Sunday, June 02, 2013

"The West has lost all capacity for self-love"

I went to mass today at Our Lady of Victories in Camberwell. The priest officiating this morning was very impressive. He spoke clearly and concretely and he managed to uphold both the universal values of the Church but also the particular traditions which carry forward the good over time.

He began the homily by talking about how man was made for community. He then asked why so many Catholics no longer take part in the community of the Eucharist. He thought that part of the reason was that Western societies have become more individualistic and that traditional communal identities have waned in modern multicultures.

Included in the mass were two prayers, which I wish I could remember verbatim, but they were about preserving cultural and civilisational traditions and how we are links in a chain connecting generations past, present and future.

Whilst on the topic of the Catholic Church, I was interested to read a lecture given by the then Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict, to the Italian Senate in 2004. It is about European identity and the crisis of European civilisation. The lecture has faults, I think, but it does at least take seriously the gravity of the situation facing Europe:
At the hour of its greatest success, Europe seems hollow, as if it were internally paralyzed by a failure of its circulatory system that is endangering its life, subjecting it to transplants that erase its identity. At the same time as its sustaining spiritual forces have collapsed, a growing decline in its ethnicity is also taking place.

Europe is infected by a strange lack of desire for the future. Children, our future, are perceived as a threat to the present, as though they were taking something away from our lives. Children are seen—at least by some people—as a liability rather than as a source of hope. Here it is obligatory to compare today's situation with the decline of the Roman Empire. In its final days, Rome still functioned as a great historical framework, but in practice its vital energy had been depleted.

Another excerpt:
This case illustrates a peculiar Western self-hatred that is nothing short of pathological. It is commendable that the West is trying to be more open, to be more understanding of the values of outsiders, but it has lost all capacity for self-love. All that it sees in its own history is the despicable and the destructive; it is no longer able to perceive what is great and pure. What Europe needs is a new self-acceptance, a self-acceptance that is critical and humble, if it truly wishes to survive.

Multiculturalism, which is so passionately promoted, can sometimes amount to an abandonment and denial, a flight from one's own things.

5 comments:

  1. The white race, which also means Europe, has been forced through a looking-glass, and now sees itself only from the viewpoint of those who have deep grievances against it. This is why the self-love essential to life is impossible.

    Consider the teaching of Shylock, a great play that vindicates Christians and Christianity at a time when that was much the same as vindicating the white world.

    "What I’ve learned from 30 years of teaching The Merchant of Venice..."

    Once the teacher regarded it as her role to argue down and persuade with her more valid viewpoint the students who were taking much the same (Christian) viewpoint as Shakespeare and were always at least latently antisemitic and in need of a great change of view.

    "That future came about 15 years later. The change was partially the result of changing demographics in my classroom..."

    "It is difficult for me to relay the sort of response this speech now evoked from my students. They heard Shylock’s voice in these lines—and it was their own. I was shocked to see the number of students who claimed to have been treated like a “stranger cur”—-a dog."

    When everyone that counts is Shylock, and Portia is an incomprehensible and despised alien to be hooted down for talking nonsense about "mercy", what must happen to the white race? It must give up its pound of flesh nearest to the heart. And it is doing so.

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  2. Another reason for the lack of visible healthy self-love is that for white people to express bold support for one's people is illegal, even if you define them by state and not racially.

    Here's a new site: Free Speech in Europe.

    The stories here confirm that if you stand up for your country, your country will smash you. The anti-white establishment favors the immigrant, the disloyal and the hostile, and suppresses and infantilizes its own people - "its own" in that it treats them as its property.

    If you identify the nation with the state - and that was the traditional attitude, confirmed by all the symbols and rituals of nationhood - that means that not only should you shut up for fear of punishment, but you should shut up because there's nothing to be loyal to, nothing to be proud of.

    When the British state puts you in prison for waving the British flag, you should have been waving another flag. You should have had a different focus of loyalty.

    People don't have that different flag, that different focus, yet.

    And maybe they won't have time to develop them before mass immigration and forced integration ends them as an identifiable nation and makes the need for symbols of the nation moot.

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  3. This case illustrates a peculiar Western self-hatred that is nothing short of pathological. It is commendable that the West is trying to be more open, to be more understanding of the values of outsiders, but it has lost all capacity for self-love. All that it sees in its own history is the despicable and the destructive; it is no longer able to perceive what is great and pure. What Europe needs is a new self-acceptance, a self-acceptance that is critical and humble, if it truly wishes to survive.

    This reminds me of an essay I read recently, authored by liberal art professor/culture warrior Amelia Jones. Near the end of a snarky feminist deconstruction of white, christian hetero paintings she confesses:

    In my sometimes pain at being white, with the negative responsibilities this entails in western patriarchy, and experiencing the inevitable privilege that my "visible" bodily appearance assigns me in this culture, I want to be this someone else."


    I was quite gobsmacked by this. Why on earth should any sane person feel 'pain' at being white? Self-hatred indeed! This culture practically breeds it.

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  4. Self-hating whites are a reality.

    Anti-white-ism, mis-called "anti-racism" but directed to the denigration and disadvantaging of whites, is a reality, and it is pervasive in policy.

    Eliminationist anti-white-ism, explicitly articulated by people like Tom Hayden and Tim Wise, is a reality, and it is enforced by policies of non-white mass immigration and forced integration, policies that obviously, inevitably mean the eventual elimination of whites in every country that adopts them. This is science, specifically Wright's "Island Model", and not a matter of opinion.

    The anti-whites have made it clear their policies are here to stay, and sometimes they even imprison people who oppose them. The 3:20am door-knock for twittering is a reality.

    Legally enforced eliminationist anti-white-ism is white genocide, in the strict meaning of the word genocide as the elimination of an identifiable group, such as a race, by policy, with or without violence.

    This is all serious, and by no means only a matter of sentiment and nostalgia for times when the population of white countries were more homogenous.

    We have to call out self-hating whites on being self-hating whites. We can't ignore their pathology. The consequences of white self-hatred enacted as policy are far too serious.

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