What links the housing crisis in the UK to the Zionist bombing of civilians in Gaza? One might say it is because Western governments are under the control of global interests with their own agenda. Israel is an outpost of the global- liberal empire in the authoritarian and traditional Middle East. House prices in the UK are out of control, because homes in London have been turned into assets for foreign money (global interests again), thereby pricing people out of the market across the whole country as Londoners are forced out.
That may well be the case, but there is also an ideology that lies behind many of the crazy and inhumane policies implemented across what now seems a misnomer of the "free world". That ideology is not simply liberalism, but it is rather anti-authoritarianism. It is a belief that any measures that require the exercise of legitimate and moral authority or making judgments, is tantamount to Fascism. And closely linked to this anti-authoritarianism is the never-again human reaction to the horror of concentration camps in Central and Eastern Europe. This though seems to have been interpreted to give licence to Israel to enact slaughter on civilians in a horrifying way. This seems to be learning the wrong lesson from the Holocaust. What we can understand is that we are living in a post-war paradigm in which Israel, because of what happened under the Nazis, must always be protected and no policy domestically can be implemented that might uphold traditional values. It is a reaction manifesting as a paradigm of thought resulting from the narrative of the Second World War and what it was about.
The situation in Israel and Palestine is not the main focus of the 'blog, but like the preoccupation with liberal progressivism, it is indicative of how we only understand political problems through the lens of the Second World War, while giving no real weight to any other part of European history. It is of course understandable emotionally, given the proximity in time. The lesson of the Holocaust though is surely that mass slaughter of civilians is wrong, not that Israel must act with impunity. That though is another discussion. Here the focus is the narrowness of the Overton Window in terms of only liberal and progressive perspectives being permissible, despite such political views clearly leading us to moral and social disintegration. World War Two cannot explain the totality of politics or society.
Even the understanding of the Second World War is anachronistic and imposed retrospectively. The United Kingdom, at least in the understanding of the man on the Clapham Omnibus was a battle for national sovereignty not global liberal values. And the war was not so much a victory for the liberal democracies as it was a hard-won and bloody victory by the Stalinist USSR. The United Kingdom's sacrifice was real, but it turned us into a vassal of the United States, as the Suez Crisis was to demonstrate in our national humiliation.
We saw this post-war triumph of anti-authoritarianism in other fields of life than geopolitics. In the West's conservative movements, true conservatism and maintenance of traditional values and society were overthrown by the liberal ideology of the market and the atomistic individual. In fields such as psychology, which gained greatly in importance, there has been a clear anti-authoritarian and anti-traditional agenda - from Adorno's the Authoritarian Personality to the dominance of Freud's sex-obsessed reductionism.
Of great importance is the way that Adorno linked the traditional understanding of self restraint and virtues to Fascism. Much of the destruction of the innocence of youth is a result of his poisonous idea that sexual restraint led to the Fascist ideology. All of this was part of a pattern as the reaction against "third way" ideology, whether Fascism, Falange, or Nazi and its replacement with valueless and anti-tradition liberalism. Hence the destructive sexual and social revolutions of the 1960s, the cancer of which has gradually worked its way through all levels of Western society and culture. In art too we see the rejection of an authoritative standpoint of beauty to an abstracted modern art often simply trying to shock traditional attitudes long vanquished anyway. Even in post-war architecture we saw this revolution. People's living space was turned into the liberal onanism of destroying "authoritarian" values of architectural beauty and traditional civic space.
We must understand therefore that because of the Post-War paradigm, legitimate alternatives to the liberal degeneracy are always placed outside of the Overton Window, however legitimate the solutions presented might be. It is also telling that after decades of Cold War, still in the West "Fascist" is the political insult of choice.
The argument here is that paradigms though can be flawed and be based upon distorted understandings. For example, anyone who has read Max Picard's contemporary writings from the Third Reich can see that Nazism was not conservatism, but an avante garde movement, relying on practical methods of cutting edge technology to put forward a demotic and anti-traditional campaign. The ideology had its roots in radical German thought, not conservatism. Atheist Nietzsche, vegetarian Wagner and artistic Futurism were important influences on the European Radical Right of the twenties and thirties. Nazism was rejected by the revolutionary conservative movement, which also opposed the degeneracy of the Weimar Republic.
Today with economic crises, sexual libertinism and radical individualism we again seem to be in a Weimar situation. Ideas of personal virtue and collective tradition are considered Fascist. Meanwhile global finance seems to have captured the liberal democracies. It looks more like we are ruled from Davos not our own parliaments.
Western intellectuals so wedded to the post-War paradigm will have to accept that unless politics is to enter a downward spiral, that some authoritarian values are not only right in principle, but necessary for a functioning and healthy society. There are vested interests that would oppose a reassertion of traditional values. We see this every time any form of genuine conservatism gains traction. It has to be censored, proscribed and cancelled.
Nonetheless traditional values are vital and fundamental for a healthy commonwealth. We cannot continue to function as a random collection of atomistic individuals driven by our evermore degenerate passions. The consumer society only encourages people to be slaves to their appetites. This suits global capital and the corruptors of our society, but it will eventually destroy us.
Only a reassertion of collective traditional values can save us. Ideas of virtue-ethics, already being revived in philosophy, must enter the mainstream discourse. According to the corrupted language of our liberal politics any such solution will be dismissed as "fascist". The authority of parents, the Church, traditional and patriarchal figures are necessary to hold together our societies - but these are the very figures most attacked and maligned. We need an idea of the transcendent Telos of Man again, particularly in terms of personal virtues, stoicism and traditional gender roles. The paradigm within which currently we exist is not sustainable. To some it feels that our atomistic, avaricious and democratic system has already run its course, its fractures and frailties clearly exposed.
For millennia, European culture understood a higher and transcendent purpose for mankind. From Stoics to the early Christians civilisation was understood in terms of higher meaning. To reduce and to caricature human civilisation to the Nazism of the Third Reich is both ignorant and anarchic.
Unless the purpose of human nature and society is rediscovered, in terms of living for something more than appetites, having a clear identity nationally, in terms of building a traditional family to give purpose, having roots and a transcendent telos, then darker solutions will beckon. Just as the dissoluteness of the Weimar Republic was fertile ground for the dark paganism of Nazism, we too may be at risk unless we start to serve the interests of human beings rather than the interests of global finance that lead us to ever increased atomisation.
There is then a lesson from World War Two after all. It is not the one usually drawn and repeated almost like propaganda. A lesson that can be drawn is that unless the moral degeneracy of today's Weimars and the impact on ordinary people of the global financial elites are not mitigated then we risk an extreme reaction. Better to have a restoration of traditional authority before something more radical emerges in reaction unconstrained by our Christian heritage and ethos.
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