The New Middle Ages Are Upon Us: Men in Tights

This has been in the works for years, ever since as long ago as the new millennium, trend guru Lidewij Edelkoort predicted a Postmodern reversal to the Middle Ages.

Dutch magazine Elsevier this week has a view on the latest fashion accessory, after hoodies and kilts, meet the new man in tights!

The male as fashion victim makes an encouraging role reversal from a feminist point of view! Let them adorn the high street for a while as the living evidence of a distorted self image!

Read the Mail Online on the issue of leggings for men.

But the most important reversal to the dark ages is actually in the mind (no insult to the epoch intended). That has been on the cards for much longer. At least two centuries have lapsed since the onset of the reactionary Counter Enlightenment movement, the Nemesis of Spinozist free-thought!

French-Suisse philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau set in train a retro-active movement when he opined that the entire culture thing is actually a perversion of the man's natural state. Generally his ideal is assumed to be the primitive tribes person - an archetypal image known in psychology as "the noble savage".

German Romanticist thinkers, Messrs Kant and Hegel clinched the back to basics deal with their assertions about the unknowable universe and the extraordinary notion that reality entirely depends on how we look at it.

Men in tights are the cherry on the irrational cake that has been gathering pace - going from strength to strength - in the last couple of years.

As baseless, unscientific delusions get confused with profound insights into the universe and the soul of man, what used to be derided as 'old wives tales' passes today for the highest inner wisdom.

Facts are irrelevant ... reality is whatever we want it to be!

Ideological Archeology: Kant (III)

Often erroneously classified as part of the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) in his mindset is entirely collectivist and subjectivist: in his Second Preface of the first Critique he writes that he found it ...

"necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith," ...

hardly the words of a scientific thinker. Needless to say that his subsequent philosophical findings supported subjectivism. Kant was an austere Lutheran Pietist and a great admirer of Rousseau. The individual to him represented little more than a miserable sinner in need of a strong master, only good as canon-fodder to teach him some morals.

Kant foresees in a teleological progress towards an end-game by means of strive, war and discord. This brings man as a species to a more ethically evolved order. The process will ultimately culminate in a world government, an international and cosmopolitan federation of states, awaiting the coming of the Day of Judgment. This is the Hidden Plan of Nature according to Kant.

The Enlighteners working towards the separation of Church and State, the philosophers based on Rousseau, Kant and Hegel - even the atheists - confusing 'is' with 'ought', reverted to recreating 'paradises' on earth.

The tenets of the Enlightenment were abandoned by the Counter-Enlighteners and replaced by philosophical principles reflecting the faith: realism made way for idea-lism, and individualism for collectivism; intuition and revelation were adopted as sources of knowledge rather than reason and experience, social theories replaced liberal capitalist theory.

Today's postmoderns are adept followers of Rousseau, Kant and Hegel, faithfully subscribing to their most irrational claims. The mind versus body dualism, reflecting the macro and microcosm, tends to identify the mind with the soul, giving rise to visualizing the mind as non-physical pure substance, distinct from the physical organs and brain. Rather then thinking of them as tools to knowledge, this leads us to view the senses and the brain as obstacles, standing in the way between the mind and reality.

Moreover, some sensorial imperfections (colour blindness, for example) in some people, induced Kant to declare the senses unsound tools to knowledge overall. To clarify the Kantian position on the separation of the mind from reality, Objectivist philosopher Stephen Hicks makes a feminist analogy: to support Kant is to state that women are absolutely autonomous and free to do as they please, as long as it is within the confines of the kitchen; Kant imprisons the mind in the skull and isolates it from the real world.

It is ironic that the Counter-Enlighteners, who sought to prevent the godless, spiritless and amoral future that would be the result of reason and individualism, have brought about precisely that by Kant's subjectivism and his imprisonment of the mind. Hicks: "Once reason is in principle severed from reality, one enters a different philosophical universe altogether."

Kant also held that reality conforms to reason, not vice versa. This marks the infamous shift from objectivity to subjectivity, the basis of the postmodern egocentricist pathology of the Master of the Universe syndrom (each individual creates his own personal version of reality: If I die overnight, will the sun still rise tomorrow?).

Anthony Rizzi in "Science before Science: a Guide to Thinking in the 21st Century" laments Kant's now codified idea-lism ...

" ... the default declared position in academia and in nearly all other environments. Kant's success is partly explained by his tying his philosphical system to Newtonian physics [... which he wanted to] have a certainty that it did not have. However, Kant thought that one could not know the thing itself
(...) Kant and Kantians múst say, "Kant doesn't know anything about anything." Such is always the end of the matter when one forgets that all knowledge in man comes through the senses. We non-Kantians can be simultaneously more accurate and kinder; we can say, "The foundational principles of Kant's philosophical system were wrong, but still he knew a lot of other things."

This enthusiasm is at once tempered by a footnote:

"Many attribute to Kant a developed skill in physics. Physisist and renowned philosopher and historian of science, Fr. Stanley Jaki has shown that Kant's knowledge and ability in physics was minimal (though Kant considered himself another Newton) (...) the book [Universal Natural History] is a storehouse of inaccuracies, contradictions and amateurism and plain fancy."

What else is new in subjectivism?

- Filed on Articles in "The Dystopia of Paradise", cat. Postmodernism -

Ideological Archeology: Rousseau (II)

Swiss-French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau's (1712-1778) personal life is marked by traits sounding awkwardly contemporary. Self-pity and paranoia play see-saw with wrong choices and deflecting blame. Man is by nature good, it is society that is the cause of corruption and vice. Iconic for Rousseauian thought is the image of the noble savage, man in his natural state before his fall from Paradise.

There is nothing ambiguous about his ethics however: he believed his 'doctrine of two substances' to be the key to the absolute quality of good and evil [Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 2001, p., 2001, p. 719]. In an example in a classical setting he saw in Athenian decadence the degrading influence of reason. He preferred the cruder, militaristic Spartans, an unspoiled and nobler tribe. Their callous practice of exposing babies to nature - now in dispute - may well have inspired Rousseau to expose his own five illegitimate children to the hardships of the Paris orphanage.

Although Rousseau died in 1778, before the French Revolution, his justification of violence to power was the source of inspiration of the Reign of Terror that the Jacobins unleashed during the latter part of the rebellion. In 1792 the French 'citizen army' faced the Prussian forces at Valmy. In a psychological victory they prevented them from marching on to Paris to restore the monarchy. Earlier in the capital a mob had stormed the Tuilleries Palace. In the massacres over a thousand political prisoners were brutally hacked to death. Fabre d'Eglantine declared: "In the towns, let the blood of traitors be the first Holocaust to Liberty, so that in advancing to meet the common enemy, we leave nothing behind to disquiet us!" [Wildmonk]

After "the first Holocaust to Liberty" many more would follow. It is a specific feature, typical of Rousseau's constellation of ideas. The chief ingredients as expressed in "Profession de Foi" are a sweeping rejection of tradition, Revelation, and all institutionalized authority. [Radical Enlightenment, p. 718]

In Roussea's ideas we find the source of every anti-Liberal, violent revolution ever since the French Revolution went off the Lockean track. Rousseau is ultimately the father of many noxious and lethal traditions besides: Romanticism, redistributive Socialism, philosophical agrarianism, conservative Communitarianism, Nazism, and more to the point, the Counter-Enlightenment and postmodernism. Cultures, adopting Rousseauian ideas found in them a mirror of some aspect of their own identity. [Wildmonk]

Many have descended into the abyss of collectivist hell. In France his radical egalitarianism led to The Reign of Terror, in Germany to Left and Right Socialism with known result, in Russia and the Far East to communism, starvation and slaughter on grandiose scales. In China Mao Tse Tung's Great Leap Forward resulted in the greatest mass murder in human history and in Cambodia the Khmer Rouge's extermination campaign to establish Rousseauian agrarianism resulted in the deaths of well over twenty percent of the population. [Wildmonk] If this is not evil, frankly I don't know what is.

Why Rousseau is different
Rousseau stands apart in many respects. He marks the fault-line in Western tradition between Anglo-American and Continental lines of thought, and forms the point of departure from the Enlightenment because he is essentially anti-modern [Wildmonk]. While loosely following the traditional path of Enlightenment thought, his radical stance differs notably on the crucial issues of anti-individualism [Isaiah Berlin, "Against the Current", 2001], anti-capitalism and against private property ("Radical Enlightenment", p. 273), anti science and technology, his radical egalitarianism, and the inherent mindset in which the means are justified by the perceived noble end.

Rousseau is often quoted as the iconic philosopher of the Enlightenment, but it is quite clear he fiercely rejected all its tenets and values. No doubt, here we have the ground zero of the Counter-Enlightenment.

He was certainly no believer in mutually beneficial interaction, or the beneficial effects on society of self-interest (Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733), "The Fable of the Bees"), asserting that "society hardly needs to feed man's love for himself and his desire to be first among men." ["Radical Enlightenment", p. 273].

His radical egalitianism is echoed in the notion that rational and industrious man with dehumanizing machines would replace royalty as an enslaver of the common man, being better and more ruthless on the aggregation of material goods. He argued that the separation of the progress and dissemination of science and art from political and religious control are hazardous for society and for the virtue of the people [Bloom, 1990]. But it gets worse."

Common will" instead of freedom
In Rousseau we see the first social contract at the price of freedom and the birth of a notion called the "common will". The latter is a concept that in Rousseau's approach requires state intervention. This should not be confused with the 'common good'. It is a far more developed conception which, and unlike the former, can only be realized in the context of civil society under the state ["Radical Enlightenment", p. 720).

For the creation of a society of common will, "freedom of all the people", they need only accept the dictates of the state. This was Rousseau's essence of "true civilization." The struggle between rich and poor would then rise to a moral experience of self-restraint. [Wildmonk] With the faculty of moral choice thus abdicated and forfeited to the state, people would be free from lowly - earthly desires and reach full - ideal potential. Man is thus divorced from the social and economic context in which he lives and interacts with others. The ideal state of heaven, separated from earthly considerations.

This totalitarian approach to freedom, an abomination in every sense, was later further developed by Marx, who wrote that "capitalist, individual liberty is the most complete suppression of all individual liberty and total subjugation of individuality to social conditions" [Wildmonk: Marx, "Grundnisse", pp. 131]. "Freedom can only consist in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of their human nature." [Wildmonk: Marx, "Selected Writings", pp. 496].

In this way man's separation from his nature and morality began. Never in human history were their worse judges of human character than Rousseau and his followers: all seek some degree of formal control over individual freedom for the purpose of creating material conditions deemed necessary for "true freedom", moralectomy in precise equal measure. Rousseau's concept of "common will" became the most savage, bloody instrument of social engineering in the history of mankind.

The Atlantic Ridge
In the United States Thomas Jefferson was the most prominent supporter of the French revolutionary achievements. Nevertheless, property rights and Enlightenment liberties were set in stone in the spirit of Locke, Montesquieu and Adam Smith. The present Democratic Party is being diverted further and further from that tradition as the sway of the postmoderns intensifies. Rhetorical style and attitude betray their influence.

While National Socialist and Communist ideas have swept America to some extent in their haydays - notwithstanding the counter culture, a product of the latter - these Rousseauian inspired ideologies remained by and large a marginal affair. Rousseau entering Locke's territory by the back- door may come as a surprise to some Americans - the wrong brand of revolution is encroaching on its most basic principles.

In Europe the situation was markedly different, as we shall see. Locke's influence remained on the whole limited to the British Isles. France and Germany have both Rousseau traditions, not Lockean. Today of great long-term concern is a possible return to some form of Rousseau inspired extreme ideology. It is chilling to see the rise of an unelected governing body on the European continent. The post-democratic elitism, combined with postmodern ideological chaos understood in the philosophical context, is an even more disquieting prospect.

Counter-Enlightenment projection* is on the order of the day and may even be consciously used as a tactic. Rousseau's brand of radical and revolutionary ideas, combined with the notion that civilization is so corrupt that it must be considered beyond salvation, makes him the father of all violent struggle in the last two and a half centuries.

Americans, tending to confuse Locke's revolution with Rousseau's, occasionally fall into the trap of supporting the wrong causes: initially the Russian Red Terror, and more recently, the covertly Islam inspired call for independence in the middle of Europe's powder keg, the Serbian province of Kosovo in the heart of the Balkans, thus providing a foothold in Europe for similarly based and equally pernicious radicalism.

The zero-sum game approach to economics also originates with Rousseau, which is giving rise to the annual media talking point that "a new report is suggesting that today's rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer". This is incorrect propaganda, some reason requiring regular public re-affirmation, perhaps for that reason alone.

Rousseau and Religion
The great minds of the Enlightenment proper - Spinozists excluded - never saw Christianity as their mortal enemy. To them Church and the Enlightenment were natural allies. Rousseau was no exception, but he had only a passing acquaintance with the Christian political tradition. Therefore he dismissed the role of Christianity as a moderating force in society. He saw the faith as entirely a spiritual undertaking, occupying itself only with "heavenly things."

Rousseau's Christians are so detached from reality that they can hardly be recognized: a people so spiritualized that they display a profound disinterest if their earthly pursuits are successful or not. Rousseau's call for transcendent values to harness the energies of men towards the 'common will', coupled with the rejection of Christianity as a engine of these values, made it a central tenet of all the Rousseauian ideologies [Wildmonk].

To Rousseau religion was an imperative. "... the state cannot ... pursue a policy of toleration for disbelievers, or view religion as a matter of individual conscience. It absolutely must, therefore, reject dangerous notions of toleration and the separation of church and state." and "so fundamentally important is religion that the ultimate penalty is appropriate for disbelievers ..." [Stephen R.C. Hicks, "Explaining Postmodernism", Scholargy Press, 2004, p. 98].

Despite being so enamored with force-feeding religion, after the publication of his work "Emile" he was driven into temporary exile in Bern after a warrant for his arrest was issued. "Emile" was widely denounced as irreligious and seditious.

The Legacy
The loather of civilization Rousseau was nevertheless greatly admired by the early Counter-Enlighteners, as he is by today's postmoderns. His followers mostly selected from his work what they could use to prop up their ideologies. Marx accepted Rousseau's critique of Locke's economic man but stood solidly by the Enlightenment in his appreciation for science and technology. Marx even went so far as to describe his ideology as Scientific Marxism, basically a pseudo scientific rationalization of his aggregate of ideas.

Hegel as well as Rousseau inspired Marx' theory of dialectic materialism, in which the theme is the dichotomy of the Oppressor versus the Oppressed. Now clearly a tactic of this dialectic, Rousseau's vista of a noble, primordial world destroyed by man's egoism, might well also have sired the epidemic of Western self-loathing.

Irony
Ironically, while Rousseau was convinced that civilization was the cause of moral degradation, little did he know that his followers, by rejecting objective reality, would drop morality along with it. Despite two and a half centuries of genocidal legacy in pursuit of Rousseauian ideal society it enjoys considerable support among the Western intelligentsia, specifically in the humanities departments of academia, the media, all levels of education, contemporary arts, the political elite, advisory boards, government ministries and departments and what is loosely described as 'the corridors of power.'

The postmodern heirs remain committed to undermining free-market democracy, casting misty eyes upon the Rousseauean atrocities. 110 million dead are not vile enough to discredit 'the Party of Humanity' in the views of some of the most stubborn apologists. Considering that totalitarian societies are today's version of the tribal community he so admired, the Rousseau ideal society could well be described as an agrarian totalitarian state.

Another point of irony is that Rousseau's conviction, that reason engenders egocentrism has been falsified by every non-government sponsored humanitarian organization on the face of the planet, while Rousseau's faithful follower Hegel is responsible for the subjectivism that saw the birth of egocentrism gone mad, the 'Master of the Universe' syndrome (each individual creates his own personal version of reality: If I die overnight, will the sun still rise tomorrow?).

In France, Rousseau's ideal of small, intimate villages and a peaceful, agricultural society built on the consent of the common will has resulted in France becoming a by-word for centralized statism. Rousseau's tenet that reason caused man's fall from paradise may well be the basis of the later Counter-Enlightenment's political ideals, modelled on the re-creation of 'paradise on earth', Utopias which usually turn out to be dystopias instead.

Postmodernism or Rousseauism?
Rousseau can certainly be traced back as the source of all members of the postmodern coalition: environmentalists, third-worldists (Baran-Wallerstein), feminists, anarchists, 'gender, identity and sexual orientation' theorists, traditional socialists of various plumage, and 'classical' postmoderns. It is a true gathering of Rousseauians that has largely remained uninvestigated, underreported and certainly undeclared.

In the chaos of the total postmodern bankruptcy in the wake of mayhem, moralectomy and grandiose failure, there is but one purpose left. A resolve that brings these ideologies together with a tradition with which it has so much in common. We are witnessing a spontaneous feast of recognition with radical Islam.

It is truly remarkable that every prior held conviction and allegiance has by now been jilted in favour of furthering the causes of the intolerant: it's back to the Rousseau basics. The grant plan: a strategy to deconstruct Western, democratic, liberal capitalism by critical theory, and 'irrational means of the will.'

* If you think of yourself as a peaceful, loving person, while actually you are full of wrath and hatred, the psychological coping device of projection - as if by magic - transforms the object of that wratch into someone who is hateful, devisive, full of vitriol and bile, bigoted, intolerant and hatemongering.

Ideological Archeology: The Counter-Enlightenment (I)

The idea of the creation of a personalised universe, or rather a personal version of the universe originates with Protagoras (Greek: Πρωtaγόρaς, ca. 490-420 BC), who said "man is the measure of all things", he meant individual man, rather than mankind.

The sophists of the rough, second generation, notably Trasymachus, a character in Plato's Republic, put that notion of subjectivism to good use. In classical Greece the sophists used language, not in the service of truth or the transfer of information, but as a strategy for political point-scoring. The sophists held that justice is in the interest of the stronger: might makes right.

Objectivist philosopher Stephen Hicks in "Explaining Postmodernism" claims that "postmoderns - coming after two millennia of Christianity and two centuries of social theory - simply reverse that claim: Subjectivism and relativism are true, except that the postmodernists are on the side of the weaker and historically-oppressed groups. Justice, contrary to Trasymachus, is the interest of the weaker."

Contemporary postmoderns have harnessed this form of political correctness to today's version of the class struggle, the dialectic, a tool to perpetuate into eternity the struggle of the 'oppressed' minorities against the 'fake tolerance' of the 'power structure'. The latter should not be understood as 'whoever is in power', but rather 'whoever is in power, other than us'.

Althought we have not always seen it for what it was, during the last two and a half centuries or so the fruits of reason have been pitted in an existential dog fight with the reactionary forces of anti-realism. The movement in generally termed 'the Counter-Enlightenment', to underscore the culture's fundamental rejection of the Enlightenment.

In his ground-breaking book Hicks posits two theses: that the failure of epistemology (philosophy's study of human knowledge) made postmodernism possible; and that the failure of Socialism made postmodernism necessary. As Rousseau, Kant and Hegel were for church authority, the postmoderns are for collectivism: their raison d'être is a desperate 'rationalization' for holding on to a rejected system.

The emergence of the Counter-Enlightenment represents the turning point of the age of reason. The era between 1780 and 1815 was a defining period in modernism, as Anglo-American and German culture split into respectively the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment.

The former began in England, and was picked up by the French. But Roussseau's followers wrested the Enlightenment inspired revolution away from John Locke's (1632 -1704) followers. This quote is from Locke's 2nd Treatise §3:

"In order to preserve the public good, the central function of government must be the protection of private property ..."

... compare that to Rousseau:

"For the creation of a society of 'common will', the people need only accept the dictates of the state" ...

The French Revolution turned it into the Jacobin Reign of Terror, the particularly bloody, third and last episode. The Germans thereafter, already suspicious of the culture of reason, began a counter movement in an effort to rescue religion from what they saw as the onslaught of reason. When the Enlightened French despot, Napoleon Bonaparte jumped into the vacuum left by the Reign of Terror and conquered Europe, the still largely feudal German states knew for sure what the age of reason had wrought.

The reaction was a counter movement by a brand of collectivist philosophers and intellectuals - politically on the Left as well as on the Right, some religious, later on also atheists - with a number of themes in common: Jean-Jacques Rousseau inspired "anti-individualism, the need for strong government, the view that religion is a state matter (whether to promote or suppress it), the view that education is a process of socialisation, ambivalence about science and technology, and strong themes of group conflict, violence and war.

Hicks: "Left and Right have often divided bitterly over which themes have priority and over how they should be applied. Yet, for all of their differences, both have consistently recognised a common enemy: Liberal capitalism, with its individualism, its limited government, its separation of church and state, its fairly constant view that education is not primarily a matter of political socialisation, and its persistent Whiggish optimism about prospects for peaceful trade and cooperation between members of all nations and groups. (...) the collectivist Right and Left are united in their major goals and in identifying the opposition."

"By the early twentieth century (...) the dominant issues for most continental political thinkers were not whether liberal capitalism was a viable option - but rather exactly when it would collapse - and whether Left or Right collectivism had the best claim to being the Socialism of the future. The defeat of the collectivist Right in World War II then meant that the Left was on its own to carry the Socialist mantle forward."

"Accordingly, when the Left ran into its major disasters as the twentieth century progressed, understanding its fundamental commonality with the collectivist Right helps to explain why in its desperation the Left has often adopted ''Fascistic'' tactics."

Another fateful innovation was set in by the counter movement. As had been the logic during the long period of Church authority over arts and science, all modern mainstream Enlightenment thinkers had accomodated the new advances in science and mathematics into Christian belief. Defying Aristotlean wisdom, human nature, as well as Hume's Law - the confusion of 'is' with 'ought' - the Counter-Enlightenment philosophers following Rousseau, Kant and Hegel - even the atheists - reversed this orthodoxy.

Instead - perhaps even subconsciously or by implication - they developed political models, which reflected religious ideals, the re-creation of paradises on earth, perhaps in an effort to fill the void left by Ancients Regimes. These political models sought to mirror the heavens, on the basis of 'as above, so below', macrocosm - microcosm: the ideal society. The tenets of the Enlightenment were abandoned and replaced by opposing principles: realism made way for Idea-lism, and individualism for collectivism; emotions, intuition and Revelation were adopted as sources of knowledge rather than reason and experience, social theories replaced liberal capitalist theory.

Universal Enlightenment values were applied, but were limited to specific themes. In these themes God was replaced by whatever fitted the theme: nationalists replaced God with the nation, state adolators deified the state, Socialists society, etcetera. We'll return to that after having a look up close at the main, early protagonists of the Counter-Enlightement drama.

Up next: ... Swiss-French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau's (1712-1778) personal life is marked by traits sounding akwardly contemporary ...

Philips' Communist Recommendation

Christie's in London has the small, but fine art collection of the late Dr. Anton Philips (1874-1951) on auction.

Christie's "About" section on the relevant website yields an eulogy about the entrepreneur, containing a typical example of the double standards that are common in the false dichotomy in dealing with the two Counter-Enlightenment twin ideologies, National Socialism and Communism.

Whereas Soviet propaganda took care that Nazi collaboration eternally constitutes a stain on corporate history, soliciting and associating with Communists comes as a recommendation. Consider the following excerpt:

"(...) Anton Philips ranked amongst the foremost entrepreneurs of the 20th century. Trained as a banker in Amsterdam and London, at the age of twenty he joined the small company his brother Gerard and his father Frederik had founded in Eindhoven in 1891. Anton was responsible for the commercial side of the enterprise and built a network of industrial customers in western Europe.

Anton travelled to Russia at the turn of the century. (...) a Russian anecdote serves as a perfect example for both his perseverance and creativity. In 1922, two decades after his first visit to Moscow, Anton tried to win over Lenin himself by presenting him with a framed picture of his elderly home in the Dutch town of Zaltbommel. In the accompanying note Anton pointed out that Karl Marx, his great-uncle from paternal side, had completed several chapters of Das Kapital enjoying the hospitality of the Philips family. Vladimir Iljitsj declined, saying that the nephew had apparently either not read or understood his uncle's writings."

Image: Kees van Dongen (1877-1968), Portrait of a woman with long hair

The collection is great though ... the "Two studies of a young man" by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) is a true gem! The accompanying video comes highly recommended ... by us!

Update:

Art Daily: "New Record for Sir Peter Paul Rubens Oil Sketch at Auction at $7.7 Million at Christie's"

Christie’s evening auction of Important Old Master and British Pictures including Works from the Collection of Anton Philips realised a total of £18,802,200 / $38,021,808 / €26,041,047. The top lot was Two studies of a young man, a little-known work by Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), which realised £3,828,500 / $7,741,993 / €5,302,473, the highest ever price for a Rubens oil sketch at auction.

Sir Peter Paul Rubens’ (1577-1640) Two studies of a young man was painted between 1615 and 1617. The panel (46.5 x 65.5 cm.) is a study for Balthasar in The Adoration of the Magi at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon and shows a Levantine head, pictured en face and en profil respectively. The sitter is unkown but judging by his tanned skin, plain shirt and leather hat, it is thought that he could have been a contract labourer building the extension of the artist’s house in the Wappen, Antwerp.

The picture was rediscovered in 1934 when Mr Douglas Lewis of Merton Park, near Wimbledon, brought it to Christie’s having acquired the work in a box of paintings at a local West Country auction. The picture was recognised as a Rubens and was offered at Christie’s on 23 November 1934 where it sold for £1,560. It was acquired soon afterwards by Anton Philips who displayed it as a central work of his private collection at his house Villa de Laak. The picture left this sanctuary on very few occasions, and was exhibited at The Museés Royaux des Beaux Arts in 1937 and the landmark Rubens oil sketch exhibition at The Museum Boymans van Beuningen in Rotterdam in 1953. >>>

The Plague of Pirates and Romantics: Arrrgh!

Military.Com: "Navy Gives Pirates Cause to Cry 'Argh'"

Somali pirates gave up control of two ships hijacked months earlier and U.S. Navy escorted the boats to safer waters Sunday as it stepped up efforts to bring security to the seas off the chaotic Horn of Africa nation.
The pirates climbed into small skiffs and headed back to Somalia after speaking by radio to U.S. naval personnel. A Navy ship and helicopter guided the South Korean-owned boats Mavuno 1 and 2 further out to sea.

It was the third time in a week the U.S. has intervened to help ships hijacked by Somali pirates. Sailors boarded a North Korean ship to give medical assistance to crew members who overpowered their hijackers, and a U.S. naval vessel fired on pirate skiffs tied to a Japanese-owned ship.

(Cmdr. Lydia Robertson of the U.S. Fifth Fleet in Bahrain) said the increase in U.S. military interventions was mostly due to the a surge in piracy. As the Navy moved ships into the area to respond to one incident, increased contact with other hijacked ships in the area was more likely, she said. "It's not that it's a change in focus," Robertson said. "But we had the opportunity to put some pressure on the pirates >>>

Forget romantic notions about the Revolution, Afghan warlords, latter-day Robin Hoods or piracy. Rather than the picture above, today's pirates come in shapes like this. Not unlike pirates, romanticists are equally a plague. Their tendency to reject the harsh light of reality tends them to look upon the facts of life from a skewed angle. Where decisive measures are required in perhaps preventing even worse, the romantic suggests options of sentimentality.

He does so, not out of empathy with the culprits, but out of consideration for what is the centre piece in his life, his own feelings. Easy scoring against some 'righteous soldier of truth' boosts his self-esteem in no mean measure and - not unimportant - it saves him the trouble of having to deal with the psychological blowback that comes with the territory of accepting responsibilities. Sentimentality actually, says the grandfather of psychology C.G. Jung, is a superstructure covering brutality. This is also philosophically correct, as I shall explain presently.

How romanticism has influenced religion is set out by David Klinghoffer in his book "Why the Jews Rejected Jesus". Besides spilling the beans on the real Judaic view on Jesus (it already being in the public domain for some time), he tells the story of Rabbi Baeck (1873-1956). This revered leader of German Jewry before World War II described how historical periods of moral rectitude since times immemorial have been alterated with epochs, dominated by "romantic tendency that revered not ethical action but emotional experience, that gauzy, swooning sensation of feeling and glorying in being personally 'saved'. This essentially Narcissistic, passive version of religion loves sacred music and wafting incense but can look with indifference on injustice and tyranny."

"By contrast, the Judaic classical counter-tendency thinks less about the self and more about the wrongs done by human beings and directs a focused passion to setting things right on earth. In Baeck's retelling of Christian history, the religion of the historical Jesus was classical while the apostle Paul's was romantic. The romantic and classical tendencies were balanced in the medieval church. With Luther's Reformation, the pendulum swung to the romantic side - which would explain how German Lutheranism could be so indifferent to Nazi violence. In his essay "Romantic Religion", Baeck was already writing on this theme in 1922!"

Germans seem to be in a constant peril in this respect, being described as "incurably romantic' by some authors attempting to capture European national traits in a few pointed words (or what a particular nation would do with a hammer). I can think of a few other tribes as well. I use the word 'tribe' with good cause: according to Justin Halter, blogging Professor of Comparative Religions, the admirer of totalitarianism may be justified in typifying his society of preference as 'tribal'.

Politics is no less subject to these pendulum swings of classical realism versus romanticism. The historical period of Romanticism can be traced back to Rousseau and the movement of Counter Enlightenment of which he was the originator. His idealistic picture of the Noble Savage simply drools unrealistic, romantic notions. The offloading of five of his children on the Paris orphanage tells the story of the innate brutality of the sentimentalist. Somehow it's the children that always suffer most.

It is the same Subjectivist (Relativist) rejection of the real world that is plaguing us today. Not only does it feed the delusion that objective reality does not exist, in the process it also ejects all notions of morality: good and evil do not exist in a make-believe personal cosmos in which everyone is right from his or her personal perspective. In today's terms we call this watershed between reality-based and the delusional the political right, and the political left side of the aisle, respectively.

Of Hive Minds and Group Souls: Marxism and Islamism

Here's a peek into the deluded world of Muslim conversion. As yet unbeknown to herself (I believe), lately I am given to follow the literary activities of a young female convert - one of 300 in Belgium alone. She has a university grade in higher Marxism, and is actually an activist posing as a journalist. (One wonders just how many of those are around!)

The first article I stumbled on, briefly appeared on the site of The Brunei Times: the word that comes to mind to describe it, is agit prop. It can now be accessed here. At present I have come across another article she authored for the Islamic press, an 'interview' with two other converts on the occasion of Belgian Convert Day, which seems to have taken place on 4th of March this year. Here's the Saudi Gazette with "My Daughter is a Muslim".

The 'discussion' - if it has actually taken place is immaterial - indicates quite nicely what the attractions of Islam are for some Leftist inclined people. I am suspecting the author is a sufferer of Narcissistic Awe, the underestimated form of Narcissism which does not mind enslaving the whole of humanity if they feel this is in the people's own best interest. Like all Narcissists they crave attention. Through identification with a victim group they can share the audience that this group is generating.

"There is not a dominant type of people that become converts. Converts come from all social and educational backgrounds. The strength of Islam is that they are all equal as Muslims."

The author doesn't seem to be aware of above psychological pathology that predisposes some people to identify with victim groups of the Marxist dialectic, or she might indeed be able point at a "dominant type of people".

"Equal as Muslims" underlines the call of egalitarian collectivism that never fails to attract the hive mind. It's as if this type of 'carbon based unit' instinctively feels the need to home back to the collective, the 'group soul' of the drove.

Apart from the aspects I mentioned in "The Unholy Alliance: Conflating the Three Great isms" this is a futher indication that the current form of Islam belongs to the family of subjectivist, collective Counter-Enlightenment ideologies (see also Chart I: The Straight Red Line), and one reason Muslims will never become "the new Joos", as some have suggested.

In a three part post on the pseudo religious aspects of the collectivist Counter-Enlightenment ideologies of the atheist variety, Communism and National Socialism, we saw that mass events were featuring highly on their indoctrination programs. The monotonous, rhythmic beat of a drum, or the cadence of a charismatic beloved leader-hierophant's prolonged speech, has the hypnotic effect that any right minded demagogue might be looking for. It is the opportunity to subliminally instill the message into the followers, a shot of ideological synchronizing of the watches, if you will. Islam's equivalents of course, are the Hajj and the blood fests associated with the Shia Day of Ashura.

Regarding the latter, Matthias Küntzel has written touchingly in "Ahmadinejad's World"; how the death cult based on Ashura (link to Time slide show) has sent half a million children into oblivion in mine fields, and wave after wave of underclass Iranians was shot to human pulp, in a way which even caused qualms in Saddam Hussein's battle hardened army.

"They come toward our positions in huge hordes with their fists swinging,” an Iraqi officer complained in summer 1982, “You can shoot down the first wave, and then the second. But at some point the corpses are piling up in front of you, and all you want to do is scream and throw away your weapon. Those are human beings, after all!”

In view of the blind sacrifices made in that war by the Basiji - the Iranian version of the Marxist proletariat - they have now been elevated to unofficial police, a sort of SA (Stormtroopers), enforcers of the Revolution and Ahmadinejad's regime apparatus. They are at present also manning the nuclear laboratories.

It is fascinating reading how the sense of 'original sin', originating in the Ashura story has been worked into today's Islamist policies of suicide bombings (the so-called martyrdom operations) and how the Muslim Brotherhood provided Sunnis with their own version.

Blood curling rather than fascinating is the Twelfth Imam dogma that underpins Ahmadinejad's apocalyptic teleology: the more the world is whipped into this Islamic version of political correctness, the sooner the Western Enlightenment notions as symbolised by the Jewish state are obliterated, the earlier this Messiah figure of the Mahdi will materialise, enabling the end game to begin.

This renders the nuclear doctrine of mutually assured destruction absolutely meaningless in this case. And this is why the political flippancy, that we'll just have to learn to live with a nuclear armed Iran, is so criminally ignorant.

2015: The Triumph of Evil or "What Happened?!"

These are momentous times. I fear there will be a point in the foreseeable future - say 2015 - that we'll ask ourselves, "how could we've let this happen, again!". My fear isn't based on phobia (of whatever variety), or on a vague gut feeling, female intuition or on obsessively reading the papers. It is not even based on historical parallels. Rather, my fears are the result of ice cold reasoning and analysis of the essentials.

This blog discusses with some intensity the intricacies of Subjectivism and its fallacies as espoused by the various branches of the Left over the centuries - including Right wing Socialism - and how these ideologies developed out of the Counter-Enlightenment movement started by Rousseau.

No matter what guise the particular variety takes, the end result is always the same: repression, followed by carnage and tragedy, born out of good intentions towards the common good. And if present developments on the world stage aren't deceiving us, the fallacy they stubbornly hang on to may come to cost us dearly once again. Since the wars of the last centuries the stakes are up and the technical means for industrial scale genocide have hugely improved.

The central philosophical con trick of all Collectivist thought (meaning: the opposite of individualism, covering the far Right (negligible in numbers), and first and foremost all of the Left of the political spectrum) is perpetrated in order to accommodate the lie, so that the ideology may survive yet another generation: it is the denial of Reality and with it, the rejection of right and wrong, good and bad.

This amorality has become a problem of Biblical proportions as adherents because of it, do not recognize Evil, even if it bit them in the behind. And because of the Left's unwillingness to concede defeat of their bankrupt ideology, the Left is also incapable of fighting Evil.

Psychologist/blogger Dr Sanity in a brilliant post "Strange Love: How they learnt to stop worrying and love the Iranian Bomb" described it like this: "Recent articles in the MSM (see here and here) suggest that the left is gearing up for an all out assault on the possibility of war with Iran. They intend to do this by using the talking point that "they can live with a nuclear Iran." ... In fact, we can translate (that) into "learning to live without Israel and the Jews". Because that is what the practical consequence of this leftist line of reasoning amounts to."

The doctor is as incisive as ever! But as the tally at present stands at 110 million victims for the whole of Counter-Enlightenment philosophies, who's to blink at a genocide more or less if it's done in the name of universal common good?! An amoral act of cowardice is better than having to fight any war, however morally justified, right?

Anybody who'd take the trouble of objectively thinking about the proposition before us, throwing momentarily aside psychopathology and the habitual ideological blinkers, would have to admit that such are the consequences of letting Iran off the nuclear hook.

But because of the central lie at the base of the ideology, they are unable to look at any given situation with anything remotely resembling objectivity. It enables them to maintain the ideology, but at the price of amorality and consequently, a blind spot for Evil.

The declaration in Subjectivist circles that God is dead has been epitomised by the proto Nazi philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. After World War II the Left have personified Adolf Hitler as the Horned One himself, thus creating a straw man for Evil. With Hitler's demise in the Berlin bunker, Evil died with him. As a result, the Leftist dogma has become that every issue can be resolved by talk and diplomacy.

The danger of this undertaking is that they run the risk of becoming Evil themselves. Their unwillingness to even consider their error, means risking the lives of another 100 million human beings. This is no political game, or a feeble discussion about up-tight morality. Existential issues are at stake, to put it mildly.

Recently re-reading some of the works of writer C.S. Lewis I stumbled upon 'Miracles' in which he refutes the Subjectivist fallacy by yet other means than set out in the PMF. In 'Miracles' Lewis is proving why - what at the time were termed Naturalists (or Materialists, Darwinians, atheists) - cannot maintain their faith in the human capacity for reason, and simultaneously assert an evolution process through natural selection.

Today's Postmodern Left have solved the issue by saying goodbye to Truth altogether, but in Lewis' time, in the evolutionary's book - absent a Designer - there could not considered to be such a thing as Truth prior to the event of thinkers, who could make the moral distinction between right and wrong.

This is the idea of Subjectivism in its full glory or, 'if I die overnight, will the sun still be rising tomorrow?', or 'if planet Earth is destroyed by an attack of giant squirrels from outer space and no human is left, this cannot be considered an immoral act (as only humans can say that it is).

Naturalists explain the world in terms of an endless chain of Cause and Effect. >>> The entire article is published on "Politeia".

"Violence cannot exist in and of itself.
It is invariably interlinked with the Lie."
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The Unholy Alliance: Conflating Three Great isms

Witnessing the sad demise of democracy in front of the European Parliament building in Brussels yesterday, takes some digesting, even for one that was already aware of the realities. I will combine further comment on it with a piece I was already working on: the cooperation in the Unholy Alliance between Islam and the Left. People have often expressed their surprise over the apparent cooperation pact between two parties that - on the surface - seem to be each other's opposites. I hope to clear up that misunderstanding.

As a girl and later as a young grown-up I could never understand how - in the run up to World War II - Nazi Germany could arm itself to the teeth with no one doing anything to prevent it. Entire weapon systems were stockpiled in the Soviet Union as the arsenals and warehouses in Germany proper were stored to full capacity. Yet the furnaces and steel works were operating full steam 24/7 as unemployment rates dropped to zero percent, thanks to Hitler's National Socialist Party's 'employment policies' of everyone on the state's pay roll.

Yet Europe had influential pacifist movements (here's an brilliant take by Sanity on the subject). The U.K. had Richard "Peace in our Time" Chamberlain, and Mayoresses who promised to "not so much as darn a sock if it assisted the war effort", while 'bluestockings' and other enlightened academics conducted Peace Marches in Europe's streets.

I never understood how advanced, civil societies could let such disasters as World War II take place. That is, until yesterday. In fact, it's becoming blatantly obvious how last century's great wars, the holocaust and the enslavement of half the continent in its wake, could take place. Now, as then, we are closing our eyes to a reality that is too scary to contemplate, let alone deal with it. Yesterday in Brussels we saw the conflation of three great isms taking place before our eyes. It is very sad to see just how far indeed we have already sank into the black hole of dictatorship.

It's a bit of a pity that Stephen Hicks' explanation of Postmodernism (or cultural Marxism) doesn't get the attention it deserves. Hicks comes to another categorization of ideologies than is common. He explains that both Communism and National Socialism derive from the Counter-Enlightenment movement that started with the philosophies of Rousseau. This was a reaction to the primacy of reason that features so prominently in Enlightenment thought, of which Classical Liberalism or Libertarianism became the political offshoot (not to be confused with today's liberalism, which is Left Light).

Does the following Rousseau quotation on the ideal state strike anyone as compatible with Islam? "... the state cannot ... pursue a policy of toleration for disbelievers, or view religion as a matter of individual conscience. It absolutely must ... >>>

After theocrat extraordinaire Rousseau, both Hegel and Kant expanded on anti reason philosophy, eventually even doing away with objective reality and epistemology: man is incapable of knowing anything, to each his own universe: reality is subjective. This has provided Communism and National Socialism with their subjectivist basis.

Experts in Islam never stop to point out there is not 'one Islam'. Every Muslim has his or her own subjective perception of it (apart from the five pillars that is, presumably). I have no reason to doubt it: after Rousseau's take on the ideal state, this makes the second, basic conflation of the three great isms.

As hinted at earlier, from 1939 to 1941 Communism and National Socialism shared a history of cooperation. The German army held manoeuvres in Russia and vice versa. Both totalitarian ideologies were Socialist and differed only on its implementation: the Nazis were nationally inclined (using the ethnic dialectic of the German Volk), while the Communists favoured global subjugation (hence the 'Internationale').

After World War II the Left portrayed Hitler as the great satan. Here the dichotomy of Nazism versus Communism was born: this was however a Communist PR ploy which has worked to this day. But far from being opposites both ideologies are in fact each other's mirror image, cousins if you will, while the real opposition, the actual enemy, is Classical Liberalism or Libertarianism, rooted in the Enlightenment and in the West, which by the way wasn't originally radically atheist at all, on the contrary.

Over time and through various twists of history the two totalitarian isms also got transplanted onto Middle Eastern soil, where they gave birth to Panarabism, Arab Nationalism and Ba'athism.

Today's political correctness emanates from a revived Marxism from which the baby boom generation of the 60s cannot seem to say goodbye: their hatred of a free West is burnt onto their souls and treason has become their second nature. Some one described it aptly as "they just cannot pop out of the Marxist dialectic". It is their mindset that is our ruin today, as they now inhabit the corridors of power.

If a recently unearthed 1985 interview with KGB agent and Soviet defector Bezmenov is anything to go by, the moral compass of the 60's generation has been totally and irrevocably removed by the KGB subversion program. What that left undone, was completed by the fifth columnists at the Frankfurt School of Cultural Marxism, as the undersigned can personally attest to. (For novices, here's a commentary on Gramsci, another luminary)

The influence these intellectuals had on that generation can simply not be overstated: they prescribed how 'thinking people' should act and what their opinions should be, from the books and the newspaper they read, the friends they kept, to the movies they saw, to the brand of tobacco they smoked and the coffee they drank.

They were in no uncertain measure specifically 'present' in the bedroom, which - if they had any say in the matter, should preferably be shared by any number of people. The family a gonner as women dragged husbands through divorce courts whole-sale, Eros and Agapi were kept strictly separated as per Kinsey ukase. Children became a kind of common property, to be raised and cared for, by whoever happened to be present (if any).

Fast forward to the new millennium. The cooperation in the Unholy Alliance of the Western Left with Islamists, as the latter swap their secular subjectivism for a theological one, is simply a Feast of Recognition: egalitarian collectivism against individual liberty, totalitarian statism versus limited government at the people's pleasure, anti reason against science and technology, socialism vs. capitalism and free markets, state (which in Islam is synonymous with religion) against voluntary mutual benefit, state/divine intervention versus free will: in short, combined totalitarianism against the classical liberal values as embodied by the West: freedom and democracy.

And of course the collectivists share the dialectic of Oppressor versus the Oppressed and socially constructed victimhood. This mock epic battle is the basis of all collectivist ideologies, uniquely cultivated to keep the 'struggle' going. Communism had its classes; the Nazis the German Volk; Cultural Marxism its students, women, gays and blacks, as Islam has the true believers versus the infidel.

Multiculturalism is a later manifestation of Cultural Marxism and keeps true to the dialectic mechanism on a cultural level, while N.G.O.ism (U.N.) and transnational progressivism (E.U., N.A.U.) play the same trick on the global scale of nations and states. The same story is transposed and extrapolated on all levels. So much for defeating Marxism, fifty years overdue.

Last but certainly not least the totalitarian isms share a justification of violence to power: the Western versions' passe-partout is provided for by Messrs Rousseau and Marx; the Islamic variety is of course rooted in Koranic scripture, which in the early stages also served as a platform for the conquest of the Christian lands in the Middle East and beyond.

I have laid down the ideological histories and how the three isms relate, in Chart I: The Straight Red Line for easy reference.

But the uncovering of the close ties within the Unholy Alliance doesn't stop here. AEL's Abu Jahjah's vocabulary of choice doesn't come by accident straight out of the Marxist-Leninist handbook for Leftist dummies ... dhimmis.

Just in: Hodja has published "Postmodern Jihad - What Osama bin Laden learnt from the Left", insights into the more recent relations between Islamism and Cultural Marxism: have hardly read it myself, but I think I should share it.

Much is made of political correctness. Some interpret it as latter day Cultural Marxism itself. Personally I see it as soft social pressure, to coerce others into conforming with the Left's ideology: the 'redistribution' of freedoms and rights along the lines of the dialectic. The idea is to shift power, capital, rights, etc. from the Oppressor to the Oppressed minorities. The great trick is to treat gender and faith, on an equal footing with race. But what we have to keep in mind here, is that gender is subject to choice, while Muslims are born as such.

This can be taken very far indeed, as legislation is put in place in support of the same object. We have recently seen that played out with the SIOE demo and Brussels Mayor, Freddy 'The Toad' Thielemans. At that stage, we have de facto a totalitarian situation where dissenters are made common criminals, case need on trumped up charges of assaulting a bus driver. Baron Bodissey of Gates of Vienna is spot on in today's post "Democratic Europe R.I.P." Freddy and His Walloon Troopers made European history yesterday.

But for most, including the good people of the silent majority [1], if reality gets too scary to deal with, denial erects a impenetrable curtain of make-belief in the hope the bogey will go away. I just read this morning in a paper that the Dutch as a nation, have become happier than they were a few years back during an economic downturn. Happy totalitarian dreams every one! I hope your bank accounts grow at an even pace!

Others - like Council of Europe's Secretary General Terry Davis - have become completely deluded in their psychological pathology. To them it's simply beyond the realm of the possible - indeed, a crime! - that people might be genuinely worried about the fate of their culture and continent. This type of custodians of 'European values' have no qualm whatsoever of beating up and criminalizing civilians and politicians with whom they happen to disagree. Even manufactured charges do not seem to trigger a red-hot-moral-no-no meme with these Quislings. They have become amoral thugs, who have lost sight of their opponents humanity, and do not know it. That is what scares me to death.

Update: The New York Times is offering a fascinating view of a German officer's World War II photo album of Auschwitz. The commentary is wrong at one point, when exclaiming that this is what "antisemitism, racism and hatred" does to humans. This should actually be: "this is what happens if ideology is valued over human life".

Blurring the Border between Reality and Perception (3)

This is the third and last instalment in a series of posts on the effects of Postmodernism (Pomo, or cultural Marxism, or Subjectivism, or relativism) on journalism and the MSM. If you've read the preceding two instalments you might want to skip this introduction and jump to "Continued from Part 2" four paras down.

To remind ourselves of the heart of the trouble: it's the basic fallacy of the industry's pet philosophy that objective reality does not exist. The danger of this deliberate mistake is, that the line between reality and perception becomes blurred, causing any amount of confusion.

One consequence is, that fact - which is based on objective reality - is also rejected as a result, which is a bit of a problem if you're dealing with facts on a daily basis, as is the case in journalism. So what we see reported by the media aren't so much cool, detached facts, as much as the reporter's personal version of reality.

Another, moral consequence of the rejection of reality is, that good and bad, right and wrong, truth and lie, are denied in the same way; or to put it in another way: everybody is 'right' from his or her own particular point of view, and anything 'bad' is called 'bad', only because it doesn't fit into our present, defective idea of society.

The spectacle of pretended journalistic objectivity has run for a long time, until quite recently - at last, pretence was dropped altogether. But the objective realists are now starting to fight back. Lists are appearing with facts, detailing when, why and how the facts were manipulated to conform with somebody's particular 'narrative', attempts at disinformation, censoring, fraud, spin and counter-spin, fibs and lies, fabrication, selective emphasizing, manipulation and censoring, the whole dishonest spectrum.

~ Continued from Part 2 ~

I recently reported, and made some work of, an example of the typical modern activist in the person of a young Belgian convert to Islam. Eva Vergaelen is academically trained in higher crypto Marxism and obtained a degree in Neo Imperialism (or, How to Ruin the Third World and Retain a Clean Conscience) at Antwerp University. She expresses an interest in Identity and Gender Politics. In short, she is a glorified activist posing as a journalist, producing work on Islamization and Multiculturalism that is stripped of anything even remotely approaching balanced objectivity.


In the recent showdown in Brussels involving the institutionalised forces of Subjectivism as represented by Socialist mayor Freddy Thielemans on the one hand, and the Paneuropean organization "Stop the Islamization of Europe" on the other, she joined forces with the radical Hizbollah affectionate, Dyab Abu Jahjah of the Arab European League, in producing a thoroughly toxic article that was filled to the brim with lies and revisionism. It was briefly published on the site of The Brunei Times, but has since been removed. The sole purpose of such invective can only be the poisoning of the atmosphere against the West within the Dar-al-Islam. One wonders just how many Eva Vergaelens roam the tortured land.

Rummaging further through my archive yielded:

- Douglas Hanson's article "The Real Lesson of the Beauchamp Affair" (there may be another such an affair in the making). The Hanson article not just lists that recent scandal, but also throws another light on the Abu Graib scandal, which he terms a "high quality disinformation operation" that played off Iraqi and Arab historical ethnic, racial and cultural biases, indicating that this was run by seasoned professionals in journalism and their government 'sources';

- Tito's bunkers in Iraq, containing the illusive WMD;

- The NIE report;

- The Hamari atrocities, as covered by independent journalist Michael Yon, and ignored by the MSM;

- The Haditha Massacre is another case in point: read the whole article on Accuracy in Media "Haditha Massacre: Media and Terrorist Hoax", which prompted NewsMax to a spot of impromptu fund-raising to cover the legal expenses of the accused;

- Or the reporting on the Beslan massacre. On the same link you will find how normal, professional journalism has become so rare, that it is covered in laurels!

Inconvenient facts are preferably spun into favourable public perceptions, or they are reduced to 'somebody's personal opinion'; alternatively they are suppressed altogether (voluntary or otherwise), or - case need - dealt with through the courts.

These days we have Leftist inspired hatred laws at the expense of free speech and freedom of conscience. These laws are little else but legal back up for political correctness, in other words, the Left's soft social pressure to conform with their morality and political agenda, which they share with their partner in the Unholy Alliance, institutionalized Islam. Read "Stop Forum Shopping Terrorism" by Flanders Fields for a very important case. Said Rachel Ehrenfeld was recently the guest of Pamela Geller's at BlogTalkRadio. The broadcast is available here.

Consider this from Doug Giles' recent article on Townhall: we are "bamboozled into believing that Islam is a peaceful, Little House on the Prairie religion being temporarily hijacked by jihadist renegades".

The combined, cultural egalitarianism of the Unholy Alliance may have prompted a commentary in Examiner by John R. Thomson "Whose Genocide Will it Be": "America is berated for heinous crimes, minimizing whatever may have been done by the regimes of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein and, currently, Sudanese President and Field Marshal Omar al-Bashir".

Let me stress at this point that all these totalitarian dictatorships are based on the rejection of reality fallacy (see Chart I: the Straight Red Line), sharing the same Counter-Enlightenment heritage as originated by Rousseau.

Giles again: "Simultaneously, the accusations are calculated to inflame the credulous Arab/Muslim street, in order to justify murderous Muslim terrorism, to recruit gullible suicide bombers and to attract covert support from Saudi Arabia, once a stalwart U.S. ally." Hm, the 'inflame' part reminds me of Eva and The Brunei Times ...

"This propaganda campaign seeks to distract the world’s attention from the real murderers, the true ethnic and religious cleansers. For the truth is, the perpetrators to an overwhelming degree are the Muslims themselves." To make the sinister list:

- Indonesia 500-600.000 - Bangladesh 1.4-2 million - Somalia 600.000 - Sudan 5-6 million and counting - Afghanistan's Soviet invasion 1.5 million, "the American invasion in 2001 created perhaps 10,000 fatalities" - the Iran/Iraq war 1.5 million on the side of Iraq, and 450-970.000 Iranians - in Iraq, Saddam's war on his own people, another 1 million deaths - Syrian fratricide in Syria 20.000, and in Lebanon 130.000 - The article further mentions Chad, Jordan, Mauretania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Turkey, Yemen and Zanzibar.

The apocalyptic figures are only rivalled by the hecatombs piled up by the heirs of Marx on the same altars of egalitarian collectivism! This, of course, is no coincidence. Both vistas enjoy an inherent justification to violence, and an end-justifies-the-means mentality.

I have no doubt whatsoever that any Pomo activist with an agenda would gladly counter those figures with the perversity of the Iraq Body Count (go ahead: check it!) - and "the Christian counterpart of the Iraqi fratricide", the Irish Troubles (4,000 fatalities), just so that things are put into perspective!

It's only appropriate to wrap this post up with Randall Hoven's "It's Not Just Scott Beauchamp" in American Thinker, a brave effort in almost comprehensively listing all the "lying and fabricating, doctoring photos, plagiarism, conflicts of interest, falling for hoaxes, and overt bias" in the recent history of damaged journalism.

Hoven's figures break down as follows: of the total count of 62 cases in the United States alone, 7 are in relation to Iraq, and 4 to the Middle East. Case number 28 makes clear that the Leftist press has been at it since The New York Times' Walter Duranty hailed the accomplishments of Stalin era Soviet Union. I conclude with Randall Hoven that:

"If it is 'too good to be true', or just too politically correct to be true, take it with a grain of salt - several grains, apparently, if from The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The New Republic, CNN or Reuters ... If this is the visible part of the iceberg, just how big is the iceberg?"

To which I can add a query of my own: I'm just so curious what the figures for Europe would be!

In the meantime there's an update in which Hoven effortlessly lists another 21 cases, of which 4 relate to the combustible Islam, Middle East, AQ triangle.