Saturday 2 October 2021

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.

9 comments:

  1. Wow, Mr Grayson is really paranoid and scared. It is funny when the likes of Tucker Carlson call leftists snowflakes when right-wingers terrify themselves into a tizzy with made-up conspiracy theories about the end of civilization.

    A majority of Americans are wary of BLM, and America is a big country so BLM only affected a handful of people. Americans have a short attention span and BLM’s moment has passed. The likely mayor of New York, America’s biggest and very liberal city, is a black ex-cop with zero tolerance of BLM or defund the police. Maybe Mr. Gottfried should pay attention to what is actually going on, it might allow a little ray of light into his obsidian-black worldview.

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    1. The world he loves is doomed. You probably have different tastes.

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    2. Caroline, the crime rate (especially the violent crime rate) has surged in many large American cities. Many people, rightly or wrongly, attribute this trend directly or indirectly to BLM and the policies inspired by BLM.

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    3. I don't think there is any doubt about it. Black Lives Matter led to the loss of a lot of black lives. Most of the murders in the USA are committed by black men who make up about 6.5% of the population which seems to me more important than the idea for which there is no evidence that racism had something to do with the accidental killing of a man under arrest.

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  2. "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."

    That's the real problem isn't it? The drift towards totalitarianism enjoys strong public support. People want Nanny to tell them what to do and what to think, and they don't mind if Nanny spanks them if they're disobedient.

    How did we get to this point? The trend from the late 50s to the early 90s seemed to be steadily in favour of greater personal freedom. Since then the trend has been towards steadily increasing restrictions on freedom.

    The Cultural Left in the 60s, 70s and 80s was fairly consistently in favour of greater personal freedom. Now the Cultural Left wants to take away personal freedoms.

    It would appear that the Cultural Left of today is a totally different animal compared to the Cultural Left of the 60s, 70s and 80s.

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  3. It depends what you mean by personal freedom. In fact the power of the state increased steadily from 1960. The state, for example, now makes various kinds of discrimination illegal in most countries, which, whether or not you approve of it, restricts freedom in various ways. Freedom of contract was severely curtailed especially when it came to employment. Freedom to do things in bed increased. Freedom to live for unborn babies in many countries was severely curtailed.
    But I agree with your basic point - things are much worse now. Europeans prefer bureaucracy to freedom - an important reason though not the biggest reason why I rejoice at Brexit. Unfortunately the British government has been restrained from infringing freedoms by the Europe.

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    1. The state, for example, now makes various kinds of discrimination illegal in most countries, which, whether or not you approve of it, restricts freedom in various ways.

      I agree entirely with you on that point.

      Thanks to the snivelling coward Tony Abbott we still have in Australia positively Orwellian anti-discrimination legislation. A disturbing example of how both major parties are essentially on the same page when it comes to taking away our freedoms.

      But I agree with your basic point - things are much worse now. Europeans prefer bureaucracy to freedom

      That's become the prevailing attitude throughout the Anglosphere as well. People seem to want to have their freedoms taken away from them.

      It all changed radically twenty years ago. Perhaps it was the internet. Mostly it seemed that a lot of different powerful groups all simultaneously came to the conclusion that totalitarianism would be very much in their interests - big business, the bureaucracy, politicians, the media, the police, all realised that totalitarianism would be very good for them.

      But what I can't explain is why people have welcomed the change.

      Maybe it's the greater influence of women in politics, the bureaucracy, big business, media and the police.

      But now we're seeing a concerted (and intensely misogynistic) campaign to erase women as a category and those women in politics, the bureaucracy, big business, media and the police are enabling and even supporting that campaign.

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    2. I must confess that there is much about the world of today that I find simply incomprehensible. I'm starting to think that's because I'm trying to understand our world rationally. But we no longer live in a rational world. We live in a superstition-ridden demon-haunted world of magic thinking and wishful thinking and out-and-out delusions. It's difficult to understand the actions of deeply irrational people.

      I suspect that even many of the decisions-makers and opinion-formers in today's world are not rational actors.

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    3. Superstition and the thinking in Catholic England and modern Romania (which is enchanting partly because of folk religion and belief in magic) makes perfect sense to me, but I completely agree that there is much about the world of today that is simply incomprehensible.

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