Article on China’s barbaric cruelty to animals published at FP

Spencer Warren’s and my article “China’s Animal Torture,” is published today as the lead article at FrontPage Magazine. The article is basically Mr. Warren’s; I tinkered with it and added a few things. Congratulations to Mr. Warren for getting this powerful message about China’s horrendous cruelty to dogs (and cats) before a large reading public.

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Richard M. writes:

I share your concern about the animal abuses; in fact I am outraged (and not with the fake ‘emotion’ one must display nowadays to prove he’s a decent person). I’m somewhat surprised to see you cover this type of thing (I note your prior mention of the Canadian seal “harvest”), though, since it’s not obviously related to the other topics on your blog. I ordinarily would not be concerned to justify my volatile reaction to these types of abuses—they tend to speak for themselves. However, now that I see you cover them, I wonder if there is any relationship with your other beliefs? Perhaps this would give me some a bit of insight into my own strong reaction, but perhaps not. In any case I would be interested in knowing your take, if you find it worthwhile to address it.

I also note that left-wing nature-worshippers have made public concern for animals a repugnant subject for American conservatives. I tend to agree in the abstract, such that the extinction of no species should dissuade us from oil exploration, for example. But this type of savagery makes my blood boil, and seems another matter altogether.

LA replies:

Well, first of all, Spencer Warren introduced these subjects into VFR. He’s the principal author of the China article; I helped out. I posted this and his other articles on the mistreatment of animals because the subject seemed real and important.

While my reason for printing the articles had no conscious connection with my thoughts on traditionalism, now that you’ve raised the point, why should there be any incapability between traditionalism and this issue? Traditionalism supports the standards, values, and allegiances of our civilization, and opposes things that contradict or endanger them. Dogs, and the relationship of man and dog, are precious to us. That there is this other country/culture, that we are now allied with and friendly with, that treats dogs in this savage way, should obviously be of concern to us.

Central to traditionalism are the questions: What is our culture? What values/cultures are compatible with ours? What values/cultures are incompatible with ours?

The more typical conservatives and neoconservatives of today are “abstract” conservatives who care only about democracy, rights, money, and who thus define our culture out of existence by pretending that it consists of nothing but a shared belief in democracy, rights, and money. That’s the conservatism I oppose. Our true culture is a larger whole, touching directly or indirectly the whole range of our individual and social being. Modern man has lost that sense of a larger whole, and traditionalism is the attempt to rediscover and articulate it.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 26, 2006 09:02 AM | Send