The Prospects of Victory in Long War
Referring my previous essay, Teretia asks:
Do you have much hope that we will accomplish your last sentence? Or are we fighting the long defeat?
The last sentence to which this refers is the observation that when war comes upon you, the only options are to fight, or to surrender. We should fight because we have so much to fight for.
To quote a better man than I:
Actually I am a Christian and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’- though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.”
–Letter to Amy Ronald , 15 December 1956
As the Bard of Oxford says, all of history is a long defeat, But the end is not entropy, by victory and joy and power beyond all words to express and vision to imagine. What war, what childbirth, what worthy act is not this way? Before joy, sorrow; before triumph, loss; before the harvest, the plowing and sowing.
I did not say erenow, so let me add that there is, of course, a third alternative to war and submission. If one’s philosophy is as devoted absolutely and without exception to insolent and utter falsehood in thought and word and deed as is Political Correctness, the remaining alternative to deny the truth to yourself and to others for so long as one finds victims willing to help one maintain that illusion, and bear the costs of one’s delirium.
And this submission by self deception is worse that surrender, since it lacks even the dignity which slaves and dhimmi keep, for defeat and death come as an unexpected shock, and as a shattering of one’s shallow yet precious world of defiant, neurotic make-shift make-believe. And all the children and students who trusted the Politically Correct make-believe of their leaders and heroes are betrayed by that very trust to their bonds and stripes and chains and grinding humiliation and shame.
Political Correctness is cultural Marxism, the belief that all human interactions are nothing but the exploitation of the weak by the oppressor, and that all human ills are solved by the elimination of the thoughts and words and actions of the oppressor. Political Correctness cannot criticize, and cannot think critically, about any group that has achieved the divine status of victimhood. Victims, in the thinking of this cult, are graced with the charism of infallibility, and all their pronouncement are truth it is sin to question. Unfortunately, when a group like the Jihadists, who are violent, international, organized, well funded, sadistic and ruthless and barbaric, are elevated to divine victim status, the PC code allows no demotion back to mortal status. As did the bronze-wheeled and gigantic idol called Juggernaut to his idolators, the Political Correctoids are trampled by their fetishes.
Myself, I see no way to defeat the military and terrorist arm of the Jihad absent a spiritual victory, that is, acts which will restore civilizational confidence to us, and rob their dark and crooked civilization of its faith in itself and its destiny.
That is what defeated Communism, which is why the Soviet Empire collapsed without shot fired. Odd as this sounds, that is what defeated Nazism also. I do not mean the allied military did not defeat the Axis military with unthinkable sacrifice of a generation of men and treasure.
I mean the idea of Nazism was discredited, so that even among campus intellectuals and Hollywood fops, the idea of racial superiority has no purchase, no traction. (Although Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood is carrying out an effective genocide on a case by case basis, by convincing inner city blacks to kill their children.) The people who love and follow Nazi ideals the most closely, the Politically Correct Statists or Leftists, use the word ‘Nazi’ now as a swear word, merely to denigrate those freedom loving small-r republicans and small-d democrats who obliterated that particular form of totalitarianism. If an idea is used by its advocates as a smear against their enemies, it is a bankrupt idea. Nazism will never rise again.
Nazism made the mistake of making particular claims that were particularly disprovable. The Third Reich did not last a thousand years. The Aryan Race was not a scientific fact. It is not in Darwinian competition with other races, and it was not a master race able by its mystical unity with folk and homeland able to overcome inferior Slavic and Gallic and Mongrel races from Russia, Western Europe, America. It promised military victory and glory in this world. The Third Reich was broken. Its promises were shown false.
Communism fell but was not discredited. It is ailing, but still alive, in China, Cuba, and in American Campuses. However, it is fundamentally a parasitic idea, because communism requires some nearly friendly democracies to fund and sustain it. The genius of Ronald Reagan was to recognize this simple fact, and to cut off the aid and supplies the West suicidally fed to Stalin. His Holiness the Pope and the Polish union organizer Lech Walesa robbed the Reds of their main talking points, their spiritual strength.
Because communism made the blunder of also promising wealth and equality, utopia and glory in this world. After decade upon decade of those promises being shown hollow, and Communism being shown able to produce only mounds upon mounds of corpses, the spirit of Communism broke.
Mohammedanism is wiser than either of these previous foes of Christendom. It promises its followers paradise in the next world, seventy-two virgins, and revenge against the Jews on whom all blame in earth and heaven is laid. The promise cannot be shown false, because it is a close parallel, I am tempted to call it a satanic and mocking parallel, to the promises of Christ. Those who yearn for things of the spirit cannot be lured or deterred by worldly things.
The idea of luring the faithful Mohammedan into a middle-class civil society with the luxuries of modern life has a certain surface feasibility.
But the detriments of modern life do not allure. Each Moslem father rightly fears his daughter will dress like Brittany Spears, or (which is the same thing) like a streetwalker, and will talk like Sandra Fluke, not merely unashamed of indiscriminate amateur harlotry, but demanding both approval for her wanton acts, and funds to pay for it, and next funds to kill his grandchild in the womb; and he fears his son will talk like Dan Savage, not merely unashamed of indiscriminate unnatural acts, but demanding both approval and funds to pay for whatever medications may be needed to assuage the various venereal disease which accompany such depravity.
On an less sickening level, the faithful Moslem may also fear, and rightly so, the degeneration of simpler virtues like honesty and hospitality, courage and war and faith in kinsfolk, which modernity and its mobility treated (until the Great War) indifferently, and then (during the Cold War) with positive and malign hostility.
Talk to your grandparents, if you doubt me. Men stopped keeping their word, then stopped thinking they ought, and then no longer knew anyone who even talked of such things.
Or the faithful Moslem may look at the soaring minarets and grim domes looming over the lands his ancestors conquered, and see the beauty of the geometric tracery reciting verses from holy books adorning these fanes, and compare that to the sheer mind numbing overwhelming ugliness of the West, in whose art museum, the most sacred symbol of the Western Lands, a crucifix, is dipped in the urine of Andres Serrano.
And he might rightly say that he and his people tried modernization, they tried Westernization, but, unlike the Soviet efforts, they failed and failed miserably. Wealth and peace and prosperity did not come.
From the Paynim point of view, the freedom of free market representative democracy seem to him as hollow as the promises of communism and Nazism seem to us. What can he do but attack, and send his children to commit suicide in grotesque despair against the superior civilization?
The idea that all men desire wealth, freedom and happiness and therefore all men desire modern democracy is false. For here are societies who tried for a generation to imitate modern democracy, and only found themselves deeper in tribalism and tyranny and profound unhappiness of anarchy and civil war. The wealth promised by modern industrialization did not come. Hand outs from the West turned them into dependents and serfs.
Their hatred and disgust with the West is not irrational. They cannot be lured to embrace our way of life, our fine cars and fine houses and fine whores and finer sodomites and expensive drugs and cheap televisions, because this stuff is glitter and fool’s gold. It is the gifts of Oberon that returns to yellow leaves at dawn. We cannot give them wealth: it turns to rubbish in their hands.
According to what I’ve read — and I leave the assessment of the matter to those better versed in the history of the Middle East — the political theory behind the modern Jihad is entirely Western in origin and practice, inspired by the Nazi methods. It is cell based conspiracy of terror and law-war, the attempt to disintegrate the superior civilization using its own psychological weaknesses, limitations and scruples.It takes it cues from Communism and uses their tried and true and very successful methods.
They differ from communism in that there is no large military power at their beck and call. However, in a modern interconnected world, one unwilling to identify enemies as enemies, nor to place restrictions on the movements of men, money and arms across international borders, military power is not needed. A squad of men armed with boxcutters and the angry soul-destroying faith of heretics, and camouflaged by a cooperative Political Correctness, can slay thousands and tens of thousand. What need have they of military power? The strategy is psychological. The unannounced and cowardly ambushes are indiscriminate, directed against innocent civilians, bystanders, and purely symbolic targets without military value.
If it were not for the Left and their Fifth Column in the press, the enemy would have no microphone from which to spread their terror, and the Left would have no platform from which they apologize and bow and whine and coward before these militarily insignificant but spiritually enormous foes, and encourage them, and urge them on, and promise them victory.
(Ah? Do you think the West did not promise them victory? The leader of the free world just told them that the future does not belong to us. Since I consider it an honor and a duty to slander their false prophet, I cannot interpret Mr Obama’s comments as other than craven and disloyal.)
Yes, I called them enormous. You cannot beat faith, even faith in the devilish mockery of God called Allah, with a shallow vacuum of faith. Our current society is a vacuum. Our faith in God is weak, is openly mocked, and indeed by some few fools is blamed for acts of terror like the very ones which currently oppress us. As if Christianity were the same as its opposite, Mohammedanism.
As long as we attempt to pacify the foe with promises that they can be wealthy and shallow and empty like us, with our broken families and our contemptible self hatred, they will sense our weakness, and be encouraged to the attack.
To eliminate this pacification, we must shame into silence the Political Correctness, punish with both formal and informal sanctions, abolish their hold over the minds of the young. Without the enthusiastic aid and assistance of Leftists here and abroad, the violent Jihadists would be little more than a gang of pirates and thugs, too fearful of the confident military hyperpower of America to stir from their holes and caves.
However, Political Correctness is both deeply entrenched and precisely and perfectly evolved to act as a parasite on our civilization, perhaps to the point where it cannot be eliminated without damaging the host.
Nowhere do I see the cultural confidence or clarity of vision needed to lead a crusade against the Cultural Marxism called Political Correctness. Just this very day on the radio, I heard a practicing Catholic say in public that the question of abortion and contraception was a matter for the private conscience, which no Pope nor Priest nor General Council, no Apostle and no Church, and apparently no God has the right to guide. I sat with my mouth agape and my heart filled with fear and rage, wondering how in the world this man’s bishop did not excommunicate him.
If the Catholic Church, that most serious and hoary and well organized form of organized religion on the planet, is not serious enough and organized enough to discipline its children in the face of Politically Correct bullshit, where shall we look for guidance? We Christians are meant to salt the meat of the Earth, to preserve it from decay and make her able to sustain life, and we are meant to be light to the benightened and frightened and sin-blinded. But if the salt has lost its savor, how shall it be flavored? If the light is hid, what shall it illume?
The West will not have the strength to face Jihad until and unless it recovers its Christian faith. That cannot happen until and unless Political Correctness is utterly broken in spirit, broke in funds, humiliate, laughed out of existence, cursed, scorned, and forgotten save as a warning tale to frighten children.
I do not believe such a thing is likely. It may not be possible. Political Correctness is evil, confidence, ruthless, conscious-less, highly adaptive, and highly expert at using our laws and customs to disarm attacks both legal and verbal against its depredations.
The law is on its side. The political parties are on its side, the Democrats openly, the Republicans reluctantly.
The mass media, the press, and the entertainment industry that both reflects and shapes the mood and opinion of the common man, the powerful and subtle instrument of propaganda ever devised, are in their hands and they are expert at operating the engines of deception.
The academia are on its side: men of ordinary learning and prudence face evil geniuses of sophomoric idiocy. (And do not ask me how they can be geniuses and idiotic at the same time. No doubt it is special gift of Azathoth, their tenebrous god, which renders them immune from the law of non-contradiction).
Every worldly gift is on their side. On the other hand, if God is with us, who can be against us?
Let us not be less than the fierce and idolatrous Norseman, whose highest hope was to die in battle that he might live again in the Final Battle. He foretold that the dim and stupid giants of frost from the north and the raging giants of fire from the south, the world serpent shattering the circle of Midgard and the chaos world cracking the sky dome with its ravenous jaws, would assault the last home of gods and men, and those worthy few, oh so few, mortals would be called when wounded, one-eyed Odin, and wounded one-handed Tyr limped to their battered and cracking walls of gold, Frayer unready and without his great sword, then Hiemdall doomed to die would sound the final blast. Oh, the pagan yearned to fight alongside the gods and offer the giants defiance, if though it spelled utmost doom and the twilight of the gods from which no dawn could ever rise again.
If with such courage they war and welcomed death, then how much more should we, unashamed and singing, go to crusade and martyrdom, having the gift of hope no pagan knows, and the extravagant promises of Christ?
Christian saints can loose all battles, but we can never lose the war.
Against the crooked men at home and the crooked swords of Asia, loosen your longswords in their scabbards, and raise the sign in which we conquer. DEUS VULT!
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.
