John C. Wright's Journal

A former column lists the nine principles held by all men of good will, for which the Last Crusade takes up the cross.

We hold to the majesty of truth; the impartiality of reason; the objectivity of reality. We believe in the authority of virtue; the verity of beauty; the dignity of man; the equality of the law; the glory of patriots; and all the foregoing we hold steadfastly, for we are fast held in the love of Christ.

In a word, the Crusader stands for truth, reason, sanity; for virtue, beauty, dignity; we revere equal justice under law; we salute the flag and kiss the cross.

All nine principles are necessary to preserve the soul of Western Civilization.

Each of the nine principle is held in dispute or held in contempt by a modern heresy whose names are Legion: postmodernism, socialism, political correctness, social justice, tolerance, diversity, Leftism, Gnosticism, nihilism, untruth, barbarism, identity politics, antilife, Morlockery. Use whatever name fancy suggests, since none fit the truth of the matter.  In this column, it is called only the Enemy, for it has no being in and of itself. It exists only to drain, to hinder, oppose and destroy the host that gives it life.

The Enemy is not merely a political movement, albeit is cloaked as one. It is a world-view; an ersatz religion; a dark dogma that reaches to every aspect of life and makes an absolute demand for absolute conformity. It is like a religion, but opposite to it.

It is an Anti-religion.

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Jonathan del Aroz has done us the honor of adding his own words to the Last Crusade:
http://delarroz.com/?p=605

Last week, I popped into a gas station’s mini-mart and had a short conversation with the employee there. He was a really friendly older gentleman with an accent I couldn’t place, and I didn’t ask where he hailed from. We talked family, work, life, and it came away a positive conversation despite what probably were vast differences between us.

What I thought on the way out of there was, when he asked what was up with me, why didn’t I tell him I was on my way to church?

It’s a subconscious thing, but our society via media, the government, schooling has drilled into us for now 2-3 generations that our faith is something that should not be touched in public, not to be discussed in public, not to be displayed in public. We’re told we will be shunned if we do so, and as a result of that, the culture has self-fulfilled that prophecy by becoming more and more hostile to the concept of faith. I feel like I’m doing something taboo even writing about it here, but after thought and prayer, I feel compelled that it’s more necessary than ever to be discussing the good news.

And it’s so necessary because it DOES feel taboo.

Read the whole thing: Public Displays of Christianity

We are watching the towers of our civilization drowning in a rising tide of madness, and we wonder why none raises any effective dike against this unclean sea.

We should not wonder. As we have seen in prior columns, the enemy of modern Western civilization in general, and of America in particular, is not animating a political movement but a religious one. This movement is called by many names, for one of its successful tactics is forever to change from one deceptive name to another.

It is religious in nature, even though it proposes no worship of God, for the same reason Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism are religious in nature.

Whatever offers an answer to the fundamental questions of human existence, offers meaning and purpose to life, and hope for unity with something higher than the self. It is religious in nature for the same reason Satanism is religious: its ultimate enemy is not America nor even the West in general, but only those parts of Western civilization still loyal to the teachings of the Church.

The movement opposes Christ.

The movement is perfectly content to use Christian notions like compassion for the poor, for example, when it allows the state to overstep its traditional role, and take on the charitable acts which once had been the purview of the Church, and, by making them entitlements rather than charitable, to decrease the charity and goodwill in the world.

The movement is opposed to marriage in its every aspect and dimension, except when it comes to homosexual unions, whereupon the full panoply of Christian rites is demanded, and Christians are the preferred persons to bake the cakes, rent the halls, an take the wedding photos. There is no glee and no glory for the movement to hire Buddhists or Jews to do these things.

The inability of the political Right to halt any of these long, slow, ineluctable attacks should need no further clarification: since the days of David and Goliath we have known it. No one can beat a spiritual enemy with a political weapon. The reach and patience is insufficient. Politicians compromise for the sake of maintaining the worldly order. Prophets do not compromise. Their world is not this world. That is true as well for false prophets as true.

But what religion is it, then?

It is witchcraft. We live in the Kingdom of the Witches.

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Let us say clearly, at the outset, who we are, for what we fight, and in whose name. Let us say what the enemy is, and why he says he fights, and then say why he truly fights.

Who are we?

We are those who accept the fundamental first principles of Western Civilization.

For what do we fight? There are nine points of belief that form the foundations of civilization which are currently being subverted and undermined. To restore and rectify these we take up the cross.

We believe, first, in the majesty of truth; the impartiality of reason; the objectivity of reality. We believe in the authority of virtue; the verity of beauty; the dignity of man; the equality of the law; and the duty of the patriots, as free men, to uphold that law. And we believe in revealed truths too sacred for any law to approach or touch.

Because human dignity belongs to Man by nature, not by grant of law, hence natural also are his sacred rights to life, liberty, and the possession of the fruits of his labor. Sacred also are his duties, oaths, and covenants. We believe it is the sacred duty to enact among men just and equal laws to protect those rights and enforce those duties.

A manmade law purporting to alienate man from his natural rights merely loses its own authority as law.

Hence it is the duty of patriots to love their homes and nations and defend those laws. However, there are things more sacred than law which the law may not overbear, including the sacred duty to love, adore, and serve the Creator whose hand makes all the blessings men know, and man.

In other words, put more simply, we hold that truth is true, reason is reasonable, reality is real, goodness is good, beauty is beautiful, and that man is man. Sacred therefore are the laws that uphold, the flag that protects, and the cross that endows man with life and liberty.

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Be not deceived.  The so-called Culture War has been a disaster for us, a series of failures with only the briefest moments of temporary victory, won at terrible cost.

This is because the war is deeper than any matter of culture. It is an arm of an infinite struggle between angels and fallen angels, fought in every heart, in every nation, every generation.

This generation is hard pressed.

We live in the era of martyrs. More have been murdered for their love of Christ in this century than in all the previous combined, including all the famous persecutions by Stalin, Hitler, Napoleon, Henry, Mohammed, Diocletian, Marcus Aurelius.  Christians in Muslim nations are oppressed, humiliated, harassed, slaughtered, killed, and the churches in America do nothing. The churches in Europe welcome the debasement and destruction at the invader’s hands, in the name of diversity, which, to those churches, is greater than the name of Christ.

And yet his generation encounters a slender ray of sunlight.

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The following is a guest column  on the nature of honor and violence and its place in the Last Crusade. It is by C. J. P. Comstock: 

Honor has been the butt of many jokes and of much unpleasant deconstructionism, a mere cosmetic application they say, for usual porcine behavior. Any modern academic of orthodox type, upon being triggered by awareness of the existence of the concept, would no doubt pronounce it nearly as great an instrument of injustice as ‘religion,’ by which he would mean Christianity.

It is, perhaps, correct that the current fad of political correctness, if allowed to run to its final and bitter end, would end conflict by programming all to believe that the best way to escape the agony of self-triggering awareness of the innumerable hurts nature, or the self-esteem of invertebrates, endure due to their privileged existence – is to embrace euthanasia as soon as possible: peace through extinction.

However, there would inevitably be a few who refused to sacrifice themselves for the betterment of self-righteousness, or certain of the programmers and conditioners would retain some for labor and recreational use, and so the planet still would not be left in sterile peace, and therefore we must look elsewhere for a mechanism to prevent injustice.

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Much of what is said these days, either on politics or on any deep matter, is misunderstood. An unhealthy portion of this misunderstanding is willful, or due to sloth, or haste, or some other form of negligence.

On my part, I wrote a column reporting the observation that Conservatism, being a political stance, could not meet with equal weapons Leftism, being a religious stance, on the grounds that religion is more fundamental than politics and determines it.

Nothing I have written has been misinterpreted so freely.

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One main reason why a Last Crusade must be called is that Conservatism, while perfectly sound when facing Commies in a Cold War, Nazis in a World War, or Slavers in a Civil War, has no defense to offer when the fascistic cultural Marxism seeps peacefully into the ivory tower, the theater, the press, the halls of power.

Imagine, if you will, the current bewilderment of the conservative, the neoconservative, the libertarian, the Whig. They have won every battle and every argument since AD 1776, and always against overwhelming odds. They grew in wisdom and power to the point where putting a man on the moon was possible.

And, as AD 2017 heaves in to view, they have lost everything, including the power to put a man into space.

To visualize this bewilderment, picture the conservative as he stood in AD 1945.

Imagine you are a man who believes with a quiet and steady belief that the laws should be made by an independent parliament, not by the will of a single monarch, or, better yet, by an elected congress with only limited powers.

Why should those powers be limited? Because men are sinful, and not to be trusted with power over those things that each man should and indeed must do for himself. The private things.

What are the private things? They are the things governed by a man’s philosophy, not by his politics. They are the personal and sacred things, the intimate things. They are his worship.

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Thoughts on Beauty

A guest post by Mike McDaniel

Those of us fighting in the Last Crusade (which perhaps should be called the Ultimate Crusade) do battle for Beauty, amongst other things. But what is Beauty?

This question came up recently, and I will do my humble best to address it.

In aviation, we have a saying. “If it looks good, it’ll fly right.” This isn’t always true, as there are airplanes that look good but fly badly, but airplanes that fly well usually look the part. And I think this is as good a starting place as any to define what is Beautiful.

Beautiful things work well.

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At first glance, and, indeed, even after repeated goggle-eyed staring, the idea of the Last Crusade being decreed by private voices seems absurd.

The aim is so ambitious, the battlefield so wide, the issues so dire, and the foe so nigh omnipotent, that this absurdity is either insane or else it is inspired.

A single snowflake that triggers the avalanche is also absurd.

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A thought for today touching the Last Crusade:

There is no man, let him be aware of it or not, who is not a combatant in this hot contest; no one who does not take an active part in the responsibility of the defeat or victory. The prisoner in his chains and the king on his throne, the poor and the rich, the healthy and the infirm, the wise and the ignorant, the captive and the free, the old man and the child, the civilized and the savage, share equally in the combat. Every word that is pronounced, is either inspired by God or by the world, and necessarily proclaims, implicitly or explicitly, but always clearly, the glory of the one or the triumph of the other. In this singular warfare we all fight through forced enlistment; here the system of substitutes or volunteers finds no place. In it is unknown the exception of sex or age; here no attention is paid to him who says, I am the son of a poor widow; nor to the mother of the paralytic, nor to the wife of the cripple. In this warfare all men born of woman are soldiers.

And don’t tell me you don’t wish to fight; for the moment you tell me that, you are already fighting; nor that you don’t know which side to join, for while you are saying that, you have already joined a side; nor that you wish to remain neutral; for while you are thinking to be so, you are so no longer; nor that you want to be indifferent; for I will laugh at you, because on pronouncing that word you have chosen your party. Don’t tire yourself in seeking a place of security against the chances of war, for you tire yourself in vain; that war is extended as far as space, and prolonged through all time. In eternity alone, the country of the just, can you find rest, because there alone there is no combat. But do not imagine, however, that the gates of eternity shall be opened for you, unless you first show the wounds you bear; those gates are only opened for those who gloriously fought here the battles of the Lord, and were, like the Lord, crucified.

– Juan Donoso Cortes, Essays on Catholicism Liberalism and Socialism

One who had volunteered to be a knight in the Last Crusade sends the following meditation on the battle before us. As an homage to one of my books, he places words in the dialog of Gilberec Moth, who is the fictional Last Crusader that inspired the reality which either you and I, dear reader, will bring forth, (or, if we fail, heaven haply will select another to save the people, but it will not go well with us).

Naturally, I have no objection to his borrowing from me, as I have borrowed wholesale from G.K. Chesterton, who introduced the name and purpose of the Last Crusade in a book called THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY. 

I thought the following list of particulars to be an apt introduction to a planned series of columns outlining the need, the philosophy, the vision, and tactics of the Last Crusade.

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We are behind enemy lines. A darkness is haunting the world. The lamps are going out. As the lamps die one by one, the darkness grows. Read the remainder of this entry »