Update: This essay is now available in German at Europe News.
As I mentioned earlier, last week a group from ICLA and other like-minded NGOs attended a side event at the OSCE Human Dimension Implementation Meeting in Warsaw. The event was sponsored by the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), the OSCE entity that organizes the Human Dimension Implementation meetings.
Below is ODIHR’s logo:
I don’t know about you, but I find this design a little bit creepy. A tree full of Orwellian eyes, watching everyone to make sure that no one’s human rights are violated! The ODIHR tree never sleeps…
And the three-colored foliage clues you in to the “diversity” of the operation. The subliminal message is that OSCE and ODIHR will be ever-vigilant in their enforcement of tolerance and inclusion for religious and racial minorities, women, the disabled, LGBT people, and so on.
In fact, the final item in the above list was prominently featured in last week’s conference in Warsaw. No matter the topic — tolerance, discrimination, the rights of women, religious freedom, etc. — LGBT NGOs sent representatives to the podium to speak up about the rights of people who hold non-traditional sexual orientations.
I’m not going to argue the merits of such interventions. But what I can’t help but notice is the massive funding behind the sexual-rights push at the OSCE. This implies the participation of George Soros’ Open Society Institute and other organizations in what might be called the “Soros Galaxy”. These trans-national leftist groups promote the deconstruction of Western culture through various means, acting in partnership with like-minded progressive organizations and well-meaning liberal Christian groups.
The following flyer was distributed on the fourth day of the event:
The “COEXIST” meme is fascinating, in a repugnant way. The seven letters seem to be religious, yet the second one is a peace sign, or broken cross — what religion is that? And the gender-related symbology of the “E” represents which particular faith? I’m not sure if the main bar of the “I” represents anything in particular, but the pentagram dotting it must refer to Wicca or something similar. The yin-yang “S” would include Taoism, but Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism are completely absent.
A strangely non-inclusive “coexistence” is at work here.
Mind you, it was a Christian organization, Christian Solidarity Austria, pushing this side event — promoting this demolition of Christian civilization in the name of “interreligious dialogue”.
Ironically, of course, once the deconstruction is successful, Islam intends to build the World Caliphate on the rubble of Christendom. You and I know it, the Muslims know it, but these progressive Christians seem unaware. Or perhaps they do see what lies ahead, and simply don’t mind…?
Such is the iconography of the New World Order.
Tuesday night’s side event was also hosted by the luminaries pushing the NWO. As I mentioned in my post, a presenter from the Runnymede Trust was among the authors of the anti-Islamophobia guidebook for educators. It’s no surprise that Runnymede is another star in the Soros galaxy.
And so it goes. Advocates for the New World Order — in partnership with socialist governments and progressive NGOs — have joined Muslim Brotherhood front groups to co-opt the OSCE and other international bodies in a push to obliterate the existing order of sovereign nation-states.
Each bloc — the Ummah and the Left — thinks it can rule over the ruins when the project is complete. Anyone want to place bets on the likely winner?
For links to previous articles about the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, see the OSCE Archives.
Baron,
These American and European groups who work to promote the undermining of Western culture: I’m trying to get into their mind set.
Do you think they are doing this out of a misplaced sense of what one could call “do-goodism” or are they deliberately aiming for the destruction of Western culture?
And if the latter, with what do they aim to replace it? Communism perhaps? The fantasy Marxist utopia with a gloss of fantasy multiculturalism?
Independent —
This is a question that I (and many other people) keep struggling to answer.
To be a progressive means to know that you are morally superior to the common masses, so that supporting progressive causes gives you that warm glow of doing the right thing.
I don’t knock wanting to feel like you’re “doing the right thing” — after all, the same thing motivates me. But it’s hard to see how people can keep repeating behaviors that seem so obviously destructive to the very society that allows them to flourish.
Progressivism must be some mighty strong medicine. It’s religion without God, and induces great fervor in its believers. None of that makes sense to me; but then, I haven’t seen the light.
“Religion without God.” Yes, I’ve noticed that for these progressives, their political beliefs are really their religion and often their only religion.
That said, it’s really difficult to understand the churches and synagogues that espouse much of this nonsense. I understand that they feel that being moral means to “take care” of one’s fellow man. But they don’t seem to realize that the ways in which they want the government and NGOs to do this are ultimately counter productive and will lead, as you say, to the destruction of the culture that allows them to flourish.
It seems like there some kind of unthinking (and stupid because unreasonable) religious impulse driving some of the progressivism. The road to hell, etc.
The “progressives” impoverish discourses, they wish to unify the world because they are not intellectually sophisticated or prepared to exercise the understanding and charity necessary to negotiate a world in which cultural and other differences among people and peoples have meaning.
To deny religion and individual psychology any validity in human experience is to marginalize it as discourse.
To deny culture or tribalism in one’s midst is another way of oversimplifying life.
The refusal to know and apply one’s own historical-cultural perspective is a major intellectual failure, it’s no excuse for ignorance of it.
There are different traditions of civilization and thought, just as there are different traditions in music– one is every bit as perceptible as the other; you need only open your mind. I never cease to be bewildered at the West’s refusal to recognize this truth and to protect its own civilization and to practice the literary study and “social sciences” in a manner consistent with its own historical experiences.
I will be glad to “take care of my fellow man” when he ceases to hate or do violence against me for saying “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
Charity must be conditional, or its fruits will be ephemeral.
An important impediment to understanding this phenomenon is a tendency I’ve noticed present all too often in the Counter-Jihad — the tendency, that is, to regard the Bad Guys as curious creatures “over there” and, by extension, to regard their sociopolitical culture as some kind of alien imposition.
By contrast, an important solvent to this impediment will only come by disabusing oneself of this tendency. For some, that may be trickier than for others; for it seems to involve quite an intricate constellation of emotions and assumptions.
(For those who find my comment too opaque, I’ve analyzed this very topic dozens of times in lengthy and detailed essays on my blog over the years; I continue to grapple with a way to wrestle its complications into a nutshell for the benefit of the Complexity-Challenged.)
Note: by “Bad Guys” I refer to those non-Muslims in the West whose badness is variously denoted as “liberal” or “Leftist” or “Progressive” or “PC”; etc.
Independent – it is indeed hard to get into the mind set of these people. I’m reading Pascal Bruckner, a French philosopher, who is very good on this issue (writing from a French perspective so what he says is sometimes specific to French history and culture eg Algeria, and the French Revolution) Look him up on Wikipedia: the title of his books gives you a clue – ‘The Tyranny of Guilt: an essay on Western Masochism’ , and ‘The Tears of the White Man’
he can be a bit wordy for my Anglo Saxon perspective! but never wilfully obscure or ‘post modern’ and he frequently packs a real punch.
If the proponents of the NWO attain their goals, the world they will have built will have no place for any genuine and serious religious belief. The NWO will be an ocean of vague ‘spirituality’ giving its adepts a warm feeling of proud self-satisfaction, providing them with some amusing ‘spiritual’ experiences and activities, and imposing no serious obligations – except those of being ‘tolerant’ and of fighting ‘intolerance’ they might perceive in others. Anyone clinging to traditional Christian doctrines and values will, of course, be accused of intolerance, demonised, punished and neutralised.
I wonder, however, if this NWO brave new world will ever come into existence – for Muslims do not seem to have any intention of giving up their religion with all its inherent agressiveness and violence for the sake of tolerant coexistence with Gaia worshippers, pseudo-Buddhists, students of Voodoo or enthusiastic participants of Tantric sexual rituals.
Thus, Christians in foreseeable future will be more probably tortured and dismembered by Islamists rather than ostracised and persecuted by ruthlessly tolerant and pluralistic adepts of politically correct ‘new’ spirituality (which, in fact, as old as the devil himself).
Understanding the philosophy, history, and goals of what has been called the New Age Movement (which is admittedly a hard creature to describe) will take you a long way in trying to understand what these types of groups are trying to accomplish, and what their world will look like, should they succeed.
Most conservative intellectuals have a tendency to “pooh pooh” New Agers as adle-minded, harmless nutjobs who tried one drug experiment too many. But I can assure you that there is more to it than that.
It is not a religion without God, it is a religion that reinvents Him into something else – the god within.
So much more to say on the topic, but if anyone’s interested, I can post a link to a downloadable book that was published in the early 80s that was the first attempt (and a darn good one!) at exploring the New Age movement at that time.
I think that “God within” and the tendency to seek transcendence within one’s self only can be defined as Eric Voegelin’s (spelling unclear) would “gnosticism.”
That is, Eric Voegelin’s gnosticism.
It’s a peculiarly narcissistic understanding of authority, spirituality and transcendence.
Yes, and Voegelin was in many ways only reviving the medieval and classical concept of the amor sui (“love of self”) as a rebellion against the amor Dei (“love of God” — in the objective genitive); to use the terms of one thinker who embodies the nexus between classical and medieval philosophy, St. Augustine.
I’m of the mind that PeeCeeEmCee Leftism is an idolatry that pretends it has outgrown the Christian God. There’s no such thing as an atheist. Listen long enough to one who so describes himself, and you will discover the neon god he’s made (thanks to Simon and Garfunkel).
Marxism has been described as a Christian Heresy.
Addendum: Your question regarding who will build upon the ashes of Christendom (and Western Civilization more generally) is a good one, and one that I’ve been trying to figure out as well. Sad, that it seems a foregone conclusion that there will be ashes.
Regarding Independent’s query as to with what the left will replace Western Civilization, I honestly don’t think they’ve thought that far.
So far as I can tell, the fundamental commitment of the left today is hatred of the Gospel. There is no other explanation for the simultaneous support of the aggressive normalization of homosexuality (complete with verbal attacks on Christians who teach traditional sexual morality, even if their legal commitments on the matter are more libertarian than their moral teachings, and law suits to force Christian bed and breakfast owners to rent rooms in their own homes under circumstances where the guests will likely be committing buggery during their stay) and of the creeping Islamization of Europe and America, ears resolutely stopped against the calls by imams and mullahs for the execution of homosexuals and eyes blinkered to attacks on homosexuals carried out by Muslims in, for instance, the Netherlands.
What comes after, what the thoroughly de-Christianized society they yearn for will look like, I don’t think they’ve thought through. They never seem to think through the likely outcomes of their policies. Their bright and shining future is bright and shining only because it doesn’t exist and is full of all their fantasies, even when implementing all of them simultaneously would be impossible either because they are contradictory or because of the constraints of reality they never seem to notice until it’s too late and their policies have crashed into them (cf. the Obamacare roll-out yesterday).
Yes, there will be ashes. And those of us, keyboard warriors throughout the western world, need to show up at church and CHALLENGE what is being said there.
This is our only hope.
Dear baron, the second Symbol on the logo is the “death rune”, the “tree of life” turned upside down. During the 3rd Reich, it was sometimes used, instead of a cross, in obituary notices. Later, it was adopted by the German movement “gegen den Atomtod” (against death by the atomic bomb). It was quite fitting because it resembles, at the same time, a rocket ready to start. Still later, the original connotation of death was forgotten and the symbol was simply perceived as a peace sign. The creator of the logo obviously knew nothing about the more original and more sinister connotation, a proof of the lack of erudition of these people.
What do you mean the “second symbol”? I only see one symbol.
What do you mean “tree of life” turned upside down” — the tree looks right side up to my eye.
Dear Hesperado, I saw your post only today, so my reply is a little late. Sorry!
The Baron said “The seven letters seem to be religious, yet the second one is a peace sign, or a broken cross, what religion is that?” It is that second letter I mean. If you turn it by 180 degrees, the three straight lines can be interpreted as a tree with 3 branches. That is the “tree of life”, it resembles, btw Goethes “Urpflanze”.The circle around them is not important; it is just the rim of the badge the demonstrators for nuclear disarmament wore. If you turn that tree upside down, that means the negation of life, i.e. death. These symbols may be no original Germanic runes, but they were seen as such during the 3rd Reich.
Independent, these groups or NWO or freemasons have no interest in doing anything good for the rest of humanity. They particularly hate the nation-state
and Christianity in spades. They are unbelievably secretive, ruthless and
well-organised. Their aim is to totally control the whole World, making
everyone except their own relatively small group slaves or at least second class
citizens. The Rothschilds and Rockerfellers are in this up to their necks.
Marko,
I don’t know if you mean “The New Religions” because that might have been initially published earlier.
I do understand the need that some people have to search for a spiritual path, within their own religion or outside of it. I also know that, historically, established religions (including Christianity and Judaism) have sometimes looked askance at–or have even punished or killed–“mystics” or others who have deviated from what was considered to be the accepted doctrines.
I also know that during the 60s, 70s and even 80s, large numbers of spiritually aspiring young people felt that Christianity or Judaism did not give them the means to conduct their search. They sought meditation instruction and even doctrinal instructions from practitioners of Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.
All that being said, I maintain that thy could do this and still acknowledge the importance of western culture. Because it is obvious–or it should be–that it is western culture which gave them the freedom and the economic and cultural wherewithal to conduct their spiritual search.
So this movement still does not explain, in my mind, the hatred and animosity exhibited by the multiculturalists toward their own culture and western culture in general.
Consider the the following evidence and see if you can avoid denying the likely conclusion it suggests as to the motive of the Progs.
1. Western advances having spurred population growth as never before.
2. The mountain of skulls and consequent subjugation of the masses wherever Marxist Ideologists or Islamists are given power.
3. Prog fear of overpopulation and the fear mongering in service to it (such as UN’s Agenda 21 and IPCC’s Catastrophic Anthropomorohic Global Warming.)
You seem oblivious to the much broader Western demographic of “Self-Haters Lite” — those who are not flaming Leftists, but who are PC MCs, and who as such have in their hearts and minds a largely incoherent and self-contradictory mush of feelings and thoughts, where irrationally excessive self-criticism of one’s own West (and its other side of the coin, irrationally excessive admiration for the Other) is promiscuously entwined with a more or less healthy and supportive participation in their own West in terms of culture, society, economics, etc.
It’s less complicated to only focus on the dastardly Leftists; but the real problem is the much broader demographic of the PC MCs as described above. Not only are they more numerous, but they also are slightly more amenable to changing their minds over time; and without their participation in the decades ahead, I dare say, the West would be lost.
But as long as the Counter-Jihad caricatures and demonizes them by lumping them in with the dastardly Leftists (or by simply being oblivious to their demographic, thus inflating the numbers of said dastardly Leftists), it will be tending to retard, rather than advance, the most exigent project of rousing the modern West from its pleasant Rip Van Winkle nap it’s been in for 12-odd years now, as its bedside digital clock keeps flashing 911 and as its pleasantly comatose bear paw keeps hitting the snooze button so that it can continue to indulge its half-asleep doze to the tune of some soft rock station.
With all due respect Hesperado — and I often find some of your comments valuable — I’m not sure what set you off here.
Unlike you, I constantly try to remember to fill in the website part of the comment form with some post at my blog that is relative to my current comment. This time is no different.
I am hardly oblivious to the other elements opposing me. I surely didn’t refer to leftists as dastardly here or anywhere else. For one thing, as my cognomen should suggest to you, my point of reference starts about 1650 before the terms Left and Right had any meaning.
My comment did refer to Progs. They are really neither Left nor Right in the common parlance; these are those who simply seek to rule in the old fashioned way.
The Progs of the late 1800s had labels for every group. I’m assuredly recognized as a Reactionary. (Funny isn’t it? Now, that they are the ones in power, how they are now the Reactionaries. Ah, projection. A well-worn Prog tool.)
Surely you know their name for the radical Left. It is their Avante Garde. Your “dastardly Leftists” are their shock troops; their more violence prone useful idiots.
A friend of mine with his own blog has a name for your PC MCs. He calls them lost souls on a good day. Or simply lost and not worth the time and effort to spit.
As time moves on I can see his point. You should consider it too. They will follow whomever will refill their food bowl and water dish when the time comes. He says that you must be prepared for when those basics are suddenly removed (kinda like Obama is threatening with this shutdown as if the time of reckoning isn’t already inevitable). Just remember that mindless stampedes are dangerous.
I get the impression you think their is more thought there. Ok. Then maybe you can point me to an extended examination of why the PC MCs are really anything but a short term threat and a body of useful idiots for our real enemy in the mid term.
I will honestly consider it. That will be probably much more than you did my comment above as it seems your comment did not address it.
Are we on the same team?
Is your point that progressives are supporting Marxist and Islamic ideologies in order to create massive numbers of human deaths in order to fight purported over-population? Is this really what you are trying to express?
” The subliminal message is that OSCE and ODIHR will be ever-vigilant in their enforcement of tolerance and inclusion for religious and racial minorities, women, the disabled, LGBT people, and so on.”
There’s a Catch-23: The rights of all minorities — blacks, gays and lesbians, women, etc. — will be thrown under the bus if they come in conflict with the #1 Privileged Minority of the World: Muslims.
Friends,
one of you mentioned the philospher Pascal Bruckner and “western masochism”.
My own study of PC/MC phenomenon brought me to the conclusion that this is exactly it, meaning in literary, almost medical sense. Sexual submissivity/inferiority complex/self-hatred, however you call it, are much more common in human population than is usually assumed, these personality traits are not necessarily “wrong” if dealt with properly. Importantly, their presence in a person tends to correlate with talent for manipulations, verbal and artistic skills, stress endurance … all this for sound pychobiological reasons. Note, that these are skills highly useful in media, eucation and academe, the most PCMC infested nests.. Hence, exaclty the professions that produce ideological millieu have become occupied by people who are unhappy with themselves, subconsciously wishing for self-destruction, but too self-absorbed to spare the rest of us of the show.
The Babel Predicament – the battle is no longer for the Gates of Vienna, the siege is now on for the Gates of Heaven, for sure men are at war with God.
That ^^^ is what I see as the basis for all discussion about where we are headed.
Chesters, thanks for the reference; I hope I will have the time to look at it.
The attitude of many of liberals (who support progressive causes) just smells of Judeo-Christian guilt. They say something to the effect of “from those to whom much is given, much is required.” Or they say they want to “give back.” (Of course they are also fine with forcing others to “give back.”)
Judeo-Christian guilt apparently can exist independently of Christianity and Judaism.
I’ve been thinking about this issue and here are some of my tentative conclusions:
As difficult as it is for many of us to believe, I think that many–if not most–of them do not realize how they are destroying the culture. For years I’ve railed against “brain-dead liberals” who are the majority population in my area. They are so mindless that they don’t even realize how far to the left their so-called “liberalism” has moved–such that they are now happily and self-righteously supporting “progressive” multicultural Marxists (a la Franz Fanon) such as Obama.
Many of them are well-meaning–but they do not think intelligently about these issues. Somehow the multicultural Marxists have managed to twist the genuine and decent desire to help one’s fellow man into a perverted hatred of or disdain toward the status quo–in other words a hatred of or disdain toward western culture.
I attribute much of this to generations of indoctrination on college and university campuses. I don’t know why it is that intellectuals are so often attracted to totalitarian ideologies. I suppose it is fundamentally due to intellectual arrogance–to the belief that they are so intelligent and so far above the common run of human beings that they are capable of planning utopias and deciding how others should live.
I remember that it was years ago that students on the Stanford campus (one of our premier academic institutions of course) while in some “demonstration,” were chanting something like: “Hey ho, Western Civilization has got to go!” Well they may just get their wish. How typical that leftists always manage to come up with mindless but emotional slogans.
Here’s another thought: I was–to a degree–like these people when I was an adolescent and in adolescent rebellion. But I matured. Adolescents are often highly critical of their parents and their culture. For many people, it is part of the process of growing up, of finding their own identities. If they mature, as they experience more of life, they understand more and so they become less critical and more understanding of others and of the culture. At the same time they gain the perspective needed to appreciate the finer qualities in others and in their culture.
It’s as if a large and growing segment of the American population is frozen in perpetual adolescence.
As I write this I remember the title Diana West’s book, “The Death of the Grownup,” and wonder if she addressed this issue. I must look into it. Oh for more hours in the day!
This is an important psychological aspect of “collective guilt” in the reflexive mode, where the group being condemned nominally includes the accuser. Another aspect is that “collective guilt” tends to dissipate individual responsibility across the group, and this remains true in the reflexive mode. So in a way, when someone speaks of the collective sins of their own society, part of their recompense is blaming their personal sins on the society (while continuing to credit themselves personally for any perceived virtues which are taken to not be a result of the society).
In other words, it is a way for people with an inadequate ratio of personal virtue to sin to shift responsibility for their sin to others while continuing to claim credit for their virtues.
Addendum
The more I think about it, the more it appears to me that the liberals/leftists in my area really are like adolescents in their political attitudes: they are highly critical and condemning of the culture, self-righteous, and they think that they know best.
@Independent: I’m a Christian of the Reformed persuasion (Reformierte, Gereformeerde, Reformee) with Jewish ancestry, so I guess I should be chock full of guilt.
Well, I own myself a sinner in need of the redemption which God put forth in Jesus Christ, and thank Him for His great grace which brought me to repentance and faith.
I also believe in giving back what I’ve gotten. Hence, I am now in the business of teaching history and social studies in the heart of a liberal constituency–and pointing out where the textbooks show their bias, explaining alternative points of view, letting them read Leonard Reed’s “I, Pencil”, noting that the limits of confiscatory taxation are quickly being reached, and noting that there isn’t a country on earth that doesn’t protect its borders or try to control immigration.
@Hesperado: I’d like to call myself a multiculturalist. I love the Western tradition, especially that of liberty under law, Augustinian Christianity, and those Hebrew and Greek roots of our civilization while at the same time having a deep appreciation for the elements of truth I can glean out of Kong Zi and Lao Zi (whom I have read in the original Classical Chinese, or 文言). I’m also learning Spanish, and can still carry on a conversation in Thai. I joke with friends that with no shame in Jewish ancestors and kin and a Chinese wife, I get three New Years annually.
However, I do not want to stand with those who loudly call themselves “multicultural”, when they are in fact very “anti-cultural” in their hatred of the Christian tradition. There is nothing quite as off-putting as being told you are a “racist” and “mono-cultural” by someone who can’t even form an English sentence correctly.