Last Crusade 37: Fighting the Wrong Battle
The Last Crusade, like any other crusade, political movement, or military operation, must have clear strategic goals, not subject to change, and flexible tactics, which change as needed. This crusade promises to be successful where Conservativism has failed and so-called rightwing identity politics is failing, because it recognizes where the real battle is, and what is really at stake.
It bears repeating that conservativism is a political movement and that identity politics is a cultural movement.
The enemy disguised itself as a political movement called liberalism, but it was actually a cultural movement, and so the conservatives expended efforts to drive it back on a political level.
The results were absolute failure. The long march of the Cultural Marxists through Western cultural institutions, academia, media, news, destroyed the cultural loyalty to faith, to family, to patriotism, to fatherhood.
Even the most basic of cultural artifacts dating back to the Stone Age, the distinction of male and female social roles, has been invaded, inundated, and overthrown.
The conservatives were fighting what they thought was a political battle, where they marshaled facts and arguments to support and defend political concepts like free markets and limited government.
Those arguments were never refuted because they were never addressed.
So conservatives would look on in helpless frustration and anger as the self-defeating policies of the Left, justified by nothing but long dead, profoundly stupid, and easily exploded theories, nonetheless, without a single intellectual fig-leaf to hide the shame of their nakedness, would be voted into practice, and run the nation ever deeper into the quicksand of socialism and totalitarianism.
The conservatives would use logic and facts to prove that the Emperor had no clothes, and find themselves bewildered and alone as the Emperor’s tailors were showered with praise and rewards.
What was happening was that the Left did an end run around the Right, avoiding facts and logic, its strong suit, and taking it in the cultural flank, where it was weak.
If every television show portrays prenatal infanticide as being one and the same as women’s liberation and health, then facts and logic showing prenatal infanticide is horrid, sinful and wrong are equated with advocacy favoring female slavery and sickness.
The Right, which takes it as an unquestioned axiom that cultural matters are to be handled in the private sphere, not the public, would not and could not understand the degree to which a political organization motivated by long term cultural goals could and did influence the culture, and win the moral high ground.
The Right offered facts and logic. The Left offered folk songs.
The Left put gay men in comedy shows and portrayed them as victims, not of sin and perversion, but of bigotry. The Left had Walter Cronkite declare the war lost when the war was won. And so the war was lost, sodomy was made legal, Christians were forced by law to aid and abet sodomites perform satanic mockeries of the sacrament of marriage, and capitalism was replaced by a slowly imploding Welfare State.
The First Amendment no longer covers Nazis, nor does the right not to be assaulted in broad daylight by a masked rioter or Berkeley professor, and everyone not to the Left of Karl Marx is suddenly a Nazi.
Outraged by this needless disaster, a new cultural movement has been born. It goes by several names, but generally is called Alternative Right or Alt Right. It started as a big-tent movement welcoming everyone outraged by the complicity of the Right in the endless victories of the Left, but has since narrowed sharply, and devolved into little more than one more identity politics pressure group seeking prestige and privilege for Whites just as the Left seeks ever more burdensome privileges for their mascot groups.
Few or no devotees of White Identitarianism seek White privilege for its own sake, but rather are forced to do so in order to combat the current legal and cultural regime of Diversity and Affirmative Action which legally penalizes whites, while the news media and entertainment industry libels and humiliates and accuses and vilifies whites day and night without cease, and hold masculinity up to mockery, and Christianity up to acidic hatred.
For the same reason Conservativism failed, this new movement is doomed to failure. It is fighting what it thinks is a culture war. It thinks culture is downstream of race, and concludes that changing the racial demographics of the nation will save the nation.
But culture is downstream of religion. As with the Conservatives, they are fighting the wrong battle.
Even if they somehow win on all cultural fronts, and retake the news, the entertainment industry, and academia, if the Left retains the moral high ground, the people (who in the long run always seek moral validation before any other factor, including wealth or gratification, applause or power) will cleave to the Left.
The Identitarians will find that their cultural ammunition, the memes and short videos which are this generation’s version of folk songs, will not have any deep or lasting effect.
One cannot change a man’s mind unless his heart allows it. But one cannot change a man’s heart unless his soul allows it.
In the same way politics is downstream of culture, culture is downstream of religion. In the same way a man’s actions are dependent on his beliefs, his beliefs are dependent upon his primal and fundamental assumptions that form his character.
That those fundamental assumptions spring out of religion rather than race is almost too obvious to argue: the genetic admixture of peoples in the Roman Empire before and after Constantine was the same, but no pagan society in the history of the world, East or West, ever abolished slavery, required the consent of the bride to marriage, abolished polygamy, abolished gladiatorial games, established hospitals and founded universities, and created a theory and form of government devoted to protecting individual rights.
Even the vaunted democracy of Athens or the republic of Rome protected collectivist social orders. Were the rights of the individual, such as freedom of speech or freedom of faith respected?
The testimony of Socrates and Christ shows no such freedoms existed then. Christianity entered Europe, but no new genetic strains, which produced the medieval and modern concern for the individual soul.
On the other hand, no race of man has more assiduously resisted race mixing than the Japanese, but before exposure to Christendom, they had polygamy, slavery, and totalitarianism just like every other heathen people. They have not interbred with Europeans, but Christian notions of monogamy, voluntary marriage, liberty, equality, and limited government now rule their islands. The ideas did not come to them through an admixture of alien bloodlines containing an alleged monogamy gene.
Examples could be multiplied endlessly.
On the other hand, the counter examples of races who refuse to assimilate and who cannot be Westernized, turn out to be examples of a perversion of some Western notion has gained control of the fundamental assumptions of a diverse group of races, and not an example of a racial identity. Socialism is a perversion of Western political notions even in China, where over forty races live under one. Likewise, Mohammedanism is a perversion of Christianity, where many races from Indochina to the Middle East to Africa, from Cassius Clay to Cat Stevens, are unified by their faith.
The reason why racial identity politics must and will fail in America is that racial identity politics is merely one more simplistic ideology.
Marxism is simplistic: the capitalist is always the devil, and the poor, oppressed prole is always the angel.
Feminism is simplistic: the male is always the devil, the female is the angel, and the lesbian is the archangels.
Social Justice is simplistic: the white man is always the devil, and the black or Hispanic or whathaveyou is always the angel.
The idea of merely swapping the values from positive to negative, and making the whites the angels and the minorities the devils does not eliminate the fundamentally simplistic, stupid, unchristian and un-American nature of the ideology.
Conservativism as it stands now, a worldview based on Anglo-American liberties and duties, Greek philosophy of rationalism, and the Christian view of all men as brothers and all life as worthy of respect, cannot prevail over Leftist totalitarian brain-dead brain-washing ideology, simply because this ideology is a religion, not a political stance. Political theory is derived from cultural values in much the same way that practical engineering and mechanics is derived from science.
You cannot build a practical and working stream-engine while ignoring the gas laws in favor of the theory of Phlogiston. The abstract science defines the practical engineering.
More to the point, old-school conservatives will lose every election from now until Doomsday. You cannot maintain a rightwing political institution in a land dominated by Leftwing culture.
If the news called out by the towncrier, the chatter of celebrities in the public theater, and the games in the public arena, all support Leftwing cultural values, then the sober speeches in the public townhall will mean nothing.
The Right up until now thinks it is rude and divisive to utter serious spiritual truths in public or to base political ends on spiritual reality. They did nothing about Hugh Hefner, nothing about Roe v Wade, nothing about No-Fault-Divorce, and left the Little Sisters of the Poor and Kim Davis to fend for themselves.
They are ashamed to speak the truth, so they meet the lies of the Left with silence. Hence they lose all battles.
Likewise, the newly formed White Identitarian movement as it stands now, an attempt to gin up some of the energy and loyalty of totalitarian ideology and brain-dead identity politics by creating a pro-white identity politics group has a better insight and motive than the puzzled and hapless Conservatives.
The Identitarians are better than the defeatist Conservatives because they, at least, recognize a culture war when they see one, and are willing to fight it.
But Identitarianism loyalty cannot prevail over the Leftwing antichrist cult zeal for the same reason no culture can ever successfully oppose its cult.
The Identitarians accept the Leftwing premise that individual rights mean nothing, that principles mean nothing, and that only race means anything.
This premise leads to the conclusion that the individual means nothing. It leads to the belief that it does not matter whether you are innocent or guilty, only whether you are white or black. It leads to the belief that it does not matter whether you earn your bread or stole it, because all property, and, indeed, all other rights belong to the race.
It leads, in other words, right straight back to the exact spot the pro-White Identitarians and Pro-West patriots claim to be trying to leave: the hellhole of Leftist barbarism, tribalism, collectivism, and cruelty which overswept and conquered all our political and social intuitions.
Leftism is a cult. It is a religion. It is a religion that scorns the idea of monotheism, in favor of worshiping Caesar and Mother Nature.
It is a religion that preaches lust and selfishness, envy and wrath, and the pride of Satan instead of forbidding these things, and its Eucharist is the rite of Abortion.
From lust, we have the sexual revolution. From selfishness, the idea of moral relativism. From envy, socialism. From wrath, riots, race riots, Antifa and Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street.
Leftist allows you to loot, burn, and murder in the name of a good cause. From Satanic pride come all the virtue-signaling and self-esteem and self-righteousness, all the smirking of empty headed dolts congratulating themselves on their wits, moral retards congratulating themselves on their moral superiority, and fools calling themselves wise.
Meanwhile the Identitarian movement is trying to preserve the West, because the Identitarians like the conservative and Christian values and virtues of the West, our decency and freedom, and they do not want their beloved homes and homelands taken away by strangers and sojourners.
This is a noble goal and I endorse it. But what are they up against?
Leftism is powered from the darkest and most tenacious sins in the human soul, and it offers utopia. It makes every minor squabble and kerfuffle into a righteous and noble jihad in the name of social justice.
Leftism offer a meaningless life higher meaning, a lonesome souls companionship with likeminded members of the warren, undue compliments and self esteem, unearned self righteousness, an excuse to carry on with whores and sodomites, an excuse to blame others for all your own shortcomings, an excuse to hate the rich and kill them and take their stuff, and an excuse to burn down black neighborhoods.
Leftism offers freedom from all moral codes, in return for absolute and unwavering loyalty to total falsehoods, deception, and nauseating untruth.
Next to such primordial and powerful governors of the human spirit as lust and envy, wrath and pride, race-loyalty is a dim and distant third influence, provincial and of no account.
The Identitarians think truth is weak and unconvincing. Only rhetoric moves mobs, not reasoning debate. They are ashamed to speak the truth, so they meet the lies of the Left with lies of their own.
Hence they win the loyalty of anyone who likes their lies about Whites being always blameless better than Leftist lies about Whites being always to blame.
But they cannot win the war. They are on the wrong footing, and they brought a pistol to a tank battle.
A correct abstract science cannot be deduced from incorrect theories of metaphysical theories about nature and knowledge. You cannot deny the principle, for example, of empirical observation and the repeatability of results, or any other philosophical principle on which science is based, and then use that as a foundation on which to erect empirical science. The metaphysical philosophy defines the principles of abstract science.
If the news called out by the towncrier, the chatter of celebrities in the public theater, and the games in the public arena, all support pro-White and pro-Western cultural values, but the voice of all the pulpits of the omnipresent Church of Antichrist supported by the Left contradicts them, then the voices of news and celebrities will mean nothing.
You cannot beat a religion with a culture. Culture depends on religion and is derived from it.
In this case, you cannot erect a White culture in a land ruled by the Leftwing Caesar-worshipping religion. Caesar worship requires that the races be divided against each other so that no one group has enough local loyalty to overthrow Caesar.
Aiding the division of the races one against the other in this case only aides Caesar.
Some Alt-Righters have discussed rewriting Christianity to make a heresy that would divest the Church teaching of principles and conclusions inconvenient to racism and collectivism. One even asked me to help write the heresy.
I give the would-be heretics credit for at least realizing what the problem is.
We are fighting a spiritual war, a battle against powers and principalities and unseen, supernatural rulers of this fallen world. You cannot win a spirit war with cultural weapons for the same reason you cannot win a culture war with political weapons.
We are in the last ditch. All the battles are lost, and the war is its last hour. Defeat is that close.
Stop bringing knives to gunfights. Stop bringing pistols to tank battles.
It is time to bring in the nukes.
Answering the lies with silence is the apt reply for the Buddhist who renounces the world. Answering the lies with more lies the apt reply for the pagan, whose cynical and melancholy fatalism knows nothing better. The answer of the Christian martyr, however, is the one answer none can silence.
It is time to bring in the truth.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
