Virtues and Rights

 The West in both its classical and Christian heritage had a strong sense of virtues, of the cultivation of the character.  Today the moulding of one’s personal character to develop personal virtues has been replaced by an emphasis on rights.  People either guard their rights jealously or actively campaign for more rights.  One’s own character is valued according to one’s tolerance of the rights of others and it seems all other virtues are forgotten, perhaps regarded as patriarchal.

If we go back to Aristotle, the most important thinker in terms of virtue ethics, he understood the acquiring of virtues to be the human’s telos.  Just as a lyre is made to be played so a man exists to acquire the virtues.  In acquiring those virtues men attain true happiness, not the hedonism of the Enlightenment utilitarians, but eudaimonia - the good spirit, a type of happiness of superior quality, like Christian joy being a more elevated form of happiness, linked to one’s purpose and to meaning.  The shaping or honing of the character in Aristotle’s thinking led to the acquiring of habits, good habits and these good habits were the virtues.

Aristotle would be a major influence on the Christian theologian, the Scholastic Thomas Aquinas.  For Aristotle the virtues included courage, temperance, magnificence, friendship, truthfulness, justice, friendliness, and phronesis or prudence, which in some sense governed the exercise of the other virtues,.  .

For Aquinas there were the theological virtues of faith, hope and love and the cardinal virtues - prudence, temperance, courage and justice.  These are not exhaustive lists of the virtues, but give a picture of the many virtues Man has to hone to develop his character.

With the Renaissance and the Enlightenment a different emphasis on virtue developed.  Machiavelli wrote about virtu, meaning the use of virtues as a means to a political end.  It was a return to a different aspect of the classical heritage, virtue as power and excellence.  This was a major departure, the consequence of the action rather than its moral quality was what counted.  It was the idea of the ends justifying the means and for Machiavelli his idea of virtue was more about excellence in power than either the Aristotlian or Christian ideas of the good for its own sake.  The Enlightenment further lost touch with ideas of virtue due to its reductive tendencies.  Material happiness and political freedom achieved by self- interested individuals was more of the emphasis rather than the development of personal character.  In England in particular with the development of utilitarianism there was a real loss of a sense of virtue as a goal of its own.  As ever J S Mill tried to mitigate the excesses of Bentham’s theories, but inevitably the emphasis was more one of individual liberty rather than virtue.  Hedonism was the inevitable result.

Again contrary to virtue and the utilitarians, the Enlightenment Colossus Immanuel Kant completely placed the emphasis on duty and the moral aspect of the action regardless of eudaimonia or social consequences.  This deontological approach is suspicious of happiness deriving from doing the right thing.  For the virtue ethicist we attain eudaimonia, a higher, more true happiness by fulfilling our purpose of virtue.  For Kant deriving pleasure from a righteous act discredits our reason for fulfilling the duty because we act out of self interest.  Thus virtue ethics now found itself between two Enlightenment ethical theories - utilitarianism emphasising the greatest happiness for the greatest number even by questionable means - so-called consequentialism and by contrast Kant’s deontology that only gave moral status to completely disinterested actions regardless of consequences.

The Enlightenment, for all its claims of its supposed victory (still believed by thinkers such as Steven Pinker) has long been in intellectual trouble.  It has revealed its innate tendencies to reduction, narrow rationalism, infatuation with science, modernity and progress, a moral and cosmological meaninglessness and hidden revolutionary aims.  Nietzsche exposed the Enlightenment and advocated a sort of exuberant nihilism where will to power was the new value.  But there was also another alternative - modern virtue ethics.  

In the Twentieth Century thinkers such as Elizabeth Ascombe resurrected interest in the long-forgotten pre-Enlightenment theory of ethics.  Roman Catholic thinker Alasdair MacIntyre, in his work On Virtue, dismantled Enlightenment assumptions to reveal their inevitable tendency to Nietzschean will to power and then presented the alternative of living virtuously, by which we attain the happiness of eudaimonia.

In popular contemporary life however, despite the great strides in the academic world made by virtue ethicists, virtue is rarely discussed.  Post-modernism with its Leftist interpretation of Nietzsche, has made far more of an impression.  Rather than live virtuously we can attain meaning by either engaging in hedonism or fighting the patriarchy.  

If we understand the Renaissance and the Enlightenment as a picking apart of what was believed by everyone, everywhere, at all times - what we might call the Tradition- then we have finally ended up in the total subversion and chaos of post-modernism.  In addition, with the utilitarians we think hedonism or pleasure to be the meaning of life.  If we think more broadly than that then our idea of the virtue of justice is not Scholastic righteous indignation, but more about promoting the freedom of others to engage in ever more subversive forms of pleasure and hedonism. 

There is some hope.  The rise of figures such as Jordan Peterson, who have challenged the woke revolutionaries and post modernism, arguing it is better to sort out your own life rather than try to change society have been welcome.  Nonetheless, there is still not a general return to a culture of virtue on the whole.

For the sake of our civilisation there must be a shift from the language of rights to the language of virtues.  Righteous indignation being expressed on behalf of the most depraved forms of hedonism is not virtuous.  Virtue must be about the development of character, not self indulgence and narcissistic infatuation with our identities.

Courage is a virtue noticeably absent from our culture.  The cowardly woke virtual- mob, hidden behind avatars throw around accusations of wrong-think and anyone who expressed an opinion once commonly held but not woke collapses and retracts.  Everywhere there is moral cowardice in the face of a capricious and self indulgent movement of hedonistic rights-focused revolutionaries.  

If we had honed character, if we had developed the virtue of courage in particular, but all the other virtues as well, then our society would be far more healthy and those extremists now running the agenda, indulged by our left-wing establishments and facing no real opposition however ridiculous and harmful their goals would instead not have been able to get going in the same way.

Sober men, finding personal reward through eudaimonia in developing the strength of character to be wise, courageous and truthful could have stood up to the insanity of the last decade or so.  Instead we have seen only pusillanimity on the part of those who should have resisted.  

Only with a return to virtue will there be a society strong enough to hold the lunatics back and to prevent the self-harming agendas of our political elites.  For several hundred years the West has been abandoning the development of character through virtue, we are now reaping the consequences.

The Legacy of the Second World War - Globalist Liberalism

 The Second World War saw the victory of the liberal United States and the Communist Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.  Most of the fighting was on the Eastern Front and the Communists essentially defeated Nazi Germany, to the benefit also of the USA (which also fought alongside the British Empire on the Western Front and against Japan).  The USA meanwhile defeated Imperial Japan by being the only country to use the atom bomb (twice).  The end of the war meant a new geopolitical settlement. In Eastern Europe and Russia this meant the temporary hegemony of the Communists over Eastern European countries and in the West the seemingly permanent hegemony of liberalism, with the British Empire defenestrated by the USA and the resurgent Germans reduced to a NATO colony.  

For the West there were important cultural and political consequences.  By allying with the Communists political liberalism and international capital secured their dominance in the West  intellectually and economically.  The CIA through Project Long Leash and MK Ultra, sought to shape the West as ultra-liberal, sexually open and culturally avant garde, thereby contrasting it in propaganda terms with Soviet conservatism.  Before World War Two, Communism had been associated with gender and sexual liberalism, but to save the USSR from the Nazi threat, Stalin realised the cohesiveness of social conservatism was vital.  The Cold War was different, to dismantle the Soviet Empire, the Western establishment decided Western culture should be dismantled too via the sixties cultural revolution with the aim that atomised individualism would infect the Eastern Bloc.  

Lying behind this also was the victory of the post modernists in the Academy such as Derrida and Foucault, who were setting about a cultural revolution from the Left in their rejection of Stalin’s conservative Communism and orthodox Marxism.  So-called Cultural Marxism and Post Modernism were used to reject Marxist structuralism and instead to introduce a chaotic meaninglessness, where all meaning, conservative or Marxist was seen as oppressive phallogocentrism.  Heidegger was deliberately revised to justify Derrida’s decontructionism.  The West became the champion of revolutionary social disintegration.  The spirit of 1968 won out over the Gaullist nationalism that could have been a genuine alternative to American liberalism, Soviet Communism and defeated European Fascism.

The CIA sponsored abstract art and the use of psychedelic drugs to transform Western society into a revolutionary and individualistic society.  The West reinvented itself as the anti-Fascist civilisation, whereby all taboos were regarded as nascent Fascism.  Behind this deconstructionism was not only Derrida, but the writings of Adorno, who in his Fascist Personality linked the existence of sexual taboos and sexual suppression to the causes of Fascism.  

As a result the West set fire to its heritage of virtues and ethics in favour of  a return to Weimar degeneracy.  Any form of authority was rejected as Fascist, by the Twenty-First Century it was to become impossible in the West to discriminate between virtue and vice as the trajectory reached its extreme.  This was always there in Western philosophy, but victory in the Second World War led to a hyper-liberalism and a consequent social breakdown, with broken families, homosexuality, sexually-transmitted diseases, single parenthood and an all-pervasive anomie.  Finally we now see gender dysphoria normalised and the masculine rejected as evil.

These are the consequences of a sort of runaway revolutionary liberalism drunk on its defeat of Nazism.  There is a blindness here.  First not to realise that such Weimar-style degeneracy causes a reaction in the form of a more authoritarian politics,  Secondly, much as the modern Westerner would hate to admit it, Nazism with its social Darwinism, its eugenics in the camps and its focus on technological advance was the other face of Western modernity, not a return to pre-Enlightenment tradition.  Nazism too was a creature of the Enlightenment.  When  all hierarchical values and God are rejected then Nazism becomes conceptually possible.  Practically the West would benefit from Nazi science and would recruit Nazi scientists after the War.  Morally there was little difference between Nazi eugenics and the aims of establishment liberals in the West such as H G Wells.  The Nazis did their eugenicist dirty work for them.  The fruit of the scientific knowledge gained  therefore could then be consumed by the West, as a result of Nazis violating all normative and Christian morality.

Today the Nazi focus on eugenics is still being tacitly implemented, but disguised with the language of rights and individual autonomy, be that with abortion or assisted suicide.  The Nazis conveniently did the research for the West on a range of scientific obsessions.

Contrary to the claims of the West there is far more in common with the social Darwinism of Nazism and our own disregard for the sanctity of life today.  The key propaganda ingredient is the language of consent and rights, but the end result is people who are weak and infirm or are defenceless babies are still being killed.

Nonetheless, the political language about the “patriarchy” or racist oppression is all linked to the Second World War and the fight against Fascism.  It means that oppression and authoritarianism are detected in any attempt to defend virtue or objective morality or even sanity as ideas about gender differences or protecting ourselves from mass-migration are seen as Fascist.  Normal debate becomes impossible as all is defined in a hysterical way within the Second-World-War paradigm.  

Jonathan Pageau, Orthodox intellectual and icon carver recently published a video in which he discussed the way our world is defined by the myth of the Second World War (to be found herehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vstNGNtl-B4).  He discusses the deep symbolism of the Holocaust and the way we interpret the dropping of the atom bomb as well as the way the image of Hitler is used as a political insult in politics.  He also touches on how the narrative of Churchill refusing to appease the tyrant has been used in every post- war conflict.

For example, with its unipolar moment after the fall of the other post-war victor the USSR, the USA used the moral claims of victory over the Nazis to justify an expansionist and violent foreign policy under the names of liberal interventionism and neoconservatism.  Perhaps the consequences were foreseen, but apart from the massive number of deaths of civilians in “democratised” countries and the consequent growing of Islamist extremism, this policy also caused the migrant crisis which will eventually further weaken Europe and if Russia can be reduced mean the continent becomes a vassal of the United States.

Another foreign policy consequence has been the unquestioning support for Israel even at risk of our people’s interests.  While Russia is condemned by the West in the Ukraine, a policy of full-scale slaughter by Israel, to which Russian intervention cannot be seen as a moral equivalent, is permitted with impunity.  The whole mythos of the Second World War makes it impossible to criticise Israel and what criticism there is has been sidelined and syphoned off to the extreme Left, thereby discrediting any conservative criticism by association.  

Jonathan Pageau’s claim that we can only understand our world in the context of a mythos about World War Two that hides the bad faith of allying with an equally horrific ideology in the form of Stalinist Russia is therefore true.  Furthermore the victory of the so-called cultural Marxists from Marcuse to Adorno (who actually rejected true Marxism) is linked to the rejection of any concept of moral or political authority and this position is consequent upon anti-fascist propaganda.  But this has not led to freedom.  Instead we have found ourselves governed by the victors of the Second World War - global finance and the Wilsonian advocates of global governance.  These technocratic globalist institutions are anti-fascist and define the term broadly.  From the UN to the WEF a progressive agenda is promoted that very much has come to be at odds with the democratic wishes of American and European populations.  Whether Trump, Brexit or the various right-wing parties in the European continent such as the ADF and National Rally there is a struggle for power between the demos attracted to populists who resist the globalists and the globalist technocrats who detect within any opposition the stirrings of Fascism.

And related to all of this is the situation in the Ukraine.   This is both an old-fashioned geopolitical struggle and also an ideological one.  To become part of the US empire the Ukraine must abandon any form of conservatism, throw away its Orthodox religious faith and embrace LGBT and woke ideas.  Russia meanwhile is painted as fascist (ironically the very country that defeated Fascism and for which that victory defines its identity).  Its move into the ethnically Russian areas of the Donbas is painted as a re-run of Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland.  While literal Nazis fight the Russians and local military groups, the Western propaganda paints it as another battle against Fascism.  Because Russia still maintains some traditional values it is categorised within the nebulous definition of Fascist and as an enemy of all the modern West stands for - open borders, no sexual borders and a rejection of any populist-democratic will (Zelensky unlike Putin - who won resoundingly - cancelled elections and now rules with no democratic mandate).  Democratic opinion is supposed to be part of the New World Order, but only if it produces the answer the technocrats favour (see Romania and Georgia).  Otherwise it is dismissed as populism, which we are told is the first step towards Fascism.

In the end we must understand who won the Second World War.  Not the British Empire.  Not the nation state.  It was rather a global network of international finance and liberal internationalist political actors allied as a matter of convenience with Stalinist Russia.   These groups have their own agendas favoured by the breakdown of traditional values and traditional social groups.  Since the War this agenda has been implemented as an aggressive policy that has been implemented without democratic support.  Any successful resistance to this unaccountable agenda that has caused such misery and anomie and broken lives must again re-establish ideas of authority, virtue, borders in morals and countries, orientation towards the transcendent and a rejection of enslaving hedonism and atomistic individualism.

Liberalism - the ideology of hedonism and covert totalitarianism

 Liberalism claims to be all about freedom, but it is a very reductive idea of freedom, one that removes virtue and human telos from cultural possibilities.  What it does is to focus on the freedom of choice as the optimal aspect of human ethics, not what we choose, not freely choosing the virtuous way.  It reduces all choices to equal worth, Bentham’s “pushpin equals poetry”, thereby reducing human eudaemonia to hedonistic pleasure.  It is through pleasure, as with Bentham’s Panopticon or the bread and circuses of the ancient world, that a population is controlled.  Liberalism is the chosen ideology of the globalist elites because it is the most powerful and most subtle form of control.  It controls us through our passions and appetites.

The end of the Second World War, followed by the fall of the Soviet Union over forty years later meant the victory of liberalism as a global force, Fukuyama’s “end of history”.  There was an added layer to the liberal perspective now.  It had played its part in history leading not to ideas of human flourishing, but to the degeneracy of the Weimar Republic.  While men in suits in America and at the Council of Foreign Relations proclaimed the victory of liberalism, looking very conservative, their ideology was one that would lead to moral degeneracy and end in the promulgation of LGBT and hedonism.  The ideology was ruthlessly implemented with colour revolutions and the subversion of conservative election victories via the power of non-state actors such as NGOs like Soros’s Open Society Foundation.

Liberalism accepted Adorno’s definition of the Fascist personality so that all authority and tradition are seen as dangerous forces to be vanquished.  All this means political manipulation and ostracising of dissent in the liberal world and outright subversion of political states in the East, from the Ukraine to Georgia.  It means acting deceptively and in a controlling way, seemingly contrary to Locke and Mill.

Nonetheless, we need to understand that what is now the globalist establishment, with roots in English liberalism, which was the offspring of English Whiggism, sees in liberalism an opportunity to control and manipulate the world population.  Liberalism is the rejection of value and therefore depends upon an atheistic mind-set where hierarchies of value are regarded as an authoritarian position.  What this means in effect is the degradation of humanity.  The moral compass of cultures is smashed in favour of a morality that says do as you will so long as you do not interfere with anyone else’s pleasure.  In this it both destroys personal integrity and fractures communities, reducing us to atomised individuals enslaved to our idiosyncratic or trite passions. Indeed idiosyncratic degeneracy is celebrated through Pride events and marches - the dominant group asserting its power over the traditionalists subdued by legislation and pressure.

Real human freedom and dignity have nothing to do with this.  Real human values recognise man has a telos of virtue and that the value of his freedom is in choosing the right path towards virtue.  When the choosing itself rather than the choice being the right one is sacralised we are on the road to degradation.  Yes freedom is fundamental because otherwise a compelled virtue is meaningless and not indicative of any internal spiritual victory.  Simply to say that whatever you choose is valid because you chose it leads to moral degradation and enslavement to our passions.  Hedonism eats up our sense of integrity, preoccupies us and makes us into malleable slaves.

So looking behind the curtain, we see that all these fair minded liberals are connected to the revolutionary elites of the Enlightenment who want to cut us off from our telos and degrade us.  If we accept liberalism we are unable to resist degradation and then the State suddenly starts to expand, despite the supposed small state of liberalism.  As atomised individuals without any of the intermediary institutions such as the little platoons to defend us from an overbearing state, we are left as isolated, degraded atoms faced with no community other than the regulatory and bureaucratic State.  Now is the real moment of power for globalist elites able to impose their absurd and misanthropic agendas they have planned for us.  Because in their deep misanthropy the ultimate revolution is against the human being.  Man is a Malthusian blight on the environment and depopulation via technocracy can now be carried out as the long term solution.  Abortion, assisted dying, lockdowns are all means of demoralising us, atomising us and devaluing the human being as the Imago Dei.

There was always a deeply anti-Christian and anti-human agenda to the Enlightenment, with discreet links to secret societies and revolutionary political bodies.  The call for liberation that identifies kings and aristocrats, the Church and the family, the male gender, the European as the oppressor will come to identify the human race as the oppressor of Gaia and Mother Nature. Only the enlightened ones are above the sin of being human.  And we discover too late that we were not liberated at all, but rather enslaved to hedonism.  We find ourselves imprisoned, surveilled, monitored and in the final stage euthanised as per the inhuman ideas of Jeremy Bentham with his hedonism and his Panoptican.

Liberalism it transpires is the ultimate and most effective means of control - no need for the Gulag or the secret police. Atheism and consumerism are far more effective. The only way to true freedom is to rediscover spiritual meaning and a telos of virtue.  Only this will free us from our enslavement to the passions, by which we are controlled.

Emperor Nero - Woke LGBTQ+ Icon

 In these strange times that persecutor of Christians and sadistic pervert and matricide Emperor Nero seems to be undergoing a rehabilitating revision by academic historians.  A closer look makes clear why.  Nero was all about breaking sexual taboos and having a sense of entitlement to validation regardless of objective and aesthetic judgement.  Whether charioteer, poet, or musician, Nero expected praise. He was an all-powerful and mad millennial snowflake in ancient Rome.  One can possibly see his character type in the very masculine transgender who demands to be told he looks feminine.  

Contrary to our own era’s revisionists, we know from sources as different as Suetonius and Tacitus that Nero was a complete degenerate.  In particular his sexual depravity is well known. Suetonius recalls a scene, one perhaps fitting for a future Pride parade:

“Nero practised every kind of obscenity, and after defiling almost every part of his body finally invented a novel game:  he was released from a cage dressed in the skins of wild animals, and attacked the private parts of men and women who stood bound to stakes.”

Tacitus recalls his cruelty to his wife Octavia and finally her death:

“But Octavia was bound, and all her veins were opened.  However, her terror retarded the blood flow.  So she was put into an exceedingly hot vapour bath and suffocated.  An even crueller atrocity followed.  He head was cut off and taken to Rome for Poppaea to see.”

His elaborate plots to commit matricide on his mother Agrippina reached burlesque levels.  She had ensured through cruel Machavellian politics his accession to the position of Caesar, but he decided he wanted rid of her.  Collapsing boats failed, but she was eventually despatched.

For centuries the Western world regarded Nero’s vicious perversions as a sign of moral turpitude, but in the modern West this is celebrated and seen as something to be proud about.  He hated the Church and  had the martyrs thrown to the lions in the circus for the voyeuristic entertainment of the masses.  Today our masses gorge themselves on the bread and circuses of reality television, artificial food and consumerism.  It is almost as though Nero prefigured our culture.  In particular, just as in Nero's Rome the Church is hated by our own establishment elites.  

Nero has sometimes been identified with the number of the Beast, six-hundred and sixty six in the Apocalypse.  Whether it was murdering his brother, his wife, or his mother or engaging in depraved sexual acts, the proud and easily-offended Nero, so needy of praise, looks like the lowest depth to which humanity could sink, despite his elevated position as Emperor of the whole known-world.     

And yet despite the martyrs, despite his depravity, despite his vanity and despite his cruel murders it was at this time that the Apostle Paul, to be put to death and martyred by Nero in Rome, instructed the Church to honour the emperor as being ordained by God.  It might have been that declining pagan Rome produced Nero, but the office itself was still a bulwark against the forces of chaos and a capstone of the order of society.  The Church is not a politically-revolutionary movement.

As we look at today's political attacks on our Christian inheritance it seems to be often directed through attacks on supposed sexual-restrictions.  In that sense we are seeing a manifestation of Nero's spirit that expressed itself in pushing sexual taboos to their limit.  If Nero can be identified in some sense as a type of the apocalyptic beast then as the enemies of the church use "sexual liberation" and "pride" as their key weapons of attack we seem to be participating in a dark and demonic pattern.

The right to be able to practise any form of sexual deviance is now how those in the Pride movement define their identity.  To condemn, question or be repelled is seen as an injury to them, analogous to not enjoying and sycophantically praising one of the Emperor's recitals.   The most opaque aspect of the Pride movement is the mysterious "+".  What is this intended to promote?  There is surely a point when sexual passions pass a boundary of acceptability?  For a society to function it cannot simply be a permissive arrangement of “anything goes”, but rather we have to hold together the general consensus of decency and morality.  Under Nero, Rome still had some residual sense of sexual standards and public probity and an idea of what a good emperor should be - Augustus.  Nonetheless, for all Seneca's stoical instructions of the young Nero, nothing stopped the reprobate's depravity, even Seneca himself became his victim.

What we must therefore be very wary of then is politics dedicated to liberation from taboos and that this does not push us yet further.  If we want to understand where we will end up, we should remember the Emperor who fed the Christians to the lions and burnt down the city of Rome.  Political movements dedicated to the destruction of taboos and the celebration of the passions will not benefit the common weal in the long run.  And the survival of the common weal requires an enforcement of common standards of moral behaviour, not simply tolerance alone.

Atheism as State Control

Since the French Revolution and its idol of Rationalism, atheism has been linked to State control and terror.  The Bolshevik regime in the Soviet Union presented yet more evidence for the link.  For all the horrors the blame for which has been laid at the door of the Church over 2000 years, the short periods of atheistic power have led to terror unmitigated and harsh oppression.  And yet atheists continue to consider themselves to be the champions of freedom and progress.  Is this pattern linking atheism to state terror just a coincidence or is there an unavoidable link between the two?

Some might point to the secular West as an example of a liberal system that has enshrined freedom and secularism.  That is though, to misunderstand the concomitant destruction and decline of Western culture as being unrelated and unplanned.  Freedom is tolerated in the West precisely because it is really a “chosen” enslavement.

By looking at Western liberal democracy we can see how the atheism of the leaders of a society is the cause of terror and oppression.  The extreme violence of the Stalinist or Robespierre regimes was not merely a coincidence, it is directly related to its atheism, because atheism is about political control as much as it is about anything else.

There is no Terror in the West of today, many will argue no doubt.  This can be agreed, but the reason there is no Terror from the State is because the atheists in control of the West are subduing their people more subtly and craftily.

It is first and foremost enslavement to the passions.  The old slogan of bread and circuses applies to the culture of consumerism and entertainment promoted as a means of stupefying the voters and citizens of the West.  Then there are the carefully structured political systems, that ensure no ideas that really challenge the political system can gain any power.  The oligarchs remain in control and powerful.  The secret societies still determine the direction of the so-called open society.  Perhaps there is more of the occult and the Satanic amongst the powers that be in the West, but atheism is promulgated, because it disempowers people.

One way atheism is such a useful tool in the hands of the elites is that it is used to destroy the family in the name of “freedom”.  As Chesterton has pointed out:

“Only men to whom the family is sacred will ever have a standard or a status by which to criticise the State. They alone can appeal to something more holy than the gods of the city.”

The family is the unit of stability and autonomy that stands in the way of the absolute power of the totalitarian.  And atheist ideology is therefore used to undermine and challenge the family.

All that upon which the family is succoured is attacked by atheist dogma - no sex before marriage, the headship of the husband, the unbreakability of marriage.  All these are undermined by atheist ideas and dressed up as liberation.  As a result families are weakened, often fracture and split.

Most of the establishment’s favourite causes - feminism, LGBT, promiscuity, abortion - are promoted as a means to weaken that which stands in its way - the loving family.  The totalitarian state needs us to be atomised, trapped by anomie and easily manipulated by a popular culture that reaffirms and promulgates the atheist dogmas.

Atheism is a means to power for the corrupt and the totalitarian.  The State becomes the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong and cannot be measured by a higher standard.  All the rhetoric of freeing us from enslavement is used by those promoters in the “noble lie” to deceive us into the servitude that we are only fit for, if we are permitted to exist at all.  The atheistic interest in depopulation and eugenics is another way in which this evil perspective is a means of cruel control.

We can see, without any use of the jack boot or the secret police, that Western democracy uses all these means to set up a future totalitarian state.  And it can only do this by cutting a people off from God.  Atheism is the key weapon in the arsenal of the oppressor.  

We must therefore come to understand that when atheism is promoted by the powerful it is as a means of oppression and power.  Our degenerate lives in the West are not about our own personal mismanaged freedom so much as the State deliberately putting us into a situation where meaning and purpose disappear and only the passions are left to enslave us and make us into easily-controllable masses.  The atheism of the West is a more subtle application of the same mechanism in the USSR with the same goals.  Terror itself nowadays is somewhat too obvious.  Now instead the manipulation is far more subtle, but the purpose of atheism remains the same - the enslavement of the imago dei by those Faustian elites with their Luciferian pride and ambition

Mercy Killings and Suffering

 As the arch- liberal and secular British Parliament looks at legalising mercy killings, the main opponents rely only on pragmatic arguments.  They point to the very real risk that in a society as materialist and focused on gain as the United Kingdom, elderly parents or sick relatives may come to be regarded as burdens and that pressure subtly would be brought to bear on them to “choose” to be killed.  This is a very real risk, but the chief reason to oppose this change in the law is deontological - life is a sacred gift from God and not our own individual possession to be disposed of as we see fit.  

This is a difficult and sensitive subject, where good points made too coldly and logically will only alienate the reader.  Our freedom is precious, as is our gift of life and suffering can be very cruel, but crucially it is permitted although rarely inflicted by divine authority.

While Man must be free from an oppressive political State he must also be protected from harming himself, because his sovereignty is not unlimited.  He holds his life on trust as a gift, not as an absolute possession.  Otherwise self harming, sexual sado-masochism, suicide or anorexia would merely be a matter of personal choice.  We have a telos, that is to live virtuously and find our full participation in the divine.  Of course participating in the divine cannot be forced, but neither should acts that completely desecrate what God has given us be tolerated.

We owe it to God first not to desecrate our souls and bodies, but also owe this to our community.  If we behave badly or in a depraved way, we do not only harm ourselves, but the communal body, the common weal.  And this gives society rights over our “freedoms”.  If we become so enslaved to our passions that we change the moral life of the society then society has the right to stop us.  Sexual vice, greed and avarice, are not to be immune from collective sanction.  We can see where the liberal nihilism of the West has led - to the Pride parades and the destruction of the wholesome family.  As a consequence, Western society itself is disintegrating and everyone is suffering.  There is a clear negative externality to everyone else if libertarianism and moral anarchism is permitted.  The permissive society of the West has led to more misery, more suicide, more mental disorders for all its material wealth.  Each person suffering is a victim in one way or another of permissiveness.

In that context we can now approach the difficult topic of human suffering from illness leading to the desire for death.  We do not need to be distracted by liberal arguments about individual autonomy on such a serious question.  It is clearly a mercy to relieve suffering and if we take a more shallow utilitarian position of maximising pleasure a case can be made that unhappiness will be reduced by allowing others to assist a suicide.  Of course this is based  on a very simplistic and shallow analysis of happiness.  We must rely on the superficial  Benthamite definition of happiness as hedonism or pleasure.  Such an understanding of happiness is far removed from Aristotle’s eudaimonia, a type of joy based on virtuous living.  It seems by contrast that this Benthamite utilitarian view of maximising happiness and of minimising unhappiness is too superficial.  It takes no account of the resulting guilt, the feeling of transgression of a deep moral law, or the fear of eternal consequences that would inevitably result.  It would be like saying a woman who has an abortion to pursue her career is not deeply wounded internally, even if she is in denial about that.

We could rely then on Aristotle’s account of doing the virtuous thing as being the way to true eudaimonia.  But the real question here is not addressed.  With life-preserving medicines, people can live much longer and suffer therefore more from their terminal conditions and degenerative illnesses.  Is it right or compassionate seemingly to force people to suffer?  Are we simply imposing a rule with no regard to the specific situation?  Would a loving response not be to relieve suffering?

Herein though is the Promethean move.  Even while acknowledging the developments in medical science means people just as much as having symptoms relieved will also suffer illnesses for longer than nature would have once allowed, to take the positive step of ending a life does surely cross a deontological line.  It is  a case of us taking power into our own hands as to whether we or our relative should live or die.  Are we really saying it is for us in the modern West to decide how much we should suffer?  Does this not in some profound way disrespect all the suffering around the world?  Is it as though we as First-world Europeans do not deserve to suffer like other people?  What gives us the right to shake off trust in Providence and declare that we are exempt from the law of suffering?

For our collective human life has been all about suffering since the Fall.  We are all both mortal and susceptible to physical suffering.  Suffering seems cruel indeed, but it would not be permitted if not for some deep reason that is to our benefit.  Suffering shapes our lives every step of the way.  It in a sense is the way to glory for the fallen human, dominated as he is by his passions and death.  And we are aware we are promised God will not put us under any trial that is beyond us.  Life is not and never has been about pleasure, it has rather been about how we grapple with suffering.  Technological and medical advances, combined with a hedonistic utilitarian philosophy have perhaps led us to misunderstand what life is about.  In the midst of life we are in death.  All around us is decaying, its beauty fleeting - a mere hint of the Transcendent.

It is all too easy to pontificate on a deontological rule in the face of the suffering of others.  There is, though a reason for doing so - if we believe life has a sanctity over and above mere individual choice, then we must see life as the embracing of suffering as a way to change us and lead us to virtue and to God.  Once we take life and death into our own hands in such a way, it is a Promethean move, it is a claim to an authority we cannot and should not have.  It is a revolutionary grab.  It is the atheistic Stephen Fry attempting to hold to account Almighty God for the child with bone cancer.

This is not just about God as a powerful authority though, but that the ultimate Authority over the cosmos is all-loving and all-good.  It is about trusting while suffering in this fallen world, full of distractions, temptations and hubris, that God really does know what is best while not compromising our free will by eradicating the consequences of our Fallen state.  Suffering was not given in Paradise, but after the Fall suffering became a part of our existence and ultimately, in a mysterious way, this will all be to the Good. 

If we juxtapose it to the alternative brave new world the advocates of scientism and our eugenicist elites advocate for, a world with no physical suffering or want, but Man remaining fallen and in a state of rebellion, we can then easily envisage by contrast a world where love becomes impossible, control absolute and temporal existence the seeming totality of life.

Instead, we should resist any move to such a temporal utopia that claims to eliminate suffering and its dread lessons about our own nature, our own capacity for love and kindness, for faith, for hope, our own susceptibility to despair, to anger, to human frailty.  Suffering may well be the route to our spiritual transfiguration - the reason we are all here.  We should not make such a Promethean move against the law of the cosmos, written by the hand of God.  .  

Judaeo- Christian - Contradictory or Complementary beliefs?

 

Politicians in the Anglo Saxon parts of the West frequently refer to our common Judaeo-Christian values.  What does that really mean?  Certainly theologically there is a vast chasm between the Christian and Jewish faiths.  

In these current times one should make clear that identifying any difference or separation between Jewish and Christian values is not a comment upon racial difference, does not imply any eugenicist agenda or must entail hostility to one religion or the other.  The purpose instead is to identify how this attempt to synthesise two Abrahamic faiths can be used to justify a particular political or cultural agenda, namely the Post-War liberal settlement, founded on a reassertion of Enlightenment values.

Let us go back tot he very beginning, the point of separation of Jews and Christian.  Following the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in AD 70 a new form of religion emerged from the Hebrew tradition, the tradition of Rabbinic Judaism that over the next few centuries developed a new sacred collection of writings in opposition to the New Testament - in particular the Talmud.  Those Jews who did not accept the Resurrection and did not become part of the Church from 70 AD, as Christ had warned, lost the Temple.  Instead, in replacement of  a faith centred on the physical Temple, the focus was on the Rabbinic tradition and the synagogue.  Over the following centuries the Talmud and the Masoretic text of the Old Testament, where prophecies about Christ were revised became the sacred texts. Only after some centuries had passed did Rabbinic Judaism emerge as a coherent and fully-fledged religion.

The Church emerged following the Resurrection and before the sacking of the Temple.  The Church was in a sense the continuation of the Temple after the physical building was destroyed.  The Christian Old Testament was the Septuagint, with an older history, where prophecies relating to Christ were clearer..  

There are fundamental differences between these faiths that both claim to be the continuation of the Hebrew faith.  The Rabbinic Jews revised and rejected the earlier multi-person Godhead, as found in Genesis and the Book of Daniel, emphasising instead a radical monotheism, as would later be found in Islam.  The Church, in the tradition of the three angels visiting Abraham and the Son of Man appearing in the fire in the Book of Daniel, and the many other Old Testament theophanies of God's energies, believed God to be triune - Three Persons in One Godhead.  The Rabbinic Jews saw the Messianic prophecies as to be about a future Messianic political state.  The Church interpreted the prophecies as being about Christ directly.  In a sense Rabbinic Judaism defined its theology against the Church.

And so in theological terms Judaism and Christianity are contradictory.  In terms of religious praxis, because of the Incarnation, iconic representations of Christ are permitted and condoned in the Church.  Rabbinic Judaism is hostile to the religious image.  Christians are freed from the dietary laws, Jews must follow kosher.

In terms of eschatological beliefs the two religions oppose each other.  For many Jews the Messiah will come when the Temple is rebuilt.  For many Christians the rebuilding of the Temple is the harbinger not of the Messiah, but of antichrist.  

In terms of ethos, Christ taught to love our enemies.  For Jews revenge on the enemy is a sacred duty.  We have seen this following 7th October 2023 in the mass killing of women and children in Gaza.

How then can these two faiths be seen as complementary?  Advocates of Judaeo-Christian “values” from Nigel Farage, Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray see Judaism as a fundamental building block of Western values.

A well-known advocate of the importance of Judaism to the West is the homosexual conservative writer Douglas Murray.  For him it is a more significant blow if Jews die than Christians, because there are more Christians.  Despite Jews being on the edge of European society historically, he regards their values as fundamental to what it means to be Western.  Throughout the history of Christendom, the Jews were though regarded as the “other”.

The reason centre-right thinkers value Rabbinic Judaism does not lie in the contradictory theologies.  For Murray and his like, it is rather that Enlightenment values and modernity emerged from the chemistry between the two religions.  The separate religions have different ideas of the sacred and the sacred is what holds each faith in its own unity.  For Murray, who is an atheist, it is the “values”.  This becomes a somewhat nebulous concept.  There is very little that can be seen as Chrsitian in the current actions of the IDF in the Middle East.  Neither was the dispossession of Palestinian families from their ancestral lands during the Nakba a Christian approach.  Nonetheless a reductive approach can find commonalities if the sacred is removed.  Indeed the reduction of us all to atomised individuals might be seen as the lowest common denominator of the two cultures denuded of their ideas of the sacred.

Protestantism was a significant factor in the injection of a more Jewish flavour to European culture.  The new world after the Reformation saw the growth of the banking sector, the importance of compound interest (usury had been forbidden by the Church).  In the translation of the Bible the reformers relied on the Rabbinic Masoretic text. As we moved towards the market economy and a more revolutionary society, our culture found common links with Judaism.  Much of what had been regarded with suspicion in Christendom - banking, revolution, trade - and linked to the Jewish other, was now endorsed and promoted in Protestant countries such as England and Holland.

The European secret societies that grew in power throughout that period were fascinated by the Kabbalistic texts of esoteric Judaism as well as other forms of the occult and esoteric.  It was then as we moved both towards an economy based on banking and a revolutionary political and cultural position that the specific variant of Western society emerged, which would later be defended by Western Judaeo-Christians.  This is what is being defended when we hear about the Judaeo-Christian culture.  It is not about the sacred, where the two religions are in contradiction.  It is about a liberal secular society, with its roots in the revolutions of the Eighteenth Century - revolutions in thought, values and politics.

A fundamental change occurred in the Nineteenth Century when the Scofield Bible was published.  This was funded by Zionists at the time who wanted the Protestant Churches to support the creation of a Zionist State.  The Bible was annotated in a way to suggest the prophecies about Christ were more to do with the creation of a Messianic State of Israel.  Christians were (conveniently) to be moved out of world history through a so-called rapture.  This heresy of dispensationalism spread throughout American Protestantism and shaped the folk view of Jews and finally the Israeli State, regarded almost as fellow believers in a sense.  This was a vital ingredient in the American popular political support for Zionism.

The secular values that link cultural or civilisational Christians and Jews are not about the sacred, but about secular liberal shibboleths such as individualism, rights, equality, liberation.  The very beginning of the USA was in the foment of the Enlightenment and the milieu of various secret societies focusing on throwing off traditional hierarchies and institutions.  

In this sense Judaeo-Christian is not a meaningful idea from a traditional perspective.  It dismisses the ideas of the sacred that are incompatible as irrelevant - looking only for materialist answers.  It focuses on the worldly and revolutionary values of the Enlightenment West, not Christendom.

In terms of geopolitics, the idea of Judaeo-Christian values has put the West on the side of revolution and progress, not tradition or an idea of the sacred.  It is not simply about Israel, but in a topical matter our way of forcing change on the proxy of Ukraine we force them to abandon their Church and their more conservative values.  Judaeo-Christian is a phrase uttered by Western conservatives who are merely yesterday’s liberals, who have little sense of tradition, hierarchy or the sacred.  They are the dull men of business and money, not the heroes of honour and virtue.  Their conservatism is the conservatism of an enervated culture, emptied of its true values and sacred beliefs.  The conservatism of the bottom line, profit, the mercantile class.  True conservatives stand for our own sacred, our hierarchies, our traditions.  This older conservatism, supplanted by the Judaeo-Christians, is about the Church and the institutions that flow from it in the Christian world.