Europe 4 All in the 4th Stage
Take a look:
Daniel Hannan writes:
Take a close look at this promotional poster. Notice anything? Alongside the symbols of Christianity, Judaism, Jainism and so on is one of the wickedest emblems humanity has conceived: the hammer and sickle.
For three generations, the badge of the Soviet revolution meant poverty, slavery, torture and death. It adorned the caps of the chekas who came in the night. It opened and closed the propaganda films which hid the famines. It advertised the people’s courts where victims of purges and show-trials were condemned. It fluttered over the re-education camps and the gulags. For hundreds of millions of Europeans, it was a symbol of foreign occupation. Hungary, Lithuania and Moldova have banned its use, and various former communist countries want it to be treated in the same way as Nazi insignia.
Yet here it sits on a poster in the European Commission
My comment: Just yesterday a reader wrote and told me it was wrong for me to liken Great Britain to a nation in the Third World. I admit my comment was an outrageous and insulting exaggeration, and so I apologized.
The apology was sincerely meant, but so was the criticism of the degeneration of the English people as they degenerate into an increasingly post-christian people, a degeneration enabled and abetted by the psychology of stoneless and gormless government dependency.
Judging from this poster, I should have likened her to a nation in the Second World, something from behind the Iron Curtain.
She and the other once great states of Europe seem to be heading that direction.
But with this difference: the energy and the desire to impose Utopia by force that is the driving zeal of the Communist Internationale is missing from this new manifestation of servile godlessness.
Real communism would have displayed the hammer and sickle proudly, and, a jealous idol, would have permitted no rivals. This is something else. This is the cult of multiculturalism, this is the culture of death.
The hardness of the Iron Curtain is gone. The strategy instead is one of sirens singing sailors to the deaths with promises of wealth and rest, or will-o-the-wisps leading disoriented travelers deeper into soporific bogs of clinging filth.
There are four general stages of corruption as a man or a nation or a civilization departs from Christendom. Each is a reaction against the defects of the former stage, but none is a return to Christianity nor likely to motivate a return.
The first might be called liberalism or enlightenment, which is a benign neglect of divine things, a desire to live and let live, an devotion of the benign spirit of ecumenism into moral relativism.It is an attempt to live by Reason, without taking into account a man’s need for communal spiritual life.
The second is ideology, an attempt to return to spiritual zeal which enlightenment throws overboard, but using ersatz religion, usually communism (and its associated political psychopathologies, such as fascism), to provide worldly and material utopias to act as idols to receive the zeal. This step attempts to fulfill man’s need to worship without acknowledging anything so backward and unscientific as a divinity to worship. It replaces the idea of live and let live with the idea that the enemies of the people must be destroyed.
The third is a rejection of the zealotry of worldly idols and a return to mystical supernaturalism, but usually under a vague adoration of a life force or spirit of man or spirit of history or cosmic energy or some other sort of New Age smelling spirit world without any God who has a face, has a personality, or makes demands. This step attempts to fulfill man’s need for mysticism without fulfilling his need for reason, and it is a rejection of the conformity to utopian cults like communism and their demand for ideological purity.
The fourth is utter nihilism, utter relativism, the conceit that all things are equal to all others, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all truths are partial and personal; and nihilism promises that if only we all abandon all our believes and virtues, then we will become tolerant and placid and all get along. It is, in effect, a combination of the worst aspects of the previous three stages of corruption: the selfish materialism of the enlightenment, the intolerant zeal of the communist, the irrational mysticism of the unitarian life-force worshiper. It rejects the communist adoration of force and violence, and replaces it with the soft dictatorship of moral relativism.
The soft dictatorship has no need of an Iron Curtain to keep its slaves from fleeing to freedom. It merely controls the press and the education and the popular entertainment and the bureaucracy, and erects a prison in the mind, a thought prison, called political correctness.
Under this final stage of corruption, Karl Marx and Jesus Christ are one and the same: a mixture of Tash and Aslan called Tashlan.
The poster above is a poster for Tashlan.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
