The Last Crusade 02: By What Authority?

At first glance, and, indeed, even after repeated goggle-eyed staring, the idea of the Last Crusade being decreed by private voices seems absurd.

The aim is so ambitious, the battlefield so wide, the issues so dire, and the foe so nigh omnipotent, that this absurdity is either insane or else it is inspired.

A single snowflake that triggers the avalanche is also absurd.

But even well-wishers are surely puzzled by the motives and aim of the Last Crusade, and wonder whether it is serious, and meant to be taken literally.

After all, crusades are a major wartime effort, preached by Popes, to which princes and parliaments vow men and arms to travel overseas. Mere laymen gathering to talk, to teach, and to engender changes in society to put it on a wartime footing hardly seem to fit this description: surely this is a political salon, nothing more.

The answer is that, like all sacramental things, a crusade is the physical expression of a spiritual reality. Hence is it serious, gravely serious, but not literal. It is more than literal. It is myth.

This no doubt provokes a flock of questions in the mind of any honest reader: Why is it necessary, at this point in history, to declare a crusade? By what authority?

Why a crusade, with its implications of holy war, and not a political movement? And if it is a spiritual war, how is it to be fought, both now, and how in times to come?

The question of necessity is one the reader may answer for himself to his own satisfaction merely by looking at the world around him.

The world is grown violent, brutal, crass, ugly and savage, blood runs in the streets, and all whom we once trusted are rank and shameless deceivers. The family is broken, marriage desecrated, chastity forgotten. Law, once our watchdog, is now a ravening wolf. Professors corrupt, not educate. Artists deface, not create. Music shrieks. The flag is burned, the cross is trampled. Truth is flaunted, virtue is mocked, reason is dethroned.

More to the point, the enemy is now openly calling for violence, assassinating police, and urging into our midst the jihadists and mass-rapists of an alien and savage people meant to intimidate and conquer us. Peaceful means of redress still linger, and we must have first resort to them while time remains.

But, by any account, little time remains.

No great public institution erected by our ancestors for the defense of our liberties remains uncorrupt. The legacy news media are wholly subsumed into the madness of Political Correctness and Social Justice Warfare; and Hollywood; and Academia; Wall Street and leftwing politicians in Washington formed an incestuous and unholy alliance called the Welfare State; and all these have shown their true colors in their support for Islamic terror now, even as they supported communist terror in years past.

In these days, not only has the darkness grown, and tyrants both great and petty waxed insolent and bold, the light has also waned, and no clear vision is revealed to the public view of any hope.

All men of good will know by instinct that despotism, insanity, perversion, atheism, and lies are black-hearted, empty-headed blind and void of truth, and so all recoil with disgust at the latest offenses, outrages, and enormities perpetrated by Leftist at home and their twin brother Jihadists abroad.

But the vision of what to erect in the place of the current sewer pit of our popular culture, the corrupt fever swamp of our current politics, the haunted desolation of our current academia, has grown dim and confused. No one knows what the future is to be.

The sad fact is that the classical liberal vision of a federated commonwealth ruled by free and equal citizen-soldiers answers only political, and not philosophical, questions.

These questions are no longer pertinent.

The current controversies embroiling our civilization today are all called political questions, but none of them are. Not one.

Whether sex is a social construct or a biological or spiritual reality is a philosophical, as well as a scientific and religious question.

Whether life begins at conception is a scientific question with ethical implications.

What reciprocal duties a man owes his family, clan, tribe, race and nation versus what he owes all mankind is an ethics question.

Whether catamites can celebrate their unnatural alliance with sodomites via desecrating the sacrament of marriage is a question of cannon law where the secular power should have no voice at all.

Whether all men are created equal is a religious question with legal implications. Whether only black lives matter and white lives do not is hence a religious question.

There is no serious attack being made against the ideas of liberal democracy. However, the faith in this conservative vision of the American Way has largely failed. It no longer excites loyalty and trust.

Whether truth is absolute or relative is an ontological question.

Whether reality, including the mind of man, is no more than matter in motion is a metaphysical question.

Whether free will exists, and man has innate dignity, is a theological question.

Because of this, certain fringe groups with no general appeal, such as monarchists or racists, nationalist socialists or nationalist libertarians, solely because they are the only voices offering an alternative to political correctness, now receive undue attention.

Many an eager youth of sophomoric age, innocent and gullible, receives these old heretical ideas as if they are fresh and new.  And the sophomore has never heard the centuries-old refutations of these tired and exploded theories long-dead, so he is baffled and convinced

Neither the conservatives, who are oddly dumbfounded when it comes questions deeper than practical political questions, nor the libertarians, who are dumbfounded when practical political questions arise, nor the political correctness mavens, who are never dumbfounded but also never sane, and so they speak in tongues as if in some satanic parody of a revivalist meeting, none of them have any answer to the deep questions of the day.

The philosophical foundation of our civilization has been ruthlessly and deliberately undermined by the treachery of our intellectuals for over a century. The Left of this generation is no longer concerned with merely political questions. A political question is one concerning the proper laws, customs, policies and practices needed to secure the rights of man and maintain peace and order within the state.

Politics is concerned with matters of property rights, family law, torts and crimes, war and peace, regularizing coin money and foreign trade, and the maintenance of common property, such as commons and public parks. Whether or not a pizza parlor can be forced against the conscience of the owner to cater to a mockery of a wedding celebrating sodomy, not matrimony, is not a political question. It is ethical, philosophical, and ultimately theological.

What the great conservative thinkers have failed to think is that the struggle of this generation is not Right versus Left, not individualism versus collectivism, not capitalism versus socialism, not republicanism versus despotism. Those battles are over. The Left is no longer a political movement but a religious one. Now it differs from Christianity in that it is an agnostic and atheist religion, but it is a religion nonetheless, for it demands the whole person in its loyalty, it answers or pretends to answer all the deep questions to give life meaning, and it offers a universal vision of man and his place in the universe.

On all these points, the Leftist religion is antichristian. It is not merely hostile to Christianity, but perfectly and symmetrically opposed to the Church on all her points. Leftism is the Church of Darkness.

Only orthodoxy can defeat heresy. Only Christianity can defeat pagans and deadly heathens. Only chivalry can defeat the paynim. That is why conservativism, a political philosophy meant to address disputes on political matters, has proved so strong in defeating political foes, Nazis and Reds, and so lax in even confronting religious foes, Leftists, Greens, and SJWs.

Conservative philosophy, a faith in democracy and human decency, could and did defeat totalitarianism. It could not defeat pornography. Decency could not defeat indecency. America could defeat Hitler, but not Hefner.

The question of by what authority a crusade is announced has already been answered by history. If Peter the Hermit or Walter the Penniless can begin a crusade, then so can any Christian: but by all means let us avoid the unhappy sequel of their ill-omened efforts by a proper understanding of which battles to fight and when.

In a republic, such as ours, any citizen is equal to the highest rank of nobility, possessing the right to bear arms and all the other rights, duties, and privileges the ruling classes in the Old World arrogated to themselves.

And, in the Church, the laity are members of the mystical body of Christ no less than the clergy. The hand may pluck the sword from the scabbard before the head shakes itself clear of fog, and the head will not be clear of fog until the heart is sure.

A second question is whether the Church, and all Christians, and all men of goodwill whatever their faith, have the right to engage in the struggle. Unbelievers and ill-wishers and enemies of the Church already, even in this first hour, have rushed loudly yammering to tell me that all Christians, in order to be true to the teachings of Christ, must passively and with perfect pacifism accept whatever humiliation, degradation, dishonor, defeat, dismemberment, wounds, pain, sorrow and death the enemy seeks to inflict on us.

Such liars. This is neither in keeping with the words of Christ nor the character of free men.

While it is amusing when rank hypocrites who hate Christ and all His works attempt to use His words to deceive the followers of Christ into confusion, submission and surrender, the stark fact is that pacifism and quietism has always been a special spiritual calling for hermits and holy monks, not a general moral rule for all men, not a general Christian teaching, and certainly not a policy of Christendom at large. St. Francis of Assisi was no more nor less saintly than St. George, St. Demetrius, St. Florian or any of the military saint. Christendom historically has been governed not but pacifism but by the ‘Just War’ theory, which limits violence to certain acceptable cases. A civilization acting in her own defense and preservation against craven and dishonorable barbarism without, and craven and subversive corruption within, is one of those cases.

A final question is why are men like me, who handle the pen, sounding trumpets and pounding the tocsin when other men, younger and doughtier, will handle the sword? Is not all this clamor too warlike

This question mistakes the nature of war and the nature of men.

War is not the clash of arms and the fall of bombs only. That is earthly war. All earthly wars are part of a spiritual war, a war against powers and principalities and rulers in high places, or, if you will, against ideas and ideals that benight the hearts of men.

For now, we fight a battle of words, and poets and philosophers, men of the contemplation have the field. When the battle of swords begins, men of action must ride forth.

This current war, this Last Crusade, is fought not just in the battlefield, not just in the ballot box, not just in the hometown and in the home, but also in every human heart. We men of good will have surrendered this spiritual battle without a word of protest for over a hundred years to sadistic enemies who hate us, with the results now seen around us.

It will take more than mere physical struggle to right this. A crusade is not just a war, but a holy endeavor, as much spiritual as earthy.

Men of the pen are like the clerks of the Middle Ages. The mission of civilians is to prepare the ground for the fighters. Those too old and gray to fight must lend their strength to the cause in other ways: with words, with encouragement, with enlightenment. We are the watchmen on the tower, and our duty is no less crucial than that of the soldier in the field.

At the moment, the enemy bends all his powers to obscuring the truth, darkening the mind, dulling the eye. The foe knows that once our full strength is unleashed his defeat is swift. (Indeed, the true enemy, the enemy behind our enemy, knows that his defeat was already consummated at Calvary.)

We must raise the lamp for the fighting men to see the foe. Merlin did not handle the lance, nor did he touch the great sword Excalibur. His mission was to row Arthur out on the lake where the hidden sword was found: for Merlin knew where it was and Arthur did not.

The occasional race riot prompted by the secular enemy is openly violent. So too is the repeated mass-murder of innocent civilians, women and children by craven and sadistic Mohammedans, whose efforts, by no coincidence, are lauded and applauded by the secular enemy. The enemy is willing to use open violence, and, as the defiance to their lies and madness grows, and as ever fewer honest men are willing to submit meekly to their empire of lies, the enemy craving for blood, for the sight of burning cars and dumpsters, for the sight of bleeding faces of women and children screaming in pain and sorrow, will grow in their sick and hellish souls.

A Leftist hates himself, but never blames himself, and so he hates truth, life and liberty, hates you, hates your children, hates decency, hates beauty, and hate God most of all. If the Leftist can tell utterly absurd lies about man and nature, about science, about politics, about economics, about history, and can compel his victims to repeat those lies and pretend to believe them, this gives the Leftist a sick and sadistic pseudo-sexual thrill, and his hatred is transferred to you and to all of us, and suicide is held at bay one more day, one more hour. The Leftist seeks submission.

Now, much ink has been spilled on the question of whether Leftists are sincere, that is, whether they believe their own absurd and unbelievable lies. I say this question is not merely moot: it is meaningless. If a man attempts to deceive himself, he cannot be talked about of his position, because if you present facts and evidence, all facts and evidence will be ignored. If you present an argument so obvious and so evident that all honest men must agree, the self-deceiving deceiver will merely deceive himself again.

So if a confirmed Leftists cannot be talked out of his position, his sincerity or lack thereof is moot. Sincerity means a man comes honestly by his belief. It means he is honest in intent, even if he is mistaken. It means he will gladly change his mind upon discovering the mistake. But a Leftist is not honest in intent. He craves a narrative, that is, a falsehood, to comfort him and prop up his crippled self image. Reality will not flatter him: he seeks unreality.

Such men will not gracefully and with good will release their stranglehold on power. They do not even clean up after their protest marches. They have been thwarted in small things now, and they resort to a few riots, burning a few neighborhoods, and applauding and encouraging a few thousand deaths by Jihadists. When they are thwarted in large, the violence will grow.

Now is the time to prepare. Now is the time to stock supply and sharpem the sword.

More to the point, now is the time to clarify and reaffirm what we believe. The fortress called civilization is coming under ever more dramatic attack. It is time to check the foundations, which are the abstract notions of philosophy, and the concrete tenets of Christ, on which Western civilization is based.

But nonetheless, an open war is not yet upon us. The clouds darken and gather, and a few drops fall, but the storm is not yet.

When the storm breaks, it is too late to thatch the roof. That is why the Last Crusade starts now.