In the Land of the Stranger

Reflections on The Content of America’s Character: Recovering Civic Virtue, edited by Don Eberly

In the margin of Herman Melville’s copy of King Lear, next to the passage in which Edmund, the bastard brother, defends bastards, Melville comments, “There is often a vitality to demonism that mere virtue lacks.” The articles in this book underscore Melville’s wise observation. After reading through these articles on virtue and character, one is forced to conclude that a person with character and virtue is as dull as a burned-out light bulb. Most of the articles read like chapters from Ph.D. dissertations, and indeed, most of the articles are written by Ph.Ds.

And therein lies the great dullness and weakness of most of the authors. So many of them, with the exception of Keith J. Pavlischek, advance Aristotle as our guide to recovering civic virtue. Here they make a crucial mistake. In an effort to find a non-Christian and therefore non-threatening guide to virtue, most of the authors seize on Aristotle. They forget an important fact: the Incarnation took place. One cannot go back to ethics without Christ once Christ has entered history. As wise as the Greco-Roman sages were, the final vision of their world, as depicted by Virgil, is despair. The “grandeur that was Greece and the glory that was Rome” is ashes without the God-Man. Dostoyevsky correctly diagnosed the problem of modern man when he stated, “Whether a man, as a civilised being, as an European, can believe at all, believe that is in the divinity of the Son of God, Jesus Christ...”

Only one author in this collection of essays faces this issue head-on. In Chapter 8, “The Religious Roots of Character,” Keith Pavlischek contrasts Tocqueville’s view of America in the 1830’s with Solzhenitsyn’s view in the 1970’s. Tocqueville was amazed that a society with a government that espouses no particular religion should have a people that seemed very religious. Pavlischek quotes Solzhenitsyn, who saw a different America:

Every citizen has been granted the desired freedom and material goods in such quantity and of such quality as to guarantee in theory the achievement of happiness. In the process, however, one psychological detail has been overlooked: the constant desire to have still more things and a still better life and the struggle to maintain them imprints many Western faces with worry and even depression, though it is customary to conceal such feelings. Active and tense competition permeates all human thoughts without opening a way to free spiritual development.

Why the different views? Pavlischek suggests that what appeared to be our strength, the lack of a public religion in the 1830’s, turned out to be the Achilles’ heel of our Republic. The public orthodoxy that banished all religions gradually marginalized American Christians to the extent that Christianity now has no real influence on public life. This situation, according to Pavlischek, is intolerable:

Of course, a significant portion of the American public dissents from this view. Religions conviction continues to shape their lives and they are increasingly alienated from a legal and political system that trivializes those convictions. Over the next several decades Americans will be forced to reflect seriously on the words of Joseph Story: ‘the promulgation of the great doctrines of religion... can never be a matter of indifference to any well ordered community.’ Indeed, we may ask whether the real question is not if we will have a community that is well ordered, but, given the lack of a broad-based moral consensus, whether we can have any community at all.

It is impossible to have any community at all, if the individual members of a community do not have a common religion which they desire to see enshrined as the public orthodoxy. And that is why, independent of whether McCain wins the upcoming Presidential election, I think the liberal liberals who support Obama will ultimately win out over the Rush Limbaugh-type of conservative liberal, for the reason that the liberal liberal has a religion and the Limbaugh liberal does not.

Having lost their faith in the God-Man (the modern liberal has answered Dostoevsky’s question with a decisive ‘no’), liberals have replaced Him with the black man. There is no escaping that fact.(1) The zeal with which the white establishment has responded to the Obama presidential run can only be described as a religious frenzy. The Limbaugh-neo-con appeal to avarice and greed has been a somewhat successful counter to the liberals’ black worshipping faith, but because of his Christian past the white liberal needs a more unselfish sounding faith (and I stress the word ‘sounding’ because ultimately it is a very selfish faith) than the faith provided by the liberal conservatives.

The new-breed of white man has made his faith the public orthodoxy. A public-spirited citizen of the modern world must worship the black man. And a community organizer is a person who looks for pockets of resistance to the public orthodoxy so that he can eliminate those pockets of resistance. This state of affairs will only end when white people replace the great black god with the God-Man. Impersonal appeals to our Greco-Roman Christian heritage won’t be effective. The new Europeans have their new god. We must cling to the old God and we must call on Him by name: “The Christ, the Son of the Living God.”

The United States and the collective states of Europe have become the land of the stranger. The Christian European does not feel at home in what was once his homeland. And it is good that he does not feel at home, because this strange new world worships, in the form of the black man, Satan. I recall a Davy Crockett song I used to sing when I was a child. One line still comes to mind with overwhelming force: “In the land of the stranger, I rise or I fall.” There is no room for us in this new world – who wants room in such a world? The black worshippers, who represent the new orthodoxy, want to eradicate all religions that are not black-worshipping religions. They will not be dissuaded by reason, by appeals for mercy, or by offers of compromise.

We are in for a long, bloody battle, which is not a very pleasant prospect. But the alternative is surrender to the forces of Satania. That might be less painful in the short run, but in the long run it would be, quite literally, hell.
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(1) Once again, let’s refer to Richard Weaver’s book, Visions of Order. He points out that Socrates did undermine the Greek religion by talking about the Greek gods in an objective, analytical way rather than as an enthusiast. This is why you hear the various newscasters hurling jeremiads at anyone who does not wax rhapsodic about Obama. One should not, the liberal media tell us, talk about one’s god in any terms except those of a laudatory psalmist. I agree with that sentiment, but I have a different God than the PCR whites.

The European Nation

In C. S. Lewis's book, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, Father Christmas is forced to give Lucy a gentle rebuke when she wants to go into combat:

Last of all he said, "Lucy, Eve's Daughter," and Lucy came forward. He gave her a little bottle of what looked like glass (but people said afterward that it was made of diamond) and a small dagger. "In this bottle," he said, "there is a cordial made of the juice of one of the fireflowers that grow in the mountains of the sun. If you or any of your friends is hurt, a few drops of this will restore you. And the dagger is to defend yourself at great need. For you also are not to be in the battle."

"Why, Sir," said Lucy. "I think—I don't know—but I think I could be brave enough."

"That is not the point," he said. "But battles are ugly when women fight."

Kipling expresses the same sentiments as Father Christmas in his poem "The Female of the Species." But let us go further. War is not just ugly when women are brought into it; war is also ugly when it is not local, when it is not, in the narrowest sense of the words, for kith and kin. The Iraq war is an abomination because it is the farthest thing imaginable from a war to defend kith and kin.

When Stalin's good buddy Hitler betrayed him and invaded Russia, Stalin found it necessary to drag some of the Orthodox priests out of prison in order to bless the troops and exhort them to repel the invaders in the name of Mother Russia. Stalin correctly saw that his men were more likely to fight for Russia than for international communism.

Bush and his neocons have attempted and are still attempting a ruse similar to the one employed by Stalin. The Iraq war is not a defensive war. It is an aggressive war to impose democratic capitalism on the people of Iraq. The beneficiaries of a successful termination of the war will be the robber barons of the United States and the government of Israel. And yet the neocon establishment has spared no expense to try to convince Americans that somehow their war of aggression is a war of defense. "We are fighting over there so we won't have to fight here." That is the Madison Avenue-styled inanity that we are asked to swallow. But of course it was because we were fighting over there in the first Gulf war and because we send Israel the money to fight over there that the enemy brought the fight to our shores.

War is always tragic, but it is not always ugly. Our Civil War is a case in point. It was tragic that utopian white men waged a war of aggression on their fellow Europeans in the name of racial egalitarianism. But it was heroic and noble that other Europeans rose in defense of white civilization. And the key words are "in defense of." William Tell is a hero because he kills in defense of; the Klansmen under Nathan Bedford Forrest were heroes as well because they also fought in defense of. Bush and his neocons (or more accurately, the neocons and their lapdog) are inhuman monsters because under the guise of patriotism, they kill for money.

It was George Fitzhugh who said, "We are the friend of popular government, but only so long as conservatism is the interest of the governing class." Now that the radical disenfranchisement of white people at home, and the violent spread of democratic capitalism abroad is the interest of our government is there any reason at all to expect that the U. S. will ever again engage in a war that a white European can support?

Walter Scott, in his poem, "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," asks the question

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!

And the answer to that is yes. There is such a man. He is the modern Gnosticized white man. He has renounced his own native land for the idea of a democratic, multi-racial, capitalist utopia. And such a

…wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonoured , and unsung.

A native land consists of a people of one Faith, one race, and one culture. White Americans do not have a native land. We live in a geographic region called the United States, and we are ruled by a capitalist oligarchy that is systematically depopulating the country of white people.

In contrast, the Scotland that Walter Scott writes about in his novel The Antiquary is a nation. Toward the end of the book, Scott depicts the reaction of his countrymen to a reported invasion (Scott takes the incident from an actual occurrence) by the French. The invasion report turns out to be a false alarm, but the threat is very real. Britain is only a few years removed, at the time of the incident, from the Battle of Trafalgar. What is significant about the Scottish response to the threat of invasion is the way every level of their nation pulls together. The landed gentry become captains with their servants in the ranks. The wealthier shopkeepers open up their shops to give supplies to the poor farmers and laborers who have come as volunteers to fight for their nation. And the apologia for the benefits of having a real nation is given by Edie Ochiltree, a beggar, when the Antiquary, a member of the landed gentry, expresses surprise to see that even Edie is preparing to do battle.

"I would not have thought you Edie, had so much to fight for?"

"Me no muckle to fight for, sir? Isna there the country to fight for, and the burnsides that I gang daundering beside, and the hearths o' the gudewives that gie me my bit bread, and the bits o' weans that come toddling to play with me when I come about a landward town? Deil!" he continued, grasping his pikestaff with great emphasis, "an I had as gude pith as I hae gude-will and a gude cause, I should gie some o' them a day's kemping."

"Bravo, bravo, Edie! The country's in little ultimate danger when the beggar's as ready to fight for his dish as the laird for his land."

When a people are a real nation they come together as one, from the beggar to the king, when there is a threat of an invasion. But when a people of a particular country, such as the United States, form divergent groups of warring tribes with no common racial, cultural, or religious heritage, there cannot even be a common consensus on what constitutes an invasion, let alone a successful effort to repel an invasion.

Our neocon government leaders stress that we are at war with Iraq because it is in the national interest. But our country is not a nation so we have no national interest. The Iraq war suits the self-interest of the neocon tribal element of the United States. And the real invasion at our borders, the type of invasion that would have mobilized the Scottish nation in the early 1800's, is countenanced by the white zombies because they view anything that weakens the older European element in this nation as serving their self-interest.

The white European remnant is in no position to wrest control of the government from the white technocrats. But white Europeans are in a position to say, "Your god is not my God and your people are not my people." It starts with a refusal to be absorbed into the non-nation called the United States of America. A European has greater aspirations. If we reject the "American dream" and embrace the European dream of an earthly nation that is linked to His heavenly nation, we will be in line with our European ancestors and we will be serving the true King of all true nations.

Soulless Nirvana

In his book, Solitude and Society, Nicholas Berdyaev makes a distinction between community and communion. Community consists of those organizations, civic and religious, which are formed to facilitate interaction between people who have something in common. Communion, in Berdayev’s scheme of things, is something deeper than community. When one speaks from the depths of one’s heart to another heart and touches a responsive chord, then, and only then, has a communion taken place.

Communities can facilitate communion or they can destroy it. Berdayev thought the most tragic situation imaginable would be a society that is organized into superficial communities in which the members, in order to avoid the agony of communion, occupy themselves totally with the trivial and commonplace and become quite content with banality and vapidity. Sound familiar? Yes, we have created the nightmarish society that Berdayev wrote about. While Berdayev, having labored in the Lord’s vineyards, now rests in the arms of the Lord, we must try to extricate ourselves from the anti-communal society we live in.

A community betrays the original ideal on which it was founded when it allows its members to affirm the idea behind the community while anesthetizing themselves from the heart of that idea. Let me use the city where I used to reside as an example: As you come into the downtown area, there is a welcome sign which proclaims that the city embraces “our traditions and our families.” Those are nice ideals. One can build something on them. But do the stated ideals of the community match the heart of the matter? Does the city really embrace tradition and families? Well, as regards tradition, the city was a predominantly white Catholic city, yet a particular Catholic nun has regularly imported black, non-Christian hoodlums into it in order to follow the dictates of her church. This is hardly in support of the city's tradition. As for families? The tax burden in the city is enormous. When coupled with the spiraling crime rate caused by the city-approved black and Mexican invasion, it is not possible to claim that the city supports families. What the stated ideal was meant to do then was to desensitize people to the fact that they lived in a community which had eliminated the possibility of any real communion of souls.

If a friendship is to be a true friendship, there must be a shared passion. And I don’t mean a passion for sailing or seafood or some other trivial pursuit; I mean a passion of the heart that contains all that a person feels about God and his fellow man. In the absence of that shared passion a friendship is only an association. Likewise a community in which the members don’t have any real communion is only an outer shell with no core.

Why would a community deliberately subvert its stated ideals and try to eradicate every communal aspect of the community? It does so for the sake of survival. If it is discovered that there is no common, shared, heartfelt passion among the members of the community, the community will fall apart. So it is much better for the survival of the community that every member of the community makes a commitment to banality and vapidity.

The Catholic Church and the mainstream Protestant churches have made the same commitment to superficiality as have our civic institutions and government, eliminating communion in order to insure the survival of community. But by doing so they have cut us off not only from our fellow men but also from God. It is only from out of the depths that we can speak to God. The psalmist did not say, “From my vapid, banal, superficial, self-satisfied being, I speak to you, O Lord.”

In theory, a man cannot live in a totally flat, soulless, vapid community, but in practice, Americans seem to have accomplished soulless nirvana. Anesthetized by blood sports, porno, and medical experts, we proudly proclaim our enthusiasm for communities without communion.

One often wants to escape the nightmare by walking through the wardrobe, but the wardrobe doesn’t ever seem to open completely. One only gets a glimpse of another world and then the wardrobe closes. But this world of ours is not the real world. The real world has depth and people crying out from those depths to the Lord God.