The nihilistic/narcissistic West
Can narcissists even BE nihilists, really? Or that a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron? Y’know, like “jumbo shrimp,” “militant pacifist,” or “unbiased opinion”?
The Scales Have Fallen. Now What?
You may have noticed that the enemies of the West no longer need to hide their animosity or their purpose. In the wake of my 2015 book, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, I was often asked what, exactly, did the Frankfurt School and its spawn in academe and its fellow travelers in the media desire in the wake of the collapse of Western civilization? What would follow the triumph of “Critical Theory”? A new communist paradise? The teleological resolution of their imaginary “arc of history”? The sunny uplands of “fairness,” “equality,” and even “equity”? None of those things, I replied. What they want is…nothing.To assume that our ideological opponents want something is to play the game on their turf. It’s a mistake we make constantly. We imagine that words mean the same thing when they use them as when we use them. We have accepted their protestations that they “only” want a new, post-revolutionary Brotherhood of Man when they speak glowingly of the future, when instead they’re happy to stop with the destruction of the past two thousand years of history, and call it a job well done. We mistakenly assume that they want the same world that we do, only different, when in fact nihilism is their goal. To put it in contemporary terms, they are Jokers, the kind of men who only want to watch the world burn.
Thanks to a host of recent developments, this finally seems to be sinking through the fog of our post-Greco-Roman Christian reality. Muslim irredentists have butchered thousands of innocents in Israel — and Muslims and their supporters all over the West march in full-throated support. In London, they have defaced public monuments; in Germany they have ignored orders to disperse; in the United States their radicalized supporters in the universities — universities that were deliberately radicalized by the Left in this country, and who now are astonished to find themselves on the receiving end of overt anti-Semitism — show not the slightest signs of shame, but instead exult in their chance to finally be against everything.
As winter approaches, the exhausted bugbear of the Covid hoax isn’t playing as it did during the heyday of the pocket tyrant, Anthony Fauci, as the public realizes that the entire charade was a test run to see just how much Americans would take, how eagerly they were willing to rat out each other out, to be spied on, lied to, panicked by their friends, neighbors, and government. The same mouthpieces at the wholly corrupt CDC and other official organs continue to push their “vaccines,” but this time the public is saying that it’s asparagus, and to hell with it. People are more fearful of dying young and “unexpectedly” after a hot shot of mRNA than they are of the weaponized common cold imported with malice aforethought from China.
The “transgender” movement, too, is losing steam, along with the “diversity” shibboleths. The sexy lingerie manufacturer, Victoria’s Secret, has abandoned its attempt to sell fat women (and feminized men) as objects of sexual desire to straight men, a wholly undesired push for “inclusivity” that has economically come a cropper. Gillette’s sales of razors and blades tanked after an unfortunate experiment with denouncing “toxic” — i.e., real — masculinity, while Bud Light’s beer sales famously cratered after its unfortunate liaison with a transsexual model: The Crying Game of American corporate stupidity. And real women are finally waking up to the fact that men in dresses can cause them serious harm, and that this delusion must be stopped in the fields of competitive women’s sports.
So the choice is stark, the danger clear and present, the time is now: do the men of the West rise once again to stop the barbarians at — and already within — the gates, or do they surrender to the resentful losers of cultural Marxism and their burning desire to set the world aflame and live in the ruins? How do we save the cultural legacy that extended, until recently, from Greece and Rome through the democratic victory of the Second World War?
Exhausted and effeminate (to use Gibbon’s scornful characterization), Rome eventually collapsed, split apart, and was reborn in the West as the nation-states of Europe, whereas in the East it succumbed to luxury, replaced war with bribery and negotiation, and eventually fell to a leaner and hungrier Islam that had only contempt for the effete Byzantines. Which is why Constantinople, founded as a Christian capital, is today called Istanbul.
In 1919, Georg Lukács — one of the founding fathers of the Frankfurt School — wondered aloud: “Who will save us from Western civilization?” Today, we must ask: “Who will save it?”
An excellent question, one which bespeaks unimaginable travail, loss, and human misery no matter what the eventual outcome of any attempt at saving it might end up being, should anyone ever bestir themselves to try at all. The jury is still out on that last one.
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