Finding a refuge to, not from, reality

 I found these two gems in Spectator USA today and yesterday.

Every diner and truck stop I’ve ever come across has presented a refreshing refuge to (not from) reality, hard to find in today’s woke world of pretend problems. Impervious to the affectations of modernity, these restaurants remain bastions of the freedom and honesty America was built upon.

Teresa Mull 

She makes me realise that I sought and found a refuge to, not from, reality in Romania. It seemed much less urgently important back in the 1990s than it does now, but it was important even then. I hoped to find reality in Eastern Europe even when I was a schoolboy, before the last ice age. I remember a clever British philosophy undergraduate (undergraduette?), whose parents were Ukrainian, telling me a few years ago that she loved going to Ukraine 'because people think like human beings there'. Ukraine is not in the European Union and so people think even more like human beings there than here.

Well,’ the guest replies, ‘I am recommending that the movement continue with the March for Life and crisis pregnancy centers but also open up for property destruction. We need to step up because so little has changed and so many babies are still being killed. So, I am in favor of destroying machines and property, not harming people. I think property can be destroyed in all manner of ways. It can be neutralized in a very gentle fashion, or in a more spectacular fashion as in potentially blowing up an abortion clinic.’

‘Do you yourself plan to be involved in such actions?’ the host asks, scandalized and titillated like a 16-year-old girl whose prom date just whispered his untoward intentions in her ear.

‘If I were planning things, I wouldn’t tell you, but I’m prepared to be part of any kind of action of the sort that I advocate in the book.’

God, he’s so cool.

And scene.

Of course, this interview never happened. Not only would the author never have been booked on that particular podcast, he’d have been fired from his university, blacklisted by every major publisher, denounced as a terrorist, stripped of his bank account, and placed under federal surveillance.

But replace ‘pro-life movement’ with ‘climate movement,’ and you’ll find that this interview did happen, less than a week ago, with Andreas Malm, whose very real book is called How to Blow Up a Pipeline.

Grayson Quay

I dislike Nazi analogies and wish people would stop making them, unless they are scholarly which Paul Gottfried always is. He writes a useful essay comparing the Nazis, Communists and the so-called Woke movement in the latest Chronicles.

Comparing this tidal wave of support for the antiwhite left to the role of Communist subversives in the U.S. in the 1940s and 1950s, as many conservatives do, is deeply misleading. Unlike Communists in the U.S. during and after World War II, today’s left does not hide its intentions; it simply grabs power after threatening its designated enemies.

We may also be approaching a situation in which the popular support that the Nazis achieved at the height of their success pales in comparison to the goodwill enjoyed by the present totalitarian left. Equally significant, our woke left enjoys comparable levels of support in most Western and especially Anglophone countries.

Like Nazism, this left is utterly impervious to rational arguments and revels in intimidating its victims. Those who claim to be fighting it usually underestimate its strength or, as Anton correctly observes, run to appease it. In the end, however, the street thugs and screaming activists may turn out to be a front for others. BLM was only one among other power players when corporate heads, the media barons, the Chamber of Commerce, the leaders of high tech and the heads of the AFL-CIO came together to plan the defeat of Donald Trump. The hellraisers and street bullies from last summer are politically tied to other interests that have power of their own. There is no Hitler waiting in the wings to take the reins of power entirely into his own hands. But we are still left with the troubling question of why our capitalists, woke zealots, and street gangs are joined at the hip right now. And two even more interesting questions concern if and when this bizarre alliance will start to unravel and what will be left of our civilization if and when this happens.