June 09, 2009

Justin Raimondo fears recent right-wing phenomena in the U.K. might be a “threat to liberty.”  And?  I can think of many things I value more than liberty:  family, extended family, tradition, my ancestral duties, the survival of the West—to name but a few.  And I must ask myself:  what has this idea of liberty, a liberal abstraction from the Enlightenment (unlike liberalis in the classical sense meaning non-slave), brought us? Hedonism and reality TV?

Aristotle said that man is a “political animal,” meaning that man is fundamentally social; he must live in groups.  The Greek denoting the individual, one unconstrained by the public, is an idios, whence we derive the word ‘idiot’.  One man’s poison is another man’s profit.  And for those of us defending the traditional West, “liberty” should be a mere abstraction, a distraction from the more important matter at hand:  the actual people and their shared ancestral traditions.  As J. Enoch Powell once said to Margaret Thatcher regarding her lofty defense of abstract principles:  “No, we do not fight for values. I would fight for this country even if it had a communist government.”

Update:  Read More.