Note that Scandinavia has been going downhill since it started moving away both from social democracy and from very entrenched traditional Christianity, of which there now remains little of the former and almost none of the latter. To what consequence, we now see.
This reaction was inevitable. Nothing could be less conservative than the attempt to make the world anew, in accordance with some academic blueprint, by means of global war: sex, drugs and rock’n’roll at the barrel of a gun. The West is the recapitulation in Jesus Christ and His Church of all three of the Old Israel, Hellenism and the Roman Empire. I would die to protect it, on whatever shore it found itself, and it now finds itself on every shore. But if by “the West”, you mean the rootless, godless, globalised, hypercapitalist, metrosexual wasteland of usury, promiscuity and stupefaction, then I hate it as much as does any Islamist.
Including the Islamists to whom, whatever they may pretend, the neocons have been allied from 1980s Afghanistan through 1990s Bosnia to today’s Turkey, Kosovo, Chechnya, Saudi Arabia (whence came the 9/11 attacks), Xinjiang and elsewhere. Including by taking out the bulwark against them in Iraq. Including in the form of Jundullah, the neocon-backed Islamist terrorists against the present government of Iran. Including in Libya. And including by means of the capitalist system that cannot function without unrestricted global migration.
We have only ourselves to blame.
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Sorry, I wasn't aware Christians are forbidden to own guns. The perpetuator self-described as a "conservative christian" on Facebook.
ReplyDeleteAnd we all see what he meant by it.
ReplyDeleteScandinavia used to be characterised by a rather more conventional definition of the term.
"The West is the recapitulation in Jesus Christ and His Church of all three of the Old Israel, Hellenism and the Roman Empire. I would die to protect it, on whatever shore it found itself, and it now finds itself on every shore. But if by “the West”, you mean the rootless, godless, globalised, hypercapitalist, metrosexual wasteland of usury, promiscuity and stupefaction, then I hate it as much as does any Islamist."
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry, is this a quote from the Morwegian terrorist's mainfesto, or your own work? It's hard to tell when you're rambling.
As it happens I agree with you on about 50% of things and agree with the Norwegian terrorist on about 50% of things and all three of us probably agree on about 33% of things. The Heritage Foundation and your other neocon bogeymen probably agree with him on about 50% of things too and all of us agree on about 25% of things.
A period of slience from you would be wise Mr. Lindsay, just a period of slince would be wise from Harry's Place and Melanie Phillips.
Those who, unlike us, share little or nothing in common by way of political views with the Norwegian murder, that is to say socially liberal, pro-immigration welfare state, Islamophile secularist globalists will no doubt use the opportunity to crow and though it is tasteless of them to do so, it is at least rational. For you to crow when you have as much in common with him as those you attack is just a bit bizarre really.
"all three of us probably agree on about 33% of things"
ReplyDeleteLike what?
My only points of contact with Melanie Phillips are on social policy: assisted sucide, drugs, education, the evisceration (her word) of civil society between 1979 and 1997. Hardly the view of the Heritage Foundation.
"A period of slience from you would be wise Mr. Lindsay"
You, and a lot of other people, should be so lucky.
"Hardly the view of the Heritage Foundation."
ReplyDeletehttp://www.heritage.org/Research/Commentary/2010/10/The-case-against-legalizing-marijuana-in-California
http://www.heritage.org/research/lecture/killing-us-with-kindness
Very little that Melanie Phillips has to say in critique of progressive educational technique and theory or of social atomisation is not echoed by the U.S. rightwingers you despise either.
I find in life, Mr. Lindsay, that it heldp to know what you are talking about before you pronounce so confidently (and ceaselessly) on all things under the sun.
Not evidently.
ReplyDeleteMy only agreement with Melanie Phillips is on aspects of social policy. My foreign policy views and hers bear no resemblance to hers, and, moreover, I recognise that Judaism denies Original Sin, and it has unfulfilled Messianic hope and expectation.
The former has contributed immeasurably to the concept of the perfectibility of human nature in this life alone and by human efforts alone. Thus was the latter able to give the world Marx and Trotsky, Freud and Alinksy, Max Shachtman and Leo Strauss, Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises, Zionism and the secular Turkish ultranationalism that goes back to the Dönmeh, the ultimate in unfulfilled Jewish Messianic hope and expectation.
However radically, each of these is completed, perfected and transformed by, in, through and as the Messiah. He necessarily turns them away from any purely temporal utopianism. Or else they become neoconservatism, a compendium of all of them, and the ultimate expression of the theory, utterly horrific in the consequences at which it always arrives eventually, that human nature can be perfected in this life alone and by its own efforts alone, since Jesus of Nazareth is not the Messiah promised by and to the Hebrew Prophets.
That leaves a gap to be filled. By Islam. Even, as discussed elsewhere, in what has become the State of Israel. (However, it must be added that Islam, unlike Judaism, affirms that Jesus was both virgin-born and the foretold Messiah, the former affirmation being an important riposte to the Jewish or Judaising suggestion that the expectation and proclamation of a virgin-born Messiah was a Hellenistic imposition on a Semitic tradition to which it was alien.)
Following Melanie Phillips’s identification of any and everything on the neoconservative hate list as an expression of anti-Semitism, perhaps we shall see the conversion of neoconservatives to some sort of Judaism, identifying the philosophical, theological and ethical resources of Judaism as providing the necessary weapons against such things. Julie Burchill has already made noises of this kind.
Those who declared themselves Jews in order to provide a spiritual or ritual framework for their neoconservatism are most unlikely to trouble the Orthodox. But they and the average Reform rabbi or congregant are hardly each other’s obvious best fits, either. So, without necessarily involving the lady personally, will we be seeing new, Phillipsian synagogues springing up?
We are about due some fresh expressions of the entrepreneurial popular religious revival that is very much a recurring theme of our history. Might this be one of them?
Sad, to say Mr. Lindsay, I've actually read that blog post before.
ReplyDeleteThat doesn't say a great deal for how I use my spare time.
Oh, but it does.
ReplyDelete