What Did You Do in the Spiritual War?

What if a spiritual war were going on and no one recognized it?

"Modern Western populations," writes Bruce Charlton, "are only semi-human in their mass perceptions and responses -- since they lack the stable centre of religion, and are metaphysically incoherent; they live inside an artificial and distorted world; and their minds are continually filled-with and distracted-by lying nonsense -- all of this in an unprecedented fashion and degree."

Concur. Our adversaries live inside a Matrix -- which has been carefully constructed for them by forces beyond their conscious control.

Thus, "the true agenda of evil is not just beyond their belief, but beyond their comprehension -- lacking God, they cannot recognise nor understand the nature of evil (and are, indeed, inclined to deny its truth and rationality)" (ibid.). As did our anonymous but always illustrative commenter yesterday, when I merely pointed out that the suppression of truth is the essence of evil. He even went so far as to suggest that doing so violates none of God's laws.

No, it's worse than that, for truth is one of God's names; to attack or thwart it is to smite the Creator. It is to pound another nail into the Cross.

We've been toying with the idea of "principles of history," but maybe we should be talking about the principalities of history. Or worse, perhaps history itself is a principality -- you know, a kind of satanic playground. That would explain why the war has been going on for, oh, 50,000 years.

Is there any reason to believe such perfect nonsense? I don't yet have any central thread, only a pile of books on my desk which may lead in the right direction. For example, of the appeasers of the 1930s, Manchester writes that "like all fundamentalists" they "held facts in contempt." But it was more than mere facts; rather, their minds attacked the conclusion to which the facts inevitably led.

The conclusion was known, but had to be rendered un-known. For example, upon reading a damning book called The House that Hitler Built, Neville Chamberlain wrote that "If I accepted the author's conclusions I should despair, but I don't and I won't" (in Manchester). Well, that was easy!

Let's try it out: If I accepted the idea that the Iranians cannot be trusted and that the nuclear agreement isn't worth the paper it is written on, I should despair, but I don't and I won't.

Or, If I accepted the idea that the left wishes to foment racial antagonism and a war on the police, I should despair, but I don't and I won't.

I feel better already!

Our anonymous commenter criticizes us for supporting Trump. If he has any better ideas as to how to stop Hillary and defeat the left, I'd like to hear them. As Prager has said, Trump is like using chemotherapy to fight cancer: yeah, it's going to make you sick and cause a lot of damage, but what choice do you have?

"Historians a thousand years hence," Churchill told parliament, "will still be baffled by the mystery of our affairs. They will never understand how it was that a victorious nation, with everything in hand, suffered themselves to be brought low, and to cast away all that they had gained by measureless sacrifice and absolute victory -- gone with the wind!"

Yes, historians will be baffled. But what about Raccoons? Should we be baffled by America's entirely self-willed decline? I don't see why. Let us consult one of our Vertical Fathers, Don Colacho. "Civilizations are the summer noise of insects between two winters."

Better bundle up.

"The external adversary is less the enemy of civilization than is internal attrition."

Oh, that and demographic flooding. Which is why the left favors open borders, which is just genocide -- and worse, pneumacide -- by other means. The left can't defeat our ideas, but they can stampede over them.

"Those who live in the twilight of history imagine the day is being born when night is approaching."

The Obama era, dawn of a new day!

D'oh!

"Modern history is the dialogue of two men, one who believes in God, another who believes he is god."

I disagree. Dialogue with Obama is impossible.

"Falsifying the past is how the left has sought to elaborate the future."

Which is why if we don't somehow take back the educational system -- now a wholly owned and operated franchise of the Dark Aeon -- a deepening metastasis of the left's grim utopia is inevitable.

Out of time here. And tomorrow must be sacrificed to the serpent of Continuing Education, so no post. BTW, I was surprised to learn that as many as 24% of psychiatrists are Republican. Among woolly-headed and thoroughly feminized psychologists the figure is surely lower. But if you're out there, please show yourself. I am occasionally asked for a referral to a sane therapist.

Patterns of Cosmic Stupidity

You know how Hillary and Obama don't want us to refer to "Islamic terror," because if we do, then normal, peace-loving Muslims will want to chop off our heads?

Well, some things never change. Back in 1937, outgoing prime minister Stanley Baldwin joined his successor, Neville Chamberlain, in expressing the sentiment to members of parliament "that if they felt they must deplore totalitarianism and aggression, they must not name names."

"It was important," implored Baldwin, "to avoid 'the danger of referring directly to Germany at a time when we are trying to get on terms with that country'" (Manchester).

Consider this an open thread, since I don't have much time this morning -- in fact, for the rest of the week. It's October, and it's an even-numbered year, which means I have until the end of the month to complete my 36 hours of discontinuing education. Something has to give, and you're looking at it.

TRIGGER WARNING: some readers have expressed the view that my deployment of any salty language diminishes the blog. TURN BACK NOW.

Recall that we were just about to dive headlong into Principles of History, if there are any. The above example may or may not reveal a principle, but it certainly suggests a pattern.

But why should naming evil cause good people to want to turn evil? That doesn't make any sense. And why should evil people care if someone calls them evil? Evil people don't care what others think, except insofar as they can manipulate them.

Another parallel: Obama and Clinton say that naming the evil is a great recruiting tool for the evildoers. Therefore, appeasing them should lessen their appeal and thin their ranks.

Okay. How'd that work out? "Time increased Hitler's momentum.... Now that England had shown the white feather, recruits swelled in the ranks of the Nazi parties in Austria, Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland, western Poland, and the Free City of Danzig." Hmm, exactly the opposite of what the Theory of Appeasement would predict.

Besides, if going after enemies creates more of them, why does the left never stop attacking our deplorable asses??

You know how the Palestinian cause -- not to mention Bernie Sanders and liberal fascism in general -- is so popular on college campuses and among Hollywood and media eliterates? Well, by the mid-1930s, "Nazism had become fashionable in London's West End. Ladies wore brackets with swastika charms; young men combed their hair to slant across their foreheads.... The Fuhrer still had many admirers in Parliament and a lofty one (King Edward VIII) in Buckingham Palace."

Each generation must learn anew the same lessons. Especially this one: "History is mankind's painfully purchased experience, now available for free, or merely the price of attention and reflection" (Thomas Sowell).

Oh, and one more -- a memo to the Kaeperdicks among us: "There is not one of our simple uncounted rights today for which better men than we have not died on the scaffold or the battlefield" (Churchill).

Principles of History

Are there any? Supposedly not. As far as I know, that idea is rejected by contemporary historians as an outmoded relic of history. In other words, historians used to think history meant something. Now we know it means nothing -- that any patterns we see are superimposed, that it never repeats itself, and that it has no intrinsic direction.

Even if true, how could one know that?

But more to the point, I really don't feel like blogging this morning. Last night, before going to bed, the idea of writing about this subject popped into my head. Must have been a side effect of what I was saying the other day about my never-to-be-written book, Ground and Principle. In short, what is the ground of history? And does it reveal any abstract principles that are always present?

But this morning my mind is on strike. I think it has to do with the Dodgers playing at 1:00 on a Monday afternoon. What the heck? Since when doesn't Los Angeles get a prime-time TV slot?

Stupid Cubs. Just because their streak of futility is of cosmic dimensions, and may finally end, they get the late game. Which throws everything off for Bob. Now I have to hurry up and get my work done before then, which means I should probably get to it right now instead of wasting timelessness blogging.

No, I can't just record the game. That's fine during the regular season, but I can't bring myself to do so for a playoff game.

So here we are, at loggerheads with ourselves. Well, I'm going to force myself to blog, just to show my mind who's in charge.

I just googled "principles of history," and the first thing that comes up is R.G. Collingwood's book of the same title. I've read several of his books, including one called The Idea of History, but not that one.

As to the latter, it says in the introduction that Collingwood began working on it during the late 1930s, when the "revolt against civilization" represented by communism and fascism "had to be resisted at all costs."

That's a good point: fascists and communists certainly had their theories of history, as do Islamists. How do you defend against people who believe that history has ironclad laws assuring your destruction? "Ha ha, the joke's on you, because history means nothing and is going nowhere!"

That's pretty much what we tell the Islamists -- which only means that they are motivated to fight for their principles, whereas the left is too broadminded to have any worth defending.

One of Collingwood's historical principles was the gradual "elimination of force from the relations between people." Woo hoo! Now there's a principle worth defending. Our persistent troll doesn't understand that this is ultimately the principle we are defending in supporting Trump, since Obama and Clinton and the left in general are always about the increase of force between people. Indeed, this goes to the very Principle of America -- its reason for being -- i.e., the principle of ordered liberty.

Last night's question about supreme court appointments was instructive. Trump's was simple, as it should be: that he'll appoint judges who will support and defend the constitution. But Clinton promised to appoint judges who will ignore the constitution and crank out opinions based upon leftist ideology. Her answer was really quite remarkable.

"I want to appoint Supreme Court justices who understand the way the world really works, who have real life experience." Excuse me, but WTF is that supposed to mean? Besides, "understanding the way the world works" is precisely what a liberal cannot do and remain liberal. Liberalism is rooted in a mis- (and sometimes dis-) understanding of both human nature and of the operating principles of spaceship earth.

This actually goes to our subject, because if there are principles of history, it would mean that they transcend perspective. One, er, principle that seems to animate contemporary historians is that history is irreducibly perspectival, which is why we have all these intellectually worthless (if not harmful) disciplines of black history, or queer history, or Chicano history, and all the rest.

I mean, feminists say that math, objectivity, and the scientific method are oppressive tools of white male privilege, so you can imagine what they do to softer subjects. I say: Teach women not to rape history!

When "principles of history" popped into my noggin, the first example I thought of was Churchill, who clearly saw certain patterns and principles at work in the 1930s, but was ignored or vilified by elites who knew better. It is rather remarkable that most everything he said would equally apply to the Islamist threat -- which again goes to the idea that our struggle is against more enduring powers, principalities, and Cosmocrats of the Dark Aeon.

Example.

"If you want to stop war, you gather such an aggregation of force on the side of peace that the aggressor, whoever he may be, will not dare challenge..."

Is that just an opinion, or a principle? For the likes of Obama, it amounts to a lie, hence his reckless project of disarmament and weakening of our military.

Churchill reasoned that "to urge preparation of defense is not to assert the immanence of war. On the contrary, if war was immanent preparations for defense would be too late."

But his opponents -- which was pretty much Everyone -- "repeatedly refused to believe that Hitler was what Hitler was. They had, in short, developed the political equivalent of a mental block." They "believed they were preserving the peace when in fact they were assuring the inevitability of war." And "inevitability" implies a kind of principle at work.

Indeed, Churchill spoke of "the features which constitute the endless repetition of history," of the "long dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind."

Unteachable? Here is what the London Times wrote of a speech of Hitler's in 1936, that it was "reasonable, straightforward, and comprehensive. No one who reads it with an impartial mind can doubt" the peaceful intentions of the Fuhrer. Are these same idiots running the NY Times editorial board and the DNC? No, but the same principalities are.

Must stop. Work to do.