Note: Takuan’s post (which was originally published last night) is to remain at the top for a while, so I made it “sticky”. However, much has happened since it went up, including the Blogger outage. Scroll down for a report on that.
See also: Two forthrightly anti-Semitic Islamic leaders in Norway, Judicial coddling in Germany, and Part 3 of the Imran Firasat interview.
More new posts will be added below this one. Oh, and don’t mess around with JIM.
The essay below is the conclusion of the ninth part in a series by Takuan Seiyo. See the list at the bottom of this post for links to the previous installments.
Left: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette, 1876
Right: George Grosz, Metropolis, 1916/17
The Bee and the Lamb
Part 9 (continued)
By Takuan Seiyo
A Whole New Road to Serfdom
That Which is Not Seen (continued)
For over 60 years, White mea-culpists have had a firm grip in all fields of cultural mind imprinting: education high and low; paper media, then electronic, then digital media; all forms of entertainment, the plastic arts and music high and low, and religious instruction and worship too. Their main endeavor has been to enforce their compulsory (e.g. K-12) and discretionary (e.g. television) self-flaying on account of long-ago Slavery, Colonialism, Imperialism, Male Supremacism, Racism, Antisemitism, and so on.
It’s the evils of the Iberian Inquisition — which were evil — but not the evils of the Japanese equivalent in which, in the 40 years up to 1597, 50,000 Christians were publicly crucified, burned or beheaded. Nor the evils of the worldwide Islamic Inquisition which — not in the 16th century but now, in the 21st, condemns Muslim apostates to barbaric execution. It’s America’s destruction of the snail darter but not Mussulmanism’s destruction of the Bamyan Buddhas or its proposed destruction of the Sphinx and the Pyramids, let alone its obliteration of all the pre-Rome cradles of Christianity but for remaining ruins in the Middle East and dust of the desert in North Africa.
It’s the evils of feudalism and industrial workers’ exploitation in Europe and America, but not the strict Confucian evils of Northeast Asia. There, a member of the ruling class in China had, essentially, a free hand with anyone of the lower classes, a Japanese samurai could test his sword by cutting down an insolent peasant, and farmers were so squeezed by their fief holders that they habitually sold their daughters to bordellos for the few coins it provided for next season’s seed.
Feminism, Socialism and anti-Antisemitism should have arisen in Saudi Arabia or Yemen, Algeria or Peshawar, for good reasons. Instead, aggressive White androphobes of all genders which I can no longer count are decimating the philogynous and egalitarian West. Equality psychos are tearing down the most egalitarian society that ever existed (except for initial communist experiments, before they turned bloody). American Jews, at the apex of the greatest fortune and philosemitic tolerance their long diaspora has ever bestowed on their kind, are busy supporting all the ideologies and policies that demolish their safe harbor and build up their Muslim, Black and Third World enemies. They will come to rue their tacit assumption that better the antisemite you don’t know than the few hundred imputed and real ones catalogued at ADL.
One would be hard put to find a nation not based on the invasion of another people’s territory and their mass slaughter. Yet poisoned American madmen proclaim “No Thanks for Thanksgiving” as though the Indians themselves did not fight endless genocidal wars from Peru to Canada, with torture, ritual murder or slavery for the captives and, at times, cannibalism too.
Leftoid masochists and the Christian meek call for returning Hawaii to the Hawaiians and capitulating before a massive Mexican reconquista of one-third of America. The self-defined “Feminist-Tauist-NeoPagan-Post-Structuralist-Deconstructionist-Socialist” useful idiot Gillian Schutte begins her New Year 2013 Dear White People by “wholeheartedly apologizing for what my ancestors did to the people of South Africa and inviting you to do the same.”
Yet the Magyars don’t seem to feel much guilt over the Illyrians, Pannonians, Sarmatians and Celts whose land and lives they took in the 9th century, to form Hungary. The rightful Etruscan landowners are not bearing angry placards in front of the Vatican. The Japanese are not planning to relinquish Hokkaido to its original owners, the Ainu. The tall, white and fair-haired Chachapoyas of the Andean forest have, alas, no remnants left to sue the Incas for genocide in a Peruvian court of law. The Aztecs, whether in Jalisco or Los Angeles, don’t agonize over having taken what would become Mexico City from its original Culhuacan owners, with lots of grisly details. Yet for 38 years Neil Young has been reminding adoring audiences about “Cortez the Killer”, discreetly omitting Tlacaelel the killer and the killer people whom Cortez killed.
Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996) is a book by Daniel Goldhagen presenting the thesis that the German nation as such was composed of willing executioners of the Jews because of a unique “eliminationist antisemitism” in the German people, with long historical roots. However, even that great moral abyss of Western civilization — the Holocausts — stands out more in its industrialized and organizational features than it does either in the quality of its hatefulness or its relative or even absolute volumes. And Holocausts they were, for in addition to the nearly 6 million Jews, the Germans also murdered over 21 million civilian Slavs, and that’s counting Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Czechoslovakia alone.
In absolute numbers, the total number of World War II non-German civilian victims of Nazi Germany is smaller than the 50 million victims of the Bolsheviks in Russia, or Mao’s 70 million in China, or the Mughal-Muslim genocide of Hindus — the latter have their own Holocaust Day on August 14.
In relative numbers, in just one year, 1994, the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda, killed off a total of one million, in a population of 7 million. 75% of the Tutsi population was erased. Is it more humane to go by a stroke of a blunt machete than by a whiff of Zyklon B?
The Khmer Rouge murdered at least 2 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979: one quarter of the population, by a conservative count. Is it more humane to die by wallops from a Cambodian pickaxe handle than by a bullet from a German Mauser?
Inscription on the back (in German): “Ukraine 1942, Jewish Aktion, Ivangorod.”
There is a special horror attached to the Third Reich, because those were 20 th century Europeans, Christians, and in many ways the smartest, most civilized people on Earth. But the Holocausts do not prove that Whites are worse than other people, just that they are no better. The history of the Third Reich also proves that with the right formula of economic blowup, misery and humiliation, sparked by charismatic evil, no people are immune to such horror, at no time.
And that includes the here and now. Unaware that history that occurs first as tragedy repeats itself as farce, the Rulers of the West have cooked up a potion with similar ingredients to those of 1930s Germany, complete with an imported Semito-Turkic minority that Europeans have far fewer reasons to like than they did the previous, semi-indigenous Semitic minority once living among them. What’s missing are hyperinflation and the evil genius. But not to worry — they are working hard on “quantitatively easing” and “prime pumping” the hyperinflation into being. And hyperinflations have a way of unearthing evil geniuses too.
All that while thinking that they have run away from Hitler as far and as fast as is humanly possible, having roiled from Berlin to Brisbane 24/7 for 50 years to find the fascist in every White and the evil in every facet of Western tradition.
Hence the loud guffaw reverberating through the cosmos.
De mortalitate
The early Church Father and martyr, Cyprian of Carthage, was witness to the smallpox pandemic that devastated the Roman Empire in the second half of the third century. The pandemic is known as the Plague of Cyprian, because he described it in the consoling missive to his congregation, De mortalitate, i.e. “On the Plague.” At its height, the plague killed 5,000 people a day in Rome alone and, according to Cyprian, no house in Carthage was without its victims.
It’s the irony of recurring human folly that the powers that be and the mob in Carthage blamed the Christians for the plague and unleashed murderous persecutions against them, just as the Christians would blame the Jews for the bubonic plague a millennium later, and kill them by the hundreds of thousands across the continent, from Spain to Lithuania. [1]
The task of science in epidemic etiology is to find and isolate the cause. Only then can the cure be devised. With respect to the Western brain rot that I call acute cognitive spongiform encephalitis, a small group of academics in the 1950s-60s was “patient zero.” What the homosexual Canadian flight attendant Gaëtan Dugas was with respect to the spread of AIDS, they were with respect to multiculturalism, “diversity,” demonizing the white race, extolling the barbaric and inferior as long as non-white, rewriting history, white population replacement, Islamization, “justice and equity” (with mutations such as “environmental justice”), celebration of loose sex and of deviant sexuality, demonization of men and masculinization of women, sabotage of the West camouflaged as love of Gaia, and the conversion of the entire Western gestalt from amalgamated Christianity and Enlightenment rationalism to a fanatical secular religion replete with totems and taboos, manifest lies, forbidden truths, hallucinatory mandates revealed to chosen prophets, and persecution of apostates.
The American philosopher Stephen Hicks has traced this causal chain superbly in his Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.[2]
Hicks traces the roots of postmodernism to Rousseau, Kant and Heidegger, but we shall examine just five of the post-1950 main branches: all university professors of major renown. Of the four academics whom Hicks credits with originating postmodernism — Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty — we shall look next at Foucault and Derrida. Then, the father of the postmodern New Left, Herbert Marcuse, whom Hicks also covers in his book. Finally, two chief Anglophone spreaders of the pox in the realms of history and literary criticism: Howard Zinn and Edward Said.
All of that, and all of these, have been mutations of Marxism, just as the successful virus absorbs and adapts to the body’s defenses and then finds a new avenue of attack that circumvents the body’s immune system.
This perception is of significant operational implication. To cite just one of some twenty major plagues now bedeviling the West, it implies that the advanced Islamization of Western Europe and the creeping one of the Anglophonic diaspora cannot be combated by arguing about the history of Islamic imperialism, the wiles of taqiyyah or the evils of sharia.
Islam and Muslims are not the lethal disease. It’s the West’s postmodern Marxism-soaked universities that are the lethal disease, and the generations of their programmed graduates who are now the Ruling Class of the West. Without them, Muslims would have been back where they were in 1955 — in Sanaa and Fallujah, Islamabad and Jawhar, but not in Houston, Melbourne, Amsterdam and Cologne. Islam would have still had its supremacist dreams, but dormant and subdued — for Muslims, in their own native milieus and dealing with a self-confident, rational West, would have had other things to worry about than how to make the World Khalifate come true. In fact, a sort of tenuous friendship could have existed between the West and Dar-al-Islam, the way it existed between mid 19 th and mid 20 th centuries.
If only the West’s nouveau-Marxists had not shot their host society in the head…
Picture on the left by permission of D.T. Devareaux; picture on the right, popular icon, creator unknown
Notes:
| 1. | It’s important to keep track of such things in a civilization that’s dying by its own hand. For what is taking place is bad karma accumulated from horrific stupidity in the past, acting to produce a countervailing horrific stupidity in the present. The chain of stupidity could be broken if people were able to see the pattern. You cannot and should not atone for the murder of six million Jews by self-kneecapping through the import of 25 million profoundly alien Muslims three generations later. | |
| 2. | Stephen R. C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault, Ockham’s Razor, August 2011. |
Takuan Seiyo is a European-born American writer living in exile in Japan.
Previous posts:
The first thing we must do is to put a stop to this self-flaying.
See: PJM: 8 ways blacks perpetuate racism and the only way to thwart it
My comment on that site:
“The upshot of the black racism that you describe above is that it has served to create an entrenched political elite of leftists – a political elite that has wreaked havoc and ruin on the US.
I always dread this time of year, and not only because of the bad weather. Martin Luther King was a Marxist whose activities paved the way for BHO. He deserves no holiday and nothing should be named after him, unless perhaps a welfare office or a bankruptcy court.
I am no apologist for chattel slavery. Even so, those of African ethnicity who currently live in the US are far better off than they would be if their ancestors had never been brought here.
Chattel slavery didn’t do the white people any good either; we are incomparably WORSE off now than we would be if no Africans ever came here. We are under the political control of an organized group of people who, owing to their own color-based prejudice, will always hate us and who will seek to abuse us and extract everything they can from us until there is nothing left to take. I am punished as an oppressor even though none of my ancestors set foot in the New World until long after chattel slavery had ended.”
@1389
I’m working at this time at incorporating in the next chapter something of the orgy of MLK/BHO/hip hop adulation that has washed over the U.S. in the last 24 hrs. Agree with you about the need to stop the self-flaying. However, I have a very different approach from most who want to stop the self-flaying.
The most strident voices of objection to the self-flaying come in two flavors: religious traditionalists and White Power nationalists. The first deny any errors and wrongdoing by the Catholic and Orthodox churches; some going back all the way to the authors of the New Testament and other Church Fathers. Yet had it no been for such errors and wrongdoing, the initial East -West schism would not have happened, nor would the Protestant schism or the current tide of secularity and ridiculing of Christians. The second simply blame everything on the Jews, even to the point of denying the Holocaust, though not only there was one Holocaust but there was a second one too — of “Whites” — exceeding the Jewish Holocaust by at least 15 million, and that (i.e. 21 million) being the minimum number of merely the civilian Slavs who were Hitler’s victims.
My way is to make full account of the errors, wrongdoings and horrors, to illuminate the stupidities behind them, and to show how the current stupidity is the mirror image of the old stupidities. Plus, to show that in fact such stupidities are the burden of all humans, not Whites alone, and to a much larger degree, proportionately speaking, among the “People of Color” (and even more so, Muslims), than among Whites. If you lie to yourself about your course up to now, you cannot chart a proper azymuth for the course from now on, either.
…I wrote this response to one of the comments and was getting ready to post it when GoV disappeared. Hopefully it will be OK to post it now, even though the original comment thread that it was in response to is now gone…
Thank you, Takuan, for a very thought provoking series of essays. The depth and breadth of your writing demands that a response should be in kind. But unfortunately, I don’t have the time to write to that level, so I will confine myself to just one small point left in one of your comments: the question of Martin Luther’s anti-Semitism.
Martin Luther was a brilliant, complex, driven and bull-headed man, but anti-Semitic, in any modern sense of the word, he most certainly was not. I know it is a minor point in your comment, but since this question seems to come up again and again here at GoV, I feel that it is important for readers here, for their own edification, to be exposed to a fuller discussion of it.
Something about Martin Luther few seem to know or appreciate is that he was one of the most prolific literary figures in all of Western European history. Not only did he translate both the New and Old Testaments from their original Greek and Hebrew into German. He was a musician and prolific hymn writer. He was a “Dear Abby” of his time, constantly receiving and thoughtfully answering letters asking for advice. He and his wife would often have his students over for dinner, those after-dinner conversations being recorded and saved for posterity by those students. He was a lawyer, a monk, a parish priest, a university professor and the department chair at a major university. Not to mention the founder, organizer, driving force and, together with Philipp Melanchthon, one of the intellectual and theological leaders of a revolutionarily new religious movement. It has been said that Luther’s collected works don’t just fill a shelf in a library; they fill a whole wing.
Despite the damning and inexcusable nature of Luther’s anti-Jew writings, even in total, they still represent less than one-thousandth of his lifetime’s literary output. One would think that if Luther were truly anti-Semitic, as many want to believe, then that hatred would have shown through elsewhere in his collected works. But it doesn’t.
It’s also important to note, when judging Luther on this account, that the writings people refer to when concluding that Luther was anti-Semitic all date to the last few declining years of his life; when his failing health and the political in-fighting of the new religious movement he had started all came to take their toll on him.
Unlike intellects, such as Kant or Nietzsche, who lived in their own heads and whose works are a product of their own thoughts, Luther was every bit a man of the world. His writing was almost entirely done in response to; in reaction to; or in anticipation of something going on his is worldly day-to-day life. So if Luther’s life as a whole can be taken as a valid indicator, then one is lead to conclude that his late in life anti-Semitic rants were the direct result of some specific worldly incident that he had gotten himself involved in.
What kind of incident(s) could have triggered Luther’s late in life need to denounce the Jews is one of history’s mysteries. In the pre-ABB days, I had often wished I could have tempted the historical sleuth and essayist, Fjordman, into tackling this mystery. But alas, those days have passed; Fjordman probably has far too many more important things to worry about these days.
@wildiris
Thank you for your appreciative post with respect to the lesser man and the greater one. If what I wrote about Luther conveys the wrong impression, this will correct it. First, I am a great admirer of Luther. I was born Catholic in an ethny that’s still over 90% practicing Catholic, yet I identify as Protestant. That alone should tell you something. I am not big on Calvin but like another Great of the Reformation, Uldrich Zwingli.
Second, I am a great admirer of Luther-the-brain. Tired of the sea of stupidity and triviality in which we are swimming, I cling to brains of the quality of Luther’s like to rocks sticking out from the roiling eddy.
Third, I have done reading about Luther and know the path he has traversed in his life and thought, including the change you mention in his thinking about Jews. His “before” attitude to Jews was as “progressive” and warm as any I know of in either the 15th or the 16th century. A man, even a great man like Luther, can very rarely transcend his times; it’s remarkable, therefore, that he had such a pronoucely positive attitude to Jews at all. It’s a mystery why he changed, some speculations notwithstanding. That the negative of it rather than the positive was revived in 19th century Germany, is not Luther’s fault. One could stitch an antisemitic pamphlet out of quotes from plays by Shakespeare and Marlowe too — yet no one has except (probably) some rabid people of the kind that contaminates some Internet forums.
Takuan, I never felt that you held a negative opinion of Luther, but I was afraid that others who visit this forum might read that into your words. It’s for this latter reason that I thought it would be good to revisit Luther in a little more depth.
Of the two men Melanchthon was by far the superior Hebrew scholar. But Luther was still among the select few European Christians at that time that could read and understand Hebrew. It was his knowledge of the Hebrew language and of Jewish customs that probably allowed him to be so much more positively pre-disposed towards the Jewish community than his fellow Germans.
Luther’s productive years roughly span the period 1510 to 1545. This correlates in time with the Reconquista of Spain and the expulsion of the Moors and Spanish Jews. Martin Luther’s early exposure to the Jewish community would have been with those Jews already living in Western Europe. But I have often wondered if Luther’s sudden switch in attitude towards the Jewish people might have had something to do with encounters with a new wave of Jewish immigrants coming out of Spain; immigrants that no doubt brought with them a culture and attitudes both foreign to and possibly hostile to Luther‘s German-Christian culture. Don’t know if this could be true, but it makes me wonder
wildiris: Fascinating theory. For what it is worth, my own personal views of the role of Jewish people as persecuted victims versus vicious aggressors changed when I began to learn of the seeming (?) Jewish penchant for inflicting political and/or cultural Marxism on the Christian world. Reading about the Russian Revolution does make one wonder about the ultimate intentions of Jewish people regarding conquering and ruling non-Jewish people.
That said, I wish Jewish people the best – and I simply wish that Jewish Marxists would STOP being Marxists.
Egghead
In the matter of Eastern European Jews’ contribution to the success of the Bolshevik plague, I have to take strong exception. Not with regard to the contribution — such occured, and is thoroughly condemnable. However, one cannot treat it as a spontaneous phenomenon that sprang from a “penchant” as you say or, as MacDonald says more explicitly, a Jewish genetic program to crush and lord over the White Christian host.
You have to start from the incredible 1800 – 1939 antisemitism of the Russians and Ukrainians, and in varying degrees other Slavic peoples. Not just as an attitude, but as a long chain of most cruel pogroms and draconian discriminatory measures, long after such expired in Western Europe. You cannot understand the Yin excesses, unless you first look at the excessive Yang. The blame for the former has to be attributed partly to the latter.
However, with respect to post-1960 Cultural Marxism, such explanations/excuses can no longer apply.
There is an interesting historical novel, “The Coffee Trader,” evolving around the Portuguese Jewish community in mid-17th century Amsterdam. It’s well researched and one does get the feeling of a very different culture amidst the Dutch.
Reading the tractate supposedly damning of Luther — “On the Jews and their lies” — while a potent brew of words, I don’t see it as antisemitic per se, but rather as a post-Christian condemnation of Jewish theology.
http://www.humanitas-international.org/showcase/chronography/documents/luther-jews.htm
While Luther does tend, in that document, to keep returning to railing at the Jews for stubbornly holding to this theology of theirs, he is not damning them for being Jews qua Jews, but for holding tenaciously and past reason to what he sees as a grievously mistaken theology (indeed, he did the same with Papists in other treatises).
On a related note: Was Luther mistaken in his claim that Jews were persisting in their theology, and in that theology and in their rituals counting themselves as superior to all non-Jews?
Sorry, by “post-Christian” I meant that the Jewish theology was post-Christ — not that Luther’s critique was “post-Christian”.
@Hesperado
You raised a point that I always like to address: this whole theological “condemnation” business. Luther had no business condemning Jewish theology. As I like to repeat, there is more of God in my cat than in the thickest book of theology [I do except the Gospels from this statements, but then they are not theology but ancient oral history written down].
We have to get away from this condemning business and claims of exclusive distributorship rights to the God brand. That is properly a Mussulmanist business, not ours. On the other hand, Islam is the only major creed that I would exempt from that tolerant ecumenist approach, because if there is one thing that’s clear from reading the founding documents and survey of the practice of that creed, it is that it has nothing to do with such immanent transcendent presence as the Jews, the Christians, the Taoists, the Jains, even the American Indians have intuited and described with varying degrees of specific cultural imprint, sophistication etc.
Nonetheless, Luther lived at a time when such an ecumenical approach was simply not in the conceptual vocabulary, for the Christian religious wars had not yet reached their zenith of horror. So he cannot be faulted for the theological condemnation.
Hesperado (and anyone else who is interested) —
Both Egghead and Takuan asked that their exchange be removed, and I complied with their wishes.
Furthermore, the argument about Jews on this thread is over. Probably on the other threads, too — I’m sick of it.
People had a nice chat on the topic, and pretty much said everything that can be said without repeating oneself. So we’re done.