Sunday, April 01, 2018

Thoughts

In case anyone is interested there is an interesting lecture given by George Hawley: Is the Alt-Right Collapsing.  Hawley's academic specialisation is in the non-mainstream Right. I've read his book, The Right Wing Critics of American Conservatism and, like his lecture, thought it a fair and balanced work.

I don't think Hawley gets everything right, but his main contention, that the Alt-Right is dying, is in my opinion correct.  Hawley lays the blame for the failure of the movement on several factors, the principle ones being its explicit white nationalism and it National Socialist "Optics" which worked to drive the normies away.

Hawley's done a fair amount of work on the Alt-Right, and though it really wasn't mentioned much at all in this talk--though he's spoken about it in other places considerably--is the explicit anti-Christian bias inherent to it. For Christian people like myself, Anti-Christian Modernism v2.0 is just as repellent as Anti-Christian Modernism v1.0.  For the Christian, there's not really much difference between being Gulaged by a Commie or Auschwitzed by a Nazi. The Alt-Right was really the same turd in a different package.

Perhaps the most depressing thing about the whole Spenceresque co-option of the non-mainstream-Right was how many non-Natsocs were sympathetic to them. I honestly felt I was a voice in the wilderness at times and it's one of the reasons I've really lost much of my urge to blog. What's the point when so many are so easily led astray.  A healthy Right would have purged Spencer and his ilk immediately on the grounds that their ideology was incompatible with that of the Right.

It has always been this blog's contention that the foundational stone of European civilisation was Christianity and any restorative movement which ignores this pillar, or one that advocates doctrines which are contrary to it, is merely another version of error. For the Rightist, the key issue is not one of Right or Left but one of right or wrong. Sure, there are contingencies such as race, geography and history which impacted upon European civilisational development but these factors on their own do not explain the European phenomenon.

That's why any movement which denies it ain't worth shit and is simply modernism or paganism in another package. The defining event which initiated European civilisational decline has been de-Christianisation.  Our secular culture is at the peak of its technical prowess and probably has the most educated population in history yet were are in a civilisational death spiral which increases in velocity in proportion to the decline of religious observance. You don't have to believe it but the correlation is very, very good.

But to be charitable to the Alt-Right--I'm Christian, remember--some of their criticisms of Christianity may have some validity. The depopulation of the Christian Churches may not just simply be due to the disobedience of an ungrateful people, rather, it could be due to the repulsion at being fed an adulterated product. The Kumbaya Christianity being fed to flock today seems a adulterated and watered down version of the faith of the past. That does not mean that return to the past is an antidote to the ills of today. After all, it was the problems of the past that gave birth to the monster of modernity. Change is not the problem, change in the wrong direction is.

If politics is downstream from culture then problem is to fix culture before you can fix politics. The American founding fathers knew that no constitution would restrain a corrupt people, virtue was needed. And you ain't going to build virtue without religion. The common man as a utilitarian philosopher is pie-in-the-sky bullshit.  Men need rules to live by.

That's why any restorative project for the West has to be based on the Christian religion.

Otherwise it's a waste of time.