Thoughts on our time

Shrewsbury writes:

Dear Mr. Auster

The very busy and increasingly dull-witted Shrewsbury was nevertheless surprised recently to experience no fewer than five insights that he feels come up to VFR standards and would like to share. Here is the first.

Question: Why are liberals so much more intolerant of conservative ideas than conservatives of liberal ideas? Answer: Since liberalism is a system of prevarications, falsehoods, and even delusions, and since the maintenance of a liberal worldview thus requires continuous lying to oneself, of course the mere existence of a creed based on reality and tradition is threatening to liberalism in a way that the existence of liberalism is not threatening to a creed based on reality and tradition. Why do lefty college students feel impelled to destroy conservative publications, and the left generally to prevent conservative views from being heard? Conservative understandings are fatal to liberal delusions in a way in which liberal delusions are not to conservative understandings.

Political programs are, of course, another matter; the totalitarianism which is the ineluctable result of liberalism pursued to its logical end, is naturally quite destructive to conservatism. Perhaps this is why conservatives seem inevitably to end up attacking merely the political expressions of liberalism rather than liberalism itself.

The four others:

1. Objectively, William F. Buckley, Jr., was loyal, not to his country, but to his class, to finance capital, and to his own wealth and status. When, after the collapse of the threat of Communism, the upper classes decided that their interests lay in globalization rather than a faux-nationalism, he magically ceased to find illegal immigration troublesome. Once Communism collapsed, there was no reason to be right-wing anymore. It was, in fact, rather an embarrassment. National Review—even in the 1980s, when Shrewsbury ceased reading it after being obliged to fling a copy across the room in disgust—cared very little for national or cultural questions as such; it was nearly all anti-Communism and pro-capitalism, all the time. Buckley’s apparent deviationism in his later decades was in fact merely a logical progression and response to events.

2. American politics becomes quite clear once you realize that the voters are retards, and that they are voting, not for policies, but for celebrities, as if the election of the president were a spin-off of American Idol.

3. The utter inhumanity of liberalism is shown in its response and non-response to recent phenomena in South Africa. The MSM threw a collective conniption fit over some prankish video by some Afrikaner students showing blacks “forced” to eat urine-laced stew (though how these burly workers were “forced” was never made clear). Meanwhile, the torture-murder of over 1,700 Afrikaner farmers and their families by black gangs is simply not reported. It’s not news. A sophomoric video is big news; the genocide of white farmers is not news at all. Ideology is everything, actual human beings are nothing.

4. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. and Russia have switched places; the U.S. has become the ideologically-driven revolutionary power, while Russia is the conservative power. Russia is now trying to contain the U.S., while we engage in various machinations on their borders. Trotskyism has simply shifted from Moscow to the Washington/New York axis.

Some of these notions you will wish to tear apart, because the language is careless or overstated. But you know what I mean.

With the vilest sycophancy,
Shrew

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LA writes:

I think Shrewsbury for his sycophantic contributions.

On his first point, it seems to be the case that the more powerful a lie becomes, the more, not less, intolerant it becomes toward the truth. Any remaining element of the truth anywhere is seen as a threat. Thus for decades religious people and atheists/agnostics tolerated each other; tolerance was what liberalism was about, right? But now that the society is becoming more openly non-religious, the atheists have dropped tolerance and are calling for the complete elimination of religion. The EU says that people who believe in intelligent design are enemies of society. Homosexuals now enjoy unimagined power and prestige, but instead of enjoying their victory, the pro-homosexual activists seek to criminalize and silence all remaining disapproval of homosexuality.

When the lie is powerless, it perforce adjusts to the truth. But when the lie gains power, the entire dynamic changes. As long as the truth is spoken anywhere, even if only by a powerless minority, even if only by one person, it is seen as a mortal threat to the reign of the lie.

I also especially like Shrewsbury’s observation about how the U.S. and the former U.S.S.R. have switched positions.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 12, 2008 09:52 PM | Send