Alone

Only posting a link! Here is an article from Belmont Club:

http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2009/10/26/alone/

A snippet:

What the Left and Fascism share is a belief in the transformative power of the state. Both regard government as the “high ground” of society and not, as some Americans still believe, simply a necessary evil. It is a prize to be seized by main force; the castle to be stormed. In the long run there is little reason to think that Nick Griffin will allow any more freedom than Gordon Brown. What is likely to happen is the substitution of one set of sacred cows for another. When the Left and fascists contend for power, the surveillance cameras are in every case fully employed.
One of the commenters at Chicago Boyz writes, “A friend of mine is a professor of Surgery and Anatomy in London. He has told me he is very concerned about the number of young women converts to Islam who are medical students. These women, like the louts in the Dalrymple books, are not from immigrant families. Why an educated young woman would convert to Islam is a real puzzle. Maybe they are seeking structure but I expect it will come at a high price. The other side of that coin may be the BNP voters.” Maybe this infatuation with Islam should not be surprising: if the central role of the state is accepted, then the only question is what the character of that authority will be: Islamic, Communist or Fascist. When you come to it, who cares? It is the same dog with a different collar. And perhaps the young ladies are simply choosing Islam on the basis of fashion. It’s as good a reason as any.
How does one get away from the dog?
 
Perhaps the greatest service that religion once rendered to Western civilization was providing the individual with a real or imagined hotline to God. Whether this was simply a conceit or not let us set aside for the moment. For as long as man imagined himself to be sacred and accountable to the Creator he stood at the center of polity. The state was there to serve him and not the reverse. Today he has lost that central place and is no more or less than a collection of curiously animated chemical substances with a market value of less then fifty dollars which the state has deigned to keep alive until some bureaucratic panel decides it is too expensive to do so. Just as Global Warming can be understood at one level as an attempt to bring nature into the purview of politics, it is impossible to understand the Left’s fixation with abortion except as a sacramental affirmation of the state’s power over man. The strident insistence on abortion on demand goes way beyond any conceivable need to prevent backroom abortions, or even an affirmation of a woman’s right to choose. It is really an absolute display of the power of politics over life. Abortion’s principal utility is as a stake driven through the heart of the notion of human sacredness, which once performed, ought to prevent its revival entirely.

My comment: the choice in the modern world grows ever narrower and ever more stark. Perhaps in the past one could maintain a position that affirmed human reason and human dignity without any pledge of allegiance Christendom from which those notions uniquely spring. These intermediate positions seem to grow ever more precarious, as they occupy a no man’s land between contending armies of darkness and light, whose ranks are being ordered for final battle. One side upholds the labarum which blazes like a comet’s tail, foretelling the doom of worldly kings; the other side, the black and anarchic banner which bares no charge, no sign, no symbol, for nihilism despises all names. The stark choice, to borrow a phrase from David B. Hart, is between Christ and Nothing.