The Man Who Wouldn't Be President

I am a former National Delegate for Barack Obama. In 2008 I was part of the Idaho Delegation that cast ballots for him in Denver. I was not a race-obsessed “hope and changer”. I did not particularly care that he was going to be the first black president. I had already seen past the white-guilt narrative that we learned in public school. I was however still in the grips of our Western carpe diem ethos, and this focus on personal freedom as the highest virtue led me to support Barack Obama as the candidate most likely to legalize drugs and do other things which would add to our freedom to seek pleasure.In the intervening years my politics have continued to evolve, and instead of watching MSNBC I spend more time on traditionalRIGHT and Radix, and the television has been tossed out.However I did learn a few things during those months in 2007 and 2008, some of which are very useful as the next big presidential race heats up.At the convention I was somewhat dismayed at the blind, communist-rally idolatry I saw. However, as ridiculous as Obama’s “Hope and Change” campaign slogan sounds seven years removed, the convention was genuinely filled with hope. Yes, the hope was misplaced, and many of the people most invested in Obama had entirely wrong and/or shameful ideas, but their hope was sincere, and I saw many people with tears rolling down their faces by the end.The power of grassroots organizing was equally on display. Obama may have had support from corporate shills and the media was certainly in the tank for him, but without the hard work of people on the ground like myself, Obama would not have raked in so many small state caucus delegates and Hilary would have become the nominee. In that alternate reality, McCain would probably have become president (arguably worse than Obama becoming president).This is all very relevant, however, because the current election season is bringing us an even more interesting alternate reality. This involves the candidate who the title of this article is in reference to--Rand Paul. The 2008 election cycle is informative in Senator Paul’s case because he is steadily building a tidal wave of hope, emotion, and commitment to potentially rival Obama’s back in 2008. In the rural small-state environs in which my family lives I end up talking to a wide variety of people--upper class business owners, middle class whites, non-white students, left wing socialists (former hippies), even the Medicaid trailer park population. In each of these groups I have met diligent Rand Paul supporters, and in their eyes gleam the same sparkles that I saw at the 2008 Convention. I am not comparing Senator Paul’s supporters to Obama supporters, obviously many of the Paulites have deep intellectual and policy-based reasons for supporting him and their politics are far different than the Obama supporters. However, the same currents that propelled Obama to the White House are beginning to flow under Rand Paul.My wife is a 26-year-old blonde-haired Texas belle. She attended an Evangelical college in Florida. One might think she would support Texas Governor Rick Perry, or a neo-con Republican like Lindsay Graham, maybe even an Evangelical like Mike Huckabee. However she is a die-hard Rand Paul supporter who has even tried to get me to volunteer to work for him.For myself, I am not too sure if it matters whether Rand Paul or Bernie Sanders or anyone else becomes president. With Paul or Sanders, the economic prescriptions may shift, but the steady slide into multi-or mono-culturalism will continue, as we become increasingly deracinated and consumption-driven. For this reason I am more partial to Jack Donovan’s hopes for Hilary Clinton to become president in order to wake men up to just how much society doesn’t want them, and hopefully usher in the Zombie Apocalypse sooner.However, Rand Paul’s campaign could equally affect such a wake-up call. For if, as I predict, Rand Paul becomes the Republican Nominee, then his chances of becoming president still may not rest on how good of a campaign he runs. If that is what it was based on then I would with confidence go out on a limb and state that Rand Paul will become the next president. The reason he is the “President Who Wouldn’t Be”, however, is because despite the groundswell of support he is beginning to command, despite the intellectual clout which he brings, and the presidential demeanor that he possesses, the changing demographics of America will most likely make it impossible for him to ever ascend to the presidency.Even at this point over a year before the election, the Democrats already have nearly enough electoral votes to win just from the states that always vote Democrat. This speaks to just how heavily the racial/cultural component is at play. A simulation was recently done to predict the outcome of the 2016 election based on such factors. In it, the percentage of each race voting in the 2016 election is comparable to 2012. However, in the simulation, whites vote Democrat/Republican in the same percentages as 2012, in which they heavily supported Mitt Romney. Minorities however vote for the two parties in 2004 percentages, in which George Bush won 4 out of 10 Latinos and became president. Even in this ideal scenario for Republicans, they still lose the White House handily, because the number of minority voters has grown so substantially. Thus a path to victory for Republicans is arguably impossible in 2016.This predicament is not unique to America or the Republican Party. In France, the next presidential election (also in 2016) is the last chance the French voters will have to save themselves from becoming an Islamic nation. By 2022 (the following election) the number of Muslim citizens will have become so large that it will become impossible to govern the country without their support. At that point a political (read: non-violent) solution will no longer be possible, and the only hope for the native Frenchmen will be a long slog into 4th Generation Warfare. For all intents and purposes this is what will happen even if Marine Le Pen and the National Front get elected next year, as France’s Muslims will not lose all the momentum they have gained without a fight.In America we can be thankful that things are not yet as bad as they are there, but still, there is something very distasteful about knowing that one party has potentially achieved a perpetual majority through its efforts at cultivating illegal immigration and racial politics. This was certainly helped by Reagan and the Republican amnesty he approved in the 80’s, which the Republican Party has been increasingly suffering from as a result. But the very ironic component to this is that the Democrats may be sowing the seeds of their destruction just as thoroughly as Reagan and the Republicans did 30 years ago.Latinos in America are not especially liberal people on social policies. Neither are blacks when it comes right down to it. Both groups voted heavily against gay marriage in California, and both groups have relatively high rates of religious belief and conservative values. For right now the blacks and Latinos are happy to vote Democrat; the blacks out of tradition and because of heavy reliance on government programs and the Latinos because the Democrats promise more amnesty for their relatives in the country illegally and over the border. But down the road it is not difficult to imagine a scenario in which both groups begin to vote for parties other than the Democrats.At that stage we may see the breakup of American two-party politics into a menagerie of parties more like in the United Kingdom. In that world the Democratic Party may be reduced to being America’s Labour Party, or worse, America’s Lib-Dem’s. But we as a society will also be reduced to an overall reality more like the UK as well, where political parties fight over the scrap heaps of multiculturalism, and where all mainstream parties are afraid to discuss issues which upset the delicate racial balance (see the 1400 11-16 year old white girls raped by Muslims in Rotherham).Facing such an eventual reality, I am tempted to campaign for one more round of hope and change and go vote for Rand Paul. Rather than toil over a political system on its deathbed, however, I hold out even greater hope that the Zombie Apocalypse is nigh and that our individual actions will once again have consequences--for that is truly where hope and change begins. -Julian Langness is the author of the upcoming memoir Fistfights With Muslims In Europe: One Man’s Journey Through Modernity, Culture, Masculinity, and Violence, coming out in the fall of 2015. To receive excerpts and updates, please email fistfightsbook@gmail.com to be added to Julian’s mailing list.

The Not-So-Dark Ages

The causal modern perception of the Middle Ages is that of an age of superstition, loss of classical learning, and general backwardness. To quote Hegel it was “smells and bells”. This view has been most popularized by Carl Sagan in his smash hit miniseries Cosmos and his book by the same name. The influence of Cosmos can also be seen in the 2009 Agora, about the life of Hypatia. He makes two rather ridiculous claims that undergird this entire anti-Christian fanaticism as it pertains to modern perceptions of the Middle Ages, that (1) the ancient pagans were proto-scientists on the verge of a scientific revolution and (2) that the knowledge-hating and bigoted Christians both burned down the Great Library and murdered Hypatia for their hatred of science, rendering her a martyr. This is absurd and the truth lies beyond the ability of the mentally challenged atheists who followed Carl Sagan. The Library was destroyed and rebuilt many times by Caesar in 48BC, Aurelian in the 270s AD, the Serapium (A temple to the god Seriphus which contained some remnant of the Library, mostly magical texts) in 391 AD by Theodosius, and in 640 by Caliph Omar. Hypatia was the sad victim of late Roman political intrigues and mob violence.The root of this narrative of Christian war against science, in which the Medieval Era is center, is John William Draper’s History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. As lying atheists these men had no compunction in distorting and down right falsifying history. No longer taken seriously by the modern scholarship on the subject we still have legions of braindead atheists and liberals who believe this account to be gospel truth. For a sound scholarly rebuttal of this myth see Jeffrey Burton Russell’s Inventing the Flat Earth.Having cleared the underbrush of atheist calumnies what exactly was the intellectual life of the Medieval era like? In short it was decline, preservation, and discovery. The intellectual life of Europe from about 475 to 1453 can be divided into three broad categories: 475-636, rapid decline; 636-1200, preservation; and 1200-1453, discovery. The intermediate period of preservation would have been impossible without the erudition and scholarship of Irish and Anglo-Saxons in the West and Greek scholars in the East.I chose the first set of dates going from the fall of the Western Roman Empire until the death of Isidore of Seville; the second set of dates stretches from Isidore’s death to the birth of Peter Lombard and the birth of Scholasticism; the final period stretches from the Scholastic era to the mass exodus of Greek scholars to the west beginning the Renaissance.Central to the narrative of the “Dark Ages” is the loss of classical learning that occurred during that period. Yet to blame Christianity for that loss is the height of absurdity, as I will show later; in fact the real source of the loss was the upheavals brought about by Germanic migrations and invasions beginning in 375 AD, with the entrance of the Huns on to the European scene. This narrative is often used as a bludgeon by atheists and liberals to discredit Christianity and as a smokescreen to their questionable treatment of scientists in, for example, the French First Republic and the Soviet Union. Central to the falsity of the narrative is that there never was a 
“Dark Age” in the Eastern Roman Empire. That empire centered in Constantinople lasted for another thousand years and the mass exodus of its scholars after the 1453 sack by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II helped to facilitate the Renaissance. In short there is not even a correlation that Christianity leads to the demise of learning.The rest of this essay will be devoted to giving a brief overview of the intellectual life and contributions of medieval Christendom. It will be divided into two parts: (1) Western Christendom and (2) Eastern Christendom. The importance of Eastern Christendom is seldom acknowledged in the Western Christian context, let alone the secular context, and I believe the Eastern influence was great as well, if not as well known. The second part will be released in another segment.

Western Christendom

The Western Christendom can be traced back to the permanent division of the Roman Empire into East and West by the Emperor Theodosius in 395. Organized around the Roman Imperial diocese, the Western Church developed in a trajectory quite distinct from the East. While both the Eastern and Western Christians were heavily inspired by Plato, the former were more influenced by his mystical philosophy and especially the works of Plotinus, while the West was more influenced by his rational philosophy. This of course is an over-generalization as there were certainly Greek rationalists and Latin mystics, but I believe that the theological and intellectual emphases of East and West conform to the broad counters of rationalism vs mysticism. With the triumph of barbarism in 476 the west dealt with a period of historical trauma of invasion and pillage that did not subside until the middle of the 11th century. In this political power vacuum the Latin Church based in Rome and the Celtic church based in Iona filled the void. These twin Western sources of light were the main reason why not all of classical learning was lost in the West. During the early part of this decline the Irish and Anglo-Saxon church played a dominant role; but as time wore on and the endless repetition of barbarian invasion and destruction was repeated the Latin Church began to supplant the Irish in intellectual endeavors. A proto-renaissance occurred in the late 8th and early 9th century under the Frankish Emperor Charlemange and his resident master scholar Alcuin of York. Viking invasion and legal succession crises terminated this hopeful turn of events. Italy in the 13th century witnessed the birth of Scholasticism, the culmination of the Latin Medieval mind. From Italy this philosophy spread to France, England, Scotland, Flanders, and Germany. Scholasticism in like manner would give birth to modern science in the persons of Roger Bacon and Copernicus to name a few.

Period of Decline 476-636

This period witnessed the birth of Latin Medieval thought's four great Doctors of the Latin Church; Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine of Hippo, and Pope Gregory. No less influential men include St. Patrick, Columba, Columbanus, St. Aiden, Boethius, and the man for which I end this period, Isidore of Seville.Ambrose of Milan is the first in our list of Western thinkers. He is most well-known for his role in converting his more famous pupil St. Augustine to the Christian faith. Yet in his own right he was a man of great erudition and laid the foundation of Medieval music by giving the Western World its first antiphonal psalmody. Ambrose is probably most famous for his courageous stand against Emperor Theodosius I. After Emp. Theodosius sacked Thessalonica and slaughtered 7,000 people as punishment for their uprising, Ambrose was incensed by this outrage and denied the Emperor communion until he performed penance for the act; even to the point of rebuffing Theodosius at the door of his own church as he was about to celebrate mass. The Emperor eventually repented and performed penance for his deeds. Seldom has such courage been shown in the face of absolute power; Ambrose must surely stand as one of the most shining examples of speaking truth to power.Jerome, a contemporary of Ambrose and Augustine was a man of letters, philosopher, theologian, and historian. He is most well-known for his translation of the entire Bible into Latin, the Vulgate. In addition to his efforts at translation he also wrote numerous commentaries on the books of the Bible. Inspired by classical authors like Plutarch and Seutonius, Jerome wrote his De Viris Illustribus which was biographical work covering the great Christians from Peter to his own day.St. Augustine was arguably the greatest mind of his millennium. His work in all aspects of Christian theology, philosophy, rhetoric, and invention of new genres of literature are unrivaled until the Scholastic era. One of the most widely read works of Augustine is his Confessions which was the first autobiography in history. His notion of free will and grace would lead to a rich development of Protestant and Catholic thought and as secularism rendered man in the image of God, influenced atheism as well. His forays into semiotics would later influence the 20th century deconstructionists. His pioneering work on just war, the most extensive revision since Cicero, rings down the ages. The very arguments for and against the 2003 invasion of Iraq would have been inconceivable without Augustine’s contribution to this world of thought. His De Civitate Dei is a tour de force against the contradictions of ancient paganism and one of the most influential history books of all time. His notions of two kingdoms, one heavenly and the other earthy, influenced both Protestants and Catholics and his vision of the heavenly city was eventually secularized in modern socialism and Marxism. His philosophy of mind and the trinity casts a shadow that can still be seen today. For example, Augustine’s elevation of the willing aspect of God’s personality can be seen in the philosophy of Existentialism. For if God is perfected through his gratuitous will, and secular man deifies himself, then man’s greatest form of expression is when his will is also perfected. From Camus to Derrida and everywhere in between we can see the shadow of the Augustine-haunted West.During the Ostrogothic successor to the Western Roman Empire we find a man who bridged ancient and medieval world in the West: Boethius. Boethius’ erudition extends to mathematics, logic, commentary and philosophy. Boethiu’s work in philosophy led to his formulation of the Quadrivium and the Trivium. The former pertains to arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music with the later pertaining to grammar, rhetoric and logic. His efforts at organizing and categorizing already existing disciplines influenced Western education for well over a millennium. Boethius was one of the few men of his time, in the West, who could read Greek. His efforts at translating the classical texts into Latin would be an invaluable foundation for future work.Out of the many Briton, Irish, and Anglo Saxon monks of this period I will mention three: St. Patrick, St. Columba, and St. Aidan. The importance of these men is they transformed the British Isle from a fringe on the Roman Empire/Christendom to the cockpit of learning and science in the West, though that will occur in the second period which I will discuss later.Patrick is famous for his conversion of Ireland, his youthful shenanigans and monkeyshines, and his courage. Patrick was kidnapped as a youth and enslaved by the Irish in the 5th century. His experiences as a slave led him in later years to free slaves and seek to abolish the trade itself. While not a great intellectual, Patrick’s courage and actions laid the foundation for the great flowering of Celtic learning in the 7th, 8th, and 9th centuries.Columba, the son of a nobleman, from an early age was enrolled in the monastic education system, a rich and vibrant network of autonomous schools that studied Greek and Latin and preserved the classical texts. Columba founded the influential monastery at Iona. Iona is famous for its scriptorium which both preserved and produced manuscripts. Some of the most famous manuscripts were the illuminated texts, a famous example being the Book of Kells. Columba spent much of his life converting the Scots and Picts to Christianity from Scotland.St. Aidan, a generation after the death of Columba, reconverted Northumbria to Christianity. He settled in Lindisfarne, a special dispensation from the king. From there Aidan paid for the freedom of slaves, fed the hungry, and built monasteries throughout the region.A short place must be saved for the monastic system and its importance to the Medieval Era. The Monasticism originated in the East with hermits such as St. Anthony. The collections of wandering individuals were later organized into vibrant communities by men such as Pachomius and St. Basil. The first major Western monastic tradition was the Benedictine order. The monastic tradition was dominated by prayer, contemplation, work, service, and study. Men and women had to swear oaths of obedience, poverty, and chastity. The monastic communities themselves were self-governing and a combination of a church, a school, a hospital, agricultural center, and manufacturing center. This is not to say that all monasteries or monastic communities were composed of all these aspects, but these aspects were covered throughout the gamut of the system. The preservation of classical texts and creation of new centers of learning in the darkness brought on by repeated barbarian invasions from the 5th century to the 11th would have been almost impossible, given the absence of any unifying civil authority, to keep the light of learning alive.With this trio of Celtic saints we see the triumph of compassion, love, and the Gospel over barbarism, violence, and hate, the triumph of learning, order, and reason over ignorance, chaos, and superstition. These were truly pivotal years in the development of post-Roman Europe and it is no exaggeration to say with Thomas Cahill that the “Irish Saved Civilization” through their steady and often unrewarded diligence to keep the flame of knowledge lit.The last individual we will cover in this period is the polymath Isidore of Seville. I chose Isidore to end this period with, in part, because he is often termed “last of the ancient scholars.” This is true in the sense that he was one of the last Western Scholars to be proficient in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. Isidore was a man whose accomplishments are so vast and varied that one is at a loss to understand how a man of his caliber could be totally unkown even to most educated people. As a cleric he aided in the conversion of the Visigoths from Arianism to Catholic Christianity, he headed the fourth Council of Seville in 633. As a scholar he wrote the first encyclopedia, the Etymologiae (a compilation of all classical and sacred learning covering knowledge of mathematics, astronomy, mineralogy, zoology, physiology, geography, agriculture, and medicine to name a few). He wrote works on linguistics, Differentiarum libri, on the sciences, De natura rerum, and history, works on theology, De officiis ecclesiasticis and Synonima. The scope and breadth of his learning is astounding and an example of the magnificent culmination of classical and Christian learning in the “not-so-Dark Ages.”

Preservation 636-1200

This period is primarily of interest as covering the Carolingian renaissance a period in the 8th and 9th centuries where the far sighted Charlemagne sought to keep the light of learning alive and rekindle the flame of which more will be said later. The primary center of learning during this time was in the British Isles; first Irish, then Anglo-Saxon converts led the West in intellectual thought, some of whom could still read Greek and their efforts culminated in the aforementioned renaissance. During this period of preservation I will cover four individuals: the Venerable Bede, Alcuin of York, Peter of Pisa, and Johannes Scotus Eriugena.The venerable Bede, a monk from the Monastery of Jarrow, was the first native English historian. His work, the Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum has earned him the title “Father of English History.” He covers the period of Julius Caesar’s invasion of the Isle to his own time. He also wrote textbooks on grammar, De arte metrica, and orthography, De orthographia. He helped popularize in the West, via histories, the principle of dating time anno domini (in the year of our Lord). Bede also contributed to our knowledge of astronomy and time with his De temporum ratione. He was a biographer and poet as well. He was a light shining in the dark after the fall of Rome.Peter of Pisa was an 8th century grammarian who would become Charlemagne’s latin tutor. As well as teaching grammar, Peter also wrote poetry.Alcuin of York was, if you will, the mastermind behind the Carolingian renaissance. He was invited by Charlemagne to join his entourage of scholars such as Peter of Pisa, Paulinus of Aquileia, and Abbot Fulrad. Alcuin personally educated Charlemagne’s sons and sought to curb the rude barbarism of Charlemagne’s faith and his cruel policy toward the Saxons. Through the witness of Alcuin, the “Butcher of the Saxons” responsible for slaying 4,500 of them at Verden in 783, by 797 had rescinded the death penalty for paganism. Alcuin was made head of the palace school from 782-796 with a hiatus in England from 790-93. Under his guidance the Carolingian renaissance flourished. Major advancements in grammar and learning that we take for granted were developed for the first time. Of many firsts was Carolingian miniscule. Carolingian miniscule was a form of script written in small letters, which is the direct forbearer of our modern script. Not only were the letters standardized in size and shape, but spaces between words, punctuation, and capital letters were added. The quadrivium and trivium were standardized and made the basis of education. More books were written and published in this period than in the previous centuries after Rome fell. A migration of Roman art forms to the northern regions of Europe occurred during this period laying the foundation for the later Gothic art to flourish. Musical notation in the West originates in the year 800 as a result of Charlemagne’s attempts to aid French musicians in attaining the Roman standards of music.The 8th century scholar Johannes Scotus Eriugena was known for his questionable theology, his mastery of Greek, translation of the Pseudo-Dionysius and his revival of the dialectic method of inquiry. He was the greatest Western neo-platonic thinker since Augustine.A brief discussion of the renaissance itself I believe is needed. Unlike the secular 16th century renaissance, the Carolingian renaissance was deeply religious and led by clerics. A vast project of collecting texts and organizing them, creating superior translations and correcting errors was an empire-wide task. The classical Latin texts were used primarily for improving one’s Latin to read the Christian texts. Education was a major focus of Charlemagne, though the primary beneficiaries were the clergy. The twin catastrophes of Viking invasions of the British Isles, which destroyed and denuded the intellectual cockpit of Western Europe and the ceaseless fighting between Charlemagne’s heirs led to the gradual failure of the Carolingian renaissance in truly transforming the Western world.The 10th and 11th century French Pope Sylvester II (originally Gerbert d'Aurillac) was a great student of the classics and his scientific and philosophical work helped recovered some of the lost classical knowledge. When Gerbert discovered the Arabic-Hindu numeral system he paired it with the lost technology of Abacus, thereby reintroducing it to Europe. Via his knowledge of Islamic scholars, Gerbert reintroduced the amillary sphere into Western usage. We see that Pope Sylvester’s efforts in the late 10th century helped translate Islamic rediscovery of ancient Greek learning into Western civilization.St. Victor of Hugo, a 12th century Catholic German theologian was an influential individual in laying down the intellectual framework under which modern science would develop. Hugo divided science into three fields: theoretical (mathematics, theology, and mathematics), practical (ethics, economics and politics), and mechanical (carpentry, agriculture and medicine). Hugo’s work of organizing Christian thought in such a way that included the scientific process was of great importance to the development of such thought in the West.

Discovery 1200-1453

By the middle of the eleventh century the conversion of the Norse, Poles, and Magyars coupled with Spanish Reconquista had pushed Europe’s enemies far enough away from the France, Germany, and Italy triangle that the true rebuilding of learning and civilization could be begun. By this time the Moors in Spain had abandoned their crude ways for a more sophisticated way of thinking informed by the discovery of Greek philosophy. Many 11th century geniuses such as Averroes, Avicenna, and Al Gazhali laid a foundation of Aristotelian thought that later passed into Western Europe which in turn help sparked the rise of the Scholastic movement. The Latin Scholastic era is one of the richest in Western intellectual history, but the theological works of these men will not be the subject of this paper, but their philosophical, scientific, and mathematical accomplishments. We shall look at Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Theodoric of Freiberg and Nicholas of Cusa.Robert Grosseteste, the Bishop of Lincoln, is one of the possible contenders for the father of scientific thought, the other being Roger Bacon. Grosseteste invented the notion of a controlled experiment, and though the original method was crude, it was vital and instrumental in the development of future scientific thought. Via Aristotle, Grosseteste developed the notion that through observing nature, one can deduce the laws that govern it. Through his work in optics and study of Boethius, Grosseteste concluded that the highest science was mathematics to which all other sciences were subordinate, a view that would dominate for centuries to come. Grosseteste wrote treatises on optics (De Iride) and light (De Luce) where he outlines a very correct view of the nature of color. It was the rediscovery of Grosseteste’s work that led to the University of Durham Ordered Universe team of scientists and historians to critically evaluate pre-renaissance science admitting it to be more advanced than previously thought.The other contender to being the father of scientific thought is Roger Bacon. The English friar Bacon, much as Grosseteste, wrote extensively on optics. Bacon, indebted to both Grosseteste and Islamic scientists, wrote on eyesight, color, and magnifying glasses. He was an early advocate of calendar reform. He noticed that the Julian calendar had calculated the wrong number of dates in a year, this error over centuries had led to many days being added to the true date. It was not until three centuries later that Bacon’s ideas on the calendar were instituted. Bacon is also the first known Westerner to give the formula for gunpowder. He hypothesized about lighter-than-air dirigibles and actual powered flight. He observed the sun via a pinhole projector. His efforts were invaluable in advancing the frontier of learning.Albert Magnus, famous for his theological and philosophical works, is thought to have been the first individual to isolate the compound arsenic. He reportedly heated arsenic trisulfide with soap and the result was nearly pure arsenic.Theodoric of Freiberg, a 14th century German physicist in his study of optics, correctly described the rainbow. His work De iride et radialibus impressionibus, with use of geometry and the theories of observation, was able to describe both primary and secondary rainbows, the reversal of color in the secondary rainbow, and light paths necessary to form a rainbow. In his study of optics he correctly described the path light takes as it enters a raindrop. To simulate the droplets he made spherical glass globes and filled with water in a flask.The fifteenth century polymath Nicholas of Cusa was renowned in his legal, philosophical, theological, and scientific writings. The subject of this paper will be his scientific work. Cusa argued that the Earth was not the center of the universe and that Earth’s magnetic poles were not fixed. He challenged the Ptolemaic view of the planets and their orbits by claiming that neither were perfect spheres. In manys was his work is a precursor to Copernicus’ work, even though Copernicus was ignorant of Cusa. In medicine Cusa argued that pulses should be counted. Cusa also observed that plants derive nutrients from the air, performed the first biological experiment, and proved that air had weight.

Conclusion

I have attempted in a very general way to describe the one thousand year contributions of Western Christendom. We have covered the last ancients, Augustine, Gregory, and Isidore and their accomplishments including, but not limited to semiotics, history, and the first encyclopedia, and the Irish and Anglo-Saxon monks who preserved the classical texts and led the valiant attempt at a renaissance in the early 9th century. We saw the recovery of Western knowledge and the first steps at laying the foundation for the renaissance with the Scholastics with major advancements in optics and astronomy, with respectable gains in chemistry and medicine as well. Contrary to the Carl Sagan view of history and the Draper-White view also, medieval Western Christendom was a vital and vibrant component of the Western intellectual tradition. They saved the classical texts, and improved upon them laying the foundation for the scientific revolution. We see the same process at work in Copernicus and Galileo. Their efforts would be inconceivable without the thankless work of the previous millennium. Given that this entire essay is a rebuttal of the misconceptions about medieval scholarship spread by atheists, I felt like ending with a brief note on Galileo. The standard story is that Galileo was a plucky scientist who proved the Bible wrong that the Earth was the center of the universe (even though the Bible makes no such claim), and that the Catholic church in its ignorance and superstition persecuted him and forced him to recant. The real story is a little more complicated. Galileo was not the first to propose heliocentrism; earlier Copernicus did the same with far less controversy. The controversy arose in Galileo’s confrontational attitude; he implicitly mocked the Pope in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Galileo also did not help his case by demanding the Catholic Church accept his position as fact when very little experimental evidence existed at that time. The problem of parallax was thought to be an argument against heliocentrism. Parallax is the fact that when you observe an object from two or more different locations it appears to change position. In Galileo’s day the optical instruments were too crude to observe the parallax between the stars, but as optics became more refined later people were able to observe the differences in location of celestial objects. So again the atheist spin doctors got history wrong. Christianity, far from being anti-scientific, is the womb that birthed science in the first place. I will end where Thomas Woods began in his book How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization by quoting Wisdom 12:21: “but thou hast ordered all things in measure, and number, and weight.”

The View From Olympus: ISIS's Culminating Point?

Has ISIS reached its culminating point, the point where a military offensive or a movement (ISIS is both) runs out of gas?ISIS's success in Ramadi and Palmyra seem to suggest the answer is no. On the physical level of war, it is moving from strength to strength. Its defeat in Tikrit was not so much a defeat of ISIS as of the Baath. That was not to our strategic advantage--or would not have been, if we had a strategy--because we should be seeking an alliance with the Baath against the Islamic puritans who front ISIS. That  would be a strategy. But as John Boyd often said, few people in Washington can do more than spell the word. America's "strategy" is bombing.To answer the question, we need to move from the physical level of war to the moral, which Boyd argued was the most powerful level. That is certainly the case with any movement.We also need to factor in the Brinton Thesis, which I have mentioned before in these columns. Created by historian Crane Brinton, whose specialty was the French Revolution, the Brinton Thesis postulates that all revolutions move in an ever—more radical direction in a series of coups leading to the left (left—right is not relevant here; rather, the spectrum is religious-secular). A final coup of Thermidor, the month in the French Revolutionary calendar when that coup occurred, restores the center.So our question becomes more specific: on the moral level of war, is the faction of ISIS which represents the religious puritans reaching its culminating point?That point is currently covered by clouds, so even Olympus must speculate. But some evidence suggests it may be.The first is that the puritans have turned Islam into a cult that demands human sacrifice. I am no friend of Islam, which is a religion of war and always has been (there are peaceful Moslems, such as the Sufi; peace be upon them). But from a religious standpoint, there is a vast difference between war and human sacrifice. The headless corpses that dominate the picture wherever ISIS goes are human sacrifices, no different from those offered to Baal or to the Aztec's Hummingbird Wizard, Huitzilopochtli.Every Moslem knows that Allah is not a god who demands human sacrifices. So ISIS, when it offers them, is offering them to a god who is not Allah. For a religious movement, that creates a problem of legitimacy--the most dangerous weakness such a movement can have on the moral level.Where this may lead is pointed out by the Aztec's example. The reason Cortez won is because all the other indians joined with him against the Aztecs. It seems they had grown tired  of feeding old Huitzilopochtli.ISIS cannot turn off the human sacrifices, because it depends on puritan recruits to fill its fighting ranks. Any move toward moderation, in any form, would make it impure and set the state for another coup leading yet more to the extreme.This points to a second critical vulnerability ISIS has on the moral level. It depends heavily on foreign troops.As we found out in Iraq and Afghanistan, foreigners are not loved in tribal societies. Now, conquest by ISIS means conquest by foreigners. Those foreigners intentionally disrespect many local customs, which they regard as un—Islamic, i.e., impure. ISIS's physical assaults on the monuments to the history of the local peoples is also an affront. The destruction of history we are now likely to witness in Palmyra will not make the locals happy--again, destruction carried out by foreigners.If the United States had a strategy for dealing with ISIS--Republican calls for more direct American military action are equally absent any strategy--it would seek to leverage these vulnerabilties of ISIS on the moral level. It cannot do so directly, because it also has a legitimacy problem in that part of the world. The more directly we act, the more we weaken the parties we are trying to support and buttress ISIS.The most promising strategy is to work behind the scenes to support the Baath against the puritans within ISIS. We might, for example, tell the Baath we would support them in creating a "Sunnistan" out of the remnants of Iraq and Syria. The Baath are the most likely source of the coup of Thermidor, which is what is needed to put an end to Islamic puritanism. That would be our strategic goal, if we had a strategy.As it is, the best we dare hope for is that our mindless bombing does not so strengthen ISIS at the moral level that it overcomes the critical vulnerabilities at that level its own actions are creating. It would be an unpleasant irony if, just as President George W. Bush created ISIS, the U.S. Air Force were to save it.

Paul Gottfried Reviews Victoria

Originally published at VDARE.comWilliam S. Lind is a man of many talents. He’s an institution of the American conservative movement, formerly the Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism of the Free Congress Foundation (under the late Paul Weyrich), a regular contributor to The American Conservative, and a noted military theorist. And now, with the publication of Victoria he is a novelist, putting forward a highly readable vision of the breakup of the United States and a traditionalist restoration. It’s a sign of the times that we can no longer regard such a story as implausible.Victoria is subtitled “A Novel of Fourth Generation Warfare,” and Lind’s writings on warfare bleed (perhaps too much) into his storytelling. His theory of Fourth Generation Warfare contends that warfare has ceased between states with standing armies and operative governments. Instead, it is decentralized, on at least one side, lacking a regular command structure and no longer identified with an established state or regular army. Countries like the U.S. find themselves in partisan struggles around the world that violate the “rules of war” built up under the old European state system.Bill’s ideas about changing forms of warfare may have been influenced by the German political-legal theorist Carl Schmitt, who wrote on partisan warfare after the Second World War. His novel is written under the nom de plume “Thomas Hobbes,” so even in this he reveals his connection to Schmitt, as the German jurist profoundly admired the seventeenth-century Englishman who wrote about the rise of the state [The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, by Carl Schmitt] (I wrote an intellectual biography of Schmitt and also deeply respect the philosopher who wished to protect us against “the war of all against all.”)In Victoria, all Hell breaks loose in a way that Hobbes might have understood. Yet it is only the Time of Tribulations before the golden age of social restoration that ends the novel. Indeed, we are told the ending in advance in the opening scenewhen we learn “The triumph of the Recovery was marked most clearly by the burning of the Episcopal bishop of Maine.”The feminist prelate who was incinerated had placed a statue of the Egyptian goddess Isis on the altar of her church, and her grisly execution was the beginning of rebellion against the central government in Washington, resulting in an independent state of Maine.This Northeastern outpost of “retroculture” eventually builds a coalition, the Northern Confederation, which fights off an invasion by federal forces and hostile multiculturalists. The novel doesn’t disappoint in its depictions of gory details, from Christians of all races crucified by invading Muslims on Boston Common to the revenge of patriots on Leftist tyrannies as the Confederation’s victories mount. The predictable baddies would represent a kind of rogues’ gallery for VDARE.com readers.In fact, Lind never misses his target when he describes his particular enemies, who are exactly what you would expect: Jewish liberals, brain-dead WASP patricians, loud-mouthed feminists, homosexual activists, the Open Borders lobby, and anti-White racial minorities. Most get their comeuppance, many at the hands of the forces under the command of the novel’s hero, Captain John Rumford, formerly of the USMC.Interestingly, the Southern Confederation, which starts out as a pro-Confederate secessionist movement, falls under the control of Yuppified Southerners and Northern transplants as soon as it succeeds in establishing its independence.But our heroes are aided by European conservative allies, such as Russian and German monarchists, who send what they can to the American Right in its battle against the godless American central state. The Left is meanwhile assisted by the UN, which provides whatever aid it can to the American multicultural forces. Thus Lind’s imaginary confrontation seems to be taken from the situation in the Spanish Civil War, when the Left and Right outside Spain took sides on the basis of ideological predisposition. Here too the struggle between Left and Right quickly assumes an international dimension.A scene near the conclusion features Christian churches joining together to declare a crusade against the Islamic peril, possibly an ode to the flamboyant playof the French nationalist and conservative Catholic Paul Claudel, Le Soulier de Satin. At the end of the Claudel’s play, church bells in seventeenth-century Spain are pealing in recognition of the victory of Christian Europe against the Turks in the sea battle of Lepanto (1571). The Don John of Austria at Lepanto is replaced here by the former jarhead Rumford, a kind of modern crusader who leads a religiously sanctioned struggle against the new Muslim enemy of Christian Europe.Perhaps as a sop to WASPs, Victoria ends with a tribute to “England’s longest reigning monarch, Good Queen Victoria.” A return to Victoria’s age and culture had become part of the “new Zeitgeist.” “The Frankfurt School was history, and with its game out in the open, no one fell for it any more, not even academics.”Of course, in an earlier scene that is my favorite moment in the novel, all the participants at a gathering of Leftist professors at Dartmouth have been summarily shot dead.Here I must point out one disagreement with Lind. We have strenuously debated the question of whether the social Leftism often termed “Cultural Marxism” is truly derived from a Marxist or Marxist Leninist worldview. Put quite simply: Bill thinks it is; I don’t.Related to this dispute is the question of where exactly this body of ideas and social prescriptions comes from. As you can see in the novel, Lind sees them mostly as the product of the Institute for Social Research, a think-tank that was founded in interwar Frankfurt by mostly Jewish, self-described Marxists. In contrast, I stress the acquired American identity of the “Cultural Marxists.”Perhaps Lind considers it unpatriotic on my part to see something that both of us deem obnoxious as being part of an American political legacy. Yet when I see James Kirchick, John Podhoretz and others I’d characterize as neoconservativestell us that gay marriage has become integral to Western identity, and, furthermore, that we must fight Vladimir Putin as an enemy of the “Western” tradition of gay rights, they are not really echoing German refugees of the 1930s. They are sounding fashionably American. The Frankfurt School, never to my knowledge, advocated “gay marriage” or countries with virtually open borders. American political and media elites borrowed selectively European antifascist ideas and then transformed them into an expanded concept of American pluralistic democracy.Moreover, unlike the original Cultural Marxists, their American successors are not socialists. They are friends of Wall Street and multinational corporations who have turned a now mainstreamed cultural radicalism into an American imperial mission. Hillary Clinton runs to do favors for big business in return for payoffs, while proclaiming in that Christian churches that do not accept gay marriage will have to be forced to change their “religious beliefs.” [Hillary Clinton: ‘Religious beliefs’ against abortion ‘have to be changed’, by Ben Johnson, LifeSiteNews, April 24, 2015]But is Lind’s larger scenario that implausible? It is a reasonable assumption that we could see a major collapse of the system. After all, our centralized state is highly pressured by government bureaucrats, aggrieved minorities and swarms of illegals. In Lind’s novel, as soon as the central administration in Washington ceases to keep order, various centrifugal forces surface and assert themselves.But in Victoria, the regular armed forces are overwhelmed by the operation of Bill’s “Fourth-Generation Warfare” and soldiers from all over the place eagerly defect. In the real America, the military would pound the rebels into oblivion and Fox and MSNBC would explain how we had averted a racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic takeover.However, if there were indeed a crisis, we could see secessionists or decentralists move toward a gradual, inconspicuous transfer of power. That would have to occur behind the scenes without risking a military confrontation between dramatically uneven sides.And history has a way of moving more quickly than people expect—something Lind clearly understands. At the beginning of the novel, Rumford and the other protagonists express loyalty to the Union, but only fifty pages later they are working to dissolve it. Not so absurd when one remembers that as late asChristmas, 1775, George Washington was toasting the English monarch. Not long after he’d be leading armed forces against His Majesty’s Government.Because it brings such parallels to mind, Victoria, like most everything by William S. Lind, is well worth the read.

The View From Olympus: Lessons Learned?

I recently received a copy of a brilliant after-action report, written by a Marine company commander and based on the lessons his company learned in Afghanistan. I will not name him here, because in the U.S. military no intellectual attainment goes unpunished. But he is clearly a serious student of military theory, especially Col. John Boyd's work, his understanding of which goes far beyond the usual OODA Loop. His report tells of something; rare and of great value, namely how he successfully translated theory into actions and results.He wrote his report as part of the Marine Corps Lessons Learned Program. But the name of that program raises an interesting question: have we actually learned any lessons from our defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan?The answer is clearly yes at the level of procedures and techniques. The U.S. armed forces have large bureaucracies and ranks of overpaid contractors endlessly churning new procedures and techniques. The best almost always come not top-down but bottom-up, as discoveries made by sergeants and lieutenants in direct contact with the enemy. Sometimes those are embraced by the larger service, but in general they prefer those which come top-down, both for budgetary and cultural reasons.But this focus on procedures and techniques is itse1f a warning sign that we are dealing with a Second Generation military. Both the First and the Second Generation seek to turn everything into procedures and techniques, which are taught, learned, and applied by rote. Too often, one result is that tactics are subsumed by procedures and techniques, as is evident in the U.S. military's frequent reference to “TTPs", i.e., Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures. Tactics done by rote are predictable, and a thinking enemy quickly learns how to negate them and turn them to his advantage.If we ask whether any lessons in tactics have been learned from our defeats, the general answer seems to be no. For the most part, our infantry has one tactic: bump into the enemy and call for fire. The resulting firestorm, often delivered by aircraft, may kill some enemy but also moves us closer to defeat at the moral level, where in the end Goliath always loses.The Marine captain's after-action report shows how lessons in tactics should be learned. Drawing from Boyd's three levels of war, physical, mental, and moral, he writes:

Mental isolation occurs when the insurgent fails to discern, perceive, or make sense out of what's going on around them. We were able to accomplish this by presenting them with ambiguous, deceptive, or novel situations, we well as by operating at a tempo and rhythm they can neither make out nor keep up with. During Operation . . . we conducted a night time heliborne multi-point infiltration of . . . using 16 different maneuver elements——all operating decentralized and along different avenues of approach; each going after a specific center of gravity. . . we changed the color of our utilities randomly . . . often patrolling with a hodgepodge of color schemes. This gave off the appearance that multiple "different" units were constantly operating in the area . . . We altered our patrol times, routes, durations, and missions constantly. . . Each entity was further broken down into multiple satellite units; each able to zigzag, double-back, revolve, and execute the swinging gate in support of the main effort . . .

The value here comes from the fact that the captain is describing applied theory. Other commanders can learn new tactics not by copying his, but by applying the same theory, John Boyd's, to their unique situations. This is what maneuverists mean when we say tactics is not what to do but how to think.At the operational and strategic levels, it is safe to say we have learned nothing. The central operational lesson is that neither the U.S. nor any other state has so far figured out how to generate operational success in 4GW, i.e., how to connect tactical successes to strategic victory. Had we learned this lesson, we would now see the U.S. armed forces engaging in a massive intellectual effort to answer that question. In fact, only the K.u.K. Austro-Hungarian Marine Corps has attempted to do so in a series of Field Manuals available here. From the Americans, the silence is deafening.The central operational lesson points to the central strategic lesson: don't engage in wars we don't know how to win. President Obama seems to have learned that lesson, but that makes him an exception in Washington, where both neo-cons and neo-libs pant for more wars against ISIS and other Fourth Generation entities. It is as if France, after 1940, had sought more opponents with tank armies to go up against (or around) the Maginot Line.

A Critical Evaluation of the New Right

The New Right has shown itself to be utterly incapable of organizing itself into any meaningful cultural force. A series of recent brouhahas (the RooshV-Krauser affair; the Aurini-Owen “breakup”, revelations that certain high-profile individuals were hiding their homosexual dispositions, etc.) proves that things are generally a train wreck. In the five years or so that the New Right has been active it has accomplished relatively nothing. I shall look at the individual components of the New Right and explain their fatal flaws and the solution to these options.The New Right, broadly speaking, can be divided into four groups: (1) the Dark Enlightenment (DE)/Neo-Reaction, (2) the Manosphere, (3) the White Nationalists (WN), and (4) miscellaneous.The Dark Enlightenment, an eclectic group of individuals ranging from race realists, to men’s rights advocates, to traditionalist, to transhumanists, to atheists, to nationalists, is concerned with primarily racial, sexual, and intellectual differences between people. The first problem we see with the movement is that it is all over the place. There are so many divergent interests and people that they cannot long cohere together. The perennial problem of ego wars hampers the movement, even though it is less severe than in the WN movement . Given the recent outing of undesirables it seems that the DE is composed of people of questionable character and calls into question the ability of the movement to operate for specific goals. The DE is better known for what it is against than what it is for. With the failure to engage in quality control and define itself in terms of what it is for, we should not expect much to come from the DE.The Manosphere is largely inhabited by disgruntled males who feel that modern liberalism has shafted them. About all they stand for is getting laid and maybe building self-esteem. They are riven by personality feuds as was seen in the RooshV-Krauser debacle as well as pretentious peacocks bragging of their alleged sexual conquests. The most obvious problem with this movement is that wet pants do not a revolution make; this tendency is summarized in their slogan “Enjoy the decline”. The problem is amorous deviancy and elevating it to the summum bonum or your life is merely falling into the roles programmed for you by the Kinsean and Reich controllers. If that is you, then you are the problem.The White Nationalists basically stand for a whites only society. They are also riven with ego wars, and are constitutionally incapable of anything more serious than sign waving protests and conferences. Greg Johnson at Counter-Currents seems to be one of the leading voices of this movement. Matt Heimbach at Tradyouth is another vocal exponent of said doctrines. The most glaring and obvious flaw in the movement is that despite all their harping about White Genocide and the need for more white babies, they are nearly all unattached, or if attached, are frequent users of family planning materials, as shown by their lack of children. So white people are dying and you don’t have any kids? That makes sense. This contradiction can be seen in Matt Parrott’s essay “Where The White Women At?”We see that he basically makes the calculation that it is more expedient for white people to be politically active and remain single than to form families and have children; ostensibly because white women are so dysfunctional. While I agree with Mr. Parrott on his Christian defense of celibacy, I assumed such a calling was for a life of prayer, contemplation, and good works, not street activism. Maybe the WN’s should take a page out of the Christian Patriarchy movement and have large families IN ORDER TO WIN POLITICAL CONTROL. This persistent childlessness is the major reason why the WNs should not be taken seriously. If extinction is the problem, procreation is the answer, something most WNs don’t seem to get.Miscellaneous refers to individuals who do not fit nicely in any one group. Jack Donovan is the premier representative of this group. Jack has affiliations with the DE, the Manosphere, and WNs. The real joke is that Jack is a spokesman for the New Right. Being an open homosexual, is it not ironic that people who bemoan the death of white people or the loss of traditional values turn to an agent of destruction such as Mr. Donovan? Really, sodomy is going to solve anything? Most of the miscellaneous share the same pathologies as the others. Instead of combining ideas to become a fasces, they have created a Frankenstein.Clearly western civilization is dying. The next question is why is it dying? I will let Solzhenitsyn answer this one:

More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.Since then I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.

Indeed, the godless French Revolution laid the foundations for this catastrophe. If we look at Europe in 1750 we saw a continent that (1) was racially homogenous, (2) had strong traditional values, and (3) was the intellectual cockpit of the world. It would seem all the elements of the New Right should be happy. Yet the traditional order of the Ancient Regime can be summarized in the Vichy French Motto: Travail, Famille, Patrie, or faith, family, fatherland. The traditionalist view of Faith and Family produced the flowering of European culture in the 1500 years of Christendom, only to die in the mud and blood of WW1. Any new political order must recognize the centrality of family and faith. Any collaboration with cultural Bolsheviks who advocate sodomy, fornication, drug use, and transhumanism should be shunned as unnatural and harmful. Men and women need to return to their savior, Jesus Christ, and beg His forgiveness in order to move forward. We need to move away from these sterile pretentious man-children and their incessant ego wars and return to a traditional view of life rooted in the Christian history of the West, while remembering that social activism is not a substitute for prayer, contemplation, and the performance of good works. Rather than embracing the sterile life of egoism, cheap sex, and intellectual posturing, a robust traditionalist movement needs selflessness, commitment, and integrity. We need men like Patrick and Benedict to restore the flagging fortunes of the West, as they did 1500 years ago.

Glass Beads and Tradition

When one thinks of exponents of big-T Tradition, Hermann Hesse would not usually be near the top of the list of those suggested. To the extent that he is known among readers, it is usually for his more “esoteric” novels such as Steppenwolf and Siddhartha, which became popular among the counterculture of the 1960s for their exploration of sex, drugs, and Eastern mysticism, and which continue to find popularity among imitators today. Yet, in his novel The Glass Bead Game (Das Glasperlenspiel in the original German, often entitled for English readers as Magister Ludi or Master of the Game), Hesse has presented us with a Western world in which Tradition has triumphed.The reader is never given a specific date, but contextual clues within the text seem to suggest that the Glass Bead Game takes place sometime in the 25^th century in Castalia, a fictional yet obviously Germano-Italic region in central Europe. The protagonist of this work is Joseph Knecht, a man who lived roughly two centuries before and about whom a legendary, indeed nearly hagiographic, tradition has grown.But first, the world of Castalia. Castalia – called a “province,” though to what extent this is geographical rather than organizational is never made clear – is a Traditional society. It is a static world, though not necessarily in stasis, one in which the exuberant growth and obsession with change for its own sake that plagues so much of the West today are absent. This is not to say that it is backwards or non-technological; trains, radio, newspapers, automobiles – all the trappings of the late industrial age society in which Hesse lived are all present. Universities still teach students, preparing them for careers in industry, business, or politics. Yet, the world of Castalia is one in which knowledge is viewed not in an extrapolating sense, but as something to be consolidated and interpolated – scholarly exploration involves the working out more fully of principles and homologies among various branches of knowledge. Indeed, this is the point to the titular game over which Joseph Knecht eventually became the Master.The mindset of Castalian society, especially in the slice we see represented by the “Mandarins” (the body of academics, for lack of a better word, who make up the Magisterium) is one that is quite foreign to the post-Enlightenment Western society of today. This is viewed as a good thing by the men of this future age. Indeed, our present age is looked back upon with disdain. It is referred to as “the Age of the Feuilliton,” as being characterized by an unserious, flippant attitude befitting the sort of inconsequential literature that focuses upon trivialities like fashion and personalities. At one point, the narrator relating to us the life of Knecht informs us that while in the past (our present), biographers would focus upon the quirks of personality that are prized today for making someone an “individual,” in Castalia’s age, a man is not considered worthy of biographical fame until he has proven that he can transcend his own “uniqueness” and “achieve the greatest possible integration into the generalities.” The sort of “individuality” that is prized in America today and exemplified by our “reality” television programs and obsession with sports, fashion, and other routes of “individual expression” (as well as by the increasingly socially liberal and libertarian politics of even the “conservatives”) would have no appeal to Castalians.Another thing that sets Castalian society apart from our own is its peacefulness. The Europe of this future age does not see war, something which is contrasted with our own age and its “Century of Wars” – yet another reason why our present century is viewed negatively (indeed, it is implied that the crises generated by our century eventually led Western man to throw his hands up in despair, and led to the Traditional world). This peacefulness comes from the Traditional aspect of this society – ideology, in the sense of being theoretical ideas which nevertheless motivate masses of men to kill each other in large numbers, is patently absent. One character, reflecting back on our age, refers to an “obscure sect of economists.” It’s unclear if he means the Marxists or the Capitalists, but it doesn’t really matter. The gross ideology of forming a “sect” around an economic idea is simply incomprehensible to them. Not just that they disagree with the idea, but that they don’t even understand how it could happen in the first place. Castalia is a world whose trajectory neatly departed from the eschatologies both of Marxism and of Fukuyaman-style liberal capitalism’s “end of history.” Castalia is a world at peace much because it is a world not constantly roiled with a new idea each year that absolutely must be implemented onto society immediately. Neo-conservatives would be most unhappy in Castalia.The glass bead game – the game itself as presented in the book – is really not a “game” in our sense of the word. It is, indeed, viewed as being the supreme intellectual endeavor in that age, and is treated with the reverence and devotion that professional sports are today. Matches and tournaments are televised, and there are intricate rules that determine the subjects to be used within the process of the game. Expert players are the closest thing to celebrities you will find in Castalia. While the mechanics are never fully explained, the general gist of the game is that the players seek to find, build, and extend correspondences and relationships between various branches of knowledge. In this game, it is conceivable that an expert player could delve out a harmonious relationship between a principle of quantum mechanics, the structure of a movement from one of Bach’s symphonies, and a mathematical formula governing the shape of a plant’s leaves. The approach to knowledge is intensive and introspective. This Traditional world has left off growth and expansion and the uncertainties that come with these, and has moved into a consolidating phase that does not reject the knowledge already gained, but rather seeks to explore it to its uttermost and organize it into a truly cohesive whole, matching the coherence of their post-“modern” (in our meaning) Traditional society.The story is presented as a biography, and the “hero” (thought this term carries too much baggage to be genuinely accurate) of this story is Joseph Knecht. Orphaned at an early age, Knecht – whose intelligence and capabilities were quickly recognized – was brought into the Castalian system and trained to be a “Mandarin,” the monastic body of Game players and academics who oversee the education of Castalian society. The book traces Knecht’s rise through the ranks, his procession from one point of growth to the next. Thus, it qualifies as a Bildungsroman of the finest type. Knecht eventually rises to the post of Magister Ludi – the Master of the Game, the one who oversees it all. As such, he is perhaps the single most respected member of Castalian society. And then he resigns from it all, a move as shocking as if the entire US government today were simply to resign en masse.What makes the story so compelling, from a Traditional point of view, is the nature of Knecht’s growth, and why he eventually resigned his post, and left the Castalian establishment entirely. Unlike the ideas of “personal growth” so popular today, in which the individual is encouraged to “search within himself” and find out wonderfully unique things that make him so “special” as he flits from one novelty to the next, Knecht’s growth comes through his realization of his place in his society – not to be viewed negatively as stifling or “communist” – and of his own service to its maintenance and stability (significantly, “Knecht” means “servant”). He resigned from his position as Magister Ludi not because he wanted to “try new things” or from dissatisfaction because of some lack of personal “fulfillment.” Indeed, it was just the opposite – he had reached a point where he had fulfilled his role as far as he could. There was nothing left for him to do. His life’s work, we might say, was completed. It is significant that not long after his resignation, and the first day after taking on work as the private tutor for the spoiled brat son of a close friend, Knecht passed from this earth. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.In Castalian society, we can see a world in which the precariousness of novelty does not hold sway over the hearts and minds of men. Man finds his place in the world, and seeks to fit in harmoniously, rather than trying to create for himself every angle and spike with which to jut out from the rest and draw attention to himself. It is not incidental that one point of Joseph Knecht’s growth and learning involves studying under a former Castalian master who exhibited very Sinicizing tendencies. The Traditional world of the West has much in common – more than many of today’s Neo-Cons would be comfortable admitting – with the traditional Confucian world of China during the Ming and early Ch’ing dynasties. It was Confucius who said, “If a man keeps cherishing his old knowledge, so as continually to be acquiring new, he may be a teacher of others.” The Traditional world is one in which “the names have been rectified,” so to speak, a society which is honest with itself and true to its foundations. It can teach us many things, if we will listen.

Grasping Neutrality

When I agree with someone on a political issue and I see him getting a bit carried away with his rhetoric, it’s easy to overlook. But when I disagree with someone on an issue, especially when we have essentially opposite opinions on a heated emotional issue, excesses of rhetoric really rub me the wrong way. After a while of dealing with it, poor argumentation starts to grate. Rational adults should be able to discuss an issue reasonably and dispassionately without resorting to illogic and ad hominem.I consider myself very conservative, therefore I generally agree with my fellow conservatives. When I disagree with them it is often over degree, not direction. However, I have long been a noninterventionist conservative on foreign policy, and thus I frequently find myself at odds with my fellow conservatives when it comes to geopolitics. For the record, I don’t concede that there is anything conservative about interventionism, but that is for a different essay.This has definitely been the case of late with the rise of ISIS, the negotiations with Iran, and the Netanyahu visit. For now, I’ll confine my observations to Iran, about which I have recently found myself engaged in several heated exchanges in various venues with people I likely generally agree with on most issues.It is one thing to have a difference of opinion on a matter. It is also possible for people to disagree about the facts related to an issue, or to have a different take on facts that are agreed upon. It is another thing, however, to engage in bad argumentation. An argument is wrong when it gets the facts wrong, is inaccurate, or incorrect. An argument that employs bad argumentation is a bad argument, regardless of all else.So, for example, I believe the U.S. should be neutral on the question of Irish unification. It’s not our problem. It’s not our concern. That does not, however, mean that I must hate Irish Catholics or that I am a shill for the Brits. As a Protestant I have certain sympathies, but I don’t think my sympathies should translate into official U.S. policy. But outside of certain circles, my advocacy of neutrality on the matter of Irish unification would not provoke those sorts of inflammatory charges. That the US should be neutral on a matter that is between two other countries likely strikes most people as common sense.Take, however, the very analogous situation of Israel and the Palestinians and the broader relation of Israel to her Middle East neighbors. There my fellow noninterventionists and I also recommend the common sense position of US neutrality and disengagement, but the mere suggestion of this in the ongoing debate over Iran is very likely to brings immediate charges that the advocate of neutrality must hate Israel, love "Muzzies”, and is probably an “anti-Semite”. This is flawed logic. The conclusion is unwarranted because the premise is flawed. Of course someone recommending neutrality could in fact hate Israel, love Muslims, and be an anti-Semite, but these conclusions are not necessarily true and cannot be drawn simply from the advocacy of a particular policy position.Daily I see on Facebook, or in my inbox, or in headlines at supposedly conservative websites that Obama must be a closeted Muslim who hates Israel and the U.S. and wants to see both destroyed because he is trying to reach a deal with Iran. I am no apologist for Obama who has been way too interventionist for my taste, and I don’t concede the legitimacy of the negotiations to begin with. I’m not sure how one sovereign nation with nuclear weapons and nuclear energy gets to tell another sovereign nation that they can’t have either, nor do I have any desire for the U.S. to play the role of global gun controller. That said, it is conceivable that Obama really thinks a deal with Iran is in the best interests of the U.S., as do most respondents to opinion surveys, and that he isn’t really a secret Muslim who hates Israel. These absurdly over-the-top declarations are unworthy of rational adults and mark the people who repeat them as intellectually unserious. I sure hope my fellow conservatives aren’t equally as irrational when they argue for tax and spending cuts, on which we agree.No self-respecting conservative would tolerate without objection the charge from politically correct liberals that advocating the abolition of affirmative action and quotas means one hates minorities and must be a racist. Nor would they tolerate without objection the similar charge from like quarters that disputing the often repeated statistics with regard to sexual assaults on campus must mean one supports “rape culture”. But in both cases the liberal is making the same logically flawed argument that interventionists make when they definitively ascribe a certain mindset to a political or cultural opinion. If they can’t see this, they are either dense or aren’t thinking about it hard enough.The hysteria related to the call for U.S. neutrality in the Middle East vs. the lack of hysteria related to the call for neutrality on Irish reunification (outside certain small circles) is clearly a reflection of the emotional investment of said hysterics in maintaining our current posture that is anything but neutral, rational, objective analysis of the issue. Interventionists should cite facts, challenge assertions, and dispute opinions. This is what debate is. But please spare me the flawed logic and ad hominem that so characterizes the debate today. It does not reflect well on your side.

The View From Olympus: They Just Don't Get It

Two articles in the April 25 New York Times well illustrated the degree to which states just don't get Fourth Generation war. The first was the lead story that day, titled "Despite Errors, Drones Decimate Weakened Qaeda":

Revelations of new high-level losses among Al Qaeda's top leadership in Pakistan's tribal belt have underscored how years of American drone strikes have diminished and dispersed the militant group's upper ranks and forced them to cede prominence and influence to more aggressive offshoots in Yemen and Somalia.

This "success story" is part of a broad PR offensive now underway to justify and ensure continuance of the drone strike program. But looked at through the lens of 4GW, there is no success, and the wisdom of the drone strike program is very much open to question.Congratulating ourselves that al Qaeda's leadership in Pakistan has been "decimated" is like cheering because, in an effort to pick up mercury, we have turned one big blob into lots of littles ones. More, it shows a focus on al Qaeda that is wholly unjustified. As we see with the rise of ISIS, if all the leadership of al Qaeda in Pakistan dropped dead tomorrow, nothing would change but some nomenclature.Al Qaeda in Pakistan has largely been rendered irrelevant by the continued march of the Brinton Thesis, a chain of coups d'etat ever more to the extreme until all is brougt back to the center by the coup of Thermidor. (It is no coincidence that my picture on traditionalRIGHT shows me digging into a plate of lobster Thermidor.) In effect, the Jacobins are now in power in Islamic 4GW and al Qaeda is the Montagne, yesterdays's news. Washington, it seems, reads only the news of the day before yesterday.As to the drone program as a whole, it, along with airstrikes from manned aircraft, are one of our enemies' top recruiting devices. When you circle endlessly over your opponent, now and then letting loose a missile or a bomb, you hurt him physically, you may scare him mentally, but morally you enrage him to the point where he will do anything to get back at you. The drone brings forth its low-tech equivalent, the suicide bomber. Which is more effective?Here we see one of the most important aspects of 4GW that states apparently cannot get, namely that, as John Boyd argued, the physical level of war is the weakest, the mental level (the key to 3GW) is in the middle, and the moral level of war is the most powerful. Drones and airstrikes win at the physical level at the expense of losing at the moral level. Which means, in the end, states usually lose Fourth Generation wars.The other piece in the April 25 Times says it all in the headlines: "Migration Crisis Facing Europe Cannot be Solved at Sea, Analysts Say". As usual, the analysts are wrong. The problem of illegal migration across the Mediterranean, which is a 4GW invasion of the Western heartland, can easily be solved at sea. When the migrants arrive, usually in Italy, you corral them, hold them until you've got enough, then sail them back to what was Libya. If one of the pretend governments of Libya objects, the Italian Navy has a good amphibious capability. The San Marco land and make a beachhead, the would-be migrants are deposited on it, and the Italian forces withdraw. Militarily, it's a piece of cake, though Italy would need the EU to foot the bill. The cost to Europe would be trivial compared to the bill for accepting hundreds of thousands of people who will never acculturate.Here we see the state failing at both the physical and the moral levels of war. It refuses the easy physical solution, shipping them back, because cultural Marxism has emasculated Europe's leadership morally. All you have to do is show some pictures of poor, weeping "victims" and Europe's elites melt into a pool of blubber. No matter that some of those same "victims" will be supporting jihad on European soil once they move in (Restricting refugees admitted to Europe to Christians would help, but political correctness outlaws that too.)When generations of war change, entities that don't get it disappear. The U.S. and European states don't get it. Ergo...

The View from Olympus: The Murder of Christendom

Three recent articles in The New York Times, when read in succession, tersely summarize the murder of Western, Christian civilization.The first, in the Sunday, April 19 New York Times Magazine, "Why Do They Go?" by Mary Anne Weaver, points directly to the essence of Fourth Generation war, the transfer of primary loyalties away from the state. After noting that foreigners make up half of ISIS's forces, it reports that:

"An estimated 4,000 are from Western nations, some 600 to 700 from Britain alone. More British Muslim men have joined ISIS and the Nusra Front than are serving in the British armed forces."

The second article, on the front page of the Saturday, April 18 Times, is titled "Tide of Refugees, but the West Isn't Welcoming." This is the cultural Marxists' prescription for dealing with the Fourth Generation threat Islamic immigrants pose to Western nations: bring in more Islamics. If your goal is to destroy Western, Christian civilization, that makes perfect sense.But the cultural Marxists face a growing problem: native Westerners are beginning to resist flooding their countries with people who want to wage holy war, jihad, against them. What are the cultural Marxists to do? Outlaw any discussion of the danger. The same April 19 Times printed on page A10 a piece titled, "France Announces Plan to Fight Racism." It quotes French Prime Minister Manuel Valls as saying,

"Racism, anti-Semitism, hatred of Muslims, of foreigners and homophobia are increasing in an intolerable manner in our country."

He also announced a 100 million Euro plan to fight "racism", a plan that will include "increased monitoring of online hate speech."A few facts are helpful to see what is going on here. French anti-Semitism is coming mostly from Islamics who are residents of France, many nominally French citizens. But that may not be what Monsieur Valls means by "increasing in an intolerable manner". Instead, he is referring to the fact that more and more Frenchmen are voting for the National Front, France's only hope of remaining France.  (In cultural Marxism, ideology trumps democracy; the rabble may not vote to overturn the work of the Vanguard of the cultural Proletariat.) And in cultural Marxism's lexicon, "hate speech" is any speech that defies cultural Marxism, or worse, exposes it for what it is and reveals its goal, the murder of Christendom.Here we see clearly how one hand washes the other. Cultural Marxism despises Islam because it hates all religious faith. The Islamics, in turn, would behead the cultural Marxists even before they could offer Christians the usual choice of conversion or the sword. But each thinks it can use the other to destroy the common enemy, Christianity. The Islamics in Western countries hide behind the shield of "racism," while the cultural Marxists use the Islamics to generate Fourth Generation war, both in the Middle East and in Western countries. It makes the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact look almost innocent.Meanwhile, thousands upon thousands of Islamics are streaming across the Mediterranean into Europe, offering the cultural Marxists a growing supply of foot troops. The European political Establishment, instead of calling out Europe's otherwise useless navies to protect its coasts, wrings its hands that some of the invaders are dying. The banners that conquered at Lepanto are handed to the Fourth Generation Islamic invaders to use as toilet paper.

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Cultural Marxism Takes the Offensive

After a period of quiescence, cultural Marxism is again on the attack. It is advancing on at least three fronts: racial, sexual, and religious. In every case, its target is Marcuse's hated "reality principle", which is to say everything that enables society to function. As the cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt School repeatedly stated, their ideology's goal is "negation", i.e., bringing everything down. The farther society can be pushed away from reality, the greater the dimensions of its collapse.On the racial front, the cultural Marxists are trying to make every instance in which a cop shoots a black a crime--with the police officer the criminal. Because the black rate of violent crime is twelve times the white rate, cops often finds themselves facing young black males who either are carrying a gun or, from the cop's knowledge, are likely to have one. The cop's life is on the line. But now, even if the black is both a criminal and armed, the cop's job and maybe his freedom are at risk if he shoots. He is put in an impossible position, thereby bringing about the "negation" cultural Marxism seeks. The cops, who are both symbols and bringers of order, are paralyzed and disorder spreads. "Negative dialects" take another step forward.On the sexual front, we see both on college campuses and in our military another push for "negation." The feminists, who are now wholly subsumed in the cultural Marxists, first demand young men and young women be intimately mixed. Colleges have coed dorms and women will soon be serving on submarines. Any attempt to separate the sexes is labelled "discrimination". Equality is falsely defined as interchangeability even as science finds more and more differences between the male and female brains. Then, having put young men and young women cheek by jowl, cultural Marxism says, "Now now, no bunga-bunga." When hormones have their way, as they will, the man (never the woman) is guilty of "sexual assault" or even "rape". Earlier generations know that if you want to prevent young people from having sex, you have to separate them. The cultural Marxists know that too, but if your goal is to destroy a society, you want to force actions that lead to dysfunction, i.e., "negation".On the religious front, a growing number of Christian business owners are being ordered to burn incense to the Emperor, on pain of death of their business. Cultural Marxism's substitute for the Roman Emperor is gay "marriage", which is impossible; it is simply not what the word means. But any Christian businessman or woman who refuses to sell products or services to gay "weddings" risks being hauled into court. If you are a believer and a business owner, you are now to be denied freedom of conscience. You must participate in a rite Christianity (and Judaism and Islam) say is sinful. When Indiana recently tried to offer Christians a very modest level of protection, the whole Establishment came down on it. The state's Republican governor did what Republicans usually do and caved.In all of this, we see cultural Marxism is the worst of all possible Puritanisms: it is Puritanism without God and without virtue. One might go so far as to call it Puritanism against God and against virtue, since its Frankfurt School founders were atheists (all good Marxists must be) and they embraced Nietzshe's "transvaluation  of all values", which means the old virtues become sins and the old sins become virtues. Christians who follow the commands of their faith are sinners and active homosexuals are paragons of virtue. Black is white and down is up.How can we fight this? By reveling what is behind it, the little man behind the curtain. It is a variant of Marxism, not Marxism-Leninism, nor classical economic Marxism, but Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. Once the average American finds that out, learns about the Frankfurt School and understands its goal is "negation", which means destroying everything, it will be in trouble. Cultural Marxism can only succeed so long as its real nature and goals are largely unknown. It's time to turn on the light and make the roaches run.

The View From Olympus: Guderian Said It

When I began the maneuver warfare debate in the mid-1970s with a critique of the U.S. Army's field manual FM 100-5 (1976 edition), most of what I knew about the German way of war came from reading books by and about General Heinz Guderian. Guderian did not "invent" Blitzkrieg; as General Hermann Balck told me later, it was conceptually complete by 1918. What Guderian did was make Blitzkrieg a practical possibility by developing the Panzer Division during the 1930s. Blitzkrieg married an all-arms, cross-country mobile division capable of rapid operational maneuver with the infiltration tactics of 1918 (and on the defensive, with the new "let 'em walk right in" tactics of 1917).Interestingly, the French Division Leger Mechanique of the 1930s looked like a Panzer Division, but because it lacked the Germans' doctrine, it had little effect in 1940. As usual, ideas were more important than hardware.One of the early points of debate about maneuver warfare was whether it saved lives. I argued it did, because it is seldom necessary to kill an encircled enemy; usually, he gives up and becomes POWs. The U.S. Army was particularly hostile to this notion. It liked it to describe itself as a "lean, green, killing machine," and while the "lean" description was hilarious given its tooth-to-tail ratio, its doctrine saw war as an attrition contest and still does. Any enemy dumb enough to just sit there and get pounded, as Red is constrained to do in U.S. Army war games, will take heavy losses. Few enemies have proven that dumb.Guderian and the question of whether maneuver warfare saves lives came together in a happy discovery I recently made in a book about Prussia, both its history and its current situation: The Vanished Kingdom: Travels Through the History of Prussia by James Charles Roy. It turns out Guderian said I was right. Roy interviewed a veteran of Operation Barbarossa, who had been a junior officer in a Panzer Division and had heard Guderian speak. The veteran recounted:

As spearhead divisions, we were always surrounded. We had enemies in the front, on our left, on our right, often at the back. Ground troops (i.e., infantry) couldn't keep up with us. Very often they were too exhausted and that could be very dangerous. That's why they often resupplied us from the air. We could move as few as 5 or 6 kilometers in a day, but we could also drive 60, 70, 80 in a day, then turn around and roll up from the back a whole front. This was the way to wage war! Taking hundreds and thousands of prisoners, saving lives if you will. Good officers can save lives, and we had the best officers in the world. If you get bad officers, you are really in trouble. Guderian said this to us many times. We are not a killing machine, he said. We break through and end wars quickly. By waging quick warfare, the generals believed fewer lives would be lost. (Page 236)

The 1940 campaign demonstrated the life-saving power of maneuver warfare. The Germans lost about 25,000 dead in the whole campaign, the French about 100,000. By World War I standards these were astonishingly small casualties; on one day in August, 1914, the French lost 27,000 dead. Barbarossa brought in millions of Russian POWs. Regrettably, few survived the war, and those who did were shot on Stalin's orders afterwards; he considered any Russian who surrendered a traitor.The ability of maneuver warfare to reduce casualties, both friendly and enemy, takes on enhanced importance in the face of Fourth Generation war. If we ever again fight and win a land war against another state, the great danger will be the disintegration of the defeated state and its descent into stateless chaos. The resulting happy hunting ground for Fourth Generation, non-state elements will almost certainly be a greater danger to us than was the opposing state.If, through maneuver warfare, we are able to keep the enemy state's soldiers alive and even perhaps in some order as whole units surrender, we can then use those troops and units to quickly reconstitute the state. Presumably, we will not again be as stupid as the neo-cons were in Iraq when they ordered the Iraqi Army and civil service sent home (that order came directly from the West Wing of the White House).The question is, will U.S. ground forces be able to wage a campaign of rapid maneuver and encirclement? In the First Gulf War, the U.S. Army tried and failed. It still sees itself as a "killing machine" today. The Marine Corps has a doctrine of maneuver warfare, but whether it has more than a few units and commanders who can actually fight that way is an open question.What is not in question anymore is whether militaries that aspire to wage maneuver warfare are "killing machines." Guderian said they are not. That settles it.

The View From Olympus: An Absence of Strategy

In World War II, however indifferently the U.S. Army performed at the tactical and operational levels, America did strategy right. Before we entered the war, we agreed with Britain that Europe would be the main theater because Germany was a far stronger opponent than Japan. We stuck to that strategy despite Pearl Harbor and Japan's string of victories in the first six months of the war. While General Eisenhower was at best an uninspired field commander, he grasped and held on to the decisive strategic fact of the war in Europe: unless the Allies' coalition fractured, they were certain to win. Hitler expected such a fracture right up to the end, a "miracle save" like that which had rescued Frederick the Great in the Seven Years' War. Thanks to Eisenhower's good strategic leadership, it did not happen.As we look at America's current role in the Mideast's Thirty Years' War, the renewed war between Sunnis and Shiites, the most striking impression we get is of absence of strategy. In Iraq and Syria, we are simultaneously opposing both sides, the Sunnis because of ISIS and the Shiites because of Iran. Similarly, in Israel we oppose the Shiites of Hezbollah and the Sunnis of Hamas, despite the fact that our alliance with Israel is temporarily suspended after Mr. Netanyahu tore it up, spat on it and burned it during his election campaign. In Yemen, we are opposing both the Shiite Houthis and Sunni Al Qaeda. Presumably we will now back the Saudis in their intervention against the Houthis. The Saudis intervened against the Houthis once before. It did not go well.The absence of strategy drives us down to the operational and tactical levels, where we wander randomly between this option and that, usually ending up with a dog's breakfast of tactical measures, most of which have previously failed. This morning's New York Times announced we are now conducting airstrikes on Tikrit, where a 30,000-man armed mob of Shiites (a typical Oriental army, as the Athenians would remind us) has been stopped by a small defending force we label ISIS but is almost certainly Baath. Baathists have reason to fight hard for Tikrit. The rationale for our use of the airpower hammer on yet another screw is operational: we want to displace the Iranians and their allied Shiite militias with official Iraqi Army and police forces we have trained, and trained to need our airpower, whether it is available or not and whether it is appropriate or not. Maybe this time it will work tactically, though I suspect not; any forces we have trained are Quislings, and Quislings seldom have much fight in them. But the tactical outcome matters little because the Iranians are far stronger in Iraq than we are, not only operationally but strategically, thanks to proximity and religious ties. A higher level of war trumps a lower. A front-page story in the March 23 New York Times on the withdrawal of our Special Forces advisers from Yemen--what does it say to the locals when U.S. troops leave as soon as the enemy gets close?--well describes the tactical hodgepodge we rely on in the absence of strategy:

Even after the withdrawal of American troops, the Central Intelligence Agency will still maintain some covert Yemeni agents in the country. Armed drones will carry out some airstrikes from bases in nearby Saudi Arabia or Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, as was done most recently on Feb. 20. Spy satellites will still lurk overhead and eavesdropping planes will try to suck up electronic communications.

One can almost hear the Times yawn as it recites the list. All have been tried before and failed, many times. Worse, all but local agents are overt, uniting the people against us.We need a strategy. What should it be? The answer is obvious, low-risk, and cheap. Stay out and let Mohammedans fight their own damned Thirty Years' War. With the exception of France, who came in late, none of the outside Powers who intervened in central Europe's Thirty Years' War benefited from doing so.As I have written before, the demographics of the Middle East guarantee war, supply-side war. The region teems with young men with nothing to do and no prospects. So what are they going to do? Fight. Our safe and simple strategy should be to let--nay, encourage--them to fight each other instead of fighting us.That strategy places one clear demand on us at the operational and tactical levels: keep the lowest of low profiles. Local agents are a good idea; we do want to know what is going on. If some locals are planning to attack us despite our non-involvement, our agents can also be used for direct action. If some locals succeed in hitting us, then, briefly, we would go overt, with an annihilating punitive raid. Other than in that case, we would always appear to be five thousand miles away, which, lest we forget, we are. Geography is the starting point of strategy, and our two oceans still give us welcome strategic distance.Our non-presence is the best encouragement we can give Shiites and Sunnis both to fight each other. Beyond that, all we need do, or ought to do, is stand on our happy, distant shores, wave our handkerchiefs, Terrible Towels or Imperial Navy forage caps and shout into the wind, "Fight fiercely, fellows." Oh, and make sure none of them come here as refugees, because they will bring their squabbles to our shores. We have enough of our own to occupy us.

Attention Populist Conservatives:

Attention populist conservatives who really want to stick it to the Establishment: perhaps, just perhaps, the best way to do that is not by supporting a candidate who GRADUATED FROM HARVARD LAW SCHOOL!It is possible that Ted Cruz’s anti-Establishment conservative rhetoric is entirely sincere.It is possible that Ted Cruz is not sincere and that his feisty populist conservative persona is a role he is playing, but one that he is playing primarily for his own benefit.But it is also possible that Ted Cruz is not sincere and is playing the role he is for the benefit of another agenda. It is possible that Ted Cruz’s Presidential candidacy is primarily intended as a stalking horse campaign to divide the conservative anti-Establishment vote, especially the vote that might otherwise go to Rand Paul. (This is not an endorsement of Rand Paul, who I believe has drifted too close to the Republican mainstream on foreign policy. It is simply an acknowledgment that Rand Paul is the candidate that the Establishment fears the most, despite his desperate and at times pathetic attempts to mollify them.) Any Cruz supporter who rules out possibilities preemptively is doing so based on faith, not because the suggestion is implausible on its face.Let’s look at some facts that cast doubts on Cruz’s populist street cred.Fact number one: Cruz GRADUATED FROM HARVARD LAW SCHOOL!Fact number two: Cruz’s wife, as outlined in this excellent article by Chuck Baldwin, is no anti-establishmentarian.Heidi (Cruz) worked in the White House for Condoleezza Rice. Heidi is head of the Southwest Region in the investment Management Division of Goldman Sachs & Co, and was also an active member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Heidi is an international investment banker who was invited to be part of a working group at the CFR which reviewed a notorious 2005 paper called “Building a North American Community.” This project was headed by longtime CFR member Robert Pastor and is universally regarded by constitutionalists as the prototype for a North American Union. Of course, Condoleezza Rice, herself, is a longtime CFR member.One does not have to be a CFR conspiracy theorist or any other type of conspiracy theorist for the above to raise serious red flags. Heidi Cruz is sporting some pretty impressive Establishment credentials, and if Cruz is sincere in his railings against the Powers That Be, his will be a house divided.Fact number three: Cruz has embraced the quintessential Establishment plank, globalist interventionism. As I discussed in a previous article, Cruz started out sounding a little different on foreign policy. In his Senate campaign in Texas, Cruz received the endorsement of Ron Paul and was heavily supported by the “Tea Party” which has a lot of former Ron Paul supporters. The foreign policy views of Ron Paul supporters and the regular GOP base that Cruz was courting diverged sharply, but he managed to put enough of a coalition together to win the GOP primary.Cruz is very clever. We know this because HE GRADUATED FROM HARVARD LAW SCHOOL, and because Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz said Cruz was one of the brightest law students he has ever worked with. Cruz managed this divergence on foreign policy rather adeptly, in my opinion. (This is not an endorsement. It is simply an observation.) Cruz struck a “Jacksonian” pose that was “strong” but less meddlesome internationally. This position was on display when Cruz opposed Obama’s attempt to escalate our involvement in the Syrian civil war.Unfortunately, the GOP base has recently been trending back to Wilsonian interventionism due to the emergence of ISIS and the Iran negotiations. Cruz, who is running as the “more conservative” candidate, appears to have felt the need to become a more bellicose hawk. How he squares this with his past opposition to escalation in Syria will take some HARVARD LAW-level mental gymnastics that I am eager to see.I personally doubt Cruz’s authenticity, though I’m not willing to go on record to say that he absolutely is a stalking horse candidate, but I am willing to say that it is a plausible idea that should be carefully considered and can’t be categorically ruled out.Note that stalking horse candidacies are not without precedent. It is widely believed, for example, that Alan Keyes, who was roommates with William Kristol at … where was that again … on the tip of my tongue… oh yeah, HARVARD, was a deliberate stalking horse intended to divide the pro-life vote with Pat Buchanan in 1996, which he did.I am not convinced that the only reason Establishment candidates generally win Republican Presidential primaries is because the Establishment coalesces around their candidate of choice early while conservatives divide their votes between several candidates, but there is at least some truth to this theory. As a supporter of Pat Buchanan who was living in San Antonio, which has a very active pro-life community,  I personally witnessed how the Keyes campaign picked off several key pro-life activists that would have otherwise supported Buchanan. The Establishment did not become the Establishment by not knowing how to play the game.So populist conservatives who support Ted Cruz, you need to ask yourself this question: “Are you fighting the Establishment, or are you being used by it?” Please think about this carefully.

Brave New World's Cornerstone Arrives

The March 20 New York Times bore bad news for the future of Christian civilization. Brave New World's cornerstone has arrived.Brave New World is the title of a short novel by Aldous Huxley, published in the 1930s. It lays out a future in which a soft totalitarianism blankets the globe. Brave New World's first rule is, "You must be happy." Happiness, for all but a tiny elite that run the place, is created by materialism, consumerism, sensual pleasure (all sex is permissible except traditional marriage), psychological conditioning, and--the one ring to rule them all and in the darkness bind them--genetic conditioning. That keystone alone has been missing. It is missing no longer.The March 20 New York Times  reports that

A group of leading biologists on Thursday called for a worldwide moratorium on use of a new genome-editing technique that would alter human DNA in a way that babies could inherit....the new technique is so effective and easy to use..."You could exert control over human heredity with this technique"... said David Baltimore, a former President of the California Institute of Technology......"people are gearing up to do this"...

If that prospect does not terrify us, then we have lost our moorings. In Brave New World, the one-world government uses exactly this kind of genetic engineering to make it impossible for the vast majority of people to rebel, or even to refuse to conform. They have been genetically engineered so they do not have those traits. They must conform the way a bird must fly or a dog bust way its tail. They cannot do otherwise.Brave New World now goes mostly under the names of Globalism or "democratic capitalism". It is the ideology of the elite in almost every country, except Russia. Ironically, while America was the defender of liberty in the face of an earlier type of totalitarianism, best represented by Stalin's Soviet Union, America under its current elite is trying to force Brave New World down the throat of every people on Earth. George W. Bush's puppeteers, the neo-cons, who see themselves as the vanguard of "democratic capitalism", thought they could do so by having America invade and occupy any countries that resisted. That did not work out too well. But the Globalist elite's objective has not changed: one world run by them just the way Huxley described.Naively, most of the Times story is devoted to warnings from scientists against using this "effective and easy" genetic engineering technology. Brave New World will laugh at such quibbles. Sauron will have no reluctance to wear the ring.Is there any way to stop this, to halt and reverse the growth of Brave New World before it consumes everyone? There is one, I think, and only one. As a culture, we must decide that the fact we can do something does not mean we must do it. We have to kill Faust.The notion that we must do whatever we are able to do, which may be the ultimate expression of the sin of pride, defines the Modern Age. Its symbol is Faust. Faust made a bargain that he could do or have anything and everything, with one exception. He could not say, "Verweile doch, du bist so schon" -- "Stay, you are so beautiful." He could not get something right and then keep it that way. Faust was required always to grasp for novelty, regardless of the consequences novelty might bring. His bargain was with the Devil.We can halt and reverse the spreading stain of Brave New World if we break the Modern Age's bargain with Hell. We must say "no" to genetic engineering and a growing host of other novelties, some scientific, some, like gay "marriage", cultural. The old ways, on the whole, worked pretty well. The new ways lead where you would expect a bargain with the Devil to lead.Thomas Hobbes' novel Victoria portrays a world where this happens through the Retroculture movement. A nation comes to realize that we peaked in the Victorian era, so its people return to living as people did then.Could this occur in real life? It has, at least once, exactly where you would not expect it, in war. War is by its nature dialectical. But a highly warlike people, the Japanese, reversed the dialectic under the Tokugawa Shogunate. In the 17th century, firearms became common in Japanese warfare. They may have been decisive at the battle of Sekigahara which put the Tokugawa in power. But the new Shogun then banned them, and made the ban effective. Japan returned to the sword.Under the bakufu, the Japanese were dealing with a government arguably less totalitarian than Brave New World. Does resistance have any hope in our time? It does--if we can kill Faust. Perhaps that is the task of the next generation.

The View From Olympus: The Source of the Vile

The distinguishing characteristic of America's foreign policy Establishment is its inability to accept reality. We see this most clearly at present in our refusal to cooperate openly with Iran against ISIS. Realists accept that our relations with other states often involve simultaneous cooperation and competition. The World War II foreign policy Establishment was happy to cooperate with Stalin's Soviet Union. While Hitler killed six mission, Soviet Communism, according to the Soviet archives, killed 60 million, most in the Stalin period. Then, Washington was capable of saying with a shrug, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." Today, no such realism is possible.All policy not based on reality will fail. Given the costs we have already paid for foreign policy failure, we might want to ask where the current Establishment's worship of unreality originated. It is clearly ideological in nature. All ideologies demand that certain aspects of reality be ignored.Two overlapping ideologies shape the present Establishment's thinking. The first is the neo-cons' "democratic capitalism", which James Jatras argues is the most destructive of the three ideologies which wrecked the 20th century, the other two being fascism and communism. The second is the cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt School, which became the ideology of the baby boom generation in the 1960s. Together, these ideologies demand the destruction of every traditional society and culture and their replacement with a combination of gross materialism and a secular puritanism, puritanism that mandates hedonism. That is what lies behind our offensive grand strategy, our wild foreign adventures and our repeated foreign policy failures. As Russell Kirk wrote, there is no surer way to make a man your enemy than to tell him you will remake him in your image for his own good.Can we identify more specific sources of ideology in the foreign policy Establishment? A book recently sent to me by a friend suggests we can. The book is Weapons Systems and Political Stability: A History by Carroll Quigley. The work is a wide survey of virtually the whole of military history, from the Prehistoric Period up to 1500 A.D. The author died before the book was finished and it was published by his friends, which probably explains the lack of source notes. Absent these, it is difficult to credit the author's often broad assertions.Quigley had some important insights. Perhaps the most important is that "The real goal of military operation is agreement." So long as we are talking about war between states, this is true, and it is forgotten by both soldiers and diplomats. A peace the defeated state cannot accept is usually short-lived.But Quigley's real significance comes from a combination of his position and his ideology. As Dean Peter Krogh of Georgetown University wrote in a tribute to Quigley,

For forty years, Professor Carroll Quigley's teaching quickened and disciplined the minds of students of the School of Foreign Service of Georgetown University. His inspired lectures ... literally defined the School and its brand of education...Professor Quigley became an institution indistinguishable from the School of Foreign Service.

The School of Foreign Service is the basic training ground of our foreign policy Establishment.Quigley's ideology was ahistorical. His book continually projects the present onto the past, a besetting sin of the current Establishment. He often references the "ideology" of ancient societies, when they had no such thing; ideology, the word and the thing itself, are born in the French Revolution. He speaks of Bronze Age infantry fighting in "phalanxes", which did not exist until the Classical Greeks.More seriously, Quigley continually criticizes ancient societies for their lack of "democracy" and failure to include peasants in the political process, and he contrasts "peaceful", goddess-worshiping, matriarchal, agrarian societies against warlike, patriarchal societies of hunters who worshiped male gods.Historically, both positions are nonsense. Criticizing ancient worlds for lack of democracy makes as much sense as criticizing them for air pollution because they did not have catalytic converters on their chariots. The average peasant knew as much about governing as your cat does about the back side of the moon. That is true in much of today's world as well, which is why the Establishment's demand for universal democracy leads not to "freedom" but to anarchy.Quigley's other major theme has been exploded time and time again. Repeatedly, historians or anthropologists have posited peaceful, agrarian societies, only to have further research show they were anything but peaceful. The Maya were repeatedly offered as an example of such worlds without war. We now know they fought contantly, to the point where war was one reason their civilization collapsed. In the real world, war is unversal. As Martin van Creveld puts it, war exists because men like to fight and women like fighters.Today we see the unrealistic, ahistorical views of Quigley throughout the foreign policy Estalishment. Quigley explicitly traced them down to our time, especially in his condemnation of the Indo-Europeans--the West's ancestors--and a male god who offers personal salvation and immortality. On page 143 Quigley wrote,

We have seen that grassland hunters, from their very mode of life, are likely to be patriarchal and warlike. Among the Indo-Europeans, however, thee attributes were much intensified and distorted by their religious history ... to create an almost psychopathic outlook...These ideas are still with us ... (P. 145)

Is it likely these errors of Quigley, rooted in ideology, not history, are part of the reason our foreign policy Establishment cannot accept reality? For generations, he was their teacher. Indeed, these ideas are still with us, Quigley's ideas that are naught but castles in the air.

Has Rand Paul Squandered His Chance to Lead the Non-Intervention Cause?

The letter to Iran masterminded by uber-hawk Sen. Tom Cotton and signed by 47 Republican Senators, including most surprisingly Rand Paul, has caused quite a stir. The letter basically states that any agreement the President makes will be subject to Congressional approval and should not be considered binding until then. Some Leftists have accused those who signed it of treason, and claim they are in violation of the Logan Act. Hawkish interventionists, on the other hand, have praised the signers as heroes.For the purpose of this essay, I am most interested in how conservative and libertarian non-interventionists who were/are inclined to support Rand Paul view his signing of the letter. My reading is that there is widespread disappointment. Justin Raimondo, who runs the website AntiWar.com and is a significant figure on the antiwar right, had been generally supportive of Paul, but this move has caused Raimondo to essentially throw Paul under the bus. He calls it Rand Paul’s “Munich” and claims it proves Paul lacks the “character” necessary to be president.Matt Purple, a contributor at Rare.us, calls it a “step too far” for Rand. This is significant because Rare, which is edited by former Rand Paul staffer Jack Hunter, generally fawns over Rand Paul.Also at Rare, paleoish writer James Antle, clearly sensing a backlash, attempts to make the case that Paul’s signature is not that big of a deal. Unfortunately for Antle and Paul, the article feels like some fairly desperate spin. I think Antle and Hunter, based on some comments he made on Facebook, realize this is a big problem for Rand Paul with his base of non-interventionists.I was a big supporter of Rand’s father, Ron Paul, in '08 and '12 generally because he is a Constitutionalist. Non-intervention flows naturally from serious Constitutionalism (and was famously prescribed by George Washington in his farewell address), so it cannot be written off as some eccentric position. But because non-intervention is where the elder Paul differed the most starkly from the mainstream “Right”, foreign policy took on an outsized importance in his campaign and became an essential part of the identity his supporters took for themselves.From the beginning of Rand’s candidacy for the Senate and now likely campaign for President, it has generally been accepted by Ron Paul supporters that Rand was not going to give us the red meat non-interventionism that his father served up. Rather, he would play the pragmatic political game necessary to get elected and not scare the masses, while working to keep us out of any more disastrous wars. In other words, we just assumed his overtures to mainstream “conservative” interventionists were insincere and a necessary evil. When I expressed something like this in a different venue, one reader was appalled. “You mean you believe Rand is being deliberately insincere?” Well of course I do. I always assumed this was understood.For what it’s worth, I still believe Rand Paul’s actual beliefs are closer to his father’s than he lets on. Why wouldn’t they be? Rand campaigned hard for his father in ’08 and has a history of supporting his father’s Texas Senate campaign, his 1988 Libertarian presidential campaign and his 1996 Congressional comeback campaign. I saw Rand speak at a rally in '08, and he hit the same notes about the Fed and sound money that his dad hits.That said, I was never totally on the Rand bandwagon, and got off a long time ago. I understand the argument that he can work behind the scenes for the good, which is basically the argument James Antle makes in his article linked to above, but I have always been very sensitive about the rhetoric. Non-intervention is based on the assumption that the US has no special or oversized role to play on the world stage and should therefore not behave as if we do. So I’m OK with pragmatism and playing the political game as long as it doesn’t undermine the basic premise of non-interventionism and reinforce the premise of the other side. In my opinion, Rand has been conceding way too much in the rhetoric department from the start, although he has often tried to engage in a kind of double speak, attempting to keep both sides happy, where he doesn’t technically violate non-interventionist principles while saying something the other side wants to hear.To help the reader unfamiliar with non-interventionist esoterica understand what I’m talking about, a fundamental principle of non-interventionism is that we should abolish all foreign aid. So when Paul came out with his proposal to defund certain entities in the Middle East, he wasn’t technically in violation of a fundamental non-interventionist principle, he just wasn’t stating it maximally. The problem that non-interventionists like me had with it was not that he wanted to cut foreign aid, which we obviously support, but that by suggesting it be cut to the enemies of Israel but not Israel, he was pandering to the pro-Israel interventionist base and reinforcing the idea that the US is under some mystical obligation to protect Israel.One man’s clever politics is another’s abandonment of the cause. For many, Paul crossed that line with his signing of the obnoxious Cotton letter. For those familiar with Rand-speak, you can see his mind working. As per James Antle, he could argue that he was just restating the Constitutional principle of Senatorial consent for treaties, but it is not at all clear that whatever agreement the US may come back with would actually be a treaty. (This will be the subject of a separate essay.) But the problem for Paul is that this letter is not benign. It is a blatant attempt to undermine negotiations that may keep us out of a surely disastrous and unnecessary war with Iran, negotiations that from a non-interventionist standpoint we shouldn’t even be engaging in in the first place. And it comes in the wake of his shameful panderfest following the Netanyahu address, where Paul had already obsequiously praised Netanyahu and Israel and signed onto Sen. Bob Corker’s attempt to scuttle the negotiations.It’s a long time until the first caucus and a lot can change between now and then, but I think Rand may have squandered his opportunity to rally the non-interventionist coalition behind him with his pandering behavior following the Netanyahu address. If it isn’t totally squandered, he certainly has a lot of work to do to build back up some seriously fractured trust.

The View From Olympus: Selling America's Foreign Policy

On September 17, 2015, Chief Umbongo of the Jujuba tribe addressed  a Joint Session of Congress. The invitation to do so had been issued by Congressional Republicans, over the objections of the president. The chief's message, spoken clearly if indirectly, was that the United States must start a war with Nigeria in order to advance his tribe's interests. Congressional Republicans, and some Democrats, greeted this message with storms of applause and standing ovations. They subsequently pledged to do everything in their power to bring such a war about.Sound ridiculous? It happened last week. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a Joint Session of Congress at the Republicans' invitation. In a diplomatic insult of major proportions, the president was not consulted or informed. The purpose of Netanyahu's speech was to scuttle any nuclear deal with Iran. If there is no deal, war with Iran will become almost unavoidable. Mr. Netanyahu wants the United States to fight such a war on Israel's behalf. Congressional Republicans wildly applauded that prospect.Republicans have long been known to conservatives as "the stupid party". Are they so stupid as to not understand that absent an agreement with Iran, Iran's nuclear program will shift into even higher gear, steadily reducing the "breakout interval", the time it would take Iran to build a bomb? As an Iranian bomb grows closer, the demands--especially from Republicans--to stop Iran's progress will grow louder. With no agreement, the only way to do that will be to attack Iran, starting yet another American war in the Middle East. In case Republicans have not noticed, we have just lost two such wars. The prosepects against Iran look no beter.If Mr. Netanyahu gets his wish, Israel will no doubt cheer us on from the sidelines. But the price, in money and in lives, will be paid by America.It is no mystery why Israel would want this. It's always handy when you can get someone else to fight your wars for you. But why would almost all Congressional Republicans, and many Democrats, cheer a policy that, from America's standpoint, is all costs and few if any benefits? An Iranian bomb might threaten Israel--assuming Iran wants to commit suicide and see 3000 years of Persian civilization wiped off the map--but poses little danger to the United States.The answer is the same as for almost all actions by Congress: most Senators and Representatives are for sale. That in turn means America's governmental policies are for sale, including its foreign policy.We have legalized bribery, so long as the bribes are called "campaign contributions". Other forms of legalized bribery include implicitly promising hefty contracts and paid board of director memberships to Members who serve monied interests and having relatives work for lobbying firms through which anyone wanting to approach the Member must go. Paul Weyrich agreed with me that at most 10% of Members of Congress now think at all about governing the country. The remaining 90% want only to have successful careers as professional politicians and leave Washington very, very rich. Most succeed.The Israeli lobby is a major political donor. Most of that lobby supports not just Israel, but Mr. Netanyahu's Likud Pary, despite the misgivings of many American Jews (some newer Jewish lobbying groups such as J Street are more discriminating). Virtually all Members of Congress who have dared defy the Israeli lobby have lost their seats, because the lobby pours vast resources into the campaigns of their opponents.When all you care about is your career, you are not going to defy a lobby that can end it. If that means cheering Mr. Netanyahu and another American war in the Middle East, so what? The lives and dollars lost in that war won't come from your family or your pocket.So long as all policy is for sale in Washington, there is no hope for the future of this country. Conservatives have long opposed public funding of campaigns, but it is our only hope to end the sale of government policy. It must be coupled with very strict penalties for Members of Congress found accepting any money from interests, including after they leave office. It is time for conservatives to favor public funding, and remember Edmund Burke's warning about the worst of all kinds of political factions, factions under the control of a foreign power.

The Permanent Things

After a recent podcast with William S. Lind in which we discussed the nature of conservatism, I believed further explanation would be helpful. I consider the Permanent Things to be faith, family, and freedom. Faith is the foundation of all civilization, family is the vehicle by which the generations are preserved, and freedom is what makes life livable.Faith is, referring to my earlier article “Traditionalism, The Anti-ideology”, that aspect of life pertaining to the transcendent immaterial world that undergirds reality. Plato saw this world as the world of forms. For Plato the immaterial world was the world of ratios, proportions, and order. It was a cold and abstract beauty; an impersonal beauty. The Judeo-Christian element brought a greater level of refinement to this transcendent realm. The divine was no longer impersonal, but personal. God of course contained the elements of the immaterial that Plato saw, but Plato, lacking special revelation, saw only so far. The difference between Plato and Moses was not their intelligence but their access to revelation. Faith in the usage throughout this essay is not to be understood as faith in any particular Christian doctrine, but the general Christian belief that Jesus Christ is the sole master of man’s affairs and that from Catholic to Protestant to Orthodox men have tried to glorify Christ in word, music, and architecture.Man can understand the divine in one of two ways : (1) natural revelation and (2) special revelation. Natural revelation is those aspects of the divine revealed through the natural world and discernible through unaided human reason. For example the propositions that God exists, God is good, the universe had a beginning (hence was created), the universe was not created five minutes ago with the appearance of age or nothing outside the contents of my mind exist. Special Revelation is that portion of divine revelation revealed through God’s spoken word (Moses on Mt. Sinai) and his written word (Holy Scripture).Faith, particularly the Christian faith, is the bedrock of Western Civilization; the period from 313 to about 1914 is known as Christendom. This is the period in which the principles of the Gospel were the air men and women breathed. The central feature of Society from Ohio to Kent to White Russia was the Church. God, His Word, and His ministers were given the sort of respect and prestige that is today given to scientists and athletes. This culture generated the greatest minds in history in every conceivable field. Through faith Newton and Mendel pioneered physics and biology. By Faith Dante, Milton, and Tolstoy wrote works of literature that steal one’s breath. By faith Handel and Bach wrote sublime music. By faith Isidore of Miletus and Anthemius of Tralles engineered Haiga Sophia, Bernardo Rossellino engineered St. Peter's and Christopher Wren engineered St. Paul's. Faith is the warp and woof of Western civilization and its greatest cultural, moral, and artistic accomplishments are inconceivable without it.Family is the cellular level of society. No viable social unit exists below it. By viable I mean able to (1) reproduce itself and (2) pass on its values to the next generation. For obvious reasons homosexuality and contraception are not viable. The family according to Aristotle is that unit in society by which man’s needs are met. This is related to the original meaning of economics, which is a compound work from oikos (household) and nomos (law), or household law. Economics was the study of how families provided the basic needs of life for the community. For the purposes of this essay family is composed of minimally one man and one woman united in a monogamous relationship. The family is fundamentally an economic unit. It is necessary to raise self-controlled disciplined individuals who are able to contribute to the well-being of society. Aristotle as well as C.S. Lewis believe that ideally families should be attended with a modest land base. This view is also Biblical as can be seen by referring to my four-part essay on Christian economics. As an economic unit the family must be self-sufficient (hence the need for a modest land holding, a yeomanry if you will), must be defended by the force of law and social convention and must be seen as the building block of civilization.We can look at men like Mozart, who in order to aggravate his father would play a musical note and then not finish it; his father would without fail stop what he was doing and go to the piano and finish it; or Pascal; or Pat Buchannan to see the necessity of and positive influence of connubial tranquility in the formation of great men of Western Civilization. The clear failure of any post Christian alternative to the family, single-mothers from the inner city, homosexual unions and general pick-up culture which leads to a sterile, loveless, crime-ridden world, demands a return to the tried and true method of civilization-building monogamous households.Freedom is not as is commonly misconceived as having a plurality of choices. Freedom--true freedo--is being free to live as man was intended. From Aristotle we derive the notion of teleology which is a compound work from the word telos (goal) and ology (study) or the study of goals. Man has a goal and the Greeks understood that goal to be eudaimonia, or flourishing/fulfilment, and for the schoolmen as beatitude. True freedom is man acting in accordance with his purpose. That purpose being most perfectly comprehended in Christ. Man’s end, to quote the Westminster Catechism, is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever. Or as Augustine said: “Thou hast prompted him, that he should delight to praise thee, for thou hast made us for thyself and restless is our heart until it comes to rest in thee.” Through the freedom of conforming to man’s natural end, however imperfectly, Western Civilization has produced music that reaches the most sublime heights of ecstasy, literature that moves and nourishes the soul, and moral truths that ended human sacrifice, gladiatorial games, slavery, and cannibalism. No social movement in history has ever achieved the social, moral, cultural, and intellectual results of Western Civilization, which in turn is inconceivable without Christianity.So, what are the permanent things? Faith, Family and Freedom; these form three legs for the stool of western civilization and remove any one of them and Western civilization falters. Remove all three, as we have currently done, and Western civilization will die, to be replaced no doubt with cannibalistic Africans, human sacrificing Mestizos, and scimitar-wielding Muslims.