Essays in Idleness

DAVID WARREN

Gleichschaltung

A false idea of me, I have noticed, tends to go with false ideas of everything else. And these false ideas can only be corrected when they can be discussed, openly. It is the contrary of the “shut up” instruction. That is, as it were, the practical necessity of free speech, which is currently under intimidation from the Left in most Western locations, as it has always been in most Eastern. A “Gleichschaltung,” or authoritarian standardization, has descended over most of Western civilization, as it descended over the Nazi realms in the nineteen-thirties. Another way to describe this is as “institutional capture” (of the universities, media, bureaucracies, &c) by the Left, and the “cancel culture” that has been spawned by it.

The same fate for the Jews, who are currently under persecution, more or less publicly, everywhere but in the most conservative rural backwaters of the U.S.A., and in Israel itself. For instance, 75 percent of Jewish students in American universities report they have been personally molested, for being Jewish, in the time since the mass Palestinian rapes and murders on October 7th.

Freedom of speech is the only possible corrective; for every crime may be excused by the enforcement of deceitful and mendacious language. Unless persons who have been smeared, or otherwise misrepresented, are given the right to respond to their “critics” — and thus allowed to reply to everything that is charged — we must live with the tyranny of “progressive” stupidity and malice. (Among the worst things to endure is the smugness of its beneficiaries.)

Chanukah is the Jewish celebration of the recovery of Jerusalem: something especially appropriate in the current age. We may read about this, and the rededication of the Second Temple, in the Books of the Maccabees. The Seleucid powers had begun a campaign to suppress the Hebrew religion, 168 years before Christ. One might suggest the Maccabees were the original Zionists, freeing Judea, but other signal moments in the Mosaic histories had spoken eloquently of freedom. We find that spirit also in Christianity, proudly and unquestionably inherited from the Jews. We will not be slaves.

We will not be slaves, whether to a foreign conqueror, or to an alien, pagan ideology, or to the Gleichschaltung that it has imposed. For after all, we are history’s non-conformists.

Resisting eco-lunacy

Perhaps it is wrong to paint the “environmentalists” and “climate change” hysterics with the label “Greenies,” as I just did over yesterday’s post. This is because they are enemies not only of human life, joy, and flourishing; and animal life (especially livestock); but also of plant life in its magnificent diversity, including all that grows in forests and farms. Carbon dioxide is, with water, the principal food of our vegetation, which in turn supplies the principal food for our animals. It takes little education to understand this. Carbon dioxide and water are the principal means by which photosynthesis is effected in nature, at levels of sophistication that our technologists have never approached.

The increase in this atmospheric gas, which has certainly happened in recent history and has an unmistakably anthropogenic cause, has a very slight influence upon the weather, and will have none at all above a certain maximum. But it has had dramatic “greenhouse” effects, nonetheless, and is responsible for the remarkable greening of our planet during the same period.

Note the implied contrast: carbon-based fuels and other products, good; environmentalism and environmentalists, evil.

I recommend that the reader, if he has not already, vary the aggressive media diet of lies and impostures on this subject by consulting several of the genuine experts touching the climate field. For instance Richard Lindzen, William Happer, Steven Koonin, Alex Epstein, Patrick Moore, Judith Curry, John Christy, Benny Peiser, are to be sought on the Internet. All of these disagree with the “97 percent of scientists” in the knowingly false media account. All those named have impressive credentials; each knows what he is talking about, and has nothing to add when he knows nothing. Nor have any been bought off by government agencies, nor are they living off “big oil.” Each carries painful scars from the malice of “the Greenies.”

The Greenies

There is something called “COP28” (28th meeting of the Conference of Parties) happening in Dubai, a major tourist destination in the Middle East (more extravagant than Disneyland). It is, at centre, a gathering of the world’s leading self-appointed environmental experts (many with government posts), and their families, extended families, colleagues, servants, mistresses, and so forth, in a grand display of virtue signalling somehow in excess of all their previous gatherings. The aeroport at Dubai is congested with the traffic of the jets that fly these perfumed creatures from the rest of the world.

This is what “environmentalism” has become today: a monstrous waste of the planet’s resources. Taxpayers everywhere are on the hook not only to pay for this display, but to fund all the ruinously profligate schemes that these “green” politicians decide upon. It is all a farce, more costly than any war. For further inconveniences are imposed by the bureaucrats who serve these witless legislators, through the destruction of our industrial and agricultural arrangements, for the counter-productive purpose of eliminating carbon, the most useful material we know.

Can the “climate change” blather, as a totalitarian ideology, grind modernity to a halt? Even this hope must be abandoned. It will instead accelerate the modern solution to the imaginary problem of overpopulation, by killing off, or forbidding birth.

It would be hard to imagine a project less compromising, and more comprehensively vile, were it not for the murderous behaviour of terrorist groups like Hamas.

Parousia

Well, God has granted me another year, perhaps, of grumbling about the communists and perverts, or perhaps He might inspire me to something better. We, or should we say “I,” do not make good use of our time, and this starts in Advent.

The Christian seasons were otherwise designed than for wasting. They begin, up here in the frigid north, with winter, which is usually supplied from the end of November by the weather gods. In the olden time, which is to say the day before yesterday, we did not try to appease these gods in the “pagan” way, or in the post-Christian savage manner, where we assume that we are responsible even for the sea level. We aren’t — it is among the many things in the universe over which we have no control — and it will continue to surprise us, just as Advent is surprising.

It is the surprise of the parousia, or what is referred to, awkwardly, in English, as the “Second Coming.” Christ’s first coming into the world was preceded by the coming of Messiah — who is subtly present to the Jews throughout the Old Testament. Before that parousia we are told to expect, also, a second coming of Christ: in our reception of grace.

But for us, now, it is a little death, at the end of the long summer. Death is meant to be arresting. We were unprepared — as we are generally unprepared — for that fell sergeant, that rap upon the door of our being. But it is just a little death, in this season; though larger, it seemed, when the last generation, for instance my parents, took their leave on the argument of November, and did not wait for the hibernal chill.

Advent is the liturgical season when thoughtful Christians consider the parousia, which is easier to do with abstinence and fasting, with prayer, repentence, and almsgiving, than when gorging on sweets. We have entered the paramony, or preparation, for Christmas; and the Eve of the Nativity will be, by holy convention, among the strictest of fasts.

For this is the doctrine of the liturgy: to everything there is a season.

The law office

The ends send our mind reeling to beginnings, and for this reason my thoughts have returned this week to my first meeting with Gerald Owen. I had been told by a learned young wench, at some Eric McLuhan party, that I absolutely had to meet him, and in perfunctory obedience I had taken a trolley out to the farther limits of the Kingston Road. Gerald’s law office was upstairs from a very modest, recently bankrupted grocery shop. Its street sign advertised the notarization of wills, at 45 dollars a turn. Even forty years ago, this was inexpensive.

It was like the opening of a Raymond Chandler novel. Two other lawyers were listed on the cracked pane in the hallway, but it turned out that both were in gaol, or otherwise indisposed. At first I could find no sign of a third, but in searching, alarmed a rather Rubenesque, obviously blind girl, who was struggling with an electric braille typewriter. Both it and she had come with some government programme, she explained. She was startled because I might be an agent of the landlord, come to evict her.

Gerald, she added, was behind the office’s least imposing door.

And he was, as I’d been warned, dishevelled, on an oaken swivel chair, his feet in muddy hiking boots propped on an heroically disorganized desk. There was a copy on his lap of Payne-Smith’s Thesaurus Syriacus. The shelving around was groaning with books, few of them appropriate to a law office. That he was not a lawyer but an Aramaic scholar I could easily believe.

He had also a deep commanding voice that, I thought, would be convincing in a court of law, if he could get beyond the stage of writing downmarket wills.

It happened that I was about to start a literary magazine, and as the reader will guess, Gerald became my first employee — once I had found someone to pay him the very little he asked for. He was my deputy, and later my co-editor, at the Idler magazine, and always the brains of the outfit; I knew we would be needing brains. I have come to realize that, in such circumstances, God throws the necessary person in one’s way: but only fleetingly.

Alas, it would be hard to revive that publication. For you see, Gerald Owen died on Monday. … Eheu! fugaces labuntur anni!

Privileged speech

“If defending free speech doesn’t get you into trouble,” Peter Hitchens writes, “then you are not in fact defending free speech. The only speech worth defending is unpopular and very often it comes out of the mouths of people nobody likes.”

This is a view that, oddly, Hitchens was not stating for the first time in human history. But as John Milton adds, in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates:

“No man who knows aught can be so stupid to deny that all men were naturally born free, being the image and resemblance of God Himself, and were, by privilege above all the creatures, born to command, and not to obey.”

(The American founders were familiar with this text.)

The freedom of speech originates in the larger privilege of freedom, claimed by this famous white man on behalf of all the human creatures, “ere the base laws of servitude began,” among primitive savages. I hate the manoeuvres to put me on the side of these latter. (Does this make me guilty of a “hate crime”?)

And a certain lecturer in Königsberg: “Freedom is that faculty which enlarges the usefulness of all other faculties.”

I superadd this quote with some hesitation. As an Idler, I try to avoid arguments for usefulness.

The soft & the hard

“Hang on; which one of us is dead?”

This was my thought upon spying, among my donors, the name of a person I had actually said a prayer for, in the belief that he had died. I had received the most persuasive evidence, although in retrospect it was merely an electronic report. One should hesitate to believe anything that has appeared only on a computer screen.

Checking my own pulse, I confirmed that the alternatives (my own death, or both of us dead) could also be dismissed as an erring rumour.

Fritz, to misname him, is not a close or intimate friend, but a reliable friend nonetheless, and an easy person to like. I do not regret saying a prayer for him. As a (late) priest once told me, “We should also pray for the living.”

This was his suggestion when I discovered that a former girlfriend — whom I was told, during a chance encounter with her sister, had died — was very much alive. I had gone to much trouble to forgive this girl, whose infidelity had caused me much grief when I was young. But if she was, as it were, “still kicking,” I might have to go through it all over again. How irritating she could be (and her sister, too, now that I was thinking of it)!

The priest convinced me to “stick by my guns.” Yes, she should “remain forgiven,” even if scandalously quite alive. (“A firm act of forgiveness is like shooting someone.” He gave a homily on this.)

He went further, for he detected that my forgiveness had been an act of sentimentality. He proposed that I confirm it with an act of unsentimental, “hard” forgiveness.

Post scriptum

If yesterday was the eve of Black Friday, today must be the day itself; that day of the year when I once again pathetically beg for “subscriptions.” I trust yesterday’s Idlepost will have discouraged those, who doubt my serenity; especially those in America who have been most generous in the past.

There were, for instance, queries about my assertion that, in effect, to vote Democrat is to vote for the Devil (as voting Liberal or NDP would be up here in Canada). Hardly anyone does this, however — votes for the Devil, consciously. Humans instinctively deny such behaviour, even when they are doing it.

But note, I say the Democrats have now permanently married the Left, which makes my assertion much more plausible. The individual, free-standing Democrat may be entirely beyond criminal prosecution, but is, as it were, Satan’s bride.

“The Left” has advanced unambiguous evil in human affairs throughout the Enlightened age, and caused many millions to be deceased, prematurely. This “Enlightenment” has lasted for several centuries. I would not say that “The Right” is better, for what “The Left” tags “The Right” are rival factions of “The Left” (e.g. Nazis, Fascists). For the alternative to The Left is not really The Right; it is rather old-fashioned mediocrity, with liberal and conservative tendencies; and an instinctive acknowledgement of God.

The reactionary, of course, is explicitly opposed to political Left/Right, including “democracy” in its several impractical forms. That is why I am a theocratic monarchist, and a reactionary.

I also enjoy peripheral neuropathy, and a few other things my pro-Hamas general practitioner may have diagnosed. This means I am not a reliable word-manufacturer, in the long-run; and provides a good reason to praise my unselfish donors; hurry before your time is up!

American Thanksgiving

It is again the fourth Thursday in November, which is to say, the very eve of Black Friday — the modern American custom of dishonouring (or, “cancelling”) Thanksgiving. The American economy may be in serious inflationary decline, and choking on the usury that apparently all have chosen for themselves; American freedom (not unlike American enterprise) is being abandoned, without much fight. But these are not reasons to despair. They would be only if the losses were “definitive”; but of course they are not. We have merely “opted” to make the good unlawful, and evil mandatory, in our public policies. This can last only for a time.

America’s universities, media, bureaucracies, and increasing proportions of her courts and military have been surrendered to the Left. Satanic demonstrations roll through the streets — currently for “Palestinian” terrorists and murderers. It is a dark, irreligious political extravaganza, reversing every principle that had once defined American federalism.

But politics will not provide the answers to this. It never has. The Democrats will not lose any foreseeable election, now that they are permanently married with the Left, and thus explicitly with the source of all worldly corruption. Old-school Americans will get used to defeat, and must expect it, until the Democrats have been uprooted and destroyed. There are tiny signs of hope, abroad in Argentina and Holland, I will grant; but in America the FBI, State Department, and Homeland Security are vigilant against recovery. Having a man of the calibre of Biden as president is a kind of guarantee that the America we once knew, is finished. We have hobbled into a post-America.

But thanks to God, there is still much for which we can be thankful. There is truth, and it will withstand every ideological lie; there is the possibility of goodness in every aspect of human life; and there is beauty in all things that God has created, and is still creating, in counterpoint to everything that He has not. Men continue to have marvellous options.

That they may be punished for choosing them should not surprise us. Christ was crucified, after all. And yet, even in the face of this setback, Christ is King.

Flinching

I would not say a word against flinching from some evil, but a long scholastic treatise might be incaminated against flinching from some good. This struck me last evening while checking for news from Argentina. Having read that Mr Javier Milei — a run-off candidate in their presidential election who was not simply another Peronist, but according to the media “far-right,” and some kind of “libertarian,” and was “threatening” to make the result close — I was curious to see what happened. I was delighted to learn that he had in fact won, by such a landslide that the BBC was now flinching from reporting it.

This morning my Chief Argentine Correspondent has provided some necessary details. Mr Milei not only swept the “youth” vote, but he did that while declaring: “Killing children is not a human right!” He mocked an accumulation of political corrections, while dropping a few more “flinch bombs” worthy of the XVIIth-century bishops who evangelized that country.

The outgoing president, another tedious Peronist like our pope, shared the old presidential palace with decorative plants. Carlos, my correspondent, claims that he could make Justin Trudeau look intelligent. If true, this would be an extraordinary accomplishment. He also leaves an amazing national debt, hyperinflation, energy shortages, &c.

Mr Milei seems to have won as Mr Trump once did in the United States: by not flinching. A point may be reached in national decline when even the young will pitch out the Peronistas. Godspeed to them, when they reach this point.

Nevertheless, one must continue to despise politics. Carlos echoes Borges: “No matter how bad an Argentine government is, the next will be worse.”

To the sea

Ahmad Shukeiri, founding chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964, was kind enough to explain the saying “from the river to the sea” that has been uttered by every subsequent chairman and such organizations as Hamas and Hezbollah. The river in question is the Jordan, and the sea is the Mediterranean.

Ahmad: “This is a fight for the homeland; it is either us or the Israelis. There is no middle road. The Jews of Palestine will have to leave. … Any of the old Palestine Jewish population who survive may stay, but it is my impression that none of them will survive.”

Other chairmen, such as the current one, Mahmoud Abbas, have stated that there must be, apart from diplomacy, a “final solution” in which the Jews will cease to exist. When he or his predecessor Yasser Arafat were quizzed on such statements by sympathetic Western journalists, they explained that they could not possibly remain in politics if they put it any other way. The “Palestinian people” wouldn’t have it.

But the “Palestinian people” (i.e. the Arabs living now or once-upon-a-time between “the river and the sea”) are not all of one mind. More than live in Gaza are, for instance, Israeli citizens, who have proved loyal to the “colonialist” regime. They did not make themselves into refugees when Israel was founded, and they have flourished within the Israeli state. That there are more than two million of them (fairly represented in the Israeli Knesset) is worth noting: for there are zero Jews living under the PLO, and almost zero in all the other Arab countries combined, from which Jews were essentially evicted when Israeli independence was declared.

These are facts worth remembering on this Remembrance Day, when “Palestinians” and their supporters will be demonstrating for the sixth consecutive Saturday around the world, shouting slogans such as, “Gas the Jews!” Nearly eight decades after the defeat of the Nazis, we have, as it were, a worthy successor.

Curiously, I think Ahmad Shukeiri was right. There is no room between the river and the sea for two states, as a consequence of the way Arab leaders have behaved, through eight decades. Arabs in this location should be given a path to Israeli citizenship, if they want it and will choose fidelity to the Israeli state. But many of them, perhaps a few million, would refuse such an offer.

That they are not wanted in Egypt, Jordan, or any other Arab country, has been made plain, repeatedly, by each of the respective governments.

But they have to go somewhere, and I would suggest Yemen, which has plenty of open space. It is ruled as an Iranian proxy, and the arrival of several million “Palestinian” refugees (presumably by sea from Eilat to Aden, avoiding a controversial passage through the Suez Canal, or the waste of fuel circumnavigating Africa) would keep the ruling Houthis busy for a while. The various aid organizations could redirect their supplies for the “Palestinians” to their new home.

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POST SCRIPTUM — The “Palestinian” motto is, incidentally, more or less identical to Canada’s. Ours was extracted from Psalm 72:8 (or 71:8, in Catholic), which promised Dominion from sea to sea — et a flumine usque ad terminos terrae. That is to say (to cite the King James Version) “from the river unto the ends of the earth.” Now, our river was the Saint Lawrence, which we have meanwhile more or less surrounded; and our seas are not limited to just the one.

Journalists

There were accredited journalists, including certain Hamas propagandists working for the Associated Press and Reuters, who were embedded with the forces that invaded south Israel on October 7th — killing outright approximately 1,500 civilian non-combatants, then raping, torturing, and kidnapping hundreds upon hundreds more, and desecrating the corpses. They took photographs and videos of the Hamas atrocities, which they proudly distributed through the “Palestinian” community, and (lucratively) to Leftists and Muslims worldwide. Many were also sent, via “social media,” directly to the friends and relatives of their victims, and haphazardly throughout Israel by way of intimidation.

Many of these journalists were, at the very least, carrying weapons for the terrorists, which makes them complicit under international law. Israel, happily, has a tradition of hunting down every war criminal who has contributed to the extermination of Jews; and godspeed to them as they search for these “flacks.”

I have often been ashamed of my participation in journalism, which by the dawn of this century was deeply degraded. The average journalist is, at his most honourable, a prostitute, or rather something worse, for poor prostitutes engage in reprehensible acts to support their families. Journalists commonly circulate knowing lies, gratuitously, to advance their political causes, or to smear their ideological opponents. In my experience, they often do it for sport.

Moreover, this is what we must consistently expect of them. Only a fool will trust the news. While not all journalists are viciously evil, in their private lives, the great majority have been debauched by their profession. I would not make an exception for anyone employed in the  “mainstream.” The few honest are hidden away, “professionally” cancelled.

But very well, for the rest. At last, we have a pretext to begin hanging them.

El clero moderno …

“The modernists in the Church believe that they can bring man closer to Christ by insisting on Christ’s humanity. They have forgotten that we do not trust in Christ because He is man, but because He is God.”

This is from the Scholia (to an Implicit Text) of Nicolás Gómez Dávila, 1913–1994, the incomparable Colombian reactionary, previously mentioned in these Idleposts. I am just reading him again, for he is always topical, and better, he can be topical without ever referring to the news. He is habitual in stating the truth, plainly and persistently in a few words. That was the length of his ambition: he did not try for any kind of fame, and would not have been published, even in the few copies he had printed, had he not inherited considerable wealth, and had just the tiniest wee hint of narcissism. (Like me, except for the inheritance.) He never found the time to attend a university, though he helped to found one. He lived in a house wherein he collected a few tens of thousands of books, and for his research, he read them — in most of the modern European languages, and Latin and Greek.

The quotation above is rattling through my head, almost painfully. It explains, for instance, what is happening in Rome. We live in a time when the Christianity that influenced our minds through recent generations, has slipped almost out of circulation. Our clerisy has, at its best and most inspiring, even at its most sincere, discovered a method by which Christianity will not recover.

The human Christ; the biological, fleshly Christ, who isn’t there: We cannot “recover” what was always beyond our knowledge.

But it will recover, for the reality is, Christ is God. Secretly, we still know this.