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Posted on 01/12/2003 9:58:22 AM PST by quidnunc
I keep trying to think my way out of the recycling bag in which we seem to be trapped in Canada. For many people who share my political and cultural outlook — Neanderthal to many who don't share it — almost everything we see around us is wrong.
Even before they open their mouths, on any important issue, we have learned from experience to expect something very discouraging to be said by almost any figure in authority in this country, from cabinet ministers, to justices of the Supreme Court, to the leaders of "mainstream" churches, to the talking heads on TV, to what one hears echoed around one in any public tavern.
Let me begin by sparing the reader a long list of examples. It would be harder for me to think of something that was not an example. Let me also dismiss from consideration anything that is happening abroad, even though the disease of moral, intellectual and spiritual surrender is rife throughout the western world. Canada is a large enough canvas.
If I were to choose a single word to describe this disease, it would be "nihilism." In broad political terms, it is the position you reach when you have evacuated from public life anything that has intrinsic meaning; when you approach, in effect, the intellectual equivalent of the heat death of the universe.
"One view is as good as another, one ideal is as good as another, one way of life is as good as another, and who is to judge?"
Now the mystery is, that as we approach something resembling pure nihilism, we don't get freedom from views or ideals or ways of life, nor do we get much variety. Instead we get a kind of diffuse homogenous sludge. The mystery is that complete nihilism is not accessible to man, as no form of perfection is available to us. What we get instead, is a series of minimal default positions, and vestigial hangovers from older ways of thought, that suddenly rise to tremendous power, in the near-vacuum. For the truth is nature abhors a vacuum, as much in moral as in physical space.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at canada.com ...
What has happened in Canada, and elsewhere in the West, is the systematic abandonment by people who still consider themselves to be "liberal," of every principle for which liberalism once stood. And at the root of this, I think, is the transformation of "tolerance." It has ceased to be a rational and defensible principle, and become instead a war cry for the demolition of anything that remains in our social order.
And it's euphemized with the righteous-sounding names 'moral relativism' and 'multiculturalism'.
… We even pass laws to prevent us from speaking out against any group that would subvert our social order, in the name of "tolerance." We have toleration turned upside down.
And this is so true that I cannot give you specific examples, today, without putting myself and my newspaper in danger of the law.
But this is what morally-superior folks do, don't you see?
I can say that because I've met one.
When no moral position is considered superior, unfettered evil takes a front and center position. This is how the slaughter of millions of the unborn innocent becomes a yawning routine within a society. Nihilism teaches, among other things, that slaughtering the unborn is no biggie because those mountains of dead babies ain't gonna miss anything in this meaningless existence we live anyway. Our lives are just another Seinfeld episode - about NOTHING.
This is the provocative argument that drives William McGowan’s Coloring the News, a brave, searching work that examines journalism’s most controversial issue. Depicting how a well-intentioned attempt to accommodate minorities and minority views has been infected by political correctness, McGowan gives a fascinating insider’s analysis of what stories get reported in the “elite” media and how. Along the way he dissects how the press “mistold” California’s Proposition 209 vote, the alleged “racist” burnings of black churches in the south, the military’s ongoing problems with the integration of women and gays, the consequences of a chaotic immigration policy, and other key stories.
McGowan subjects the journalism of the New York Times, the Washington Post and other prestigious news organizations to careful analysis in showing how the quest for “diversity” has influenced not only editorial policy but news gathering itself. The diversity that has seized hold of the nation’s newsrooms does not value true diversity of opinion, he maintains, but instead promotes one-sided reporting-by-the-numbers.
McGowan highlights the clumsy bureaucratic instruments some news organizations have institutionalized for monitoring racial, ethnic and sexual fairness. (One of his case histories shows how the executives of the Gannett chain of newspapers have used a system for evaluating their editors and reporters according to how many minority faces appeared in photographs and how many minority voices were quoted in news stories.) He also examines the climate of righteous denial and moral preening that discourages the journalistic establishment from needed self-criticism.
Coloring the News is as bold in examining the political impact such skewed coverage has had as it is in showing the sources of this distortion. Ironically, McGowan points out, the crusade has had unintended consequences for the very constituent groups and progressive political causes that diversity was supposed to help. Chief among the casualties are the intellectual and electoral viability of liberalism, as well as the credibility and financial health of the media itself, which have been repeatedly embarrassed by biased reporting and out-of-touch editorializing rooted in unexamined, pro-diversity assumptions. He also shows how the perception of bias in the "mainstream" media has fueled the rise of alternatives such as talk radio and Fox News.
Perhaps the most notable, but not the worst expression of the nihilism discussed in the article that follows occurred in the previous century when the National Socialists rose to power in Germany in the 1930s. As I’ve said before, the Nazis didn’t march out of a flying saucer and proceed to take over the country, Darth Vader-like. They were openly applauded and voted into power. The National Socialist Workers’ Party leadership – NASDAP, later shortened to NAZI – made no secret as to what they stood for and what they intended to do. So why and how could such monsters as these ever meet the approval of the people who voted them into power – and then go on to slaughter millions?
The answer lies in the culture and the attitudes and the worldview that people of the time held. And where do people get their attitudes and their worldview? Who are the culture makers? And what does this portend for our country and our future? Perhaps it’ll look something like this:
On August 9, 1932, the government decreed the death penalty for those convicted of ‘political’ murder. The next night a band of Nazis invaded the home of a Communist worker in the Silesian village of Potempa and stomped him to death, kicking his larynx to pieces. When the killer s were arrested, tried, and sentenced in accordance with the new law, Hitler responded with threats and demonstrations. On Sept. 2, the government gave its answer: the death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. The killers were freed by Hitler next year.
The civilized men in the country did not know what to do. In the words of one historian, the moderates voiced desperate "appeals to reason… [But] their techniques were distinctly out of tune with the wild emotionalism that seemed to have gripped a large part of the nation" The civility cherished by the civilized men had finally been defeated by their ideas, although they did not know that this was the cause.
After years of preaching contradictions and of evading principles with an anti-ideological shrug, these men were astonished to see the nation conclude that man cannot live by principles, that reason is no guide to action, and that anything goes. After years of institutionalizing interest-group warfare, which they had justified as sacrifice or collective service, these men were astonished to see hostile gangs take to the streets and demand one another’s sacrifice. After years of undercutting the mind by preaching the primacy of gentle feeling (whether ‘progressive’, religious, or skeptical), these men were astonished to find that they had nothing more to say, and that there was no one left to listen. The moderates were helpless. The authorities were helpless. The killers were taking over.
On January 30, 1933, after due attention to every requirement of German law and of the Weimar Constitution, Nazi rule was made official… It took six months for the Chancellor to transform the country into a totalitarian state."
Leonard Peikoff - The Ominous Parallels
Does this mean that the USA will go the way of the Germany? Not precisely, but many of the preconditions for this sort thing are in place now. All it takes is enough of us with a similar set attitudes and the worldview necessary to put human monsters into positions of power. All it takes is the kind of culture that delivers the message that man cannot live by principles, that reason is no guide to action, and that anything goes. And as history so clearly shows, monsters like the Nazis were not unique; the world is still full of people who think a whole lot like they did and the world is still full of people who would cheerfully vote them into positions of power. What the article that follows shows us is that these people exist in abundance in our neighbor to the North. What should really haunt us is the knowledge that our own culture and our own country has gone a considerable distance down the same road as Canada – and we have arguably gone even farther than that, at least in some areas. Doubt that? Then pause and take a look around. What are the messages you get from popular culture - music, TV, film, and what passes for literature in a post-literate age? What does the reigning orthodoxy of political correctness on the vast majority of our colleges campuses signify? What does the relentless liberal/socialist drumbeat of ‘mainstream’ news sources tell you?
The answer is that all of these sources, all of these voices, all of these images virtually without exception are telling you the same thing they told the Canadians. They’re telling you the same thing they told the German people of the 1930s - that man cannot live by principles, that reason is no guide to action, and that anything goes.
The question for you, dear twins, is what can you do - what should you do in the face of such evil?
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