A friend of Paul Gottfried sent Takimag this report from his last trip to the mall in Houston, Texas: 

Today I went to the Harwin Central Mall to pick up some crystals. The very first store that you come to when you walk from the lobby of the building into the shopping area had this sign posted on their door. The shop is run by Muslims. I couldn’t stay in the building, it made me so sick.

The text reads, “We will be closed on Friday, September 11, 2009, to commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Ali (A.S.).” The message is repeated in Spanish. 

When I emigrated from newly post-Soviet Russia, I stayed in touch with some of my classmates. Years later, I began hearing about our mutual acquaintances, girls in their late teens and early twenties at that time, getting abortions in the half-a-dozen range. The very existence of these rumors was shocking.

The epidemic of terminating pregnancies as a form of birth control remains one of the biggest challenges to Russia’s demographic struggle. Arkady Mamontov’s new prolife film, simply called Abortion, is the latest attempt to raise awareness about this issue.  Whether the film is independent is largely irrelevant, as it premiered on state channel Rossiya during last Sunday’s popular television talk show, Special Correspondent.  The host, Maria Sittel, also seemed quite supportive of this filmmaker during the follow-up expert discussion panel.

This graphic documentary examines Russia’s private clinics, which illegally end unwanted pregnancies long after the first-trimester limit, including on-camera admissions to destroying just about fully formed babies at 22, or so, weeks.  A particularly disturbing moment involves a medical staff lecturing an undercover correspondent, pretending to be 15-weeks pregnant, regarding the ethics of her decision “to murder her baby” all the while agreeing to perform the procedure.

Mamontov is no stranger to controversy, and this documentary fits the mould: not because of its shock value per se, but, rather, the filmmaker’s bold assertion regarding one major cause of this epidemic.  He points his finger at the Western political establishment.  Not only has the United States’ and, to a lesser extent, the European Union’s foreign policy been aimed at encircling Russia in the past twenty years, he argues, but the West has been attempting to depopulate this country from the inside.

His main culprit is organizations like Planned Parenthood. Instead of “leading a ‘brave and angry’ stance with regard to people’s right to access to good sexual and reproductive health care and services”, as the IPPF website claims, this institution has been responsible for dispensing irresponsible and potentially deadly advice to unsuspecting Russian women, whom the filmmaker interviews.

Why is his country a target? Mamontov tells his viewers to read Brzezinski: it is unfair for Russia alone to access all the rich natural resources within its immense territory. This geopolitical reasoning allows the documentary to avoid a preachy pro-life tone so typical of this genre.

However, Arkady Viktorovich never had the onus of proof that these insatiable Eurasian desires exist. Rather than emphasizing Russia’s uniqueness, he should have elaborated on the civilizational discontents, as Freud would say, that drive these institutions well beyond their intended raison d’être—and not only in Russia.
But, at least shock value gets the ratings!

Regarding Nina Kouprianova’s “Motherland” piece, it has long seemed to me that most thriving civilizations have been undergirded by two tenets:

1) A recognition of something greater than itself (i.e., a God or gods)
2) A recognition of something lower than itself (the animal kingdom and natural habitat).

Most Western nations have largely forsaken both premises. They have become much more secular (adios “something greater”) and now fret more about the environment and its suitability for the local frog population than they do about having progeny of their own. Some even recommend foregoing children to ensure greater frog comfort (effectively demoting themselves to the “something lower”). 

What’s more, many Westerners see the spread of religious skepticism and the growth of environmentalism as signs of progress. What they do not seem to compute is that for all of their advances, what they are ultimately doing is progressing themselves out of existence. Naively, they appear confident that they’ve won the debate about whether one should still believe in the Divine and in man’s place atop the food chain.

Well, it all depends on how you define winning. Looking at the numbers, I wouldn’t even call these Pyrrhic victories. All that folks on Team Progress have to show for their triumph is their replacement by those sticking to the something greater/something lower model. The debates’ “winners” are simply being exchanged for people who didn’t hear the ref blow the whistle.

My instincts are to laugh at government sloganeering. Still, at the very least it is refreshing to see a campaign that equates patriotism with living for your country rather than dying for it.

I’ll grant Tom that Richard Dawkins (who’s made time between writing hysterical liberal op-eds to compose a 500-page tome on recent advances in evolutionary research) might be motivated by a residual Anglican prejudice against the Catholic Church. This prejudice also has a historical foundation: there was something about that Spanish Armada that made Elizabeth and her subjects suspect that, yes, foreign papists really were trying to take over their country. I guess what makes me dubious about a lot of contemporary Catholic trads is that I sense they want to have it both ways with the history and character of their church. Putting aside the issue of whether a Darwinian outlook might actually re-enforce many values and commitments Tom and I share, I think it’s safe to say that Richard Dawkins represents the very height of scientific, leftish modernity: there’s the atheism, the rejection of the past as mystical obfuscation, a little polymorphic sexuality thrown in, the dreams of a more rational global society in the future, the whole lot. Thus, why exactly would Catholic traditionalists get bent out of shape if this man dislikes their church and faith? Shouldn’t they expect him to do so? Shouldn’t this re-enforce the idea that their church is still on the right path—and still relevant? Shouldn’t the right response be, “There he goes again…” Doesn’t the church have a proud tradition of standing athwart history (or at least modernity) and yelling “stop!” Didn’t popes oppose the secularizing ideology of a great many nation-states, including England and America? Aren’t these aspects of the church some of the major reasons people become traditionalist Catholics?

Just this afternoon (providence perhaps?), I received an email about a fascinating anti-Darwin conference that shall take place in Rome in November:

Scientific Conference Refuting Evolution Theory to be held in Rome, Italy

In Response to Pope Benedict XVI’s Call for Both Sides to be Heard

ROME, ITALY –  The 150th anniversary of Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” in November 2009 will be the occasion for a unique conference at Pope Pius V University in Rome presenting a scientific refutation of evolution theory. 

The conference, “The Impossibility of Evolution” will be held on November 9 in the auditorium of St. Pius V University (Via Cristoforo Colombo, No. 200) beginning at 9:30 a.m.

 
I have nothing against the holding of this conference; indeed, many of the participants are impressively credentialed. But the existence of such an event makes me think that it’d be more intellectually consistent for Catholic trads to view eternal damnation-bound Dawkins as a mortal foe, and not expect him to address the pope with proper salutations and refrain from saying ugly things about the church. 

In many ways, this discussion reminds me of some of the nostalgic reveries penned by prominent Catholic paleos about the Habsburgs and their empire, usually with Kaisers Franz Josef and Karl I depicted as saintly Christian rulers. There is, of course a great deal of truth to such portrayals, the later having made well-intentioned efforts to end the blood-letting of the Great War. But the House of Habsburg only became benign, warm, and fuzzy in its late, decadent period when the Old World was collapsing all around it. Three hundred years early, Habsburg rulers showed little compunction in ordering the slaughter of their Saxon Protestant enemies (my ancestors, by the way). I’m sure Genghis Khan, too, was a dear old chap on his death bed.

I don’t write any of this because I hold some excessively longstanding historical grudge—I don’t. To the contrary, I’ve always had a deep admiration for the glorious contributions to the arts the church patronized during the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation. I guess I just respect and admire the church more when it’s in a bold, aggressive, “pagan” mood, and less when its leaders demand universal tolerance and cry victimization.

More news on the David Letterman and playing bouncy bouncy with the staff story. Nell Scovell, who worked as a writer for the show in the 90s, talks about the atmosphere that led her to quit in Vanity Fair.

Scovell’s point is not that she was sexually harassed directly, far from it. Letterman paid her a little attention (as men are wont to do with young women) but certainly nothing objectionable. Similarly, no other manager forced themselves upon her nor made lewd suggestions. However, she does say that she felt she had to quit because of the atmosphere of sexual harassment. The problem, as she saw it, was that managers were indeed conducting affairs with the younger female staff. Nothing particularly objectionable about that: wives might object but that’s a personal matter, not one for public policy. Similarly, as long as the affairs are between consulting adults not really anyone else’s business as long as no one tells the pastor.

No, her point is that those young women who were having affairs were privileged in the workplace. They got more leeway, more power, over those who were not doing the horizontal rhumba with the bosses. And that in itself is, in the modern formulation, sexual harassment.

Now I’m not all that in love with many elements of the modern world myself and I’m sure most here agree. But some rules about what is and is not allowable really rather do need to be worked out. It’s entirely clear and obvious that men and women working together is going to lead to at least some of them deciding to play Doctors and Nurses whether on a temporary or permanent basis, exclusively or in a rather more secret manner. It woiuld seem absurd to insist that no one can ever date a co-worker. But that is indeed the implication of this description of what constitutes sexual harassment.

In one way, the complaint is that if someone does attempt to sleep with me at work then that is harassment: and if they don’t attempt to do so this is also harassment.

Perhaps the way out is simply to ask that everyone behaves as an adult?

In response to Richard, I did not mean to suggest that England’s Anglican past makes the English particularly susceptible to atheism.  I meant to suggest that such English atheists as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Philip Pullman exhibit more hostility to Catholicism than they do to other faiths in part because of their English background.  This greater hostility is palpable, and is clearly shown by Dawkins’ latest outburst, which both condemns “Pope Ratzinger” and claims that the “Archbishop of Canterbury” exhibits a “saintly quality,” “a benignity of countenance,” and a “well-meaing sincerity.”

I also think that the rise of men like Dawkins is in part responsible for the decline of Britain, and I make that argument at length in the October 2009 issue of Chronicles.  The reason I make that argument is not Anglophobia, but because “We Americans, who owe so much to Britain and are more like the British than any other people in Europe, ignore at our peril the problems Britain is encountering from effectively abandoning Christianity and the rest of her heritage.”

Yes, Dawkins is not a buffoon as a scientist, but he seems to be doing little science these days, preferring instead to sound like Lord George Gordon on the eve of London’s No Popery Riot.  An analogue is Linus Pauling, a brilliant scientist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, but who was also a moral and political cretin and a pro-Soviet agitator.  National Review properly treated Pauling with disdain, because of his moral and political idiocy.  As for me, I intend to give Dawkins the same level of respect he accords Pope Benedict XVI.

Tom: unfortunately, I don’t have time at the moment to go into this. (I’m preparing for the HL Mencken Club, and one minor personal emergency has followed another.) But I would just like to say that I don’t think the Anglican Church could have endured as long as she has if an irrational (groundless, do you think?) antipathy towards the Catholic Church were her foundation. It is true, of course, that Protestant identity has been intertwined with the development of modern national identity (and England is not alone in this regard.) But to suggest that a country’s independence from Rome makes its intellectuals more prone to atheism is a bit of a stretch. Moreover, Dawkins’s recent blog is embarrassing and conventionally leftist, to be sure, though the man is no buffoon as a scientist, nor I do think his work is a part of soccer hooliganism. I myself picked up the England-bashing paddle the other day, but in my mind, if Britain is worse than the rest of Europe, it’s only by a matter of degrees. And I’m not holding out hope that the West will be saved by Italy or Spain, or the Catholic Church, to be frank. Who knows what motivates the political Left? I am sure, however, that the contemporary Right is not well served by dwelling on ancient hatreds. 

In a letter to one of his sons,  J.R. R. Tolkien, a convert to Catholicism, wrote, “hatred of Our Church is after all the only real foundation of the C[hurch] of E[ngland]—so deep laid that it remains when all the superstructure seems removed.”  So deep laid is the hatred detected by Tolkien that it remains even after all shreds of Anglican belief have vanished, as shown by the atheist Richard Dawkins’ anti-Catholic tirade occasioned by the recent effort by the Roman Catholic Church to create a structure within Catholicism for Anglicans disaffected by their church’s increasing liberalism.  Dawkins also reveals himself to be a very pedestrian leftist in his thinking, railing against the Catholic Church and the disaffected Anglicans for their “misogyny” and “homophobic bigotry.”  It tells you all you need to know about contemporary Britain, the land of soccer hooliganism and public drunkenness, of Sir Mick Jagger and Sir Elton John, that Dawkins is considered its leading thinker.

UPDATE:  I have heard from an Anglican reader, who objected to my use of the Tolkien quote in the context of Dawkins who, after all, is no longer an Anglican.  Upon reflection, I think it is a fair point.  I would also note my own high regard for many Anglicans, including C S Lewis and John Mason Neale, who translated into English several of my favorite hymns.  Indeed, the structure for disaffected Anglicans that Dawkins is objecting to recognizes the value in the Anglican tradition, since it envisions a liturgy based on Anglican tradition.  Still, I find it striking that so many of the new atheists are both English and palpably more hostile to Catholicism than to other religions.  Something atavistic is at work there, and Dawkins’ anti-Catholic tirade which both damns Pope Benedict XVI (“Pope Ratzinger” to Dawkins) and praises the Archbishop of Canterbury is a prime example of it.

Fyodor Dostoevsky has rightly been called a prophet of the modern age. With a depth of vision unrivalled, he saw that cultural, political, and economic disorder have their main source in the crisis of the spirit.

Dostoevsky foresaw how man’s rebellion against the Transcendent would progressively accelerate into full-blown anarchy. In The Possessed, he was particularly attentive to show us the spiritual corruption of the ruling class, the so-called “conservative” elements of society. Dostoevsky wrote about Russia, but he was also deeply sensitive to the West’s descent into secularism.

Parties like the Republicans and the Tories have done nothing to arrest the decline of our societies because they ultimately share the same radical, anti-traditional principles of the Left. For evidence, look no further than Britain’s rapid transformation into a crime-ridden, multicultural surveillance state otherwise known as “Cool Britannia”, or at the mass of contradictions in the program of the new Edmund Burke Institute in Washington, DC (Richard just recently addressed both examples). 

If one holds fast to the ideals of modernity, if one’s faith in sacred Progress, Equality, Democracy, Total Individual Autonomy, etc. is unshaken, opposition is meaningless and purely cosmetic. Rhetorical nods to cultural consolidation are articulated within the corrosive framework of Enlightenment rights ideology, and only for the purpose of grabbing votes. The conservative movement knows what’s really important: generous contributions from the financial and defense industries to maintain policies of corporate centralization and overseas empire.

The mainstream Right has led the West to systemic cultural collapse in full collusion with the slightly more radical Left. The Possessed reveals the spiritual and intellectual dimensions of this long process. A conversation between the story’s provincial governor, Von Lembke, and the nihilist revolutionary Peter Verkhovensky nicely encapsulates the mentality and path of modern conservatism (translation is mine):

“We have responsibilities, and as a result we also serve the common cause as you do. We are only holding back what you loosen and what without us would scatter in various directions. We’re not your enemies; hardly so. We’re saying to you: go forward, make progress, even shatter, that is, everything that is subject to alteration; but when needed, we will keep you within the necessary boundaries and save you from yourselves, because without us you would only send Russia into upheaval, depriving her of a proper appearance, and our duty is to look after proper appearances. Understand that you and I are mutually necessary to each other. In England Tories and Whigs also need each other. Now then, we’re Tories, and you’re Whigs…”

“Well, however you like it,” murmured Peter Stepanovich. “Nevertheless you are paving the way for us and preparing our success.”

Strip away the concern for proper appearances, and it becomes clear that modern conservatism is the handmaiden of revolutionary nihilism.

Every mainstream figure who opposes illegal or mass immigration never tires of informing everyone who will listen that they’d never, ever do it because of race and ethnicity. It’s all about being a “nation of laws” and protecting citizens from unfair employment competition. Apparently, many of these immigration hawks don’t even think about race, or else are positively welcoming of a demographic transformation of fading Anglo-Protestant America, provided it’s done through proper legal channels, of course.

It’s certainly right to support the rule of law, and I agree that mass immigration doesn’t, in itself, raise anyone’s standard of living. But those concerned with immigration should take note that, as revealed by Andrew Neather’s recent tell-all column in the Evening Standard, when the Left, even the moderate Left, concocts immigration policies, it’s all about race. As a friend remarked to me this weekend, average conservatives may not be interested in race, but race is interested in them.