But Mr SPencer, it is exactly the “permanent things” that are under attack. Europe’s heritage cultures, religious history and ethnic make up are all being destroyed by the Eurabian elite and New Class.

“Ideological struggles” are about conversion, about upturning the other side.... 

Not for Edmund Burke.  Yes, he identified the French Revolution as an “armed doctrine”, comparing it to the Reformation as an international, ideological threat.  (I think that was in “Thoughts on French Affairs”, I’m not sure.) But you don’t have to respond to that threat in kind, by trying to convert or upturn the other side.  Burke didn’t, and I doubt that Robert Spencer is either.

On that Pinkerton column, I agree with Richard.  It was the kind of nutty idea that a neocon would come up with if a neocon tried to come up with a paleocon idea.

The use of the term “The West” is the only politically correct term we can use in a discussion about advancing/preserving the goals of white men. While there may be historical, cultural, nationalist reasons that would make another term more appropriate, “The West” is the only way we can describe ourselves without immediately damning ourselves to charges of racism and it is the closest we can come to identity politics.

What about, say, ‘Christendom’ ?  Monks, knights, Kings, and farmers built the greatest civilisation the world has ever know; the puffed-up intelligentsia destroyed it.  We continue to idealise the beginning of the descent as that moderate and happy time when order, good customs, and grand liberal ideas of saecular government and economic growth flourished simultaneously.  This is empty mythology.  It never existed but is re-packaged every four years to excite the portion of the population of latent sanity.

It never more than a transitional period.  The good aspects of the past were simply not yet retired to the ruins of an abandoned Christian civilisation.  Opening doors for women, corporally punishing one’s children, sexual morality, the traditional family, female modesty, etiquette, care for tradition—these are all remnants of a society based on Altar and Throne.

The new society based on capitalism and classical liberal social philosophy is pliable, inconstant by design.  Its principal is novelty; indeed, novelty gave it birth and is the very foundation for its existence.  Bless the poor souls who, alarmed, attempt to suspend the progress of man who jumped from a cliff to the impending abyss of certain doom below.  It cannot be done.  He will either die a bloody death or we will, being given a second chance by God, return to the sturdy heights of yesteryear for good.

One can polish the brass on the Titanic if he likes, but I do not think it properly addresses the issue of the giant hole in the side of the ship that allowed all of the foreign forces of destruction to compromise the vessel in the first place.

Isn’t the preservation of Western civilization from attacks by One World Marxists and Capitalists, from ethnic tribalist special interests, from left-liberal hedonist-socialists, and yes, from Islamic totalitarians, what the paleocon movement is all about? Limiting your ambition to locally defending a “a nation-state, a class, a particular way of life” is useless when up against that kind of juggernaut, as the persistent degradation of Europe and America has proven.  It’s like setting up a dress-code committee on the sinking Titanic.

North Americans and Western Europeans need to regain their identity as heirs and protectors of Western civilization before they will ever be able to fend off calculated, persistent attacks from these interests, each of which seems to hate the West for its own selfish reasons.

(I should append to the above: not-so-selfish reasons, as well. For example, One World Marxists and Capitalists and ethnic tribalist special interests have given average Muslims good reasons to THINK they hate the West (ie, the Iraq war) when in fact the West is currently as occupied by malign ideologies as they are.)

We defend the abstract - the West - by defending the particular, our own hearths and homes, our own peoples and traditions.  I think that fits in fine with Pinkerton’s ‘Shire’ analogy.

If we look to the Lega Nord and its ilk to preserve the “Judeo-Christian tradition” of Europe, then God help us.

I despair at the flood of third world immigrants to Europe and the increasing erosion of our culture, but for someone to assume that a bunch of thugs who think a bullet is too good for anyone who lives south of Rome is the answer, is even more depressing.

We should also address the problems of our own culture which seems incapable of little more than spitting out celebrity obsessed yobs.

This is what makes me never want to call myself a paleocon:  I will align myself with paleocons because we oppose the the neocons and their war schemes, because we need to limit immigration, but that seems to be it.  You people are anti-capitalist and anti-classical liberal, so why not then just come out and admit you are socialists of a different flavor?  You people seem to have this dumb fantasy that all was perfect in some far off fairytale past.  While medieval Europe was certainly much better than many people would think (Thanks to Thomas Wood’s book on the Church which helped my understanding more of the times) You people still will refuse to admit that there were bad things back then as well.

I just realized that you are really no different from the liberals you claim to hate.... you both are obsessed with ethnicity, you both want to use government as a tool for telling people how to run their lives, you both want to turn back the clock on technological progress, and you both are haters of the free market.

Speaking of conservative Episcopalians who want to build alliances with their third-world brethren, I know many Catholics and Anglicans who spy in the developing nations the last, best hope for Christendom on the grounds that African and Asian Christians tend to be more orthodox on issues like abortion and gay rights than their counterparts in the West.  That may well be, but Christians in the developing world tend to be more socialistic on economic issues too.  As laudable as it is to to invite priests from all over the world to preach to the lapsed believers of western Christendom, American and European Christians cannot fight one leftist influence while importing another.

Richard,
When it comes to defending the West, could it be that focusing on the threat from Islam means barking at the wrong tree?  The reason for this suspicion is the question:  what would the people who made West say about us?  To make the question more concrete: with the eye of your mind, visualize the founding fathers of the Mayflower observing a football weekend on any modern US college campus; Imagine them walking down State Street, watching the drunken crowds in search of some sex.  What would the founding fathers say?  What would they do?  (Probably get right back aboard the Mayflower and sail away, mumbling nervously about Sodom and Gomorrah.  Though I wonder where they would go?  Certainly not back to the Netherlands.) The cause of the decline is internal, and battling Islam will do nothing to stop it.

James Pinkerton’s attempted neologism is both under and over-determined.  Christianity cannot be a sufficient condition for the West since, as Richard states, there are clearly non-Western Christians, nor can it be a necessary condition, since the West obviously existed prior to Christianity.

As mistaken as this route too is to think of the West in terms of “culture,” ‘culture’ largely being a creation of the 19th century, and an empty notion.  (Why do deracinated societies cling to a notion of ‘culture’?)

And before asking what the West is, we should ask who are Westerners?  Westerners are Europeans and the descendants of Europeans (including the UK and continent).  This traditional definition, relying upon the ancient notion of the ancestral, is straightforward, and doesn’t suffer the ambiguity of modernist attempts.

I agree with Richard (Scott Richert, et al.) that a defense of the local is more desirable, but this doesn’t mean that we cannot speak meaningfully about the West.

“There’s a dialectic here in which it is those localist groups that have done the most to preserve the Judeo-Christian tradition of the continent as a whole”

“Judeo-Christian”? What’s that? The term didn’t even exist before WWII. Western culture is White culture. Jews aren’t White, genetically speaking. And the religion of Judaism is not Christianity. Therefore, the term “Judeo-Christian” is an oxymoron.

N.B. This is not saying that I think that the West is neither Christian nor should be.  Christianity is a long-standing tradition that must preserved.  Rather, I was only saying that Christianity alone cannot define the West.

Let me correct myself:  Pinkerton’s attempt is not really a neologism so much as it is an attempt to superimpose a new concept (globalist Christianity) upon an older word (Christendom).

R. Spencer doesn’t seek the ideological conversion of Muslims--not to something Western, though he does ask moderate Muslims to do something about their radical brethren and to show that moderate Islam is more authentic than radical Islam.

conservatives should never become involved in discusions on how to reform third parties, ie, Muslims.  Each religion must wrestle with the tough questions that arise in its own way.  The Catholic Churc is doing it, the Anglican Church is doing.  Islam must also do it.  Outsiders can only be a destructive force and it is usually atheists who propose such intervention in religious groups.

Jerry,

You said: I just realized that you are really no different from the liberals you claim to hate.... you both are obsessed with ethnicity, you both want to use government as a tool for telling people how to run their lives, you both want to turn back the clock on technological progress, and you both are haters of the free market.

Your charge that liberals and paleconservatives have a mutual obsession with ethnicity does not quite capture what is at work here. The point of contention is not ethnicity, but whether or not we “Western” men have the right to advance and preserve our interests against the competing interests of “non-Western” men. Paleoconservatives believe we do while Liberals contend that there is no such thing as competing interests, and if there is, we do not have a right to defend these interests because we are evil bigots. Probe deeper and you will discover that the real issue of contention for most paleconservatives and liberals is equality. Since liberals perceive all men and all cultures to be equal, any circumstance where inequality exists must be the result of unfair circumstances and the evil behavior of white men. It is the duty of government therefore to correct the circumstances that produced inequality.  Paleoconservatives, on the other hand, believe that inequality is both natural and good and that government has no right to forcibly create equality, particularly since this effort will always end in failure and will thus be used to perpetually justify increases in power, size and cost of a leviathan government.

But Jerry, I do agree with you that paleoconservatives are not right about everything, particularly their foreign policy tendency towards isolationism. In this I am not alone, one need only read the works of James Burnham to understand the many reasons why the United States must take an active role in foreign affairs. What many paleconservatives fail to acknowledge is that geopolitics have changed tremendously since the time when our forefathers advised us to stay out of the affairs of others. In the age of missiles, terrorists, submarines and airplanes, we are not longer protected by two great oceans.  Furthermore, unlike the timeframe of our forefathers, we can no longer rely on a weakened Britain and France to secure the Western world from the tide of non-Western forces.

Jerry wrote:
“we need to limit immigration”

True.

“You people are anti-capitalist”

Correction: anti-One World Capitalist, which is merely the flip side of Marxism. Who do you think has been pushing for open borders all these years? One World Capitalists looking for cheap labor.

Paleocons and liberals “both want to use government as a tool for telling people how to run their lives”

Nonsense. You are confusing paleocons (who support diffusion of power and localization, including such initiatives as localized school vouchers) with Bush Republicans and Neocons. Most paleocons, like libertarians, correctly see the federal government as a dangerous, Soviet-like Leviathan that has become an enemy of Christianity.

“you both want to turn back the clock on technological progress, and you both are haters of the free market.”

Most paleocons recognize trade is almost a natural law, so why would they bother hating it or trying to turn it back? Most, I believe, want it subordinated to its rightful place , not elevated to an ideology. Hyper-materialism (money worship), which is trade as ideology, is a Godless, destructive enterprise, because people in its grip, just like their Marxist-materialist counterparts, reduce existence to a ledger, and thus become capable of anything. It’s a “fire in the mind,” but one that is indoctrinated in business schools and universities across America and thus seen as respectable. It is not respectable.

Regarding Italy: I do not think one can expect much from the current right or far-right as far as preserving European cultural heritage is concerned.  One part of them consists mostly of clowns who like publicity by giving fascist salutes, and other forms of demagoguery that appeals to low IQ soccer fans.  Unfortunately they also often cross the line between being critical of immigration policy in the interest of preserving European cultural values and racism, prejudice, etc.  The Berlusconi half is a group of ruthless opportunists.

Italy’s misfortune, although no one likes to call it that, was the so-called “corruption trials” of the 90s.  During these trials a genuine Christian Democratic party, with flaws of its own, but one that brought Italy decades of progress, was eliminated from the political scene, and replaced by the clown Berlusconi.  The corruption of the DC is a far cry from the corruption of both sides nowadays.

Re: Italy: I think we all need to face the facts. Western Europe needs to stand up and say, “Europe is White culture only. It is not negro culture, or Asian culture, or Turkish culture, or Jewish culture. Europe belongs to Whites only.” Then, maybe, we can return our culture to White hands. If not, then the greatest culture in human history will be lost forever. Will silly, p.c. “rules” trump that? Only Whites can decide. Your culture, or Jewish cultural Marxism? Which to choose? What a decision…