Revanchism is a political movement based in the desire to reverse territorial losses after a war or cultural upheaval, like a revolution. The term originated in France in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. Nationalists wanted to avenge the French defeat and reclaim the lost territories of Alsace-Lorraine. It is often mingled with irredentism, the desire for lost territory based on legend. Israel’s territorial claims in the Levant are an example of both concepts.
In the West, revanchism is generally associated with the Right and especially with nationalist politics. The revanchists wish their nation to reclaim lost turf on perhaps fulfill its destiny by reclaiming its ancient territory. It can also mean a reassertion of the old culture and traditions, rolling back the current culture which is seen as foreign or illegitimate in some way. Revanchists want to go back to some point in the past where they think the break occurred in the culture.
An example is this American Conservative post by Sohrab Ahmari, Gladden Pappin, and Chad Pecknold. It is titled, “In Defense of Cultural Christianity”, an apologia for the traditional Christian order. It is not a defense but rather a call to reassert a pre-Reformation Catholicism and the political and social elements required to do it. Theirs is a “throne-and-altar” conception of conservatism that seeks to restore the Church as the partner of the secular state.
This wing of the Revanchist Right is responding to the modern Gnosticism of the Left, especially its view of the material world. Since the modern Left does not believe in an afterlife or God, their view of the material world as being hostile to the sacred essence of man leads to a war on the material world itself. Rather than transcending this life, like the Gnostics of old, the modern Progressive seeks to conquer nature and transform it into the tool of the fully self-aware man.
These Catholic revanchists are not the first to note the utopianism of modern liberal thought or its connection to Gnosticism. Conservative gadfly William F. Buckley popularized Eric Voegelin’s phrase “Don’t immanentize the eschaton!”, which became a conservative slogan in the 1960’s. Immanentize the eschaton means trying to bring about the final, heaven-like stage of history in this world. Hans Jonas, a century ago, noted the link between Gnosticism and modern thought.
This link between Gnosticism, Progressivism and the Catholic response to ancient Gnosticism is clear in the essay. “The thoroughly anti-gnostic Augustine, moreover, viewed Catholic cultural Christianity as an elongation of the Incarnation. It was its incarnational, anti-gnostic realism about our social and political nature that lent the Christian order of Europe its radiant vitality, its longevity and strength.” In other words, the proper response to the modern is the ancient.
The authors go on to point out that the secular state that subordinates all religion inevitably leads to a deracinated, gnostic form of Christianity. You can enjoy your faith in total private, but it can have no place in the culture or society. In the modern context, Christianity becomes just another hobby that can have no impact on this world or the people in it. You are left with a form of Rod Dreher-ism, in which you must retreat from the material world and wait for salvation in the next.
As an aside, it is interesting that this essay is posted on the American Conservative website, where Rod Dreher promotes his bespoke Gnosticism. He does not sell it as such, but that is what he is selling. His form of orthodoxy is just the special of the day at the cafeteria of Christianity. From the point of view of the revanchists, his call to retreat from this world is just another manifestation of the deracination and degradation of man by the liberal moral order.
Putting that aside, the revanchists are correct for the wrong reasons. They correctly see that the throne and altar are inevitably linked. They seem to think this is a Catholic innovation, but that is incorrect. The joining of the supernatural with human hierarchy is as old as human society. Every ruling elite needs authority, and that authority comes from legitimacy. There is no better way to solve this problem than to claim the ruler or ruling elite are the will of the gods or actual gods.
Once belief is understood as a natural part of man’s nature, like intelligence or the desire to reproduce, the question becomes, what should man believe? This has been the engine of human conflict and human progress since the beginning. The Catholic Church was a late comer to this battle for the soul of man. Modern liberalism may have roots in the ancient past, but it too is late to the party. It displaced that old order the revanchists seek to restore.
That is the central problem of revanchist thinking. It is not hard to make a compelling case in favor of the old throne-and-altar but there is a reason why it was abandoned in favor of the liberal order. Simply dismissing that reality as a wrong turn in the arc of history or a sign of moral decline avoids the issue. The Catholic Imperium has a defined beginning, the conversion of Roman emperor Constantine the Great in 312 CE, and a less well define end, possibly the Treaty of Westphalia.
To make the claim that this is a universal or timeless moral framework has to address why it did not exist for most of human history and why it was pushed aside. This is a problem shared by all cultural revanchism. In its reaction to the present, it blinds itself to the failings of the past. As a result, it becomes a form of escapism, where the past becomes fantasy literature. In this case, the Catholic integralist gets to imagine what it would be like to live in Medieval Europe.
The anti-Gnostics, however, should not be dismissed. Their observations about modern liberalism are useful, if incomplete. What we see with liberal democracy is an effort to solve its own internal conflict. It rejects the supernatural, but like all political orders, it needs an external source of legitimacy. It is trying to evolve one that only hints at the supernatural by leaving out large swaths of reality that can only be filled in with an undefined faith in the present order.
This is why the term “woke” is popular. These people are aware of their eternal identity, which is analogous to being aware of their divine essence. The great war between those “defending our democracy” and the so-called fascists is a rework of the old Gnostic dualism where the material world is evil, and the god is pure good. Critical theory then becomes the logos connecting the two. Modern Gnosticism is the quest for legitimacy and authority in a secular world.
In the end, revanchism can only be a starting point to model a new moral order that incorporates the old while recognizing its flaws. A new moral order will have to appeal to people as they are in this deracinated modern state. That means what comes next must be a continuation, rather than a rollback. That is both difficult and frightening, which is why revanchism will grow in popularity. Even so, the path is always forward. There is no going back to a prior age, no matter how much we desire it.
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I’m calculating how many times I need to re-read this latest post.
Verdammt Z! Now I need to start studying the downfall of Catholicism as well?!?
“Qualia”, that’s the word I was trying to remember! Thanks, Pozy.
I’ve been thinking about the nature and function of consciousness, both group and individual. Trying to achieve measurement, and *ahem* “tools”.
Pozymandias: “materialism doesn’t know what to do with “qualia” (i.e. feelings and experiences and thoughts)”
In the end, doesn’t it seem like the “right”, however we can define it, must also begin its’ own long march through the institutions. Of course, at present, the “right” can’t effectively define itself positively. This goes to fundamental questions of exactly what are the foundational differences between the liberal/left order and those who reject it. Since most of us have spent our lives living within the framework of a progressive society, it becomes difficult to accept any meaningful paradigm that can describe the foundations of why we reject the spirit of the times. While it’s easy to label the… Read more »
‘Woke’ is the 99 Cent store version of the biblical image of being born again, but without the regeneration, new life, and potential martyrdom. It is secular Soma for the Delta-Epsilons living in the stunning and brave new world of mommy’s basement.
Gladden Pappin and Chad Pecknold?
Weren’t they characters in a Dickens novel I read back in high school?
OT, I have listened to the witch podcast 3 times. I will listen to it more. Absolutely amazing.
Very clever, too! Z is becoming an artist
The crucial turning point was Kennedy. The day the jews killed him because he dared to fuck with their money monopoly was the day this country slowly turned to shit. Now, with immense power, they’re killing the rest of us, and our kids with the needle protocol of zion. 911 was an appetizer, get ready for the main course.
Off Topic: https://www.iceagefarmer.com/2021/11/09/farmers-land-confiscated-for-carbon-pipeline-through-corn-belt/
Assume this is real. Add in the world-wide fertilizer shortage, and rising energy prices, and you have genuine food shortages. I haven’t really seen any serious shortages yet, but supposedly this guy (and others) have warned the impact will be felt next year. Putting this out there for info only; YMMV.
3g4me-
I watched that earlier today.
That is pure death cult lunacy. There is no other explanation for it.
Genocidal psychopathology, this, basically turning the Breadbasket into the world’s largest waste dump. Truckers need to stop servicing the Acela Corridor, among other things.
OT: Xirl Science Alert!!! On Testing Steel https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/11/on-testing-steel.html Elaine Marie Thomas, 67, of Auburn, Washington, was the director of metallurgy at a foundry in Tacoma that supplied steel castings used by Navy contractors Electric Boat and Newport News Shipbuilding to make submarine hulls. From 1985 through 2017, Thomas falsified the results of strength and toughness tests for at least 240 productions of steel — about half the steel the foundry produced for the Navy, according to her plea agreement, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Tacoma. The tests were intended to show that the steel would not fail in… Read more »
After reading your comment, I searched the name, and what do you know, not a picture available.
I’m going with a vibrant diversity hire until I’m corrected.
Hey, science is hard!!
You’re not alone in your actions, and suspicions.
Still, given her age, she may have been a garden variety “you go girll!” hire back in 1985.
She might even be right; government contractors live padding the bill and double dipping.
OTOH, this is why we pay the wymens .80 cents on the dollar. (Kidding!)
She is absolutely right. LOL at the -100F testing requirement. What is this, a submarine made for deep space exploration? Someone post the Gigastacy meme!
Not necessarily. The Navy may have been using that extreme test temperature as a point of reference to compare the performance of various materials. The Navy may have been using that temperature to determine the margin of safety for that material in a specific application. Where she screwed up was dismissing the test as, “stupid,” seemingly out of hand. If she was really some amazing, you-go-girl, uber-professional engineer she would have questioned the test temperature, then have made convincing argument that the test temperature was excessive for that application. Dismissing the test as, “stupid,” out-of-hand is exactly the kind of… Read more »
Hi Howard, thanks for the response. I agree she shouldn’t have faked the test results. I do think she might be right that testing at -100F is stupid. From the article you linked, they are using this metal for submarine hulls. I can’t imagine a scenario where the hull temperature would be -100F. Also, w/r/t testing, the foundry material would be tested for comparison to the properties of a known sample. If the tested sample was bad, a deviation would likely show at any test temperature (e.g., room temp, sea temp etc). So specing to run the test at -100F… Read more »
It is in fact stupid, and pretty useless. Seawater – with dissolved solids – doesn’t go below about 28 degrees Fahrenheit. “During the Océano Profundo 2018: Exploring Deep-Sea Habitats off Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands expedition on NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer, we dove to a depth of 5,000 meters (16,405 feet) on Mona Seamount, where the average ocean water temperature was 2.2°C (36°F).” https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/facts/temp-vary.html So the lowest those tests need to go is, say, 25F, and anything less is ridiculous, at least at depth. For a surfaced submarine I suppose the situation might be different, but not much,… Read more »
As the social fabric collapses, the current ruling order is looking for new ways of reestablishing their legitimacy in order to preserve the status quo. They’ll need a new founding mythos to go along with this. Thus, wokeism, “White Supremacy,” and CRT for the Left; it’s all a means of galvanizing and binding together disparate minority groups (which might pose a threat to the ruling class) against us — White Caucasians — under the White Left’s leadership. This might also explain TAC’s Catholic revanchism as some people on the Right are probably also sensing a future opening in this vacuum… Read more »
I can’t figure out your point here. This article is definitely a miss. The current morality of the Marxist-liberal world order is almost completely the inverse of what is good, true, and just. It must be entirely uprooted and its architects [Fed Post] until people are afraid to believe in it. The morality of God is universal and eternal, beginning with the first Christians Adam and Eve, going through the generations of the Israelites, and culminating in the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. The church (the Orthodox Church mind you- the Catholic Church was created by the schism, not the other… Read more »
The Founders left that up to the States. Many had blasphemy laws that persisted for a very long time. Some had restrictions on who could settle in their communities. There’s a reason Ellis Island opened in 1892. And there’s a reason an immigration moratorium was instituted in 1924. You can read about the anarchist chaos, the gangs of New York, etc. A population unwilling and uninterested in assimilation.
But Z-Man, empirically Revanchism is mostly a success. France did regain Alsace-Lorraine. Zionism was successful. So was Irish Independence. So was Khomeni’s Islamic Revolution. So too is Xi’s Maoist Revanchism. And the Taliban. I would not dismiss it. Particularly when White men young and old have nothing invested in the current system. White heroes everywhere are replaced by go-Grrrl feminists and black people and gays and trannies. They mean nothing and are naturally repulsive to White men. White men are not the majority but they are the majority and vast majority of people of ability and potential. Yes we can’t… Read more »
I want to disagree with Whiskey and then he pulls a Thomas Wolfe quote. I am helpless.
See?
I told you guys Whiskey was fun!
Whiskey is the bomb. I have been reading (and mostly agreeing) with his comments on various blogs for years now!
Even better, a John Lydon quote.
Whiskey is our Otto Weininger, a serious man with a unique perspective and *no* respectable opinions.
Awesome and on point.
To add, “revanchism” generally was used as an epithet by the Soviets against Germans. It was effective rhetoric in Europe for quite a time.
“…the old Gnostic dualism where the material world is evil, and the god is pure good. Critical theory then becomes the logos connecting the two.” Can’t help being reminded of Z’s comment about EMJ being a Marxist. I’m not studied enough to know the boundaries between Marxism, postsructuralism, Critical Theory, etc., but there does seem to be a common thread in all of this modern leftism concerning language. Which is interesting given EMJ’s focus on the Logos, and his background as a literature guy. Another thing that jumps out is how left and right will grapple with the same ideas,… Read more »
The Magna Carta lasted about 30 days. King John appealed to the church and was given Devine approval to renege on his signature. I doubt the constitution would last much longer under the current pope.
do catholics really want vatican to rule over them, what’s the point? You exchange one set of pedophile elites for another set of pedophile elites. If your answer is “we’ll clean up the vatican first!” then why don’t you clean up your own governments instead, easier said than done, bunch of utopian nonsense. western world is beyond degenerate at this point, things won’t change by simply picking a different team. “Ooo, they praise Jesus that means they must be good!”, what simple-minded thinking. Priests have turned Jesus into a migrant-loving figure, who approves of sodomites. This plandemic has made it… Read more »
once the military is sufficiently weakened and ineffective , the CCP will come in and set things up however they see fit . think Tibet writ large. or Ukraine under the USSR. we are not going to have a say in it. and forget the ” nuclear deterrence” . if you think that general ” i will warn the CCP if we are planning an attack” miliey would ever let a launch proceed , you are kidding yourself.
PLA disguised as UN blue helmets will be invited to, “help,” with any insurrectionists.
Blue helmets make good targets.
The ultimate peace with China will probably be when we offer to sell the urban Goodwhites to them as slave labor in exchange for a peace agreement with them. Everybody wins! The Chinese get lots of new slaves which is something they can’t get enough of by locking their own people up in the Laogai for unpaid parking tickets. What’s left of Murrica gets cultural peace and lots of nice urban real estate that finally becomes habitable again. The Goodwhites get to learn that their mommy (all three of them) lied when xe told them they were special snowflakes and… Read more »
Won’t happen. The globohomo’s “peaceful” interest in China is wanting access to financially pillage China, now with the threatpoint of siccing their dying ‘Murican Empire on China if they resist. Hence the schizophrenic “China is the glorious future, China wants to kill us all” headlines that you see in official media these days. It’s the overflow from unseen negotiations.
However it plays out, Globohomo partnering with China is not going to happen. These people are too arrogant to tolerate the existence of peers.
Priests come from the society that raises them. Ymmv.
You are not wrong that we are tres screwed on many fronts. So what, do nothing?
titanic has already hit the iceberg, what else can you do at this point. if life/destiny gives you the opportunity to save some of your people then do it, but you can’t force the western world out of its feminized lethargic state, the only thing that can do that is desperation & struggle that comes out of hard times.
titanic has already hit the iceberg, what else can you do at this point Something I’ve thought about the titanic for a good long while is that the ship was chalk full of wooden furniture, strong young men, and tools. With a little organization they could have improvised enough rafts to keep everyone out of the freezing water until the Carpathia arrived – it was only a couple of hours and the sea was calm. Instead, the first hour was wasted with listlessness among the people that knew what was coming, ignorance among the large majority who did not. Followed… Read more »
There are religious RCs and ethnic RCs. Most of the RC political class (your Kennedys, Bidens, Pelosis, etc. are the latter.) And yet their co-ethnics keep returning them to office. Go figure.
I admire much of what Christianity gave the West although I don’t find Christianity inspiring. I concede that this may be my own failing. One of the most striking features of the early adoption of Christianity was that it greatly diminished the cruelty of the Romans. Of course, the Christians still burned heretics on occasion, but it seems like Christianity greatly reduced torture for entertainment. Each human life had an intrinsic value and dignity under Christianity. While I think this change was a good thing, I can hear Nietzsche criticizing me that this change necessarily inducted the worship of the… Read more »
you’re right that christianity has been responsible for uplifting the humanity of europeans. Peak of christianity was the end of slavery(for a very brief period), a lot of people were allowed to blossom cause of it, they’ve uplifted western society & made it what it was, this would not have been possible under paganism, which goes hand in hand with slavery.
But all this is going away and now we’re left both without a high-trust society & without a fighting spirit.
Agree with Sentry but I’ll add: we get tough or we don’t survive. Life is suffering. We can embrace it or the tomb.
At the risk of injecting my quasi-pagan-possibly-heretical Christian beliefs, that’s the significance of the empty tomb.
The cruelty of the Romans is vastly overstated. The pagan Romans of the 4th century were not as cruel as those of the 1st even without Christian influence. And the benevolence of early Christianity is overstated. The church engaged in a series of purges from the 4the century through the ninth that contributed to the fall of the western empire and the rise of the Islam. And slavery was seen as compatible with Christianity for at least a thousand years. It petered out in the west by about 1000ad but continued in the east past the fall of Constantinople.
Oswald Spengler went over all of this. Cultures have a lifespan. History isn’t linear, it’s cyclical. Just as there are no Roman legions now occupying Britain there will soon be no US Navy Seals deployed to the Middle East. While it may be interesting to reflect on the future, no ordinary person can do anything about it. Even the nutty decisions of the phony leaders have little or no effect on what happens next.
I agree, you should throw yourself off the nearest cliff.
personally, I have three twentysomthing kids and a couple of grandkids so opting out of the future is not possible for me .
I think there is a bottleneck coming . we have to navigate through as best we can .
I advise you younger guys to fingd a good woman or rehab a bad one and get the family going.
good woman? My stars, friend its good laws, and we don’t have them. If divorce and abortion and contraception are legal, there are no good women!
thats nonesense and bullshit. d, a good trad wife, my daughter in law is a good wife and mother, and a blessing to the whole family. so find a good orthodox church or trad catholic parish. the girls there are not all good but a lot of them are. most will have normal hair color, no face jewelry , no tats , no bobbed hair. get your shit together and get going .
Did nailheadtom hit a nerve?
The political is not the same realm as the personal.
As Goethe noted
Let everyone sweep in front of his own door, and the whole world will be clean,.
That we can do.
Now if you can get power somehow? Well that allows you to enter the political sphere and shape it to your will. That too is part of the cycle.
Agreed. As Cesar Vidal (Spanish writer) said: “The day after the Fall of the Roman Empire, people kept on marrying and having children” The fact that we are in the decadent phase of the civilizational cycle is obvious. The fact that the historical forces unleashed some centuries ago cannot be stopped is obvious. Every civilization has a cycle and dies. No culture is eternal. But this does not make life not worth living. Cultures come and go but family, friends, nature and faith are forever. You can live a very good life in this time. In fact, you can live… Read more »
This is plato too, the Republic is all about the individual and the state. Its hard to tell sometimes which he is talking about.
Tom, it may be civilizations have a natural lifespan that can’t be altered much. If that is true, our team, which is trying to preserve western civilization, is like the old people who are grasping at every medical fad to prolong their life.
For me, I must keep grasping to preserve our civilization, even if it is as futile as trying to keep a 100 year old man alive. Maybe Spengler overlooked something…
We here are followers of a generally-shared muse: to build an optimal European Society. Scientists and Engineers of Society looking through the parts box: contemplating what do have, what better stability point can we reach.
What we would consider Success is possible. But how do we do it? That is the muse. We may fail; we may succeed.
We follow the muse because we are people of the muse, through its joys and anguishes, just because it’s the muse that was given to us.
I think that I’ll go for a walk after lunch. There, I’ve changed my future.
Cultures may have lifespans, but to say that we can influence the future with our own actions is insane.
I think you meant “cannot influence”. We actually do the same things to both change our own futures AND that of the larger society, which is build whatever new things we can according to our values, not those of the decaying society around us. In Florida, near where I used to live, there’s a giant tree that’s over 2500 years old. It’s held up with the aid of cables. Eventually it will fall no matter how many wires they attach. The thing to do is to be spending most of our efforts planting new trees and even making some effort… Read more »
I have a great deal of hope that the way forward is the blossoming of Orthodox Christianity in the West. According to my beliefs, the Orthodox Church is the *actual* Church, and the Papal pretender inevitably must fail and collapse. It’s a shame so many traditionalists cling to the dying body of Papism, even as it sheds any shred of apparent legitimacy and becomes an outright and obvious competent of the NWO pigwhore beast system.
Which Orthodox Church?
Probably the American one, the one that doesn’t exist yet. What I mean is that I agree with the basic idea of the OP but the Russian and Greek variants are just too… Russian and Greek to transplant here. This is if we are going to stick with some sort of Christianity.
“the one that doesn’t exist yet”
We’re similar, yet different. I want a to awaken white nationalism in America that doesn’t exist yet and you want to awaken Orthodoxy.
We’ll see who succeeds. I wish you all the best of luck.
Aye. It might be best to leave the Abrahamic ideal back in the sand where it came from.
This means all of it. Islam, Orthodox, Catholic, Jewry you name it.
LARP something new , traditional folkish, tribal, muscular and merciless till its real.
I’m actually just a lapsed Catholic who became an apatheist. Today, I’d say I’m open to some vague mystical notion of consciousness as the fundamental reality. It works to solve the problem that materialism doesn’t know what to do with “qualia” (i.e. feelings and experiences and thoughts) That said I used to attend various churches until they all went Covidian and started having services with everyone standing in a little “Biden Circle” wearing a burka. It’s funny but in the next county over most of the churches just ignore all that Coofian shit. I was really just there to meet… Read more »
Penacostalism.
It’s here now.
Should have been:
“Pentacostalism”
as a trad papist , I can tell you we do not worry what the pretender has to say. It doesn’t affect us locally. A number of Catholics I know have went over to the greek or russian orthodox.
Just looking from it at the outside. Isn’t orthodoxy a deeply ethnic and nation state based religion.
I can’t imagine that the “deracinated” variety of Orthodoxy that you would find in America bears much resemblance to the main churches. I’d imagine it attracts completely different sorts of people, people I don’t want to be with. Like Rod Dreher or James Martin.
Dreher isn’t a good representative of the American Orthodoxy I know of. Try Jay Dyer or Fr. Peter Heers.
Old polls showed about half of Orthodox in the US support SSM. I’m not talking about rw orthodox twitter, which is a tiny segment of that church. There are liberals who show up to Orthodox church of America services irl. There are James Martin type liberals affiliated with the more assimilated ethnic churches. There has to be. Or else the American media would have attacked those churches as some renegade threat a long time ago.
“Isn’t orthodoxy a deeply ethnic and nation state based religion.”
There is no American Orthodox church and there cannot be one because none of the apostles visited the Americas. The Orthodox have never been able to account for the New World’s existence… thee full continents exist outside their perception of reality.
They abandoned the Americas to the Catholics and Protestants instead of revisiting their concept of apostolic succession (read: sanctioned priesthood). Catholics believe they’re the universal church and Protestants don’t care about praying to the correct saint, thus we avoided that theological hangup.
I always understood “Don’t immanentize the eschaton!” to refer to fellow conservatives who were Evangelicals that were seeing the Antichrist under every rock or even trying to bring about the Eschaton by supporting Israel and donating to a Third Temple and stuff like that. Of course, I wasn’t alive then so I can’t really say I know this.
“the conversion of Roman emperor Constantine the Great in 312 CE…”
Knock it off. It’s AD.
This is one of those progressive things I agree with. It’s a bit unfair to have something as crucial and basic as time being Christianized. BCE and CE are fine with me. Unless you’d be happy if the Indians had invented time and we’d be in kali-yuga 5122.
You don’t find it fake and gay, still, to use the (supposed) birth year of Christ as the pivot point for the “common era”, as in before point X and after point X, but to call it something different only because “reasons”. It is still, objectively, a date that is defined by literally the historically “agreed upon” birth year of Christ. Calling it something different doesn’t make it so. Changing it is the equivalent of removing statues of Robert E Lee. And erecting a statue of MLK or St George Floyd in its place. Trying to hide the historical reasons… Read more »
It’s more like renaming a statue of Robert E. Lee as one of MLK. Still the same thing it was before.
This post is what I call a ‘checkmate’
I don’t want to come across as mocking “Marko”, and I don’t want to be a contrarian to what he said without having some real, honest philosophical teeth behind my comment. Having said that, I’m very critical of all people, especially those who claim to be dissident right, who find it necessary to critique western conventions. Even atheists ought to take a step back and think about what I’m about to say: I doubt you could find 10% of Chinese, or Japanese, or Hindu, or even Muslim people (outside of the highly political) who object to time being marked by… Read more »
CE – can also be shorthand for “Christian Era”.
BCE – before Christian Era
It’s more straightforward than
AD – anno domini
I have to say that this in one innovation I like. Christian Era is much more bold and sweeping. It also implies were remain in the Christian era, which opens he door for useful rhetoric.
I thought “CE” meant “common era”,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Era
I mean, I have no problem with just saying “Christian Era”, but I don’t think that’s what THEY mean when they use CE.
I insist on Christian Era for obvious reasons.
Indeed. Not many recognized the Latin AD. Might as well have it in English, the modern universal language
English (with proper grammar and spelling) is more like High Church Latin. The modern universal language is Engrish – a curious pidgin with random spelling and only a 2000 word vocabulary but over 17,000 different consonants and vowels. The most helpful reference for learning it is to just listen to American hip hop all day or call tech support at any large corporation. Be careful where you speak actual English – “Unaware of what year it was, Joe wandered the streets desperate for help. But the English language had deteriorated into a hybrid of hillbilly, valleygirl, inner-city slang and various… Read more »
Just drink more Brawndo, and you’ll get it. It’s got electrolytes!
I always ask if CE means Christian Era and BCE means Before Christian Era……..
AD is best….good gravy!
Odd. The leftists insist on a separation of church and state for obvious reasons: faith and morals have no place in worldly affairs and would be bad for business. Honest men will not put up with grifters, and will deal with them if they get stupid about it. In the bible, we are told to keep affairs of man and state separate too. I believe that is what the stuff about “rendering unto Caesar” is about. We don’t have to return to the old ways and the old days of the alcoholic mad men, the driven materialism and consumerism of… Read more »
what’s stopping you?
“Separation of church and state” goes back, at least, to the founding of the Haitian Alexander Hamilton’s bankster empire. I think what you will find is that when the religion suits the wandering merchants they seek to impose it through the state/government. When it does not suit them, then they seek separation. Age old: The king Josiah centralized religion into the kingdom he controlled; destroyed it else-wise.
Today’s woke-ism is useful them so they use the government to impose that religion. The European-Centric is not, so they tear it down.
Not true. The state is meant to lead its citizens to their natural end: heaven. How is this done? Through the RCC (not to be confused with the false Catholicism in parishes now).
The state is obliged to make the RCC the state church, and her laws
“. . . American Conservative post by Sohrab Ahmari, Gladden Pappin, and Chad Pecknold.”
Ahmari, Gladden Pappin, and Chad Pecknold.
Are these real people?
I have to confess that I assumed the latter two were fake, but I googled them and they are real or as real as anything on-line.
If I ever become an Essayist on the Information Superhighway my nom de. plume shall be Dirk Drake. Who calls himself “Chad”?
Dirk Drake? Why did you reject Francis Diggler?
Hmm, Pappin does sound like a hobbit name…
Look, no matter how much booze and how many pills that old hag in the House ingests every night, she knows that throwing hundreds of thousands of Anglo Saxons into the streets may result in her head on a pike at some point.
Perhaps cracking a history book before they are all re-written would provide some insight to her, the Dancing Israeli Chuckielesbiandad and their ilk. They seem to be trying pretty hard to convince viewers they are having “fun”.
Every society is some form of theocracy. It’s a just a question of what belief system is used to underpin authority. Naturally, the advantage of a theocracy based on a formal religion is that there’s a rule book, which, theoretically, should limit how far the rulers can go. (It doesn’t always work, but the rule book does generally keep the rulers in line.) What we have now is the worst of both worlds. We have a theocracy, but the rulers get to re-write the religion’s rules every day so there’s no godly limit on what they can do and the… Read more »
I think this is the essence of why things can’t continue this way. Even Leftists are confused. “just tell me what I’m supposed to say!!” They can’t Mr. 2010-Loyal-Commie. They don’t know themselves what new taboos the Blue Haired fiends will shriek out tomorrow.
There is clearly a continuity between monarchy and today. Napoleon followed the King and when the Kings finally vanished Dictators rose in their place. America forced the dictators from power only for every subsequent democracy to centralize power within an increasingly powerful executive. Today China more resembles fascism than communism. We could go as far as to say political Party replaced the aristocracy. Much like Napolean’s legion of honor. The way forward is through but only a hegelian synthesis of our traditions and present reality is that possible. Thus, the Throne and Altar has a part to play in the… Read more »
Zman, that American Conservative piece suffers from the same defect as all their other pieces – it ignores racial differences. The Iranian Catholic convert, Sohrab Ahmari, of course prefers to focus on merely cultural Christianity – because he has written before about his alienation from and hostility to much of the White west. His religious conversion has not changed his innate character and the culture and history from which he emerged. In this he merely parrots the song of E. Michael Jones – that we can all live together peacefully, the White and the Iranian and the Nigerian, if we… Read more »
My loyalties are clear, and they lie with White people. There are a number of varieties of “White” people. Generally these are segments of the north European post-Neandertal population. These people include warring groups like the English vs. Irish, Swedes vs. Russians, Prussians vs. everyone, Serbs vs. Croats and so on. Given the task of choosing between the Swedes and the Poles, which of those “white” people receive your loyalty and why? I don’t follow lockstep in their particular version of Christianity How many versions of Christianity are available to be followed? If there is indeed a single, all-powerful God… Read more »
nailheadtom: Most here, myself included, deride the excesses of modern American society. You alone, however, seem to choose to tie these excesses to White genetics and criticize everything and everyone. I’m so very happy for you that you are perfect and omniscient; I feel no need to justify my beliefs or choices based upon your self-proclaimed inerrancy.
Gee, no commenters on this site are critical, are they? White genetics doesn’t have much to do with anything. American culture might be a little more significant. The numero uno objective of the majority of Americans is finding a parking space as close as possible to whatever building they intend upon entering. That’s why the employee of the month gets a treasured spot next to the boss’ BMW. There’s premium space reserved for cripples, even though they need exercise perhaps more than others. In fact, Target is considering reserving close spaces for menstruating women, indicated by a sanitary napkin on… Read more »
Excellent 3G. Much has been stolen from the story of our people as well as the very nature of the Word. Our duty to our people went the same way as the sword of the Christian soldier. Coincidence that it is largely the work of a relatively small group of strangers that have severed the entwined roots of our People and the Word. But the strangers merely do what they do. Those who would furnish their enemies are justly liable to suffer. Nonetheless the duty to our People and our Lord have been set loose, pulling apart both the Word… Read more »
Just seems odd that a religion could be both true and not universal. Either there is a God or there isn’t; that God is either universal/all powerful,etc., or He isn’t. And the binaries continue. I suppose you could fashion a neo-pagan larp, but the best of ancients knew it as a larp (albeit a socially/politically expedient one).
I’m not so sure about this theme of Z’s. Broadly speaking, of course, there is every reason to think the people who just want to roll us back to a time when things weren’t so awful are missing something important. But the idea that the way is forward misses the fact that there is no forward. All the new stuff has already been done. A tyranny is still what happens when the ruling class begins to advance their narrow interests, which is what happened to us. Legitimacy is still not conferred by God’s will, but is something earned by ruling… Read more »
Ruling to advance the interests of the people *and* earning that right through superior skill and performance. The corruption of the old aristocracy and their claim to their “right” to rule via chance of birth eventually brought the whole system down as will the current corruption of our new “aristocracy”—whose climb to the top is anything *but* based upon meritocracy. Indeed, one can’t view the current “war” on Covid except through the lens of Dutton who lays out the case for a general decline in the intelligence of the population, which of course includes those who would rule us. See,… Read more »
This is why I like the old divisions so much: those who pray, those who work, and those who fight. I would like to have virtuous leaders. Finding virtuous leaders is a problem, but I can select for leaders who have at least one cardinal virtue: courage. All I have to do is make sure they fight.
I don’t know who is wise or just or temperate. But that guy over there with all the scars? Well, I know he’s courageous. And that ain’t too bad.
Yep, that gets us back in a round about way to the dilemma of the Industrial Revolution and the circumvention of evolutionary fitness. It seems that the worst of us in the virtues you describe rise to the top. Whereas before the IR, this was not so much of a problem. Why?
Not sure. Have to admit that, at least with the mandate, Biden has shown some courage (could be stupidity or both) in giving the courts a big middle finger on their injunction. Point is, courage alone can be detrimental.
It doesn’t take courage when you know they can’t fight back. You’re confusing courage with bullying.
Can’t they though? Can’t the SCOTUS declare it whatever? Force Biden to pull a Jackson and risk who knows what? Couldn’t alleged red state governors use it for cover? Sure, call it bullying if you want, but the fact is he’s playing a game of chicken and winning. The entire Left is. We don’t like to hear it, but thems the facts.
does it scale? bet it doesn’t.
That was the important take-away for me though: people know that the current Christian order is running on fumes as they want to try and return to a time when it wasn’t so. The rot of GloboPedo has infected everything and it’s a help to our side that another societal segment is coming around to the fact that all is not right in ‘church town’. Their fix, which is the same fix as the MAGA crowd: turning back the clock, obviously doesn’t work (as even if successful, the clock will just resume it’s normal direction) but also like the MAGA… Read more »
If everyone were a believing Catholic and followed the Magisterium of the Church, we would not need the Z Blog. Unfortunately, man is fallen, most aren’t Catholic, and truly good Catholics are few and far between.
The teachings of the Institution of Catholicism (the Magisterium, Thomas Aquinas, and Pius X, eg.) are correct and would create the world we are.looking for if obeyed and followed. The people who run the Church today are soy boys toadies who have screwed everything up. Criticize the people in charge, not the Institution.
Kyle Rittenhouse odds are improved, up to 50/50.
If he walks it will be because the sleazy Armenian Cartel that runs Kenosha is more despised than feared.
If he is convicted it’s because the Sleazy Armenian Cartel + 👁 of Sauron Dox is more feared than hated.
There are no laws, just power.
two words-jury nullification, worked for the Bundy’s
No. It is a good concept, but they will simply retry—and worse, their next attempt will be perfected by what they learn in their first failed attempt at framing Rittenhouse. For example, the prosecution witness who screwed the pooch ain’t coming back.
If he doesn’t skate free this time, it’s uphill from there. Better a conviction on a minor charge and an appeal possibility, than a retrial. Of course, best outcome is not guilty on all counts—which really is justice. But we don’t talk justice these days, do we? Only power and of those who would wield it upon us.
No need for jury nullification in this case. Rittenhouse is truly not guilty. This case should not have been brought to trial. nullification is necessary when the law itself is wrong. The jury being the last line against tyranny.
Rdz: “The jury being the last line against tyranny.”
Snort. Snigger.
Having “served” on a number of juries, I must agree with you, 3g4me. Once in a while my jury duty surprised me, but most often the “people” who wind up on juries toe the line and would bring in the conviction sought without much question or critical thought. The aspect of your peers serving and empathizing with you, the defendant, is really a myth more often seen reinforced by movies like “12 Angry Men”. Hell, I’ve seen jurors speak in deliberations with more passion than the prosecutor had in the closing arguments! Point learned, “It’s a crap shoot” at best.… Read more »
The prosecution blowing the case is probably just an op intended to hand the Feeb and Open Society Foundation the perfect excuse to rev up their insurrection machine again.
“There are no laws, just power.”
Hey, that would make a great motto for the current demofascist party. Pair that up with a logo of a hammer beating a White man senseless while a sickle slices his throat and they have advertising perfection.
I love the deep dives into intellectual history. If “revanchisme” is as old as man, then Leftism dates to at least Protagoras, back in the 5th century BC: “Man is the measure of all things.” Plato said Protagoras was the first professional Sophist, and hey, if the shoe fits…. Obviously I don’t have the answer to what comes next, but a rhetorical strategy I’ve found useful is the assertion that I — the maniac Rightist in your life, the man who thinks Augusto Pinochet should be canonized, the dude who thinks de Maistre and Jean Bodin were bleeding heart liberals… Read more »
I don’t like monkeys and for that matter chimps too. Apes are chad.
It sounds daft, but in the main humans instinctively feel uneasy around other primates. If you’ve ever had the chance to stroll through a park, mostly in Asia, where monkeys live ferally, like squirrels, you immediately sense the antagonistic relationship. They try to steal from you, you attempt to avoid them. Some humans, regular visitors to the primates’ domain, will befriend them through gifts, to the extent that “friendship” can be constructed, but those are always the exception to the rule.
It’s no different than an American inner city.
I’ve been around a lot of wild monkeys. (That’s not a metaphor; I’ve traveled a lot in South Asia). They scare the shit out of me. Once in Delhi I saw a troop of macaques take on a pack of street dogs (again, not a metaphor). Big, mean, nasty street dogs… who didn’t last 30 seconds against the monkeys. Our closest relatives are vicious, nasty bastards.
And the monkeys are not much better.
Chimpanzees are vile. I wonder if our reaction to them and the Kneegrows has something to do with the Neandertal/Denisovan in all of us.
Elephants are cool as hell.
any true emergency will cause humans to revert to type, it’s always the males who band together to rescue someone or defend the females and young, and the females nurture the young, hunt for berries and roots, tan the hides and fashion them into clothing etc, while the males bring down large meat-bearing animals. It was ever thus and will always be.
Actually, I was thinking it would be better for society if it was a little more as it once was (hence the “thus” as you put it) than it is today. As the division between the sexes lessons, we seem to have developed all sorts of societal pathologies. And yes, I claim a cause and effect .
how can we evolve past it when we have so much shared DNA with chimps.
We have a lot of genes, most do nothing we can detect, only a few are needed for great differences. One can also search the literature and find animals with a high percentage of similar genes—but we ain’t like them. But you’re correct in the main, evolution is a slow process—especially when the modern era has basically put a stop on it. 🙁
That whole “we share 99% of our DNA with chimps” thing has never passed the smell test with me (nor has the corollary, which used to be cited all the time by the science-loving Left, that we share 90% (or whatever) of our DNA with frogs (or whatever)… but let’s roll with it, because it fits the rhetorical strategy perfectly. Ok, so: Which 1%? If it’s that small of a variation, you can no doubt point at specific groupings. Ahhhh, so that’s the “learn how to use fire” group! And that one over there is the Sistine Chapel, and that… Read more »
karl: We also share DNA with tulips. Just as all art is created from the same color palette – but a Rembrandt is not a Rothko, thank God. Same basic building blocks but number and order and other minute differences create different creatures and species. I believe in intelligent design, and God created reason and free will to pair with DNA and genetic predispositions.
The other metaphor I’ve seen is someone postulating that they have two 50 gallon vats of ice cream, but one of the vats is 1% poop. Which will the race-denier want to eat from? After all, they’re practically the same!
not sure why my statement has caused so much hanky fluttering. homo sapiens have a measurable amount of shared DNA with chimps; this is an objective fact. i checked the federal genome site and they say 96%.
obviously chimps have very different physiognomy than humans; e.g. their digestive systems are completely different. but just as obviously we share a lot of innate behaviors, including murder, incest, and cannibalism.
out of curiosity, do the objectors not believe homo sapiens are a form of primate?
I’m not objecting, I’m piggybacking on your assertion to advance a rhetorical strategy. Whatever the percentage difference, it’s small… small enough that – for rhetorical purposes – we can use it to put the hurt on the “race is just a social construction” people.
I realize I started with a “yeah, but” kind of statement, which undercut the rest of the comment, for which I apologize. Now, let’s put our differences aside and go tear these bug eyed aliens a third corn chute.
karl: I don’t object to defining homo sapiens as a form of primate. I do object to categorizing homo sapiens as purely animal, just as I object to those who find man’s animal and physical side ‘icky’ and prefer to focus solely on the spiritual. We may be primates, but we are more. God gave us more – we’re less than the angels but we have consciousness and souls (I personally limit this to those correctly classified as homo sapiens sapiens, not all humanoid primates currently living). Just as Jesus was/is fully God and fully Man. We have a dual… Read more »
The Catholic Integralists are quite correct in that every society has a state religion, whether it wants to admit it or not, and that some form of Christianity would be preferable to the Homo-Floydism that is our current state church, but they seem to have no valid suggestions about how to get from here to there, and their suggestion that the only mistake the Catholic Church made was not burning Luther in time would have struck even Leo X as utterly simplistic (see the Counter-Reformation for details). BAP isn’t seeing nothing when he accuses Integralism as being a Fed diversion… Read more »
Eh, I feel like most, “Christian,” institutions in the West need a serious hard reboot.
I mean, look how hard orgs like Catholic Charities sold out to Mammon’s fedbux in exchange for importing immivaders hand over fist, thus destroying the civilization they purport to defend.
Orgs like that probably aren’t salvageable.
Fair enough. But who has valid suggestions for how to get anywhere from here? The whole, get local, form local bonds, etc. is not a valid suggestion for getting anywhere at all. It’s merely a thing everyone should be doing to prepare for tough times.
But the answer to how you get to a state religion is the same as it is for everything else: by doing it.
Perhaps we just survive “the great reset” and then rebuild with the remaining (hopefully) majority of “normal” people.
THIS!!!!! +1000 this is really where we are .
Once upon a time, our species developed complex language and used to it program our offspring with ancient, hard-earned wisdom that “worked” to make them more robust in the environment of their birth. Religion proved to be an effective means of propagating this wisdom via consistency, repetition, and social reinforcement. And this worked very well as long as social change was relatively slow and the ancient wisdom held up over time. Then the modern era of civilization happened and technological/social change started occurring at light speed. A mere 6 decades separates the invention of the flying machine and the moon… Read more »
> We are now selecting for superior hand-eye coordination traits.
Do gamers have higher reproduction rates? A good question to ask is reproduction rates based on use of technology. There’s a good chance the extremely online and gamers are statistically on an evolutionary dead-end.
TomA: “We are now selecting for superior had-eye coordination traits.”
You might reconsider this. Depends on who’s doing the selecting and for what. That’s certainly not a criterion for joining the bestest armed forces in the world today, as evinced by those currently crashing ships and becoming ‘elite’ snipers.
Hand-eye coordination is at least a positive trait. Having the attention span and long term memory of a goldfish is *not*—and that is not even genetically programmed, but rather induced through current technology and societal incentive.
–“Revanchists want to go back to some point in the past where they think the break occurred in the culture.”– There is no ‘going back’ but I can throw 3 darts at our absolutely f-cked timeline and give you 3 dates that would -clearly- show where the ‘break occurred’ in the culture. So I guess I’m a pseudo-Revanchist at least. Let’s do a little thought experiment. Imagine you wake up tomorrow and step outside your front door into the world. 3 events from our clown world timeline never occurred: 1) The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 never happened. 2) The… Read more »
As I said above, we can’t recapture the past, but we can learn lessons from the past in moving forward. For me, the one big lesson from the past is that ethno-nationalism is your best chance of creating and maintaining a society. Basing a country on a people means that the culture and institutions will match that people. The elite will at least share a common heritage with the people, which, hopefully, will limit their veracity. Religions change. Technology changes. Types of government change. But the people remain. The people will be a gravitational force that always pulls the culture… Read more »
Israel writ large.
That seems odd. What does “the people remain” mean? Are you saying they don’t change, but the things completely dependent upon them do? How does that make sense? Is your average 20 something today the same as one from even 50 years ago, let alone 100?
Have to disagree. People do change. That is why it is extremely difficult (but not impossible) to change them back.
Are you dense?
A people is an ethnicity, so as long as they don’t mix with other ethnicities, that 20-year today is the same “people” as the same one from 100 years ago or even a thousand years ago.
An Anglo-Saxon working the farm in southern England in 1900 was part of the same people as his ancestors in 900.
And your right. If your people change via mixing with other peoples, especially those distant genetically (unlike, say, the Angles and the Saxons), it is extremely difficult, indeed impossible, to change them back.
I’d like to wake up and find out term limits for congressthings were enacted 50 years ago.
Might not make me very popular, but a larger discussion should probably be had on #1. I won’t bog Z’s site down with it at this point and will only note that, unlike the other items, it wasn’t as if the Federal Reserve was created to address a problem that didn’t exist.
But whose problem was it?
I see the way forward as decentralization. Christianity works best in a decentralized form without the imperium of Rome or the Church of England models. One can read how Christianity was to be organized just by opening the New Testament. That organization included local elders and deacon whom were male and with a solid reputation. There is no mention in the new testament of Popes and high church authorities as we have seen down through mans history. Point is New Testament Christianity has not failed. It’s just not widely practiced. The current state of affairs with man looking for meaning… Read more »
The office of Pontifex, or Pope, was a Roman office. Julius Caesar held it for awhile. So the RCs just grafted the new religion on the old structure.
Of course they did. They also used its language. Probably stole some of their plumbing ideas as well.
Don’t nock Keeping sewage and drinking water separate. An idea that might work for people too.
It also included apostolic succession as well as transfer of keys to Peter. Or does your abridged version not contain Acts or Gsp. Matthew? Seems a reasonable person either takes or rejects the NT in toto. Cherry pickers are suspect.
you can have a modern society, or a religious society, but not both. pick one and go with it is better than trying to pretend you can do both and succeed.
at this point in time, if you genuinely believe the supernatural aspects of anything, be it a religion or be it healing crystals, you are cognitively crippled. thanks for playing, but you and yours are headed back to subsistence agriculture as a lifestyle.
and you smug leftists are too, so no crowing about being on the right side of history.
Karl is sure I’m cognitively crippled. Thanks, Karl! Can I suggest you go and kill yourself?
how christian of you!
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*****yawn*****
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The old trope of the CC being anti-science is an old and false one. I’m not convinced that science and belief are unreconcilable, rather they complete/complement each other. Don’t let extreme off-shoots from either side color your observations.
Heh. The same terms for the same phenomena in every language, every culture, and every people known. Even the pre-literate primitives speak those terms. Almost as if we’re trying to talk about something we can sense, but don’t have the engine manual for. Nope, nope, I can prove that I’m the first smart generation ever born. They made it all up! Yup, everybody made the exact same mistakes, everywhere, and they made them for 20,000 years. That explains, well, everthang!! My gods. I am SO smart. *admires mirror approvingly* ***** Ice Age Europe, 20,000 BC: Seal hunter, pointing to the… Read more »
(Southern populations were not sensitized to the emanations of the aurora. Thus, it was our mutation that conceived of, and is made to open, the gate of Heaven. All others see only the endless recycling of souls within the greenhose walls. We are the combination capable of breaking through the chrysalis, the eggshell- to the Seeding layer, fulfilling the highest imperative of Creation, the reason the thin skein of a biosphere forms…to form, itself, the radiant Seed to fertilize the unformed eggs of young worlds. Our physical form cannot cross the immense void. Energy can, and does. You shall, as… Read more »
“Their observations about modern liberalism are useful, if incomplete. What we see with liberal democracy is an effort to solve its own internal conflict. It rejects the supernatural, but like all political orders, it needs an external source of legitimacy. It is trying to evolve one that only hints at the supernatural by leaving out large swaths of reality that can only be filled in with an undefined faith in the present order.” Camus makes this point so well in “The Rebel”. The Commies waiting around for “world socialism” to become “communism” are just like Christians and Jews waiting for… Read more »
Just so. Same story, same mechanism, same origin for both: “From the ashes of the Catastrophe, a returned Garden will arise.” Genesis is a story trying to explain the end of their world, and what followed- the beginning of ours. The Fertile Crescent had been obliterated, our megalithic might smashed by angels with swords of fire, meteoric death from above. The nomadic peasants who had been living in our shadow and breeding with us were reduced to cannibalism, so bad it was. Then, driven by the same catastrophe from our home in the Caucusus and Pontic, we went west, east,… Read more »
Beautifully put. Thanks.
“There is no going back to a prior age, no matter how much we desire it.” Yes, but can we at least go (or bring) back a prior way of thinking? Most people deep down know the traditional and moral truths that have been perverted by our current atheistic, secular liberal democracy. Right vs. wrong, good vs. evil, male & female, responsibility for one’s own actions etc.,etc. Personally, I’ve never been particularly religious, but I never looked down on those who were. In modern society, I think it has helped a lot of people keep their lives centered, and I… Read more »
This idea that there is no going back… What, exactly do you suppose the Founders were doing, if not going back to republican Rome?
Good point, rebooted though: they didn’t just reprint the ancient constitution and call it day.
If your conception of movement is linear, there’s no going back. If your conception is cyclical, going back is inevitable. The moon waxes and wanes, the tides goes then out, dictators rise then fall to the demos who fall to the oligarchs who fall to the dictators. Vice yields to virtue which yields again to vice, and so on eternal and unyielding.
Random thoughts: I think one issue is that we are living from the savings from a more decent era and we need to run out of cash before we can start the new era. This is what the accelerationinsts want. Reusing Asimov’s Foundation one can say that it would be necessary to establish a place where wisdom can be stored to rebuild society after it fails. I was born in the 70s in a “modern family” with all the nonsense drama, divorced parents, etc. and I was easy prey for a trad-ish catholic cult in my 20s. Had to escape… Read more »
cargo cultism takes many forms. and it is not restricted to uneducated savages…
> As a result, it becomes a form of escapism, where the past becomes fantasy literature. In this case, the Catholic integralist gets to imagine what it would be like to live in Medieval Europe. Technology and mass scaling has dramatically changed the parameters of the game, and nothing but a modern Butlerian Jihad is going to bring back older traditional political structures. There are people like the Traditionalist Western Art twitter guy who aspires to extremely simple cities that use technology in a simple, non-complex manner that is easy for your average technician to navigate. There are other who… Read more »
the organizing principle for small scale societies is minimizing energy requirements. a large part of north america is a very tough hang in winter, without lots of cheap energy. smelting takes a ton of energy, even on a small scale. there is a reason most of greece is denuded of trees, and has been the last 2000 years. lots of third world societies cook over a fire fueled by animal manure.
don’t worry about the other alternative — smart cities — wouldn’t work but will never be tried because the existing cities are all busy dying.
It’s pretty incredible to see the lunatics in DC can’t grok the fact their smart cities are unrealizeable without a stable power grid fed by coal, gas, and nuclear power plants.
Bidr cuisinarts and solar fryers ain’t gonna cut it, and they’re going to find out the hard way.
They don’t care.
They are a death cult who want the world to burn with them.
If it dies with maximum misery all the better.
trumpton-
Sadly, I fear you are absolutely right.
God help us.
karl: Excellent points that those on the left and right like to ignore. Farming is damned hard work, and generating power has vast industrial applications both large and small that effect all aspects of life. Famed ‘solar power’ is a constant struggle to live with what most consider basic utilities, like hot water and electric lights. Every ‘homestead’ or ‘prepper’ youtube channel I’ve viewed maintains a back up generator run on either propane or gasoline. It gets damned cold in northern New England and Idaho. It gets damned hot in the south (I fear a lack of air conditioning in… Read more »
Just as an aside, don’t imagine that our modern cities resemble anything like our prior smaller cities wrt to living conditions and how a prior population made due with their technology of the time. For example, at my last university, there were living and teaching structures still in use designed for large groups of individuals and *no* a/c! To say that we could not live without a/c in the cities, is not the quite accurate. Rather we should say, we can’t live without a/c in the cities we design for today because we make certain assumptions, like a/c.
Should we conclude the use of “CE” rather than the more descriptive “AD” to be a “just another manifestation of the deracination and degradation of man by the liberal moral order”? Gnosticism, indeed. The removal of religion from the state also removes the moral obligation of the actors in the state. Or haven’t we noticed the body count from anti-religious governments? Perhaps that’s just a coincidence but I doubt it. Christians aren’t perfect but at least they put forth the effort to be good. Do fascists? How about communists? Hell, even your average plain old socialist cares nothing about morality… Read more »
From the perspective of their moral framework, communists and fascists are on the side of angels.
No they’re not and never pretended to be. They are liars and thieves and rightly admit it. Besides, they don’t believe in angles.
you need to read a little history. start with 1920’s italy: “The popes had seen the Italian government as enemies, basically. They had rejected the notion of the separation of church and state, they had lost their privileged position in society, and they had always called that system illegitimate. Pius XI at least began to see the possibility that Mussolini might be the person sent by God — the man of providence — as he would later refer to him … who would reverse all of that, who would end the separation of church and state, restore many of the… Read more »
Perhaps citing your quote would be helpful? Who’s version/interpretation are you quoting and why is it more authoritative than another?
“The Church, therefore, never being powerful enough herself to take possession of the entire country, while, at the same time, preventing any one else from doing so, has made it impossible to bring Italy under one head; and has been the cause of her always living subject to many princes and rulers, by who she has been brought to such division and weakness as to have become a prey, not to Barbarian kings only, but to any who have thought fit to attack her.”
Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy
christians are not inherently moral and good. nor are they an unalloyed good for a society. they are grillers to their core…
nobody said they are inherently moral or good. they are fallen men like us all and have to work to develop virtues, as you would do to develop good habits. This is what the Catholic Church teaches, though I understand that many Protestants believe that you are “saved”, good with God, once you accept Jesus. This, of course, is hogwash to the Catholic.
No they (Christians) are not! See how one gratuitous assertion is easily—and logically—refuted by another? Try to form better argument, or simply refrain from ad hominem.
You don’t like Christianity, we get it.
I am a Christian and I am not a griller. Christians like every other group have their good and bad people, I was watching some of Tucker Carlson’s one on one interviews which is worth the 6 bucks a month for Fox Nation by the way, but anyway a scientist was being interviewed on one of his shows and that scientist was both very brave and a Christian.
He was caught up in the wokeism and banned from speaking at major colleges.
One problem for me with this thinking is that it is an attempt to restore some things about the past while not being able to bring forth other portions of the past that made those initial things possible. The churches are hopelessly corrupt. They are corrupted by the spirit of the age. The big denominations are all anti-racist and pro homo to the core. The people are corrupt and so their institutions are corrupt. Is there anyone here who would really want the existing Pope and his shitty ideas to the be the cornerstone not only of religion, but of… Read more »
No. A pozzed Church is a symptom of the crisis. It’s been taken over by unserious men because it is not a serious institution. It was different, before, and it could be different again.
Not without radical reform. The pre-Reformation Church could rely on the ruling class to produce it scholars, theologians and men willing to wield the sword in defense of the faith. The “heir and a spare” still left a plenty of extra sons of the secular elite to populate the Church hierarchy. It is is why celibate priests made sense. The princes of the church would not threaten the throne or claim Familial ownership of their altar. That relationship began to collapse in the Enlightenment. That’s how the Church fell prey to degeneracy. The sons of the elite have better options… Read more »
Indeed. Church leaders broke one of the key Cardinal Rules of Integralism: instituting change is an act of violence.
A perspective I have not heard before. An article on this please.
I understand the impulse but have no interest in going back to rule by a corrupt organized religion that maintained control by torturing people to death.
Distilled all of organized religion down to that pithy observation did ya?
All change is not progress and all progress is not forward. I like that one.
Ironic statement given that you are –currently– being ruled by ” a corrupt organized religion that maintained control by torturing people to death.” Well, to be fair, we are not *quite* at the tortured to death phase but that is only because they are still testing the waters of normie tolerance which seem to be limitless. We already have political prisoners, complete corruption of the ‘justice system’, anarcho-tyranny, sham elections, etc. If you think you don’t live under a radical theocracy sort of like the Iranian regime you haven’t been paying attention. We have the faith/religion (Woke), we have the… Read more »
Don’t forget we also have the Covid and Green sects of the ruling theocracy with all their attendant deities, dogma, rituals, saints, and holy relics.
I find it interesting when someone wants to disparage 2100 years of Christianity they almost always concentrate their rage at the Inquisition which lasted about 200 years resulting in only about 32,000 deaths. I guess it’s akin to judging the success or failure of communism by the 200 million or so deaths it inspired in the last century. Although the last century is the entire history of communism so one would need to conclude it’s not a political/economic/religious movement but a climate change movement bent on the elimination of humanity. Without morality the state is no more than a killing… Read more »
The Inquisition only went after people who were heretical Catholics, not true blue Muslims or Jews. Since when do dissidents believe authorities have no right to police their own. The Inquisiition went after heretical Catholics. Period. If you really know your history you know that it took place in Spain and just (((who))) these heretical folks claiming to be Carholic actually were.
The inquisition was run by the Spanish government to out traitors, hence the focus on fake conversions. Due process, to the extent it existed, was better in the ecclesiastical rather than secular courts, which is why defendants sought transfer
I thought the Catholic Inquisition resulted in about 3000 deaths, while the Prots burned some 30,000 at the stake , ten times as many–
(plus gosh knows how many villages caught in the crossfire- half of Europe’s pooulation, wasn’t it?)
Most of the slaughter was in the south of Europe.
95% of what ails us is because we stopped torturing heretics (though this was nowhere near as widespread as atheists want to say) and burning witches. The corrosive effect of these cannot be overstated.
We still torture heretics. It’s just that the people doing the torturing are the heretics we failed burn at the stake and they are now torturing the rest of us.
Indeed. We are living the movie cliché: You should have killed me when you had the chance.
My daughter and I have endless fun with the leftist Hollywood trope of not killing the villain when you have the chance, almost invariably because “that would make you as bad as him!” Our phrase for doing the opposite is the “kick’em through the engine” rule, derived from the first episode of Firefly: Mal: Now, this is all the money Niska gave us in advance. You bring it back to him. Tell him the job didn’t work out. We’re not thieves. But we are thieves. Point is, we’re not takin’ what’s his. Now we’ll stay out of his way as… Read more »
“Spiteful mutants”?
I know. I would much rather be ruled by an organized government that maintains control by torturing people death.
“Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people–a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.” – John Jay. This hasn’t been the country the Founders envisioned for a very, very long time.