RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the wake of the universal “shock” at Donald Trump’s private comments to Billy Bush, remarks that automatically branded him as terminally misogynistic, it’s fascinating to see the reaction of critics to the film “Elle,” the latest offering from Paul Verhoeven. Since this article is not meant as a review, stop reading now if you want to see the movie for yourself. The chattering classes were overwhelmingly impressed and delighted by this film about recurring rapes in which the level of violence escalates as the heroine refuses to notify the police. Isabelle Hupert plays the icy head of a video-game company who keeps urging her young male employees to ratchet up the sex and violence in the program they are currently creating. She is a divorced single mother whose ex-husband and son are both weak, unsuccessful men whom she berates routinely. But she’s an equal opportunity exploiter of women as she cheats on her trusted friend/partner with that woman’s husband; maligns and humiliates her elderly mother, perversely recounts her recent rape at a dinner table as casually if she were discussing what to choose from the menu.

If you’re a thoughtful viewer, you will question the sangfroid she displays after the initial horrifying attack as she picks herself up and immediately sets to cleaning up the broken dishes on the floor and then being more bemused than disturbed by the bloody foam visible in her bath. She has a backstory of being the daughter of an imprisoned mass killer and she may or may not have been implicated in his crime or in some previous sadistic abuse by her father. We soon see that the masked rapist, a tall man in a form-fitting S & M bodysuit, has access to her computer and her house – he leaves sexual messages that don’t seem to affect her decision not to call for protection. She has a tall handsome neighbor who is clearly a candidate for both predator and prey as she scrutinizes him through binoculars while simultaneously masturbating. At a dinner party to which she invites him and his wife, she plays footsie with his leg and proceeds higher to his crotch without betraying any change in her expression.

Though the rapes are brutal enough to leave you wondering whether both parties might end up dead, they are treated with a comic book approach to no lasting damage. At one point, our heroine’s head is bashed against a basement boiler but no medical care is necessary. Similarly, after her car overturns as she swerves to avoid hitting a deer, she is trapped inside and calls the neighbor/possible rapist to rescue her. He too is comfortable with the sight of blood and mashed tissue and patches up her leg expertly with no sign of squeamishness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7F5bm2NHDa4

The infamous neutron bomb was designed to melt human flesh without damaging infrastructure.

Something like it has blown up lots of people in the 2016 election and left behind empty institutions.

After the current campaign — the maverick Trump candidacy, the Access Hollywood Trump tape, the FBI scandal, the Freedom of Information Act revelations, the WikiLeaks insider scoops on the Clinton campaign, the hacked e-mails, the fraudulent pay-for-play culture of the Clinton Foundation — the nuked political infrastructure may look the same. But almost everyone involved in the election has been neutroned.

In theory, there are nominally still such things as a D.C. establishment, the Republican party, still abstractions known as “fact-checking,” still something in theory called “debate moderators,” still ex-presidents’ “foundations.” But, in fact, after this campaign, these are now mere radiated shells.

Who are the big losers of 2016, besides the two candidates themselves?

The D.C. ‘establishment’ and its ‘elites’

Collate the Podesta e-mails. Read Colin Powell’s hacked communications. Review Hillary’s Wall Street speeches and the electronic exchanges between the media, the administration, and the Clinton campaign. The conclusion is an incestuous world of hypocrisy, tsk-tsking condescension, sanitized shake-downs, inside profiteering, snobby high entertainment — and often crimes that would put anyone else in jail.

The players are also quite boring and predictable.

They live in a confined coastal cocoon. They went largely to the same schools, intermarried, traveled back and forth between big government, big banks, big military, big Wall Street, and big media — and sound quite clever without being especially bright, attuned to social justice but without character. Their religion is not so much progressivism, as appearing cool and hip and “right” on the issues. In this private world, off the record, Latinos are laughed off as “needy”; Catholics are derided as near medieval and in need of progressive tutoring on gay issues. Hillary is deemed a grifter — but only for greedily draining the cash pools of the elite speaker circuit to the detriment of her emulators. Money — Podesta’s Putin oil stocks, Russian autocrats’ huge donations in exchange for deference from the Department of State, Gulf-oil-state-supplied free jet travel, Hillary’s speaking fees — is the lubricant that makes the joints of these rusted people move. A good Ph.D. thesis could chart the number of Washington, D.C., insider flunkies who ended up working for Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac or Goldman Sachs — the dumping grounds of the well-connected and mediocre.

A treasonous, self-lacerating and nihilistic worldview is now institutionalized throughout academia, the press and political class, which funds with taxpayer dollars the very activists and agitators whose goal it is to sow the ideological contagion of shame and self-loathing.
Can the West save itself? Or will it decline and collapse, like all the great civilizations of the past? There are many components of civilizational decline, but one of the most important is demography, involving a plummeting birthrate and a large scale invasion of legal and illegal immigrants, as I pointed out in an earlier Quadrant article, “How Civilisations Die”. This is complemented by another component, which involves the collapse of the culture that sustains the civilization, usually involving the treason of the intellectual and political elites. These become cultural quislings, turning their backs on the very culture that sustains them in their privilege, proudly declaring themselves enemies of their own civilization, and working actively to undermine it, effectively handing over control to the aggressive invaders.

The paradigm for this intellectual treason was established by the Comintern nearly a century ago, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, when Lenin decided that the new Soviet Union slave state would only survive if it was able to foment revolution in the West and could mobilize the intelligentsia to achieve this. The poisonous message these intellectuals were to carry, an ideological contagion, was enunciated vividly by the leading French communist ideologue, Louis Aragon, in 1925:

“We will destroy this civilization that you cherish … Western world, you are condemned to death … We will awaken everywhere the germs of confusion and malaise. We are the agitators of the mind … those who will always hold out our hands to the enemy.”

This treasonous, self-lacerating, and nihilistic worldview is now institutionalized throughout Western academia and it has an ideological stranglehold over political activism, as we see in Australia with the Green-Left. These academics and activists live in a parallel universe where the source of all evil in the world is their own society, in which they posture as reluctantly privileged rebels. Consequently, as Pascal Bruckner observes in The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism (2010), “nowadays all it takes to attack Europe is a bit of conformism” to the all-pervasive hatred of the West that constitutes the intellectual monoculture of our society.

The West must repent continuously and unreservedly for the vast litany of sins for which it is held responsible. Indeed, “from existentialism to deconstructionism, all of modern thought can be reduced to a mechanical denunciation of the West”, which is depicted as “the very figure of Satan”. According to this fashionable nihilism, “we Europeans are born with a burden of vices and ugliness that marks us like stigmata”. Indeed, “a curse is hidden behind our civilization that corrupts its meaning and mocks its grandeur … The whole world hates us, and we deserve it.”

This grotesque vision of their own civilization as a global predator has been systematically promoted throughout academia, the schools, and the media for decades and has poisoned the intellectual atmosphere. Excellent current examples of how this self-lacerating ideology operates at the personal level is the infamous Safe Schools program and the new $22 million ‘respectful relationships’ education program that is also presently being imposed on Victorian school students. It exemplifies Bruckner’s observation that the white male is now a pariah, a monster “genetically determined to kill massacre and rape; he has split himself off from the rest of humanity in order to enslave it”. Consequently, under the new program boys and girls will be taught that males are violent, powerful, and privileged predators:

“Proposed lessons will introduce students to the concept of ‘privilege’, which is described as ‘automatic, unearned benefits bestowed upon dominant groups’ based on ‘gender, sexuality, race or socio-economic class’.”

In particular, boys will be taught in Years 7 and 8 that they enjoy “male privilege” that encourages “control and dominance”, and that:

“Being born a male, you have advantages — such as being overly represented in the public sphere — and this will be true whether you personally approve or think you are entitled to this privilege.”

As with the Safe Schools propaganda, this new program is really just an ideological Trojan Horse dominated by radical ideology, as Kevin Donnelly points out (“Marxist Agenda in Anti-Violence Campaign”), Apparently, whether they are just intellectually thick or utterly cynical, Premier Daniel Andrews and his education minister, James Merlino, are proud to preside over the pedophile grooming, ideological indoctrination, mass brainwashing, and terrorizing of school children.

Should Americans uphold the Judeo-Christian values, which have governed Western civilization until now? Or should they quietly allow the defeat of those values by a false liberalism — false, because it is anything but liberal — which will allow values, such as that of Islamic sharia religious law to settle over the United States? Will people willingly surrender their own culture in order to avoid becoming victims of intimidation?

Worse, these policies often come in the seemingly benign-sounding terms of “diversity”, “multiculturalism”, “peace”, “anti-racism”, and “human rights”; but are often used in an Orwellian way to mean their own opposites. “Diversity” means, “it is great to look different so long as you think the same way I do”. “Anti-racism” often means, in a racist way, anti-white or anti-Jew. “Human rights” now means a political agenda. “Peace” is used to mean the destruction of Israel. “Multiculturalism” means any culture except the Judeo-Christian one — regardless of whether that culture supports denigrating women, slavery, flogging, amputating limbs, murdering gays and the intolerance of all other religions and cultures. These inversions of language are having devastating consequences not only on university campuses, but also throughout the U.S. and abroad.

“The process of settlement is a ‘Civilization-Jihadist Process’ with all [that] the word means. The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers…” — Muslim Brotherhood, 1991.

The question of whether to submit to these policies, as Europe is doing, or to uphold freedom, as Israel is doing, has arrived in the United States. The choice Americans make will immeasurably affect not just the US, but, despite sounding melodramatic, the future of Western civilization.

For the American voter, issues of immense urgency to the survival of the free world — such as individual freedom, dispassionate enquiry and freedom of speech and thought, which we dangerously have come to take for granted — are being derailed by crude language and behavior, when Americans need to be paying attention to serious threats to the United States, its allies and to the values of the West.

Internationally, these threats come from Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, and countless terrorist groups.

Domestically, they appear in the form of massive corruption — financial and otherwise — that is visibly hollowing out American institutions, such as the FBI (the failure to follow investigative procedure, followed by calls for FBI Director James Comey’s resignation); the Department of Justice (the “Fast and Furious” gun-walking scandal, and the Attorney General meeting with a former president whose wife is under investigation); the State Department (email leaks are still yielding up evidence of collusion between the Clinton Global Initiative and the State Department under Hillary Clinton); the IRS (targeting conservative non-profits, and raiding the businesses of private citizens, who disagree with policy); the Environmental Protection Agency’s attempt to acquire power over every puddle in America) and the Executive branch in the “I have a pen and I have a phone” president’s dealings with Iran.

Many people believe that the more you understand another culture or religion, the more you will appreciate it.

That seemed to be the assumption of a Massachusetts district court judge when he ordered the Reverend Daisy Obi, age 73, to learn about the Islamic faith as part of her probation. Reverend Obi was found guilty of pushing her Muslim tenant down a flight of stairs and was sentenced to 6 months in jail, and 18 months suspended provided she take a course on Islam.

In sentencing her, Judge Paul Yee Jr. said, “I want you to learn about the Muslim faith. I want you to enroll and attend an introductory course on Islam. I do want you to understand people of the Muslim faith, and they need to be respected.”

There is no evidence that the Reverend Obi was prejudiced against Muslims. She had other Muslim tenants with whom she had no quarrel. And ironically, she had, in a sense, already had her introductory course on Islam. Since she comes from Nigeria, a country near a Muslim majority, she probably knows more about Islam than does Judge Yee.

Nevertheless, his ruling was upheld last month by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. Reverend Obi, they agreed, needed to be educated about Islam — presumably on the assumption that once she learned about Islam, her “prejudice” would melt away.

Meanwhile, about the same time that the Massachusetts court was deliberating Obi’s case, in Turkey another court was deciding another case. Before them stood a 35 year-old man who was accused of assaulting a young nurse and kicking her in the face because she was wearing shorts.

Did the court sentence him to six months in jail, and admonish him for misunderstanding Islam? Er, no. They released him on the grounds that he had done nothing wrong. The man argued that the shorts were inappropriate, and apparently, the court agreed.

It’s a common cliché among liberals that the more we learn about a belief system, the less we will fear it. That’s true some of the time, but in some instances it’s not. The more that Jews in Germany learned about the Nazis, the more they justifiably feared them. The ones who fully understood the Nazi mentality left Germany while there was still time. Jews are again leaving Europe to escape the threat of anti-Semitism. This time they are faced with Islamic anti-Semitism — an anti-Semitism that is rooted in Islamic scripture and tradition. Will Reverend Obi learn about that tradition in her introductory course on Islam? It seems doubtful.

The Islamic notion of peace is somewhat different than the one we are generally familiar with. We think of peace as the end of violence. Islam thinks of peace as the triumph of violence.

This tragic misunderstanding has sabotaged the peaceful visit of a Muslim cleric to Australia.

A Pakistani scholar visiting Australia for a speaking tour has been ordered home after a video sermon surfaced of him saying the world will be purified when every Jew is wiped out.

Muhammad Raza Saqib Mustafai, who has a Facebook fan base of almost a million people, spoke at the Ghausia Masjid in Blacktown and the Al-Madinah Masjid in Liverpool over the long weekend.

Ghausia Masjid’s imam Hafiz Raza, who organised the tour, didn’t respond to questions about the visit or the 2012 video titled “Jews are the enemies of Islam and the real peace”.

What does the “real peace” consist of? Killing all the Jews. Also destroying Christianity.

“And a time is about to come when Allah would bestow such a success on Islam that there would not be a single Jew left on the face of the earth… and the symbol of cross would be broken.”

“And when the last Jew will be killed from this world, then peace would be established in the world… As long as there are Jews in this world, peace cannot be established in the whole world… Muslims are being called terrorists… Muslims are not terrorists; they are the lovers of peace and preachers of peace.”

And this is what Muslim peace looks like.

But remember the real problem is Islamophobia. And it’s all a misunderstanding.

“Association president Abbas Khan said Pakistani Australians are deeply committed to harmony in Australia and he was shocked by the video.

He said he met Mr Mustafai on Wednesday and the scholar said the video didn’t reflect his opinions and was a quote from a book.

Know Before Whom You Stand. These words, inscribed above the ark holding the Torah scrolls in many synagogues, assume added significance between Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. During these Days of Awe, Jews of faith take the measure of themselves before the Almighty. The term “penitential prayers” does not begin to convey the range and intensity of the accounting that worshippers give of themselves about every aspect of their lives.

To lay bare one’s deeds before the ultimate Seat of Judgment is very different from the practice of individual introspection or meditation. Here each person stands within the community in a public attestation to dozens of wrongdoings. In the extensive Yom Kippur confessions, worshippers recount sins committed willfully or involuntarily, “by idle talk or by lustful behavior . . . violence or by defaming Thy Name.” All the verbs for transgression are in the first-person plural, we rather than I, making the individual an organic part of the nation. I used to marvel at how young college students, hardly past adolescence, passionately assumed moral responsibility for wrongs they had never committed.

Jews rightly take pride in their culture of self-accountability—before the Ultimate Judge and justly established human authorities. This culture has created and sustained a remarkably resilient people. Lamenting the excesses of the current American electoral cycle, the columnist Ira Stoll imagines how much richer the country’s politics would be if “this spirit of self-examination were exported from the Jewish religion into the rest of American culture.” If democracy requires the patient improvement of life in a community, nothing furthers that goal better than the practice of individual and collective self-scrutiny.

But the millennial-long history of Jewish self-restraint also stands as a warning. It is all very well to focus on overcoming your failings. Yet the search for moral perfection can also render individuals, and nations, prey to those who believe in conquest rather than self-conquest and who join in holding you accountable for their misdeeds. The same confessional posture, praiseworthy when standing before the Perfect Judge, becomes blameworthy when adopted before an enemy that has you before a rigged tribunal.

In the 20th century, some modern European thinkers and political leaders began singling out the Jews for their alleged racial or religious or social culpabilities. Many Jews felt obliged to answer apologetically for these supposed failings, instead of exposing the evil ideology that had chosen them for its target. Jewish Marxists, for example, blamed Jewish capitalists and bourgeoisie, even though defamation was leveled equally at Jewish professionals, artisans, journalists and paupers. CONTINUE AT SITE

Apparently it is universal. Here is a quote from Australia’s premier conservative journal QUADRANT….

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2016/09/better-book-burning/

Tim Wilms : Better Than a Book-Burning

“However, we are no longer living in a country where both sides of an argument enjoy equal access to the pulpit of public opinion,…… Conservatives tend to believe that those who disagree are most likely ill-informed and that a civil conversation might change their minds. Those on the left, by contrast, tend to view all who differ as evil and give their arguments no more than a contemptuous dismissal. Rather than argue the point, in this instance they have pitched a narrative that paints opponents as gay-bashing bigots and jackbooted homophobes, further insisting that mass outbreaks of suicide and mental collapse must surely follow if such views are allowed to be freely expressed. When the vocal left turns out in force to oppose something — well, anything, really — respect for free speech becomes an also-ran.”

The sort of people who set off class wars as a hobby have very particular classless societies in mind. The average left-wing revolutionary is not poor. He is a homicidal dilettante from the upper classes with a burning conviction of his own importance that he is unwilling to realize through disciplined labor. His revolution climaxes with a classless society in which he is at the very top.

Not near the top, not adjacent to the top, as he usually was before, but at the very top.

Utopia has a class system. At the top are the thinkers, the philosopher kings who develop plans based on how things ought to be and then turn them over to lesser men to actually implement. They are the priestly class of an ideological movement whose deity is politics and whose priests are politicians.

In a planned economy, they are the titans of industry and finance, they are the heads of banks and the men who move millions and billions around the board, and they are utterly unfit for the job. But they also make decisions in matters of war and science. And in all things. They measure political heresy in all things and all the activities of man are measured against their dogma and rewarded or punished.

This is the way it was in the Soviet Union or Communist China. But take a closer glance at the White House and see if you don’t spot the occasional similarity.

In the middle of Utopia’s class system is the middle class. This is not the middle class you are familiar with. There are no small business owners here. No one striving to make it up the ladder. Utopia’s middle class is the bureaucracy, the interlinked hive mind of government and non-profits.

At the top of Utopia’s class system are the philosopher-planners who issue the regulations. Or rather they offer objectives. The bureaucracy filters them through successive layers, transforming grandiose ideas into stultifying regulations and each successive layers expands them into further microcosms of unnecessary detail. This expansion of regulations also expands the bureaucracy. One feeds off the other.

Utopia has no lower class. That would be dystopian. Instead it has a client class. The client class is what used to be known as the working class. Utopia however transforms it into the welfare class.

Clienture transforms the working class into the welfare class. The destruction of the conditions under which the working class can exist forces its members either upward into the bureaucracy, a feat that is only possible for the younger generation willing to undergo the educational process, or downward into the welfare class.