the Culture of Mockery

One of the things that has fatally weakened western civilisation has been the Culture of Mockery. This has been particularly the case in Britain.

Take a look at British popular culture over the past half century. It’s nothing but a sustained campaign of mockery of traditional Britain. Back in the 60s we thought this was being done by the counter-culture – by bold avant-garde nonconformists attacking the Establishment. But it wasn’t. It was the Establishment doing the mocking. Tearing down everything that ordinary Britons cared about.

The British people still haven’t figured out that it’s their own Establishment that hates them. The political, cultural, financial, bureaucratic Establishment. The hilariously misnamed Conservative Party. Even the Church of England, which has nothing but contempt for actual Christianity. Even the Monarchy, which has stood by and cheerfully watched while the country was trashed, occasionally rewarding the worst traitors with a knighthood or a peerage.

It’s not the global left that has destroyed Britain – it’s the British Establishment.

Never underestimate the absolute loathing that people like Theresa May have for everything Britain once stood for.

Of course the Culture of Mockery has undermined all western societies, but it has assumed a particularly virulent form in Britain. The British elite has waged a continuous and all too successful war on Britishness.

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how the culture war could have been won

You can divide people into two categories, the civilisation-preservers and the civilisation-wreckers. The civilisation-wreckers have taken various forms but the most dangerous of all are the Social Justice Warriors with which we are too familiar today. The real question is – why have the civilisation-wreckers been so much more successful than the civilisation-preservers?

A major reason is that the civilisation-preservers are generally speaking fairly ordinary people. They have jobs. They’re married. They’re raising kids. They have only a limited amount of time to devote to politics.

The civilisation-wreckers on the other hand are usually unemployed. Or they work in academia, which is the same thing really (at least in most of the humanities departments). Even if they’re married they usually have one or even more commonly no kids. They have lots and lots of leisure time to devote to political activism. In practice ten civilisation-wreckers can achieve more than a hundred civilisation-preservers simply because they can devote their whole lives to the task.

The sad thing is that this situation, this massive over-supply of activists with time on their hands, is not natural. It has been manufactured. And it could have been stopped.

Anyone who has had to deal with an infestation of household pests such as ants knows that the only way to eradicate the problem is to find the nests. It’s the same with SJWs. Fortunately in the case of SJWs we know where the nests are. They’re in academia mostly, in the bureaucracy and in NGOs and the media (especially the government-owned media like the BBC and the ABC). And they’ve been breeding there for decades.

Over the past decades supposedly conservative governments in Britain, Australia and the U.S. have had ample opportunities to solve this problem. All they had to do was to cut off the supply of oxygen, in other words cut off the funding. Would-be SJWS would them have been forced to find real jobs in the real world. They would then not have had all that leisure time for political activism (some of them might even have abandoned their SJW beliefs after encountering the real world).

This would not have been a complete solution of course. Some of the nests in the media would certainly have survived and some of the useless university departments handing out Mickey Mouse degrees would have found alternative sources of funding. But it would still have achieved quite a lot. The supply of SJWs funded by the taxpayer with unlimited amounts of free time could have been reduced radically. The SJW menace might have been contained.

And those supposedly conservative governments in Britain, Australia and the U.S. have done nothing. They have allowed SJWs to continue to proliferate. The worthless NGOs still thrive, the Women’s Studies and Gender Studies and sociology departments continue to get funded to churn out unemployable misfits intent on destroying our society, the bureaucracy has not been reined in and the BBC and ABC still spend billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money on civilisation-wrecking.

There is an obvious conclusion to be drawn from this. Those so-called conservative governments never did intend to win the culture war. They never even intended to fight it. Worse than that, they have been not merely passive spectators but in many cases have worked actively for the forces of darkness. Those conservative political parties need to die.

revolutions and democracy

Rebellions were not uncommon during the Middle Ages. There were quite a few. They all had one thing in common. They all failed. Peasants with pitch-forks don’t do very well against well-armed disciplined soldiers (and even medieval soldiers were well disciplined compared to a mob of peasants with pitch-forks).

The ruling class wasn’t too worried. There was no real threat to the social order. They made sure they always had those well-armed disciplined soldiers on their side.

Then things started to change. In the late 18th century a peasant’s revolt actually succeeded. OK, the French Revolution was much more complicated than just a peasant’s revolt but the important thing is that the social order really was overturned. The ruling classes started to get nervous.

From then until the mid-19th century (1848 being the celebrated Year of Revolutions) there were more revolutions. They met with mixed success but the fact that any of them enjoyed any success at all was enough to send a chill up the spines of the ruling classes.

Some way needed to be found to nip this revolution business in the bud. The answer was democracy. Parliaments and congresses already existed but they were not the slightest bit democratic. Now they would be made democratic. Now the peasants wouldn’t be tempted to resort to pitch-forks. They would have a say in the government.

Of course it goes without saying that the ruling classes did not have the slightest intention of allowing those nasty smelly peasants (or those nasty smelly and increasingly numerous workers) to have an actual say in the government. It was all a game of make believe. Representative democracy was in fact a system set up to ensure that the people would never actually be asked for their opinions. The people would be passive observers but they would think they were active participants. Instead of manning the barricades and cutting off aristocrats’ heads they would vote. Their votes would be meaningless. That was the whole point of the exercise.

It worked very well indeed in countries like the US, Britain and Australia. The masses became docile and compliant. They believed the lies about democracy. They kept away from pitch-forks.

This has turned out to be very unfortunate. Sometimes the only way to persuade the ruling class that the people are seriously angry and discontented is to man the barricades. But we now have a population so drugged by the illusion of democracy that they will never man those barricades, even when their ruling class has declared war on them and intends to destroy them. Instead they dutifully show up at the polling booths, filled with the touching belief that if only they can throw out that nasty Mr Tweedledee and his Liberal Conservative Party (or his Democratic Republican Party) and vote in that nice Mr Tweedledum and his Conservative Liberal Party (or his Republican Democrat Party) then everything will be fine.

In the latter part of the 20th century the ruling class really did declare war on us. And we did not take to the streets. We did not man the barricades. We voted. We are now paying the price for our naïvete.

is evil a useful concept?

A recent post at A Political Refugee From the Global Village asks the question

“…is evil a word it is very useful for historians to use?”

The post is mostly concerned with political leaders to whom the word evil is routinely attached, which basically means Hitler and (much more rarely) Stalin. The point does however have a wider relevance. It has become increasingly common for people to regard those with whom they have a political disagreement as evil. Even more disturbingly perhaps it has become common to dismiss those who voted for those “evil” politicians as evil as well.

This practice is not confined to one end of the political spectrum. The most spectacular example at the moment is liberals regarding Donald Trump as some kind of comic-book super-villain. But there are plenty of conservatives who see Hillary Clinton in the same light. I’ve even encountered British conservatives who seem to think Jeremy Corbyn is some kind of Bond villain.

And of course anyone perceived as being an enemy of American foreign policy (like Vladimir Putin) is considered to be evil incarnate.

The trouble is that once you dismiss someone whose political views you dislike as evil you give up any chance of understanding what makes that person tick, of understanding why they hold those views, and you give up any realistic chance of comprehending the reasons that so many people support (or supported) that leader.

This might sound like I’m arguing for moral relativism but I don’t think I am. Some political views have produced great evil in practice and some political leaders have led their nations (and sometimes the world) down paths that have been so catastrophic that evil does seem like a reasonable way to describe the results. But the fact remains that once the evil label is applied it is no longer possible to understand the motivations.

Politicians are by nature corrupt and vicious but the frightening thing is that at the same time many really are True Believers. It is necessary to understand what it is that they believe in. It is also necessary to understand what motivates those who vote for them.

It might be comforting and emotionally satisfying to think that our enemies are simply evil but that doesn’t help us to oppose them effectively. If you can’t get inside your enemy’s head you cannot predict his actions.

It’s also somewhat dismaying to see the evil label bandied about in reference to entire groups of people, whether they be Brexit supporters or Remainers or white people or Muslims or Christians or Russians or any other group. It’s useful to understand the motivations of our friends. It’s absolutely vital to understand the motivations of our enemies, or those we see as potential threats. From our perspective it is possible that our enemies really are doing evil but they certainly don’t see it that way. Very few people wake up each morning asking themselves what evil they can do today. In a frightening number of cases they actually wake up asking themselves what virtuous things they can do today. Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people with a burning desire to do good. Liberals have all but destroyed civilisation through an excessive desire to do good.

the culture war accelerates

Those of us who deplore the social decay of the West have for many decades now become accustomed to the basic strategy of the Cultural Left. It’s been a strategy of gradualism. Push for radical social change but do it slowly enough that nobody really notices what’s happening, and ordinary people don’t get scared enough to resist. The boil the frog slowly approach.

All that has changed in the past few years. We’re now seeing a whole new strategy. It’s a strategy of pushing radical social change as far and as fast as possible. The Cultural Left no longer cares if the frog notices how hot the water is getting. It’s a strategy of relentless all-out attack on every front.

This change really became obvious when, with the homosexual marriage issue still not quite decided in their favour they were prepared to launch an all-out offensive on the trans front. The usual expectation would have been that they would wait and consolidate their victory in World War G for a few years before launching World War T.

Partly this is because the Cultural Left believes (correctly) that they are very close to final victory in the culture wars. There is no longer any need for caution. Now is the time to press home their advantage. Now is the time to crush the last few isolated pockets of resistance.

Of course another reason is that Brexit, the jump in support for the Front National in France and the Trump election win revealed the existence of pockets of resistance that were slightly larger than the Cultural Left/globalists had suspected. Their obvious intention now is to crush this resistance mercilessly, to ensure that such annoyances as Brexit and Trump can never happen again.

While the culture war accelerates we’re also seeing an extraordinary quickening in the pace at which western “democracies” are embracing totalitarianism. The major political parties (all of them) no longer even pretend to believe in actual democracy or any semblance of freedom of thought. In alliance with Big Business they are moving with terrifying speed to destroy any hint of opposition to the globalist/SJW agenda.

Time would seem to be running out rather quickly for the West.

towards a racial politics?

Race is very much in the news these days and on the right one of the burning issues is whether some form of white nationalism is possible. There are those on the right who believe that politics is going to become purely race-based and that whites will have to accept and embrace this.

I remain very sceptical, for several reasons.

First off, politics is about differing views on the kind of society in which we want to live. Democracy has certainly become a sham (or perhaps more of a sham) and party politics has become largely irrelevant. On the other hand there are still absolutely fundamental differences among ordinary people on the issue of the kind of society at which we should be aiming.

There is no common ground between traditionalist Catholics and Kumbaya Christians. Militant atheists are barely willing to acknowledge the right of Christians to exist. The libertarian is not going to learn to lie down with the big government progressive. Feminism is absolutely incompatible with a belief in family life. The views of LGBT activists cannot be reconciled with the views of those who believe in marriage and the family. Greenies are hate-driven fanatics who cannot even be reasoned with by normal people. These are all massive differences between the beliefs of white people. White people are not going to put aside these disagreements for the sake of race. It just isn’t a workable proposition.

The chances of forging a viable alliance of white people based solely on race or ethnicity are zero. Even forging an alliance based on a common culture would be formidably difficult. White people do not have a common culture. Maybe they did once but they don’t now. Not only is there is no white common culture, there is not even a common culture between whites of the same ethnicity. Rural Australians might belong to the same ethnicity as sandal-wearing tofu-munching environmentally conscious inner city lesbian feminist lecturers in women’s studies but the two groups have zero in common.

There is also the question of class interests. Anyone who thinks class interests don’t matter any more hasn’t been paying attention. Class hatred is more virulent today than at any time in history. White elites would be totally delighted if every working-class white person just died. The average working-class white person would be equally delighted to hang members of the white elite from the nearest lamp post.

It’s also vital to remember that immigration has no downside whatever for upper middle class and upper class whites. Such people will always be able to live in comfortable safe overwhelmingly white neighbourhoods. Money insulates people completely from the dire effects of diversity. Wealthy white people like diversity because it doesn’t affect them.

The irony is that because ideological differences are irreconcilable the best way to forge effective political alliances among white people is by avoiding ideology and focusing on bread-and-butter issues. So the best likely way to build a groundswell of opinion against immigration is by not fighting it as a race or ideological issue. Fight it as a bread-and-butter issue.

Inner city lesbian feminists and wheat farmers might not agree on much but they might agree that affordable health care is a good thing. A stock broker with multiple mistresses and a strongly family-printed professional fisherman might disagree on most things but they’re likely to agree that aged care is important. Both are going to grow old one day. A Christian truck driver and an atheist interior decorator might have little in common but neither wants to live in an overcrowded city. Immigration means affordable health care goes out the window. Immigration means not enough money to provide aged care. Immigration means cities become overcrowded. Too many people means society starts to collapse.

If you fight immigration as a bread-and-butter issue you not only have a chance of gaining wide support, you also make it more difficult for the open borders crowd to do what they want to do, which is to make it all about race and ideology.

to control society first control the culture

A commenter at Oz Conservative recently stated, “Liberals can only mount their progressive tyranny on non-liberals through the power of the state.” I’m not sure I agree with this, not completely anyway.

The current dominant ideology, a combination of globalism and liberalism, has gained its ascendancy mostly through gaining control of the culture. This process began early in the 20th century. By the 1960s liberal leftists were firmly in control of the worlds of art and literature. They controlled Hollywood, and most of the world of entertainment. They controlled most of the news media. They controlled the universities. They had thoroughly infiltrated most of the churches. They were well on the way to controlling the culture. Their cultural control is now total.

In most cases they did not advance their agenda through direct political means. They did not control the power of the state. They have certainly been able to force the state to enforce their agenda but this has been a fairly recent thing. In every case the coercive power of the state has only been used to compel obedience to cultural changes that have already taken place.

Homosexuality had already been culturally normalised before legislation was passed to make homosexual acts legal. Marriage had already been undermined before divorce laws were relaxed to the point of making marriage nothing more than a temporary sexual arrangement. Feminists had already gained acceptance of most of their program before feminism started to be legally enforced by the state.

The use of the judiciary to accelerate the rate of social change is a recent phenomenon and it has only been made possible by liberal domination of the culture (both high culture and popular culture). 

Liberals haven’t actually needed the power of the state to push their agenda. Nor have they needed to win election victories. As long as their control of the culture remains total they can rest assured that the power of the state can and will be used to reinforce their victories. Those victories are however always won by cultural battles, not political battles. Politics is downstream of culture.

It logically follows that liberalism cannot be defeated by conventional political means. Liberalism can only be defeated by wresting control of the culture away from them. That can only be achieved by a more powerful, more attractive, more dynamic, cultural force. At this point in time such a cultural force does not exist. Until it does liberalism will remain in the driver’s seat.