Cowards, Bullies, and Killers
The gunsmoke at Virginia Tech had barely cleared when the reliable thunder about gun control began pealing from the New York Times editorial page and other cumuli in the leftist stratosphere. Down on terra firma, a few intrepid observers, citing the students who used their own weapons to stop a gunman at Appalachian Law School in West Virginia in 2002, unlimbered the obvious opposite point: Had someone at Tech been packing heat, he might have cut down the lead-slinging Korean lunatic before he killed nearly three dozen people.
The point’s truth is self-evident. But it also skirts over an underlying pathology: the liberal fear of and disdain for Americans’ using guns or even their fists to defend themselves against criminals. Columnist Mark Steyn called it the “culture of passivity,” asking why no one tried to stop the gunman. The answer isn’t just that Tech students were unarmed thanks to the campus’ being a “gun-free” zone, that just last year, the Virginia General Assembly scuttled a bill that would permit state college students with valid permits to carry firearms. Point is, guns or no, except for the 76-year-old professor (and Holocaust survivor) killed trying to defend his students, and perhaps the boys who shoved a table against a classroom door to prevent the gunman from entering, the men did nothing.
So Steyn doesn’t go far enough. It isn’t merely “a culture of passivity” that paralyzed the victims at Virginia Tech and elsewhere, but a culture of emasculation. As I argue in the preface to my book Real Men: Ten Courageous American to Know and Admire, modern American culture has emasculated, feminized and homosexualized the American man. Thoroughly imbued with feminist ideology, the culture-at-large teaches that raw masculinity and nearly all physical violence must be eliminated to overcome “male dominance” and “sexism” and “oppression” and “patriarchy.” The average American never heard this ideological poppycock before the original Ugly Betty got mad about the ironing and put her castration shears to the sharpening stone. But now, our anti-Christian, feminist cultural elites, meaning Hollywood, the media and big business, expect men to think and behave like women. Many of them do.
Yet even as the petticoat tyrants gelded the American man over the past half-century—mostly because he laid down for the operation—an evil, faux masculinity has arisen, best exemplified in the antics of Don Imus and Howard Stern, other shock-jocks and the talk-show bloviators. They routinely insult guests on their programs. They mercilessly ridicule anyone they choose, behind the safety of a microphone in a sound-proof studio somewhere in New York or Washington, D.C. Many are the notorious, neoconservative, chickenhawk agitators we’ve all come to know and despise. Others spray the airwaves with scatological and pornographic fare that would, 50 years ago, have meant a term at Leavenworth.
Question is, how did we arrive at this pass?
Modern Men And Men Of Yore
Before answering that question, it’s worth observing that young Cho Sheung-hui, the student who murdered 32 people at Virginia Tech on April 16, isn’t the first of his ilk. He had “heroes” on which to model himself—the Columbine killers, for instance. And Steyn’s “passivity” isn’t merely a feature involving a determined, heavily-armed fruitcake with a history of stalking, homemade apocalyptic videos and writing violent plays. Granted, the heroes who crashed United Flight 93 into a Pennsylvania field on 9-11 were sadly anomalous. But showing passivity in the face not only of certain injury and death but also garden variety thugs and bullies is standard fare for American males. It’s what they’re trained to do.
Consider the tale told by Richard Poe at www.lewrockwell.com., recounted in Real Men. Poe writes about the night he was in a Kinko’s copy center in New York City, when a scuffle broke out at a copy machine. A black man, hurling epithets as he walked out the door, stole a white man’s materials. “Look, he’s leaving with my stuff,” said the victim, “wringing his hands in frustration.”
“Behind the counter,” Poe wrote, “were three or four young men in their early twenties, all white, all sporting some combination of bizarre haircuts, earrings, pierced noses, and other countercultural appurtenances. All stared blankly at the customer who was complaining. No one made a move to help,” except the “chubby bespectacled” manager, a woman less than five feet tall.
“As I stood in Kinko’s that night,” Poe wrote, “it occurred to me that those glassy-eyed young men behind the counter with their earrings and pierced noses did not know this fear. They had probably been taught to fear accusations of ‘racism, ‘sexism’ and ‘homophobia.’ But the word coward was not in their vocabulary. They were feminist men.”
Yes, men used to worry about being called a coward. Which is no small point. A skeptic might well answer that a few sheets of paper weren’t worth fighting over, and maybe that’s a valid point. But certainly your life and the lives of your women are worth fighting for, which invites discussing the behavior of three men on a spine-chilling night in December 2000 that culminated in The Wichita Massacre.”
On Dec. 14, two black brothers set upon five young whites, three men and two women, spending the night at one of their houses. The criminals, Jonathan and Reginald Carr, ending a week-long feral rampage, subjected the victims to an orgy of sexual torture nearly beyond description. They forced the women to have sex, forced the men to have sex with the women, then raped and sodomized the women. They robbed them and drove the naked victims to a field, having graciously allowed the women to wear sweaters, and executed four of them. One woman, having been shot in head and run over with a truck, survived and escaped. The men did not fight back. The men did not attempt to escape. The men did not protect their women. This is curious, given that one of the Carr brothers forced each victim, one at a time, to drive him to an ATM machine, which left two or three men at the home with the other brother who was raping the women. But the men did nothing.
Time was, it didn’t take such an attack to provoke a man’s violent reaction in self-defense. Consider a few stories from Real Men. A few years ago, the Anchorage Daily News reported, an octogenarian veteran of the 82nd Airborne, which jumped into Normandy on D-Day, stopped two teenagers from burglarizing his house. Roy Lee Hendricks shot himself in the finger, but he beat the daylights out of the two punks, then drove himself to the hospital. “I never ran in my life, and I don’t intend to now,” the rough-and-ready Alaskan told the paper. “I’d rather be a dead hero than a live coward.” Hendricks cared about something more than getting hurt or even killed. He cared about his honor. About his obligations as a man.
Audie Murphy, who received 33 battle decorations, including the Medal of Honor, during World War II before he was 20, was another American to be feared and respected. Thanks to a friendship with Jimmy Cagney, he became an actor after the war, but he never lost his sense of what it meant to be a man. In his excellent biography of Murphy, No Name on the Bullet, Don Graham recounts two stories that today would invite Oprah or Dr. Phil to spend an hour chewing the rag about overcooked machismo. At a party in Beverly Hills, a drunken actor named Lawrence Tierney was cursing around Murphy’s girlfriend. Audie politely approached the man.
“Mr. Tierney, you don’t know me, my name is Murphy and I’m here with my girl, and please, don’t do that anymore.”
“Get away from me,” said Tierney, who towered over Murphy.
Tierney persisted, and Audie returned: “Mr. Tierney, this is very disturbing, please don’t do that anymore.”
Murphy went away again, but the blotto thespian persisted, an invitation for a third conversation. Murphy tapped him shoulder.
“Mr. Tierney, I’ve told you twice and I’m not going to tell you again. Get your hat and coat and leave right now.”
“Tierney looked at those eyes,” the witness said, “and got his hat and coat and left.” Murphy’s steel gray eyes, Graham writes, “were the thing that everybody remembered. They were cold, almost deadly.”
Another time at the racetrack, Murphy was reading the racing form, but glanced up as two women walked by. He quickly went back to the form, oblivious to anything but handicapping the ponies. “So about five minutes later,” a friend of Murphy’s told Graham, “here comes a big Dago guy about two hundred and something pounds and he says, ‘Hey, next time my wife ever comes here again and you make eyes at her ...’
“Are you through?” Murphy replied.
“No, I’ll tear your head off.”
“So Audie just leaned back and pulled out this gun and laid it right here and said, ‘I killed three-hundred fifty of you guys [during the war]; one more wouldn’t make any difference.’”
Real Men is full of such encounters, which are less indicative of “violence” or the “gun culture” than a culture that expected men to defend themselves, their women and, yes, their honor. Consider the gunfight between James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok and Dave Tutt, who won Hickok’s watch in a poker game. It was July 21, 1865, in Springfield, Mo., and Tutt threatened to wear Hickok’s watch on the town square to humiliate the storied plainsman and Indian fighter. Wild Bill suggested that such effrontery would not be amusing or appreciated. When Tutt appeared in the square at 6 p.m., Hickok showed up as well. Tutt drew first, and Hickok put a bullet in his chest.
The Feminist Victory
So back to the original question. American society has descended from one that whelped men who threw punches if a woman heard the lame profanity of a drunken lout, to one that whelps men who watch their women suffer rape and murder. How did we come to this pass?
The answer lies in the steady stream of propaganda from the feminist cultural elites that have equated masculinity—and the healthy and righteous violence that goes with it when necessary—with evil. They taught men to behave like women. Television and films, of course, helped.
In 50 short years, we have descended from the American man as represented in The Rifleman and Father Knows Best to the feminized men on Seinfeld and Everybody Loves Raymond. Once upon a time, television fathers were solid. Like Lucas McCain. Or Jim Anderson. No more. Now, the American man on television is a clown, a helpless, pathetic sissy whose wife and children have all the answers and order him around. Dan Conner, the slovenly, dull-witted husband and father on Roseanne, is just one fine example. Hollywood once offered us The Rifleman. Now we get Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Will and Grace. Not to mention preposterous films with lady warriors, such as G.I. Jane and Courage Under Fire.
No wonder we now have the news media’s latest hero, the “metrosexual.” “Male executives find feminine traits pay off in the workplace,” a headline in the Salt Lake Tribune aptly put it. Metrosexuals “are very secure in their sexuality,” ran one report on the phenomenon, and getting a facial or a pedicure “doesn’t make them feel any less masculine or any less heterosexual.” Metrosexuals are true pioneers, “finding the courage to explore the female domain,” another report averred, without losing their ‘status’ as real men.” Time was, our pioneers were Lewis and Clark and Kit Carson, who traversed and tamed the American wilderness. Now, they “explore” the “female domain.”
Yet Hollywood and the news media aren’t the only factories manufacturing this this cultural poison. Schools are another front in the war against masculinity. Illinoisloop.org posts a list of 22 practices in grade schools that harm boys in myriad ways. Where the subject matter of genuine manhood is concerned, the site scrutinizes curricula and makes several observations. “Assigned literature,” it reports, “is skewed lopsidedly towards social issues, and away from novels of high adventure, courage, patriotism, etc.” And boys also face an “almost total absence of fact-based biography and non-fiction in literature and reading classes.”
In short, don’t give a boy The Killer Angels, a novel about the battle of Gettysburg, or a biography of Gen. George S. Patton. Let him read a story about a girl who makes the football team and the boy who shows real courage by admitting he takes ballet lessons.
In schools, masculinity is out. Commentators such as Diane Ravitch argue that reading material has been feminized. In her article “Education and the Culture Wars,” published in Daedalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Ravitch described reviewing test material as one of the board members of a federal agency. She learned that reading selections on one standardized test were not only racially biased against whites but also sexually biased against boys. “In one story, a white boy in a difficult situation weeps and says plaintively, ‘If only my big sister were here, I would know what to do.’” Ravitch also reviewed one publisher’s guidelines for standardized tests: Among the taboo items were:
Men shown as “strong, brave, and silent,” women shown as “weepy, fearful, and emotional;” boys playing sports, or girls playing with dolls; ... men working as lawyers, doctors, or plumbers; women working as nurses or secretaries; ... men playing sports or working with tools; women cooking and caring for children; ... men portrayed as breadwinners; women portrayed as homemakers… Illustrators must not use pink for baby girls or blue for baby boys. Out is the old-fashioned idea that females care more about their appearance than males do: today’s illustrator must portray both sexes “preening in front of a mirror,” with Dad using a blow-dryer.
Thus is a metrosexual made, and Ravitch and others aren’t just describing obvious propaganda. They are describing the cultural elite’s manipulation and alteration of traditional symbols to remake boys and reorder society. By replacing those traditional symbols, they have changed the moral order from what it was 50 years ago to what is now.
Phony Masculinity
Given the subversion of masculinity, it’s unsurprising that the emasculated, homosexualized man evolved concomitantly with the phony tough guy. His exemplars are Imus and other radio blowhards such as the increasingly popular neoconservative, Mark Levin. Levin expresses a few opinions with which many conservatives agree, yet he incessantly berates his guests in particularly sophomoric terms, such as “moron,” “jerk” and “idiot.” He has labeled House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “stretch” because she has, he assumes, undergone a few face lifts. Another such insufferable crank is Glenn Beck.
The comments that finished Imus, as so many have observed, are nothing new and not confined to the Left, where Imus made the bed he’d have to sleep in. Many of the radio commentators who dominate conservative talk radio are chicken-hawk gas-bags who do little, apart from goading America to send other, braver men off to war, than defame callers, public officials and celebrities who do not share their ideological obsessions. They say things about others that, in a civilized country, would invite a pistol-whipping in the street.
But perhaps phony masculinity is best represented in the obsession with carnality among celebrities and the hyper-sexual swamp called radio and television, perfectly represented by Howard Stern and something called The Man Show, now mercifully moldering in its richly-deserved grave. Stern is known for “Black Jeopardy” and other racial capers, but his stock-in-trade is filthy sexual banter and monkeyshines that reveal him to be a full-blown pervert. Anyone familiar with Stern needs no rehearsal of his pornography (which includes, for instance, incestuous lesbian encounters). It suffices to say no subject, no matter how perverted or repellent, is off limits.
The Man Show was tamer, but it too presented a false and perverse image of masculinity that offers feminists the inventory with which to peddle their lies and fantasies about “sexism” and “oppression.” The Man Show defined masculinity in terms of belching, flatulence, drunkeness, and watching scantily clad, large-breasted women hop on trampolines. Such filth was lower octane than Stern’s, which perhaps explains its commercial failure. The Man Show lost the race to the bottom.
These two examples don’t come close, however, to some of the gratuitous and malevolent sex and violence in many Hollywood films, which is, again, precisely how feminists wish masculinity to be depicted. It proves their point that masculinity is a pathology to be feared, rejected and erased.
Men Are The Problem
Of course, real masculinity is none of this. And tempting as it is to blame feminists for what’s happened to men, one unsettling truth is that men were in charge of society’s major institutions, cultural and otherwise, when the feminists began their equivalent of Sherman’s march to the sea. Men ran the courts and legislatures when women demanded war on fathers and husbands. Men ran the universities when the feminists demanded bogus academics such as “gender studies.” Men ran the military when women demanded “the right” to fight on the battlefield. They ran the movie studios, law firms and newspapers.
One explanation for their surrender is that feminists exploited the very quality in men they claim to deplore, meaning chivalry and a man’s natural desire to please women. Men don’t like to tell women “no.” I saw this dynamic up close when I served on the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces. Highly-decorated military men, to use an apt cliché, were putty in the hands of women, even the bitter, snarling crones who hovered about the commission to monitor and subvert its gathering of facts.
But the feminists offered something else, and looking back, we can see what that something was: doing it. In return for giving the feminists the political, cultural and financial clout they wanted, the feminists offered easy sex. The agreement was implicit in the exchange. Paradoxically, as sexual morals gradually disappeared over the last 40 years, and more and more women offered casual sex, men have been less willing and able to assert their masculinity. The sex, allegedly, is great. But masculine control over society’s major institutions collapsed. Maybe when the feminists launched their campaign for free sex, they knew exactly what they were doing. But the men knew what they were doing too.
So we have what we have. Imus, Stern and the rest of the tough guys—hollow men whom Audie Murphy would have torn to pieces. We have the men who do nothing when a remorseless killer loads up and shoots, like the professor at Virginia Tech who, located in another building, hid under his desk for six hours, and left his students alone in a basement laboratory.
Which brings us back not just to the wounded campus, but to the massacre in Wichita, and myriad other scenes where men fully capable of fighting back did nothing. The culture has told men loud and clear that defending themselves, their women or families, with a gun or without, risks professional and financial ruin. Or worse, prison time. Men have learned that raw-boned masculinity is a psycho-sexual disorder. They have learned, as one observer said, that men are just big women; that women are little men. They have learned to “explore the female domain,” that “feminine traits pay off.”
Indeed they do. At a very high price.
R. Cort Kirkwood is the author of Real Men Ten Courageous Americans to Know And Admire (Cumberland House). This essay reprises material that appeared in the book.
Comments
I am indeed impressed. This is a case with an uncompromising language worthy of me.
What I would add, and perhaps it is in the book, is that this problem of feminized men (which is NOT identical to homosexual activity or even self-definition - most younger purely heterosexual men today are feminized to a significant degree by a perverse culture) is not restricted to the overtly Leftist and Neocon Leftist camps. You can see it among alleged paleoconservatives as well. Various of them get their panties in wads when people like me speak forcefully and refuse to back down or kiss up. And then they, like women operating behind the scenes to avoid any public debate they fear they could lose, lock out of their little circles all those whose views and refusal to back away from them frighten them.
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Mr Cantrell,
OOOH! We’ll scratch your eyes out! Or even worse, we’ll sic these guys on ya (from Monty Python’s “Military Fairy” sketch):
http://youtube.com/watch?v=I_iH1GhM2j8
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So what’s your solution? Vote Republican? The GOP
front-runner right now is Rudy Guiliani,
a crossdresser. Is John McCain, your MAN?
All the other ‘choices’ are just plain not viable.
Everyone knows all this stuff, so what’s new?
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Let’s see, the writer argues: “Given the subversion of masculinity, it’s unsurprising that the emasculated, homosexualized man evolved concomitantly with the phony tough guy. His exemplars are Imus and other radio blowhards such as the increasingly popular neoconservative, Mark Levin. Levin… incessantly berates his guests in particularly sophomoric terms, such as “moron,” “jerk” and “idiot.”
But when it comes to Audie Murphy’s friends, ethnic slurs are implicitly praised: ““So about five minutes later,” a friend of Murphy’s told Graham, “here comes a big Dago guy about two hundred and something pounds and he says, ‘Hey, next time my wife ever comes here again and you make eyes at her ...”
So we learn that to Kirkwood, “jerk” is a bad word, and “Dago” is a good word. Come on, let’s move beyond this tendentious label-splitting, and just support a slur-free society.
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Of course Paul and Tancredo are viable. They would need grassroots funding because the israeli-dominated party bosses wont voluntarily fund either.
why let a foreign country dictate the viability of candidates for public office in the USA?
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I’d say that there’s a big difference between uttering an ethnic slur on the radio, using your power to influence millions, from the safety of a glass booth with security guards--and using it in a context of a personal confrontation, where your opponent can:
a) Insult you back.
b) Punch you in the face.
c) For all you know, pull out a knife or a gun.
There’s nothing more natural and inevitable than the use of group-based slurs when in a violent confrontation between two angry males. That’s quite different from using a perch in the media to bully the weak.
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It’s sad to look in the cultural mirror and see what we’ve become. Values such as honor, respect, integrity, fairness, humility, decency, morality, and plainspokeness are antiquated notions that have fallen into total disrepute. American culture today is all about glorifying the Seven Deadly Sins and celebrity worship. Naturally in this environment honorable manhood is deplored and ridiculed.
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When our country is attacked, or when it goes to war, our chicken-hawk president tells the chick-hawk American public to go shopping. Instead of a foreign policy of “walk softly and carry a big stick” we have the “Power of Pride” bumper stickers. We destroy weak defenseless countries and call our armies heroic, yet our soldiers are lauded for their deep feelings and constantly depicted as men and women (no distinction) distraught and crying for fallen comrades (not much of that at Gettysburg or Stalingrad).
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If American men had real courage (which we don’t) we would challenge the supposed axiomatic rightness of woman in the workplace, woman in combat, women in locker rooms.
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“So what’s your solution? Vote Republican? Is John McCain, your MAN? “
The solution to this problem will certainly not be implimented in the next Presidential Election. The solution starts with the Men on the street… with the readers of this article and our families. The solution is to educate our children against the grain, and against the political correctness. Make ladies of your daughters and make Gentlemen Fighters of your sons, for nothing less will certainly be required of them in the upcomming years.
It is my firm belief that nothing short of a catachlismic event, (be it natural disasters, stock market crash, WWIII, etc.) will change minds and actions of the general populus, and when that time comes, it won’t be the feminestes or the demasculinated guys who pulls the rest of the population through. We will be pulled through by the Real Men, or we will not be pulled through, for that is not a job that metrosexuals are capable of.
It starts with you, the reader. Take action with your self and your family.
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Mr. Kirkwood manages to blast in a single, sustained
invective just about every human type that I despise. I
I suspect that he was an academic at one time but
won’t admit it. Read his book. It is dynamite. Paul
Gottfried
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What’s a man to do? Women frequently kill their children in abortion clinics that would have a higher death-toll than Cho’s action.
Women are quite violent, killing a million of their offspring each year, but we are equally told that those murders don’t count. At least if done before birth in the right place at the behest of the woman. (when men beat the unborn baby to death, it’s murder, as it is when the woman delivers then kills the baby).
If you aren’t going to follow Ghandi or Martin Luther King, (or a number of Saints), who would suffer injustice in your face, but instead go the other way, the most obvious place to show manly defense of the innocent against violence is the one place where it won’t happen.
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Great article, but I do quibble with its more-masculine-than-thou tone. I’m not going to say it was ever easy to be like Audie Murphy, but surely it was less difficult in a society where his behavior was lauded. Today, his behavior would be condemned as sociopathic, and he’d be whisked off to serve a multi-year sentence at some prison with a (perhaps well-deserved) reputation for homosexual gang rape. Under circumstances such as those, perhaps even Audie Murphy himself would have been inclined to tone it down a notch or three. I was born into this society, and I’ve never cared for a great many aspects of it, but I’ve certainly had no viable choice in the matter, short of suicide. The author, I suspect, belongs to the generation that permitted things to get this way. Forgive us young fellows for being remiss in our duty to undue the errors that were imposed on us shortly after we escaped the womb. If I had no criminal record and I, a working class White man in the contemporary USA, layed a hand on a Black dude, for nearly any reason, my life would, after all, be effectively over. I would be charged with a hate crime, invariably convicted (Has any White man charged with a hate crime been acquitted, anywhere, worldwide?), and rendered effectively unemployable hence forth (no one hires people who commit hate crimes, a fact I can personally testify to, as I have been convicted of one of these offenses, and now no one will hire me anywhere, not even at McDonalds, over seven years after being released from jail). Maybe those earring-in-the-nose guys at Kinko’s were cowards, but when a gun is being held to your head, even if only figuratively, few people are likely to exemplify the manly virtues (especially over a few sheets of paper). I once almost tripped a (Black) shoplifter who was being pursued by a group of Tower Records employees. It would have been very easy to do, and he would have gone down hard and been taken into custody, and I really wanted to do it. But I didn’t, because I knew society, shaped by those who came before me, would not sympathize with an Irishman over a Black, irrespective of who was objectively in the right. I’d have likely gotten sued for helping to enforce the criminal law, no doubt by some ACLU lawyer empowered to service indigent criminal clients by virtue of the trust fund bequeathed to him by his parents, so I declined to do the righteous and manly thing. Those who allowed my generation to be placed in Politically Correct, emasculated captivity, should not, from their no doubt privileged and lofty perches, condemn we captives for having a captive’s mentality. We’re just trying to survive in the Gulag-Without-Walls we got born into. Tough guys in modern America can go to Iraq, to prison, or fade away into unemployable obscurity. I wonder just how tough the author would have been had he been forced to grow up under such a miasma of Politically Correct tyranny.
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Very, very good article. I would like to mention that my cousin was among those shot at VA Tech. He is a very brave man of Hispanic descent and the support of his family. He was wounded before he even knew what happening. The students around him were dead, mostly. There was little opportunity to plan a counter attack. They had no idea if there was more than one gunman. They really were not expecting someone to walk into their class and start shooting them.
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“...and the boy who shows real courage by admitting
he takes ballet lessons.”
Whoa. Hold on a minute there. You can’t have ballet
without male ballet dancers. Who’s going to hold the
women up in the air? They also aren’t going to dance
to anything unless it was written by a male composer,
or inspired by the writings of a male poet.
Artistic pursuits should not be considered feminine,
and a boy who wants to pursue the arts and stands up
for that in the face of childish ridicule from his
peers is indeed brave and courageous.
And this is not coming from someone who is OK with the
“feminized” school system. I don’t think this school
system is good for girls, either. Pull them all out
of school and back into the real world, where boys
and girls alike can learn what real courage is all
about.
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The perversion of sex roles seems to be at the heart
of the American Imperium. Look at the reflections
in the “economy”—split into a
distorted feminine (houses, houses, houses!)
and distorted masculine (bombs, bombs, bombs!)
Good honest work in life-sustaining occupations
is disappearing in all this pretence - and the
“bubble” economy is a perfect metaphor for
all this pretended being.
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In the mid-20th century many of us supposedly acted because of the fear of being labeled a coward. In the early 21st century, many of us supposedly don’t act because of a fear of being accused of racism, exism or homophobia. The common denominator in both historical situations is fear. The symbols are manipulated but the fear remains. What is this thing called fear?
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In his latest work the brilliant Israeli dissident writer, Israel Shamir, touches on this very subject:
I take great dislike to these victimhood stories, and not only because they are factually weak. The victimhood stories are not the result, but a cause of suffering. Whenever these stories of unprovoked persecution are being delivered, have no doubt: their promoters are preparing a beastly atrocity of their own. Jews brandished the story of the holocaust and erased the peaceful Palestinian population in 1948. Armenians recited the story of their unique unprovoked suffering, and massacred innocent Azeri civilians in Qarabag( in 1991-94 war, sending hundreds thousands of refugees to Baku. Poles and Czechs inflamed by stories of their suffering under the Reich expelled millions of ethnic Germans from their ancestral lands, while Ukrainians who told the stories of their suffering in Rzecz Pospolita slaughtered the Poles of Volyn by the thousands.
National politics parallel gender politics, as it was outlined by Otto Weininger: thus, the feminists promoted a narrative of women’s suffering under their eternal male oppressor, and caused the breakdown of many families, the impoverishment of women and the emasculation of men. A narrative of this kind may be balanced by a counter-narrative. While it is true that men lead in physical violence, women are much more efficient in verbal aggression. The lashing tongue of Lady Macbeth was no less guilty than Macbeth’s piercing knife. Women do know how to provoke a man; and men respond – sometimes with a kiss, sometimes with a blow, sometimes with a bullet. Jose killed, but Carmen provoked. Despite the much promoted myth of the muscular Barb Wire type of girl, women are less successful when it comes to physical blows, so they tend to forbid physical violence but allow the verbal one and outlaw the very concept of provocation.
This is a powerful insight. In retrospect it is obvious that victimology is not defensive but offensive. Just look around you. But sometimes you need someone to shove your face in it to see it.
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Bob’s Riddle: All anti-white racists agree that it’s ok for whites to become minorities in their own countries. All anti-white racists also agree that a Japanese person who wants to become a minority in his own country is either a traitor or clinically insane. Therefore, what is an anti-white racist? Answer
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What about the widely publicized incident about a month ago, in Chicago, when an off-duty cop beat up a barmaid in front of several passive onlookers? (see http://youtube.com/watch?v=Nz6YJtnLtus) Pundits and talking heads bewailed the misconduct of the policeman, but there’s nothing newsworthy there—pathological punks have beat up women from time immemorial, but the truly shocking revelation on that video is the behaviour of the bystanders—one of them thought it a good opportunity to place a phone call—to the police, presumably—I’m sure he feels proud that he chose to “get involved.” Time was when mass cowardice could prompt some soul-searching (remember Kitty Genovese?) but by now the new norms of behaviour are thoroughly ingrained.
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I congratulate Mr. Kirkwood for his excellent article. He has painted a very sad picture of contemporary American life I suppose an answer to the problem if for real men to TAKE back what was lost. Probably, this will have to begin in the home by putting “super-moms” back in their place. I think that is where the battle will be won. It certainly won’t be won in the U.S. Congress.
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Kevin O. makes some valid points, unfortunately! We do
live in a PC Gulag. As a former US Marine, officer,
Cobra pilot and Southerner, I consider my bona fides to
qualify me as a real man but I must admit in a world turned
upside down that it takes ‘large ones’ to speak your
mind at work or in public. Let’s face it, we all know
what ‘groups’ can not be touched without taking major
heat.
We do not need WWIII to change things. What we need is
a revolution in the way men think and act. The first
step is to ‘not care’ what the pantie waisted bed wetters
think. But we also need some people in positions of
authority that will tell the whiners to put a sock in it
and not back down. Once that happens a few times, the dam
may very well break. We also need to support men who
take a stand and back them up. Adopt the adage of the old
paratrooper, better a dead hero than a live coward. A lot
of people are just waiting, looking and hoping for a hero
to rally around.
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Looks like the Modernist-Freemasonary-Kabbalist are right on schedule with their New World Order programs (Novus Ordo). This is not some ranting of a fanatic Traditionalist Roman Catholic, but a review of where we have been and where we are heading in a not so far future.
First, it began with the French Revolution with the intoxicating promise of Libete, Fraternite, Equalite. Then the errors spread with the Bolshevik Revolution. Then Masonic governments of Mexico and Portugal followed with the Communist inspired Spanish Civil War and then the Greek Civil War. Now the moral compass of the World, the Roman Catholic Church, has been captured by these same people and for the past 43 years the decline of Western Civilization has degenerated into this, the homosexual and feminization of the culture and the civilization, it is no surprise we are experiencing all these sensitive men who act like women, and unwilling to defend themselves and others.
The fix? The rule of Christ the King in the hearts of the faithful, and the restoration of the Catholic civilization.
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OK, is this guy for real, or is the whole thing a
joke?
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Now, what does this all have to do with neoconservatives?
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I can’t add anything to this discussion which hasn’t already been better written by the original author or one of the commentators. My thanks to all of you for your insights. Whenever I come to this site, I know I will be taught by intelligent people of noble character. My thanks to Taki once more for creating this site. His article on winning the gold in judo fits in quite well with this one.
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I can’t add anything to this discussion which has not already been better written by the original author or one of the commentators. My thanks to all of you for your insights. Whenever I go to this site, I know I will be taught by intelligent people of noble character. Once more, my thanks to Taki for creating this site. His article on winning the gold in judo fits in well with this article.
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Darn (old fashioned masculine word, no longer in use) good article. Another type of man you see these days is the wannabe bodybuilder, mostly young guys who spend hundreds of hours in the gym bulking up. Interestingly, bodybuilders include both types identified by Kirkwood: effeminate metrosexuals and phony tough guys. Since so many behaviors once properly thought male will now get them fired or land them in jail, they are compensating by grotesquely exaggerating one of the few characteristics that still distinguish men from women: big muscles. Yet, for all their steroidal machismo, these guys will never achieve a small percentage of the masculinity of an Audie Murphy, a scrawny runt who weighed about 140 pounds, soaking wet.
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One other point needs to be addressed. Men can act masculine only if they have a goal. In a few places the author refers to men protecting “their women”. In the archipelago of personal islands that is modern culture, there is nothing to protect. Chivalry only works because meekness is a virtue - the strong use their strength in a sort of redistribution of graces to protect the weak.
Instead the “weak” often call lawyers or the constabulary when there is even the hint of a problem. They are no longer weak in anything recognizable.
And you can see the parallel with the robin-hood taxation.
That leaves honor, but that must be, well, honored. It was CS Lewis who observed long ago “we laugh at honor and then are surprised to see traitors in our midst”.
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My vote-Anyone the Constitution party puts up, was a good one in 2004.
BTW-your source for the “heroes’ of flight 93?? the govt, a reeeal trusty source there.
PLease
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Wait a minute. Why didn’t Poe stop the thief instead of sitting about watching other fellows and pondering what cowards *they* were?
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Kevin O. makes some good points. A big difference between
Adie’s world and ours is the use of the legal and the economic system to ‘keep us in line’. Standing up one at a time is suicide in most cases if you have a family and assets. The elite are using fear to hold us down. Unfortunately, it is working.
I am afraid we need a real revolution by men and for men. As a former US Marine, Cobra pilot, officer and Southerner, I consider my bona fides to qualify me as a real man but I must admit that the fear that Kevin speaks about creeps into my mind on a daily basis. I do what I can to help the movement and consider myself a little part of a bigger ‘resistance’.
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I don’t believe American men are as
bad off as the article claims. Perhaps
the schools are a problem but that is
not news. Southern and Western men are
the bravest I have known. No such school
massacre could have happened in the
South or West. The Virginia Tech shooting
was unusual as I would think the male
students there would have behaved
differently, but apparently did not.
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