If you want to get a sense of the crisis faced by our world – the world of free speech and the rule of law, accountable politicians, transparent decision-making, responsible media and cultural self-confidence – you should read this week’s Spectator, specifically the articles by Lionel Shriver and Niall Ferguson. If they don’t make you reach for the gin, congratulations, you’re six feet under in Glasnevin and you probably didn’t even know you were dying.
Our civilisation is under an unprecedented attack. Internally, self-confidence has almost collapsed after three decades of unbroken assault on our Judaeo-Christian values. Free speech has been destroyed by the lynch-mobs of social media, bizarrely aided by their political allies and economic foes in the mainstream media (MSM). No politicians anywhere – and certainly none in Ireland – will defend the victims of the on-line/MSM lynch-mob, and I can say this with some certainty.
Cowardice is the primary currency of modern journalism. The leftwing rentamob of yesteryear has been replaced by the joinamob of the New Totalitarians. In Ireland the Newts are an alliance of the ultranationalist racists of Sfira, the PC warriors of universal equality & inclusion, the vegan hippies of Greater Kingstown, campus janissaries and the reactionary old left. All western societies have different forms of Newtery, but unlike the 1930s, this time there’s no elected Churchill to oppose the gathering might of the enemy.
Meanwhile, the west is faced by an existential and technological threat from China whose power is magnified by the certainty that drives Peking, contrasting starkly with the craven cultural pusillanimity of Washington and Brussels. The present regime in the White House is probably the most ambitiously incompetent and politically dangerous in history. Its lethality has been enhanced by the infantalisation of much of the American population, while the Covid pandemic has given the administration the opportunity to debauch the US economy irreparably.
None of these factors is unconnected. The growth of the Chinese economy was made possible by giving a slave-labour society access to world markets without political and cultural reforms. A “tolerant”, post-Vietnam world order dominated by “liberals” – and what would we do without inverted commas these days? – actively encouraged this process This was the order that ended the evils of white apartheid in South Africa but left the rest of the far greater squalor in the rest of Africa untouched. Indeed, the west has for decades subsidised the maintenance of the world’s most corrupt regimes; Uganda, for example, is kept afloat by the Irish taxpayer, whose subsidies enable this landlocked state to have Mach 2 maritime fighters, while Ireland, the EU’s only Atlantic island-state, has no fighters of any kind. The outcome for Africa has not been an increase in the influence of white Christian democratic countries, but their replacement on that continent by China.
Well, that certainly went well, didn’t it?
The American electorate has in the meantime been brainwashed by the 1960s generation of teachers to deplore all notions of patriotism. Any chronological history from the school curriculum has been removed and replaced by tales of how women really invented radar and the motor car, while the Wright brothers were actually Black. Fictional bogeymen such as the “white supremacist” are now allowed to dominate the political imagination, and the real social evil – familial dysfunctionality – is hailed as a legitimate political goal by Black Lives Matter, the most sinisterly effective political movement in the US since the South covertly reinstalled slavery under the Jim Crow laws.
BLM got much of its power from one killing of a black man a year ago in Minneapolis, which was believed by the illiterate young to be representative of all police behaviour towards black men, even though many police chiefs in the US are black and many more white men are killed every year by the police. (Google Tony Timpa for an identical killing to Floyd’s, David Dorn for the murder of a black former police officer, Justine Damond for the police-killing of a white woman in Minneapolis, Daniel Shaver for a cold-blooded police murder of an unarmed white man, and for a French precedent, Cedric Chouviat).
It was by an evil coincidence that the Floyd killing occurred as the pandemic lockdown was beginning, but there was nothing coincidental about the behaviour of the Chinese government, which had earlier closed down internal flights from Wuhan but kept open international flights until the world was well and truly infected with the China-virus. The result must have been pleasing indeed: while the US economy last year shrank by 2.3%, the Chinese economy rose by the same amount.
Mirror mirror on the wall….
Simultaneously, the Chinese military has been flexing its muscles across the entire range of disputed territories involving Japan, Taiwan and India. Meanwhile, the US military is hunting down its primary enemy: “white supremacists” (hello, “, and thank you, yet again!) within its ranks, even as “minorities” (do) are promoted to leadership positions. A lesbian Filipino is now number 2 in the USAF, while a transgender biological male and a very public lesbian have been assistant Secretaries of State at Defence. It’s very hard to believe that the cherished minority status of certainly the first two is unrelated to their promotion: it’s even harder to believe that the Chinese would play such frivolous identity-games with their military.
The last imperial power to impose a ludicrously irrelevant political agenda on its military was the USSR during its purges, 1937-1939, which probably cost it several million dead after the Nazis invaded in 1941. Nonetheless, it’s worth remembering that there was actually very little difference between the Third Reich and Soviet Communism, which was illustrated by the “Treaty of Friendship and the Border” of September 1939. This gave Stalin thirteen million new citizens, all now available for conscription into the Red Army and Soviet factories. More significant were the personal sweeteners that accompanied the deal: the German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop arranged for a Mercedes (named after a Jewish girl, Mercedes Jennoschek) to be given to the wife of his Soviet counterpart, Molotov. Most enchantingly of all, Stalin, as a personal gift to Hitler, handed back some 4,000 German refugees who had fled to the USSR after the Nazis came to power, to their certain deaths.
That’s the point about the two extremes, “left” and “right”: they’re not on a linear scale but a circular one, making what appear to be opposing extremes actually adjacent ones. Their authoritarian values reinforce one another: their mindsets join. It is the admittedly extreme template provided by “the Treaty of Friendship and the Border” that we should use to understand what is going on in civil societies in the western world.
The socialist & feminist cancel-culture of the US campuses is not merely respected by the billionaires of Silicon Valley but is also emulated by them. Facebook has now banned President Trump, to join an entire galaxy of social media exiles. Monopoly Capital and College Marxists have signed their own “Treaty or Friendship and the Border”, an alliance which mirrors the action of the weakest and most incapable president in American history, who has already renamed his administration “The Biden-Harris White House.”
The Manchurian candidate Harris is unashamedly BLM, with an agenda that plays directly into the hands of the Chinese politburo. The Chinese Ministry of Education recently ordered all schools to replace books suspected of embracing foreign values with the likes of The Chinese Dream of the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation, a collection of Xi’s speeches, and A Brief History of the Communist Party of China, which at 530 pages is probably Xi’s version of brevity.
My own feeling is that underlying the current Chinese continent-wide aggression is Peking’s continuing obsession over the admittedly evil Opium Wars, in which the Old Summer Palace in Peking – perhaps the greatest concentration of beauty in the world, 840 acres of superb architecture stacked with sublimely beautiful artifacts – was in 1860 completely looted by British and French soldiers. Putting human losses aside, this was probably the greatest cultural crime in the history of either country’s imperialism; and though it has almost been completely forgotten in Europe, it probably merits rather more than a footnote in Xi’s speeches about the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.
The Caucasian Christian civilisation which made the modern world and rid it of slavery, which gave it the machines and the technology to feed billions more than anyone would have thought possible merely fifty years ago (and invented the antibiotics that are leading to the imminent demographic calamity in Africa, which the Chinese will no doubt watch with perfect equanimity, hoping to pick up the choicer pieces) is coming to an end. It has no belief in its values, its faiths, its past or its future: it’s not even reproducing itself and is having to import members of entirely different and even hostile cultures to run its shops, its care-homes and its hospitals.
Here’s the message in a nutshell. Our civilisation? It’s over. Wave bye-bye…