culture. No one may criticize the barbarities of the French Revolution or the even greater bloodletting of the 1945 terror lest disapproval be suggested for their atheistic/Satanic republic.

Bringing in a hostile replacement population is a part of the program to erase even the memory of Catholicism in France, but it has raised a question: are Muslims sufficiently anti-Catholic to be allowed to participate in the political process? The answer of the mainstream (i.e. Leftist) parties is “Yes, of course Muslims are anti-Catholic. They don’t even have an analog of ‘the Church’ in their religion, so they are secular by definition. They are natural communists who always vote for the farthest-Left parties. They are vocally hostile to Christianity and traditional France. They are, in sum, exemplary French republican citizens, and their influence should be welcomed.” The nationalists, on the other hand, say “Wait a minute. Muslims aren’t really anti-Catholic because they’re religious. They recognize authority beyond the republican state, and they recognize authoritative principles beyond those of the Revolution. They are really just another kind of Catholic, and our precious secular republic must be protected against them.”

My position, as usual, is To hell with them both.

Some say that conservatives have a duty to preserve and defend Western culture, meaning for the purposes of this post the best of our civilization’s literature, art, and music from the ancient Greeks to the early 20th century. The dangers facing this high culture are twofold: erasure under an avalanche of vulgarity, and ideological attack from the Left (“classical music is racist”, “English poetry is hideously white”, etc.) The twofold danger calls forth the twofold response of preserving / carrying on and defending. Reasons for a conservative to care about Western culture are also twofold. First there are reasons of filial piety: part of honoring and maintaining connection with our ancestors is remembering their cultural lodestars and countering slander against them. Second, there are eudaimonic reasons: the best of our culture has a power to foster a deep understanding and appreciation for spiritual realities and the human condition. The two reasons speak to the two aspects of conservatism–the particularistic and the objective/universal. The conservative will acknowledge part of the accusation, that our culture is tied to a particular people and history, but will deny that this makes it an expression of “hate”, but rather a particular expression of universal truths.

One problem with this is that Western high culture clearly does not have the promised spiritual effects most of the time. English professors, artists, actors, musicians, poets, and museum curators by-and-large hate Christianity and distinct European peoples much more even than average people do; there is an inverse correlation between immersion in the best of Western culture and what any conservative would recognize as wisdom; deeper exposure to Western culture seems to inspire only a greater hatred for it. Furthermore, a Christian is bound to admit that Western civilization is deeply, fundamentally evil. This hit me forcefully watching universal celebration from all French parties as France enshrined abortion rights. A culture with no resources to criticize the wanton killing of unborn children deserves to be erased from the world like the culture of Canaan. Like America, European core values are baby-murder, sodomy, usury, anti-white bigotry, contempt for ancestors, atheism, and totalitarian bureaucracy. The world would be better off if this blight of a culture were totally forgotten.

A lover of Europe might wish to say that although the culture has become evil, it was not always so. However, the hideous full flowering makes it easier to recognize the earlier development in retrospect, and we see that the poison was there all along, intermingled with all the greatness, in the Renaissance, in the Middle Ages, in ancient Greece and Rome: the philosopher’s contempt for the traditional and inarticulate, the urbane sophisticate’s for the countryside, the self-righteousness of the prophet and intellectual. It seems to me that the honor and loyalty due to our ancestors is to them as souls and not as bearers of a great culture. Indeed, we should hold that great culture in no higher regard than other worldly pomp.