What is the West to do, when there is no West?

Olivier van Renswoude writes from the Netherlands:

Recently, one of the Dutch public broadcast corporations aired a “classic” porn movie (Deep Throat). There was much concern about this. Earlier a group of Christians had held an hour of prayer near a TV mast, to protest against the broadcast. Now a leading Dutch newspaper has published a cartoon that ridicules not only the aforementioned Christians, but is the height of profanation and sacrilege. It pictures God with the TV mast in his mouth, suggesting the fellatio which the movie is said to be about.

Here is the last scene of the cartoon: ; the cartoon has the praying Christians say “We are sure that God will intervene … in his own inimitable way! Amen.”

A friend of mine says this kind of sacrilege should be punishable by death as it would have been before the advent of Modernity, be it with Christians or Indo-European pagans. I disagree. Perhaps it is a lingering liberalism inside of me talking, but I believe that it’s useless to hand out such severe punishments in a time where hardly anybody believes in God and holiness, let alone sacrilege. I think that even in a time of orthodoxy we should be reserved in such matters. Besides, such sacrilege would be unthinkable in a traditionalist society.

How do you think the West should deal with this kind of sacrilege? (Especially in light of the sacrilege that Muslims experience in the Danish cartoons.) What is the traditionalist answer to a cartoon like this one, in your view?

LA replies:

When you say “the West,” do you mean the West as it now exists, or the West as you think it ought to be? Further, when you say the West, do you mean the constituted authorities of society, or the people?

I’m not trying to be difficult, but the fact is that in the case you’ve just given, it is “the West”—the constituted authorities of the Netherlands—that has broadcast a porn movie on state supported tv. So to ask what “the West” ought to do about this outrage only points to the total civilizational crisis we are in, since the West itself is the agent of the outrage.

So, before we think about what ought to be done, we need to acknowledge the existential question: If something is to be done, there must be an entity that has the power and the will to do it. The current government is obviously not that entity, because it doesn’t have the will to do it, and a hundred Christian protesters are not that entity, because they don’t have the power and numbers to do it. There would have to be enough people organized and active that they could not be ignored. Imagine, not 100 people praying, but a 100,000 people in a major public demonstration in the middle of Amsterdam demanding that the state broadcasting companies never again show porno films and that the executives who made the decision to broadcast Deep Throat be fired. Or imagine a major public demonstration surrounding the newspaper that published the sacrilegious cartoon. Imagine a campaign to boycott that paper until the cartoonist and his editor were fired.

The point is, there are things that can be done, but there must be people with the will to do them. If there are no people with the will to do them, then the question, “What should the West do?” becomes meaningless, because, in real terms, there is no West. If there is no West, the West must be re-created. The creation of a popular movement in Netherlands against present government policies would demonstrate that the West is not dead.

Same with immigration and Islam. Imagine a major public demonstration, 200,000 strong, demanding the total cessation of Muslim immigration into the Netherlands and the closing down of all mosques and schools seeking to spread jihad and sharia.

If that seems impossible, remember this: if things continue as they are, the West is finished. If the choice is extinction or the impossible, maybe the impossible is not so impossible after all.

Those are some of my thoughts.

LA continues:

But then let’s say that the people of Netherlands elected a traditionalist government that was opposed to publicly financed porn and anti-Christian sacrilege. Now, I don’t think that in modern times, even in renovated traditionalist society, we could go back to capital punishment for sacrilege, even in such cases as the cartoon you mentioned. But at the very minimum, such expressions could be prohibited, no? I mean, it passes belief that every EU country now criminalizes speech that stirs up “hate” of a group including Islam, but that there are no such laws protecting Christianity and the Bible from far worse hate. So, at a minimum, what the newspaper did would be outlawed and punishable by fines and prison sentences.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 05, 2008 08:12 AM | Send