Conservative Swede bids us all an unfond farewell

Leaving the pleasant prospect of Astaire and Rogers for the tortured soul (not that there’s anything wrong with that) of my erstwhile friendly correspondent Conservative Swede, I read at his blog that CS has decided that it’s all over for the West. Since, having given up on the West, he’s also giving up on conservatism (he even hints that this is his final blog posting), maybe it’s time to stop calling him Conservative Swede and call him, say, the Nietzschean of the North (NoN) instead.

The NoN says that the West consists of three groups, the Christians (the conservatives), the post-Christians (the liberals), and the Nazis or far-whites (John Zmirak’s great coinage from an unpublished novel in the nineties which NoN has picked up via VFR), and that all three of these groups despite their differences really subsist together under the influence of Nietzsche’s Slave Morality. Unfortunately the NoN doesn’t sufficiently define Slave Morality in the present context or explain in what sense these groups exhibit it. But the idea seems to be that all three groups, even the far whites, are in various ways under the malign or incapacitating influence of the Jewish-Christian God, and therefore lack the stuff to do what really needs to be done to defend the West from Third-World immigration and Islamization.

At least I think that’s NoN’s point, but his writing in this entry is only semi coherent (as it has pretty much been since his sudden personality change and accompanying attack on me a couple of months ago), and so I can’t be sure. If his point is that all three groups are inadequate because they lack the will to—what?—to kill all Muslims and drive all Third-Worlders out of the West, then why doesn’t he clearly say that? If a writer is totally disenchanted with what he sees as the existing range of opinion, to the point of deciding to dissolve the civilizational bands that have connected him to the West, doesn’t a decent respect for the opinion of mankind require that he set forth the reasons for the separation, and tell us what the right approach ought to be? But NoN doesn’t do that. Like a pseudo-intellectual, he just keeps tossing around “Slave Morality” and other half-digested Nietzschean concepts as though they mean something.

In any case, he’s definitively given up on the West and on identifying with any Western nation or people, since all of that is doomed, and says he might become a “Jew,” meaning a wandering person without roots in the surrounding society, and go live in Latin America. (Rabbi Mayer Schiller suggested something like this in his speech at the 1994 American Renaissance conference, but it was a strategy of group survival rather than an individualist mode of hanging out. Schiller said whites needed to form tightly knit, Jewish-style enclaves in which they and their culture could survive in the midst of the coming nonwhite majorities.).

NoN also has an interesting theory (and a hopelessly depressing one—to paraphrase what Nietzsche once said about the Greeks, Oh, those Nordics!) that the Christian God cannot work psychologically for Europeans, because the Christian God is really the Jewish God, and so remains a foreign God for them, a God whom they cannot truly embrace (a curious point to make after 2,000 years of European Christianity, but we have heard something before about Germanic restiveness under Christianity, haven’t we?). The only people for whom the Christian God can really “work,” according to NoN, are Jews or people of Jewish ancestry, because for them the Christian God (who is really the Jewish God) is really their national God, and so only Jews (I am NoN’s prime example) can really derive civilizational confidence from the Christian God. However, because these Jews or Jewish Christians are still operating within the ambit of Christianity with its Slave Morality (there’s that term again) with its inability to use tough measures against enemies, it still comes to nothing.

It all seems quite half-baked, and I feel bad that such a promising and intelligent fellow is churlishly seceding—at least spiritually—from our entire civilization for reasons that he won’t even make clear.

One thing is fairly clear to me, however. The true reason for Nietzschean of the North’s decision to decamp from the West is not the inadequacy of the existing Western factions; it is NoN’s own complete rejection of God. To see how profoundly he disbelieves in God, go to this VFR entry and scroll to where I describe NoN’s theory of how men invented God as a rationalization for whatever power-holders controlled a society. Completely denying the God through whom the West came into being and has been preserved in being, NoN cannot relate to Western civilization. This, I believe, is the unspoken source of his anguish

- end of initial entry -

Gintas writes:

No cause worth fighting for is ever lost, and if you don’t fight, you cannot win. So what does it say for conservatives who quit? Your observations on Conservative Swede provide an insight. He, in his darkness, no longer sees a cause worth fighting for and is willing to give up what is left. He turns into a collaborator.

Towards the end of World War II the Germans on the East Front, as they retreated before the Russians into Germany, fought with a bitter savagery. Yes, they had fought for a bad cause, and their leaders were unworthy. But when the cause became defending their homes, wives, children, against the Red hordes, they raised their intensity. Regardless of what had gone on before, regardless of the leaders they had, here was a cause for which one would fight bitterly to the death. It was not the same on the Western Front.

Dimitri K. writes:

As more and more bloggers turn into grim pessimism and give up to catastrophic predictions, whereas others bombard us with great news from Iraq, your site remains one of the few places where one’s mind can have some rest. I used to be a scepticist myself, but as things started to go not so well, I realize that what we need is some thoughtful optimism, not disabling pessimism.

P.S. I think that Germans started WW2 because they were desperate. So, let us not become desperate.

Mark Jaws writes:

How tempting would it be to invite Clarence the Angel down from heaven and grant NoN his wish—to see what the European world would be like had the Jewish Christian God been confined to the Levant. The possible endless scenarios one could generate simply delight the imagination, but we can be sure that whatever Europe would be like, most of us would not recognize it or wish to have anything to do with it. Farewell, Conservative Swede. I hope that as you wander aimlessly in this lost world that you will come to the conclusion that just about most everything good that has come out of Europe the past 1000 years, stems directly or indirectly from Christianity.

M. Mason writes:

An overview of his writings reveals that “Conservative Swede” is indeed critical of many things: Christianity, Judaism, Islam—and even “moral relativism”, which at first glance might lead one to think that he believes in the existence of objective truth outside of himself by which he can make those assessments. But as you’ve said, such is not the case, unless he’s prepared now to declare himself as either a true believer in pagan Norse Mythology or a pantheist. If not, then by rejecting theism the only other philosophical alternative that I imagine being an option for someone in his position is naturalism which, unfortunately for him, cannot possibly be the basis for a universally valid morality. For this is the crux of the matter, and CS must ask and answer this question for himself: how can a purely materialistic world-view without God really explain objective morality and obligation at all? Christian theists maintain that neither social conditioning, biological evolution, social contract morality nor self-interest can convincingly account or argue for it. Even advocates of contemporary atheist philosophy like Kai Nielsen have admitted that naturalism can give no answer to the question, “Why Should I Be Moral?”:

“We have not been able to show that reason requires the moral point of view or that all really rational persons, unhoodwinked by myth or ideology, not be individualists or classic amoralists. Reason doesn’t decide here.

“The picture I have painted for you is not a pleasant one. Reflection on it depresses me… The point is this: Pure, practical reason, even with a good knowledge of the facts, will not take you to morality.”

Conservative Swede can fulminate about the “perverted, parasitical psychopathy” of Islam or the dangers of a weak “moral relativism” as loudly as he wants to, but without those views being anchored in objective moral truth rooted in the transcendent, the bottom line is that such statements are merely his personal opinions, nothing more. Without an adequate basis for morality and ethics he is left, ironically, in exactly the same ontological boat as the moral relativists he so despises—”everyone’s beliefs are true or false only to himself”. Which means that in his current philosophical plight, Conservative Swede’s opinions are only true for himself. That being the case, why should his extravagant claims matter to anyone else?

Despite all his erratic ideological bouncing around like a marble in a pinball machine, however, CS has gleaned from Nietzsche one thing he does see clearly: In the absence of the possibility of truth, power will rule the day. Because many governments and other social structures today have no objective standard to determine whether what they advocate is good or right or even sane, they can only exert power to legitimize their views. This is the present environment into which websites like VFR speak—relativistic, power-conscious and hostile to truth-claims, especially those that flow from the Christian faith.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 07, 2007 01:50 AM | Send