An uncomfortable point well made. I wonder how these champions of 'global south' would process what the loss of Western civilization would mean not only for their own comforts but those whose causes they espouse? The case of Fawzia Sido - a Yazidi woman enslaved by ISIS and sold to a Hamas terrorist held captive in Gaza - liberated thanks to the IDF offensive must stand as an obvious example of the very person that these pampered morons would sacrifice willingly.
The hatred of this home grown menace indulged and pampered towards those who nurtured them is astonishing. The parallels between groups in the West supporting Hamas, XR, and BLM seem quite pronounced. There is a hatred of Society's material achievements (wealth, rule of law, individual freedoms) and there is a drive to pull all of these things down through demands that are simplistic as they are utterly destructive. My consolation is that as this tendency starts to fray and that more Universalist ideals gain a chance at sprouting again in the minds of their would be supporters.
The best analogy I can think of to our current zeitgeist of civilizational self-hatred is the Russian Nihilists of the 19th century, as best described by Dostoevsky in his "Demons" (or "Possessed" depending upon the translation).
First come a generation of educated idealistic young people who feel stifled in their options and in their limited future prospects, who begin to focus on the hypocrisies of their society and of their elders—in their case the disparity bw a society led by supposed Christians that was still very poor and very cruel, in our case the disparity bw our egalitarian ideals and our levels of income inequality and social chaos. Both cohorts also had become enormously disenchanted with (and hostile to) religion, which only made them very ripe for all sorts of charlatans selling theories of a New World and a New Man, leading to...
The second aspect being all the disaffected intellectuals, activists, bomb-throwers (literal and metaphorical) and wannabe saviors selling spurious snake-oil theories about fantasies like the "dictatorship of the proletariat", which boiled down to focusing all hatred and frustration on one group (then kulaks, now the "Oppressors" of Whiteness) and proclaiming that once this group is destroyed, Utopia will arrive.
If the Nihilists of the 1890s could have glimpsed the future and seen that their project of pure destruction would lead to a dictatorship that erased civil liberties, killed all its enemies, and created the gulag, would they have changed their minds?
Either way, the Western liberal class seems completely exhausted and would rather appease their angry children than oppose them. The next time a Western cultural leader makes a passionate defense of liberal values and civilization will be the first this century. If there's to be any kind of counter-revolt, it will have to come from conservatives.
The explosion of Jew hate and the moral cowardice of the "ceasefire" pleaders—as if Hamas or Hezbollah has ever or would ever honor a ceasfire—is truly disturbing and a truly worrisome harbinger of where the West may be headed.
For reasons I won't belabor, the Jews seem to be our canary in the coalmine, and in times of social upheaval and/or times of ideological uprisings, it seems the first thing all the radicals du jour always agree upon is: Let's kill all the Jews!
The Islamo-Left alliance and the Leftist enabling of Hamas etc and their truly deranged hatred for the Jewish state will go down as another of their great moral stains, along with their support for other similar eruptions of utopian eliminationism (Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro etc), but let's hope that this time the body count isn't as high.
Whatever the moral illiteracy or even depravity that underlies people in the west siding with Hamas and Hezbollah, its roots go back beyond the recent explosion of wokeness on campuses and in the media. George Orwell identified it as far back as 1940 when he wrote that intellectuals would rather steal from the poor than stand for the national anthem. The repudiation of Western Civilisation has since multiplied through social media and the capture of institutions. Even so, what is its root?
I think there are three undercurrents. One is the publication of the Communist Manifesto, a pamphlet that changed the course of world history and infected the study of history with a warped morality. A second is the decline in religion. The vacuum has been filled with new but secular gods to ally to. And the third, a consequence of the now ubiquitous globe spanning social media is a type of narcissism in which people's self-image is defined by betrayal of group norms. How special it is to be a person who separates themselves from the herd with luxury beliefs and even repudiation of the civilisation that provides them with the luxury to do so. It is a form of self-aggrandisement.
In 1867 Disraelisaid change was an inevitable part of human existence, and the question is not whether change should be opposed, but “whether that change should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws, and the traditions of a people, or whether it should be carried out in deference to abstract principles, and arbitrary general doctrines”. It is abstract principles that now govern us. For example, DEI and Labour's proposed extension to legislate for equal outcomes based on race, an abstraction of the many ways of life and beliefs of people who share a skin colour.
Decolonisation abstracts form the complexity of human history and simplifies it into oppressed and oppressor in disregard of actual facts and sets to punish the alleged (and often imagined) sins of the father to the exclusion of celebrating the 1500 to 2000 British sailors who died stopping the slave trade around the globe. It is an embarrassment, of course, that many of the people leading the abolition of slavery were white and so contradicting the evil of being white.
We need to get back to "deference to the manners, the customs, the laws, and the traditions of a people", to acknowledging how civilisation v barbarism has characterised the West.
In Israel an arab can become a doctor and stand for the Knesset. No Jew can do the equivalent in any surrounding arab state (or even live in those states). In 1973 Syria gave a medal to one of its army captains who beheaded 28 Israeli soldiers captured in the war of that year.
I wish the word anti-semitism was properly called racism in the media. It would not be so easy for the media to treat anti-semitism as a lesser kind of racism.
Labour are reviewing the education syllabus and say they will impose it also on academy schools. It is an indoctrination program. A chilling one.
The enemy within is to be feared far more than external enemies. Chinese gunboats are not about to sail up the Thames. That day lies far off once the enemies within complete their destruction of the West.
Brilliant piece. One can understand (but not validate!) the indoctrinated hatred for Israel of what seems like a majority of Palestinians (if true,polls suggest most approved of the Oct 7 atrocities), but how to reconcile the internal threat against civilisation that you rightly identify as an equally valid threat? In some perverse & extreme ‘tall poppy syndrome’, the cultural elite have turned against the very society that gave them life. I struggle to even partly understand these pampered prats and their intersectionalised idiocy, their rabid desire to replace modern science, education & charity with weird, dysfunctional ideologies. Sadly their worldview of victimhood and resentment is indulged by the weak leadership we have seen by left wing Governments across the West. One can but hope the incipient lurch centre/right continues and our rapidly crumbling western societies return to their enabling traditions. 🇮🇱
So glad that Fawzia Sido was freed
Weak leadership all around the west.
An uncomfortable point well made. I wonder how these champions of 'global south' would process what the loss of Western civilization would mean not only for their own comforts but those whose causes they espouse? The case of Fawzia Sido - a Yazidi woman enslaved by ISIS and sold to a Hamas terrorist held captive in Gaza - liberated thanks to the IDF offensive must stand as an obvious example of the very person that these pampered morons would sacrifice willingly.
The hatred of this home grown menace indulged and pampered towards those who nurtured them is astonishing. The parallels between groups in the West supporting Hamas, XR, and BLM seem quite pronounced. There is a hatred of Society's material achievements (wealth, rule of law, individual freedoms) and there is a drive to pull all of these things down through demands that are simplistic as they are utterly destructive. My consolation is that as this tendency starts to fray and that more Universalist ideals gain a chance at sprouting again in the minds of their would be supporters.
The best analogy I can think of to our current zeitgeist of civilizational self-hatred is the Russian Nihilists of the 19th century, as best described by Dostoevsky in his "Demons" (or "Possessed" depending upon the translation).
First come a generation of educated idealistic young people who feel stifled in their options and in their limited future prospects, who begin to focus on the hypocrisies of their society and of their elders—in their case the disparity bw a society led by supposed Christians that was still very poor and very cruel, in our case the disparity bw our egalitarian ideals and our levels of income inequality and social chaos. Both cohorts also had become enormously disenchanted with (and hostile to) religion, which only made them very ripe for all sorts of charlatans selling theories of a New World and a New Man, leading to...
The second aspect being all the disaffected intellectuals, activists, bomb-throwers (literal and metaphorical) and wannabe saviors selling spurious snake-oil theories about fantasies like the "dictatorship of the proletariat", which boiled down to focusing all hatred and frustration on one group (then kulaks, now the "Oppressors" of Whiteness) and proclaiming that once this group is destroyed, Utopia will arrive.
If the Nihilists of the 1890s could have glimpsed the future and seen that their project of pure destruction would lead to a dictatorship that erased civil liberties, killed all its enemies, and created the gulag, would they have changed their minds?
Either way, the Western liberal class seems completely exhausted and would rather appease their angry children than oppose them. The next time a Western cultural leader makes a passionate defense of liberal values and civilization will be the first this century. If there's to be any kind of counter-revolt, it will have to come from conservatives.
Well observed Clever Pseudonym!
Thanks!
Thanks so much for this piece.
The explosion of Jew hate and the moral cowardice of the "ceasefire" pleaders—as if Hamas or Hezbollah has ever or would ever honor a ceasfire—is truly disturbing and a truly worrisome harbinger of where the West may be headed.
For reasons I won't belabor, the Jews seem to be our canary in the coalmine, and in times of social upheaval and/or times of ideological uprisings, it seems the first thing all the radicals du jour always agree upon is: Let's kill all the Jews!
The Islamo-Left alliance and the Leftist enabling of Hamas etc and their truly deranged hatred for the Jewish state will go down as another of their great moral stains, along with their support for other similar eruptions of utopian eliminationism (Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro etc), but let's hope that this time the body count isn't as high.
Well explained Stout
Whatever the moral illiteracy or even depravity that underlies people in the west siding with Hamas and Hezbollah, its roots go back beyond the recent explosion of wokeness on campuses and in the media. George Orwell identified it as far back as 1940 when he wrote that intellectuals would rather steal from the poor than stand for the national anthem. The repudiation of Western Civilisation has since multiplied through social media and the capture of institutions. Even so, what is its root?
I think there are three undercurrents. One is the publication of the Communist Manifesto, a pamphlet that changed the course of world history and infected the study of history with a warped morality. A second is the decline in religion. The vacuum has been filled with new but secular gods to ally to. And the third, a consequence of the now ubiquitous globe spanning social media is a type of narcissism in which people's self-image is defined by betrayal of group norms. How special it is to be a person who separates themselves from the herd with luxury beliefs and even repudiation of the civilisation that provides them with the luxury to do so. It is a form of self-aggrandisement.
In 1867 Disraelisaid change was an inevitable part of human existence, and the question is not whether change should be opposed, but “whether that change should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws, and the traditions of a people, or whether it should be carried out in deference to abstract principles, and arbitrary general doctrines”. It is abstract principles that now govern us. For example, DEI and Labour's proposed extension to legislate for equal outcomes based on race, an abstraction of the many ways of life and beliefs of people who share a skin colour.
Decolonisation abstracts form the complexity of human history and simplifies it into oppressed and oppressor in disregard of actual facts and sets to punish the alleged (and often imagined) sins of the father to the exclusion of celebrating the 1500 to 2000 British sailors who died stopping the slave trade around the globe. It is an embarrassment, of course, that many of the people leading the abolition of slavery were white and so contradicting the evil of being white.
We need to get back to "deference to the manners, the customs, the laws, and the traditions of a people", to acknowledging how civilisation v barbarism has characterised the West.
In Israel an arab can become a doctor and stand for the Knesset. No Jew can do the equivalent in any surrounding arab state (or even live in those states). In 1973 Syria gave a medal to one of its army captains who beheaded 28 Israeli soldiers captured in the war of that year.
I wish the word anti-semitism was properly called racism in the media. It would not be so easy for the media to treat anti-semitism as a lesser kind of racism.
Labour are reviewing the education syllabus and say they will impose it also on academy schools. It is an indoctrination program. A chilling one.
The enemy within is to be feared far more than external enemies. Chinese gunboats are not about to sail up the Thames. That day lies far off once the enemies within complete their destruction of the West.
Brilliant piece. One can understand (but not validate!) the indoctrinated hatred for Israel of what seems like a majority of Palestinians (if true,polls suggest most approved of the Oct 7 atrocities), but how to reconcile the internal threat against civilisation that you rightly identify as an equally valid threat? In some perverse & extreme ‘tall poppy syndrome’, the cultural elite have turned against the very society that gave them life. I struggle to even partly understand these pampered prats and their intersectionalised idiocy, their rabid desire to replace modern science, education & charity with weird, dysfunctional ideologies. Sadly their worldview of victimhood and resentment is indulged by the weak leadership we have seen by left wing Governments across the West. One can but hope the incipient lurch centre/right continues and our rapidly crumbling western societies return to their enabling traditions. 🇮🇱