Earth to Planet Niburu: We're Still Here!

It is said that man's mind needs some form of religion.

The Postmodernists admitted as much after relentlessly attacking Christianity for most of their existence; they went on to propagate Hinduism and Buddhism; protect, aid and abet assertive Islamism; peddle New Ageism, and creating the Emerging Church - a form of Christianity that manages to combine, without the slightest cognitive dissonance, the absolutism of the message of Jesus Christ with agnosticism, as far as truth is concerned! The same is practiced in pomo politics.

It is also said that if no longer accepting organized religion people will believe anything, specifically clueless, peawitted Narcissists, doing philosophy with theoretical physics, the same reason why relativists refer to Einstein's Theory of Relativity for an explanation.

It cannot be said enough: you cannot use chemistry for doing math, you cannot use physics to do philosophy.

A little knowledge is a terrible thing.

CERN: Hadron Collider (enlarged photo here) - here explained in three minutes


Update 23rd Sep 2008 - adding insult to the injuries of the technology Luddites, not planet earth exploded, but the contraption itself went rather flat - the ultimate anticlimax ...

Gallimaufry & Chips: "Large Hadron Collider Results"

It would appear that £4 billion has been spent to produce an anticlimax which isn't actually a little bit of a little bit of an atom but just the announcement that the experiment designed to break things has broken itself. (...) >>>

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.

The Straight Red Line (5): Love of Islam, Loathing of Self

~ Continued from Part 4: the Founders ~

The touching words quoted yesterday (here in entirety) were uttered by the Subjectivist [1] champion of the Collectivist Counter-Enlightenment movement: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). I regret to say we have no winner of Hicks' groundbreaking tome "Explaining Postmodernism".

Rousseau set the tone of the premise of mankind basically being good but corrupted by his environment, that we have come to know so well in Leftist thinking. In Rousseau's vision the world's trouble is caused by civilization, Reason and its fruits, knowledge and science. He's often quoted as a philosopher of the Enlightenment, but it is quite clear he rebelled against all the tenets of individual Liberalism, Reason, secularism and limited government.

In Rousseau we find the very source of our trouble with Postmodernism, but also the answer to many a vexed question:

- "why does the Left ally itself with Radical Islam against the permissive Liberal society that is of their own making and of which they are the prime beneficiary?", and

- "why should Western civilization be considered so uniquely bad?" and related:

- "what's with the self-hatred", in these pages often termed "Down With Us", or Operation Western Auto-Destruct, so often confessed to by our Postmodern Multiculturalists and directed against white, rich, hetero-sexual, Christian men in particular and Western society in general.

Earlier I suggested to have discovered the source of self-loathing in the Positivism of Auguste Comte. But in Rousseau we have yet an earlier Ground Zero.

Disappointed Marxists often return to the grandfather of Collectivist Anti-Reason, but when the Leftist press recently sabled the film '300', about the three hundred Spartans that defeated the Persian Army in 480 Before Christ - driven by Pacifism and love of anything that doesn't answer to the white, male litany, in casu the Greeks - they forgot to check back on their Classics, the pure, emotional Rousseau.

As opposed to the degradation of Athenian decadent Civilization generated by Reason, Rousseau glorified the militaristic Spartans as pure, unspoiled, noble tribesmen - their callous practice of exposing babies to nature may have even inspired him to expose his own five children to the hardships of the Paris orphanage.

Because to Rousseau, the more advanced a civilization, the more corrupted and corrupting it is. As a paradigm of Rousseauian thought we can envisage the Noble Savage, or man's fall from Paradise: the snake of old was often used as a symbol of wisdom; read 'reason' for 'wisdom' (not to be confused!) and you have Rousseau in a nut-shell.

More of his ideas inspired by the image of noble savagery is the divorce of Eros and Agapi, so highly prized by contemporary man and woman; and a distaste for compassion with others which would only generate more decadent civilization: this is reminiscent of the view that drove the Russian Revolution: one cannot create a workers' Paradise with sentimentality, at which point usually the village headmaster was made an example of.

Rousseau also inspired in Marx the use of the Leftist dichotomy of the Oppressor versus the Oppressed; and seems to have been the source of Postmodern Fallacy Number One: the world as a pie, the view of the zero-sum game, where it is inappropriate and fatal.

Rousseau as the source of Western self-loathing can be found in the vision of the noble, primordial world that is destroyed by man's civilizing force: Reason, knowledge, science, technology, art, aesthetics, property, and economy; man not only destroyed this pristine environment (!), he also became soft, fat and lazy, and created a social conflict: a few winners on top and a whole lot of losers at the base of the pyramid of power.

It's this inequality that is so damning in Rousseau's erroneous total-sum game! Far from considering contemporary Western society an engine of equality and a creator of wealth, it is seen by the Rousseau followers as doomed, the epitome of social pathologies! Down With It ... à la Lanterne! Presently the problem is our destruction of the environment by technology: it doesn't save it, it despoils it.

The West prides itself for what it considers progress. But for anyone who has invested completely in a world view seen as evil, amoral and utterly failed, this gloating is unbearable. So the fight isn't over for the KGB's ideologically demoralised remnants. The capitalist world's moral values are attacked as utterly sexist, racist, dogmatic, authoritarian, cruel, uniquely civilized - uniquely bad!

If Reason makes no sense to what you're saying as Reality clearly shows otherwise, attack Reason as pernicious and superfluous, and persuade the world that Reality doesn't exist!

Rousseau as the source of the revulsion for civilization unmasks Fjordman's correspondent at the University of Helsinki for the Postmodern vile hypocrites that Multiculturalists at heart are: sending the message that retaining culture should be a human right, when in fact they mean to destroy anything that can remotely be considered a 'civilization', favouring instead the long-lost ideal: Marx' pseudo religious red paradise, or by default, Rousseau's wild tabula rasa of the tribal society, so pure and self-sacrificial, possibly Islamic (apparently not considered civil enough to be damned).

But then again, Postmoderns have a relation to language, that Muslims also have when lying to infidels: language, not as a means to transfer information, but as a means to a usually bloody end: it is about effectiveness. This is part of the confusion: to Postmoderns language is not about objective Truth, which to them doesn't exist any way. Therefore language isn't used as an instrument of precision, but as a propaganda tool. A word of advice: never, ever, take a Postmodern's words literally: what is being said habitually requires a good deal of deconstructing before its meaning can be discerned - which they will then go on to reject as non-existent.

To Rousseau religion was a imperative, as we have seen in yesterday's puzzle contest. He had the intention of cutting a few individual heads in the interest of society's stability as a whole. In Hicks' words: "... 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. Further: so fundamentally important is religion that the ultimate penalty is appropriate for disbelievers ..."

At which point we see the source of our Unholy Alliance of the Left and assertive Islam emerging on the horizon. As the cursed Western civilization was practically built by Christianity, this obviously rules it out. Now Islam on the other hand - due to the precise parallel characteristics of Collectivism, Anti-reason and Oppressor versus Oppressed - is the ideal candidate. The use of irrational terrorism is just an added attraction, as we shall see!

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ayatolla Extraordinair, far from being the Left's Mister Nice Guy, also has the honour of being the source of political justification to irrational violence, committed by Jacobin thugs during the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror; of the horrors that Marxist dictators inflicted upon their own peoples; and of various Leftist terrorist groups who - from the 1960's onwards, when it began to dawn on them that with the passing of the 100 million victim mark - the Totalitarian game was up.

Most people, myself included, with the fall of the wall in 1989, made the mistake in taking for granted that Communism had conceded defeat. But the KGB's ideologically de-moral-ized, brainwashed crowd never gave up: they weren't programmed to pack it in. On the contrary! After their contributions to the permissive society to corrupt it even further, the West is currently witness to their collusion with the forces of Radical Islam.

I think we need to carefully consider the ominous words of one of the Four Horsemen of the Communist Apocalypse, Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfort School in 1974, after the 'failed revolutions' of 1967 and 1968: "It will be resurrected in the universities".

~ To be continued in Part 6, the Collective: ... we have seen that Syria/Lebanon and Iraq found themselves - as French colonies during World War II - on the side of Vichy and Nazi Germany ... ~

Neo-communism exposed! (III)

Fjordman, with an article "Communism for the 21st Century" has the entire conservative blegosphere abuzz in sheer shock, with comments, quotes, cross-posts and re-posts. These pages had already come to the same conclusion some months ago through our own separate, well-documented investigations. The chances therefore, this is only a figment of the delusional, conservative mind - as doubtlessly some projecting Leftists would have it - is herewith narrowed down to practically zero, I posit!

We came to the same conclusion, because the founding fathers of the postmodern pseudo philosophies that underpin the whole miserable construct - positivism, subjectivism (relativism) [1], deconstructionism, multiculturalism and other related sophistries - all had their feet firmly planted in the same Marxist clay in one way or another. This is something that anyone, who's willing to put in a bit of reference work, can conclude for themselves. To read related posts, enter 'communism', 'totalitarian', 'soviet' and/or 'dictatorship' into the top search box).

Another give away are the terms used (intelligentsia, peaceful coexistence); their knee-jerk pathological reactions to concepts like authority, dogma and religion; the need for a common scapegoat to blame all the short-comings of an otherwise perfect ideology on (neo-cons, Christians, Israel); the fact that their ideals are only practically attainable under totalitarian circumstances (intolerance towards dissenters); that the basic unit is the group (as opposed to the individual); criminalization of dissent (crimes against the ideology: racism, Islamo/homophobia, etc.); a mentality in which the end, justifies the means (everything is secondary to the realisation of the ideal); science is seen as a means to 'prove' the scientific correctness of the ideology (Darwinism, suppression of theories that potentially disprove its tenets and underpinnings); transnationalism (a borderless, multi-ethnic and multicultural 'Empire', the Emperor being substituted by a democratically unaccountable meritocratic elite); anti-realism; subjectivism (not: all men are created equal and therefore treated equally in similar circumstances, but: unequal groups must be compensated in proportion to their inequality); collectivism (ditto); a socially constructed identity and victimhood (ditto).

The above also explains the mutual identification of the postmodern ideologies with the cause of Islamism and their cooperation in the Unholy Alliance. All totalitarian concepts have a lot is common. Hence the mutual admiration. I don't propose to repeat the whole argumentation here again, as these posts are readily available in this blog (enter 'unholy alliance' and/or 'Islamo-Nazism' into the top search box).


Commentary from a contributor identified as The Great Satan, and brought together in an easy readable post "The Long Game- Enlightened Commenters Reveal All" on weblog "Mr Smith's Refusal" has some additional insights into the matter on the basis of Darwinism (natural selection and survival of the fittest), worth quoting extensively.

On the postmodern version of 'democracy':

"An ideal democracy is a coalition where political power is allocated among groups in proportion to their numbers. It has nothing to do with voting or with individual citizens expressing opinions, and in fact it doesn't require elections at all. A 'winner take all' system, or one ruled by a majority, is profoundly repugnant because it disenfranchises minority groups of all kinds and deprives them of their proper share of power."

... and emphasizes that ...

"National identity is evil. We should try to think of ourselves as citizens of the world, not as citizens of the nations in which we live, and we should try to minimize the effects of national interests, especially our own if we live in powerful nations."

And concludes ominously that ...

"... basically, the government policy is to ethnically and culturally replace the current majority ethnicity/culture with a different majority ethnicity/culture (ed.: Latino and Muslim for the U.S. and the E.U. respectively). Sounds familiar? It should because that is defacto GENOCIDE - albeit soft genocide by stealth [sic]. I imagine in Europe the Muslims would then wipe out the remaining Westerners by traditional genocide which they are quite good at."

In other words:

"... 'my' supposedly democratic government and media has the nerve to simply inform me it will continue with policies that will replace my ethnic/cultural group as the major ethnic/cultural group in my own country in relatively very small number of years, and if I don't like that, I am racist? ...."

"Diabolically clever. Hitler failed in his genocide of European Jews. The political U.S. and E.U. elites are much closer to a successful genocide of a much more numerous ethnic group."

I firmly agree with the qualification 'diabolical': that term sums up the stealth with which this treacherous policy of global proportions is being executed upon the indigenous people. Diabolical is also the crypto Marxist pseudo philosophy that underpins it all: relativism, i.e. your senses are untrustworthy, objective truth does not exist, and each person/culture/country/religion is identical except Western ones which are inherently and uniquely bad.

If you can make people believe that - eventually with the assistance of the useful media - anything goes - even global Islamic crypto Marxism.

Another Victory of Unreason over Reality

We live in blessed times. Man is making great strides forward. After we have done away with the shocking notion that one religion or culture might actually be superior to another if only because one stayed barren while another caused civilization as we know it; and even the regrettable scientific theory of the existence of objective truth has been discredited, thus enabling us to commit oppressive ideas as 'lies', 'wrong', 'mistake' and 'error' to eternity; today we can celebrate that neutrality as vital prerequisite for professional journalism has finally fallen in the name of victory of unreason over reality.

That the mainstream media (MSM) have become a by-word for political bias was an accusation which - till today - was always vehemently denied. Yet any owner of a bit of an open mind reading the papers, watching television or the Internet, could come to the conclusion that the dice are loaded on the left hand side.

As neutrality and emotional distance once were the trademarks of professional journalism, one would have thought that the allegation of bias is a serious one. Yet the BBC has gone within the course of one year, from the standard bearer of the trade to one of the worst offenders against it.

Since anti-Americanism re-took hold - as it usually does to some degree with a Republican President in the White House - even the pretence of impartial reporting got less and less with each passing year that George W. Bush has been in office.

As former neoconservative politicians turn into Gerbil Mix wherever the opportunity presents itself, U.S. ally Israel is at present singled out by Britain's 35,000 strong membership of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) as a particularly savage country, as it sits in an ocean of human and social injustice. But in this vast field of choice in the Middle East, the NUJ has declared a boycott against America's ally.

Just say No! to Israeli agricultural produce, they demand, echoing former U.S. President Carter's ludicrous accusation of "Apartheid!". Ludicrous, as the essence of Apartheid is discrimination on the basis of race: the author was the first to deny that this was the case, thereby declaring the title of his own book null and void.

The luminaries and intelligentsia that make up the Leftist elite, likely subscribers of the Euston Manifesto and other such offences against reason, en masse adhere to "multiculturalism, that university-nurtured version of cultural relativism that has now firmly ensconced itself wherever politically correct college-educated elites congregate, which is to say just about everywhere." Needless to say that the vast majority of the NUJ are likely self-proclaimed members of said elite.

Another trait of this côterie is the blood-chilling cynicism that is the result of the disappointment after communism failed to live up to its earlier promises to put an end, once and for all, to Western civilization. After a decade or as so of brooding over this unsatisfactory state of affairs, a particularly nasty piece of irrationality was dreamed up: relativism, accompanied by its ugly stepsister multiculturalism.

A lot has been said in these pages about these postmodern pseudo philosophies, but the fact of the matter is, at heart, these fallacies to a large extent cloak cowardice in a shroud of intellectualism. It sounds as an excuse, but Clifford Day in his article "Hacks or Flacks?" on the site of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies describes why the NUJ seems to be caving in to intimidation:

"Johnson’s kidnapping (by Palestinians), the abduction and forced conversions of Fox journalists Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig, the video-taped decapitation of Daniel Pearl - these and other atrocities are intimidating a growing list of journalists."

He sarcastically concludes that "with this as backdrop, perhaps the NUJ boycott against Israel should be seen less as bias and more as a kind of tribute - a sacrifice of journalistic integrity in the hope it may appease the editors who matter most, those who cut not with red pens but with butcher knives, those who produce not packages for the evening news but snuff videos for the Internet."

I say, if you haven't got the spine to uphold your own standard of professionalism against your personal political activism, go find a job where your lack of character and spirit is less required. Go restock store shelves, or something!

After Easter: Islamic Tyrannosaur Eggs (II)

That said, on other vital areas Islamic principles and Liberal values collide irreconcilably; the problem areas are numerous and fundamental. A recent report published by the Middle East Forum "Can there be an Islamic democracy?" explained it like this: "Ironically, while Western scholars perform intellectual somersaults to demonstrate the compatibility of Islam and democracy, prominent Muslim scholars argue democracy to be incompatible with their religion ... Islamic law regulates the believer's activities in every area of life, and ... some Muslim scholars further reject anything that does not have its origins in the Qur'an."

In consideration of my personal health I go out of my way in avoiding the calls to dhimmitude issued by The Kings of The Borg, Messrs Garton Ash, Sim and Buruma as per their cold, robotic mantra: "Resistance is Futile - Prepare to be Assimilated ... !" Regretfully I had the misfortune to stumble upon an article that the Dutch-American product of multiculturalism, in the person of Ian Buruma, recently published in Pakistan's Daily Times, entitled rather counter-intuitively "The strange death of multiculturalism". Well, not due to wishful thinking on his part, I should think.

Anyway, apart of the usual nut-cracking that kept me sleepless till six this morning - and the habitual whispers of Resistance is Futile: "... like it or not, Muslims are part of Europe ... so ... learn to live with them", he singles out Indonesia as the crowning evidence that "Liberal democracy and Islam are reconcilable." That is, conveniently passing over acts of terrorism - which, according to The Borg are to be taken in our stride, in the life in the new nationless Empire: just ask the Hapsburgs and the Romanovs; beheadings of young Christian girls are but a small price to pay for so much celebration of diversity!

It so happens that the Middle East Forum report also mentions Indonesia, but as an example that Islam is the antithesis of any secular Western democracy: "Outlining his plans to establish an Islamic state in Indonesia, Abu Bakar Bashir, a Muslim cleric and the leader of the Indonesian Mujahideen Council, attacked democracy and the West and called on Muslims to wage jihad against the ruling regimes in the Muslim world. "It is not democracy that we want, but Allah-cracy," he explained". The Borg's sense of reality has been totally relativised, I'm afraid! But that doesn't keep them from serving in governmental advisory committees. Want to bet?

Western society as a whole is in serious trouble due to Liberalism's relativist view on religion as a result of the erroneously reasoning that is typical for the pseudo philosophy, of which Buruma is a master. For instance: "Christianity equals religion, Islam equals religion, all religions are equally valid, Christianity is Islam". This infantile fallacy causes radical atheists and agnostics to seek refuge in the Christophobic French secular system, by which religion is pushed to the very margins of society. There, in the fringes it may play a silent role within the confines of the private home.

As is in evidence in the French suburbs with the violent rioting of Islamic - no, strike that last word - unemployed youths, this approach of the religiously neutral state - as warmly recommended by author Pascal Bruckner - apparently doesn't work either. It doesn't produce a better integration, or a more peaceful society, while it does create a religiously sterile public space in which even the wearing of a small crucifix on a necklace amounts to a crime. And, by Bruckner's own emphasis, this state of affairs is built on the blood of priests and nuns. No, thanks!

The bane of subjectivism within the judiciary was recently in evidence when in a German case, a Muslim mother of two petitioned for an expedited divorce from her violence prone husband. Judge Christa Datz-Winter didn't apply German law, but instead saw fit to single handedly declare Sharia law in Germany, denying the woman's request on the grounds that the couple hail from a "Moroccan cultural environment in which it is not uncommon for a man to exert a right of corporal punishment over his wife." We may not notice it any more, but this is pretty serious Eurabian stuff! Justitia blind? Objective? This isn't class justice, it's sheer racism!

Western society and the Liberalistic philosophies underpinning the legal system, are tuned to a free, responsible people that respect other person's freedoms. Adjustment of legislature to the intolerant dentencies is threatening to undermine these civic freedoms, the foundation of Western societies.

~ To be continued: New morality laws are in the making: it is just a matter of time before the first priest or vicar will be jailed for homophobia or abortionphobia ... In the meantime, denial of Jewish and Armenian holocausts are entirely the done thing ~

After Easter: Islamic Tyrannosaur Eggs (I)

While Jesco Delorme in his article "Multiculturalism is not cultural relativism!" states that in Liberalism the fundamental idea is that "the human being is autonomous, takes precedence over the collective ... metaphysical concepts such as God, History and The People may not be invoked in the formulation of political demands", he goes on to state at least three - in his eyes legitimate - examples of Muslims invoking Allah (or the Koran) in demanding privileges in re of headscarves, separate swimming pools and beaches for Muslim women. Those that mind about such minor details are merely being shortsighted and petty bourgeois. Yesterday we saw that Mr Delorme's brand of Left Liberalism justifies granting certain special rights to unequal minorities.

I don't propose screening Mr Delorme's article further on inconsistencies and inconsequential reasoning, but to move on instead to another very important point that he raises, which sets Left Liberalism (or free-market Socialism), apart from Classical Liberalism (or Libertarianism).

It is the fundamental leftist mistake of abandoning universal equality, thereby introducing subjectivism into politics and society. Decades ago I was taught the virtue of trying to be as objective as possible: to assess a casus or a situation on its own merits, without taking into consideration the persons involved: their social class, status, race, gender, or the amount of money in their bank accounts. This premise was based on the biblical principle that God created man in His image, and that consequently all people are of equal value, have equal rights and possess dignity in and of themselves.

With the Left in attendance of politics, the judiciary, education, housing, welfare, social services and a number of other fields, this universal principle was abandoned - objectivity made way for subjectivity - with grave consequences all round. Jesco Delorme justifies it as follows: "Aristotle himself insisted that equality must be understood as proportional equality. To treat persons equally in the strictest sense is justified only when they are truly equals. However, if they differ from one another in normatively relevant respects it is justified - indeed imperative - to treat them unequally in proportion to their differences". This principle may be philosophically sound when pertaining to plastic balls and pieces of fruit; it doesn't make good policy towards a healthy social state of society.

Since the departure from objectivity in politics it has become the norm for people and groups to formulate and foster any number of perceived grievances and inequalities, so as to claim special status and privileges over and at the expense of other people's rights and freedoms. It has caused the cultivation of victimhood, it has kept people from taking responsibility for their own actions, and caused the waiving of acceptance and atonement for the consequences of mistakes. That is, apart from the endless debates over how and in what measure perceived unequal proportions must be determined and compensated.

Mr Delorme's article brings us right to the heart of today's trouble when on its basis a number of privileges for Muslim women are demanded: we are not to whine pettily over headscarves and separated bathing areas. In the past decades we have been likewise subjected to positive action for women and blacks, unreasonable demands on the mentally and physically impaired, special housing and services for lower income brackets, ditto for immigrants, ditto for students, funds for violence prone youths, pregnant women, sufferers of particular diseases, AIDS victims, teen mums, the elderly, underprivileged youths, the morally challenged, divorcees, the list is endless and the struggle for inflated victimhood goes on ...

The result is the virtual incarceration of people within social and mental ghettos, poverty, class justice, ludicrous situations as a result of positive action, unfair mirroring of society in group quotas, and the excruciating phenomenon of the politically correct: the inviolate face of the prevailing ideology, the representation of today's red handkerchief. Still worse, it has made inequality the norm in Western society.

Dr Pat's chart shows in which areas the Left and Islam's social views coincide: socialism, collectivism - the subordination of the individual to the group, subjectivism, anti-realism and a socially constructed victimhood. The Unholy Alliance presently extends to a growing Muslim constituency adding to the Left's vote and a growing influence on politics in general, on immigration policy, and of influence of foreign governments on Western soil.

On a less directly visible plane of operation it could be said that the multicultural branch of the Unholy Alliance is disseminating ideological confusion, while the terrorist off-shoot takes care of radicalization in copying Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory. The multiculturalist's view of a world without national borders - one huge multi-ethnic Empire without a worldly Emperor, coincides very happily with the Islamist's vision of the Khalifate.

Islam's unprecedented special status of victimhood backed up by terror threats has led Liberal subjectivism to allow distortion of history, adjustment of school curricula, denial of the holocaust, all so as not to hurt Islamic sensitivities. The story is ongoing. Further special privileges are demanded or coerced at the expense of other groups, and cohesion of society as a whole. Especially the more radical versions don't accept the democratic tenets, nor do they accept - or even appreciate - democratic values. We have passed "go home if you don't like it here" a long time ago. This has turned into "let's change it in accordance with our wishes". It's the West that does the assimilating, at home.

The incompatibility is to a large extent due to the Islamic principle which holds that society is subservient to the all transcendental laws of Allah, as laid down in the Koran. The concept of free will is non-existent. Assertive Muslims don't accept, nor are they willing to understand, Liberal c.q. Western values which they take for weak and degenerate. As an exclusive, superior religion it expects global conversion and victory of Islam over the infidel. Neither does it accept socially deviant behaviour of the faithful, nor does it tolerate dissent.

With regard to Delorme's proposition one wonders how he reckons to police the Liberal rights of the individual within the Islamic singularity. I'm thoroughly looking forward seeing him do that!

~ In Part II: That said, on other vital areas Islamic principles and Liberal values collide irreconcilably; the problem areas are numerous and fundamental ... ~

For Easter: Multicultural Cuckoo's Eggs (II)

Since this series of posts are consecutive I'll not provide back-links ... just scroll away. We left off yesterday with the definitions. Considering confusion is rife on this subject it is vital we know what we are talking about. You are of course free - in fact I urge you, to do more reference work on these definitions. If not ready at hand, you can find a number of links to encyclopedia and dictionaries in the Store Room.

1. What is the essence of relativism?
Relativism is the pseudo philosophy that posits that all points of view are equally valid. In ethics, this amounts to saying that all moralities are equally good; in epistemology it implies that all beliefs, or belief systems, are equally true; in anthropology that no culture is more superior than any other. Reality depends on your point of view, who you are and where you are: it is subjective. It follows that there isn't any standpoint that is uniquely privileged over another. Thus: there is no objective reality or truth, nothing is true or false in itself, there are no lies, mistaken opinions or "wrong" points of view belong to a murky past. To borrow an apt line of Ann Coulter's: "Truth is a discredited scientific theory from the Victorian age".

A great number of things may be said about this, not least of which - and I keep stressing this point because it is so familiar but no one seems to be aware of the cause - this is what makes debates in the Western world at present so very frustrating and pointless: in the absence of objective truth it a discussion over personal preferences. The one likes red, the other blue: you cannot convince the other that red is better, because it isn't. Denying the most basic of all philosophical tenets - true or false - has far reaching consequences indeed. It undermines the very basis of reality and it is what makes this fallacy so toxic: I have written extensively, but clearly not enough about it.

2. What is the definition of multiculturalism?
Contrary to popular belief multiculturalism is not the definition of a society with more than one culture: the definition politicians like to dish up to the average citizen, who takes it to mean, something vaguely like 'being nice to immigrants'. Rather, said to be rooted originally in the black civil rights movement in America, it was first adopted as an official policy in Canada in 1971. Multiculturalism's "principle aim is to assure the peaceful cohabitation of populations of different ethnic or racial origins on the same territory" - a useful point of view - for a huge, thinly populated semi continent of an immigration country without a history, a tabula rasa in all respects.

"In multiculturalism, every human group has a singularity (remember the collective soul or tribal spirit, the totem?) and legitimacy that form the basis of its right to exist, conditioning its interaction with others. The criteria of just and unjust, criminal and barbarian, disappear before the absolute criterion of respect for difference. There is no longer any 'eternal truth': the belief in this stems from naive ethnocentrism - reason why multiculturalists grow fangs at hearing the word 'dogma'. It demands that we see our values simply as the beliefs of the particular tribe we call The West. Multiculturalism is the result of this process."
N.B. the bold passages highlight some of the infamous contradictions, inherent in the ideology.

Europe, at present gravely at risk by its open door and (re)uninification policies of the last forty years, which they mistook for close-up charity (read: development aid) (or Eurabia theory, if that's your cup of kaghwa), have silently and quite undemocratically adopted multicultural policies in a last ditch effort to stave off civil unrest. But, if anything, this exacerbates the situation. Efforts in the opposite direction, of assimilation, have had the same contrary effect so far due to the overwhelming numbers: you can assimilate one person into the environment of ten people, but this gets progressively more difficult as the number of people to accommodate, increases.
For those interested, here's a colourful lecture on the subject of multiculturalism.

3. What is Liberalism in the original sense?
Since even far left green parties, with a history in pacifism and radical leftist Protestantism, have now adopted Liberalism as its basis, and multiculturalism is as well making efforts in that direction, I think it is wise at this point to go back to basics. To return to the original Classical Liberalism as it was meant to be, and leave the steady build up of leftist ideas that have been thrust upon it, for the time being aside. Later on I will provide a chart that shows the havoc the leftist cuckoo's chicks have brought upon the liberal nest.

Liberalism is the belief in liberty, as long as it does not conflict with the freedom of others. Its coin is the individual. People are endowed with a number of negative rights [1]; people have these rights in themselves, meaning they weren't granted by a government, but that every man is born with these rights (which stems from the Christian teaching that man was created in God's image). The people can form and dissolve governments whose sole purpose is to protect the rights and the realm. Liberalism's economic theory is based on free-market, ideally laissez-faire. Contrary to Radical Liberalism, Classical Liberalism was from the outset never anti-theist: see my post on The Impossible made Possible: the Dictatorship of Liberalism [2].

4. What is Socialism in the original sense.
Socialism is an economic and political ideology based on collectivity, on public ownership of the means of production and distribution of wealth. It stresses the privileges of the many over the rights of the few, i.e. the rights of the few (the individual) are subordinate to the good of the many (the collective). As per its economic theory, the purpose of the government is raising taxes over private wealth, coupled with social policy or directly via nationalisation and public ownership. While Socialism is anti-theistic in character, and many leading Socialists (most prominently Karl Marx) have been critical of the role of religion which they criticize for lending support to an unjust social order, there has been considerable interplay between Christian and Socialist ideas, which Christians hope soften the harsh free-market laissez-fair approach of Liberalism (as a consequence, we have never seen how entirely free markets actually work). Pope Benedict XVI has declared liberation theology anathema as inconsistent with Christianity.

Now that we know what's what, we can do some comparative work. How Liberalism ended up as a leftist philosophy is made clear by Dr Pat's chart, which I will once again borrow from her.

The left hand column lists what Classical Liberalism originally set out to be; the right hand column shows what the leftist adoption of Liberalism has made of it. It is almost beyond recognition; in fact, it's the very opposite on all fronts.

The chart also solves the puzzle of the Unholy Alliance, the axis of the (far) left and radical Islam, together against the West: they share all right hand side traits.

This multifunctional chart also shows that multiculturalism, far from being on the side of the individual, the dissidents, the Ayaan Hirsi Alis of this world, is on the contrary on the side of the collective, the tribe, the group, the singularity.

While we are on the subject of spacing, remember Star Trek's Prime Directive [2]? That's the only law that might - just might keep the peace in a world consisting of loose singularities. Also multiculturalists should at long last explain how they hope to persuade radical Islam to stay within their singularity and not break out in posses for a spot of conversion by the scimitar.

And while we're clearing up, which inherently and uniquely bad Western hegemonic achievements would they like to abolish first? Should we be thinking of environmental hazards like electricity, refrigerators, the combustion engine and water closets, or are we more likely to find ourselves in want of vaccinations, water purification, or inalienable human dignity?

~Tomorrow we'll return to Jesco Delorme's philosophical musings in defence of the multiculturalists. ~

In Search of the Origins of Postmodern Self-Loathing (II)

Part (I)

Part (II)

Auguste Comte completed his vast work in re of Positivism in 1842. Comte believed in no other source of human knowledge than the empirical method exclusively, and built a fuzzy agnostic pseudo-religion around it. Positivism is the opposite of relativism, it is materialistic and science as an idea gone haywire.

It is not a very great surprise that every French intellectual appears to be practically raised on it. De Lubac: "Every undergraduate in France knows "the law of the three states ... every branch of knowledge has necessarily to pass through three successive theoretical states: 1. the theological or fictitious state, 2. the metaphysical or abstract state, 3. and the scientific or positive state".

So in the earliest stages of man's development he began by conceiving phenomena as a result of continuous influence of supernatural agents, which Comte terms fetishism: found in animism - to which we seem to be reverting today, as Comte would have it, as we shall see - and for example in the Greek and Roman pantheons.

In a later stage, the metaphysical, man came "to regard such phenomena as produced by various abstract forces inherent in bodies but distinct and heterogeneous". This stage is found in the monotheistic religions 'of the Book', Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

And finally man considers phenomena as subject to a "certain number of invariable natural laws that are nothing but the general expression of the relations observed in their developments", in other words science: the third, or positive state. For this stage Comte later used the term 'sociology'; Auguste Comte is considered by some to be the father of sociology.

Comte seems to have had a total contempt for the contemporary dominant, secondary stage and would prefer to skip the phase altogether, which he deemed possible under certain circumstances. It reminds me of the remarks of Stuart Sim in his contribution to the polemics on Signandsight re The Multicultural Issue: "Personally, I'd like to see religion wither away as a force in human affairs ...". Sim means, secondary stage religion. Compare Comte: "Catholicism is rotten to the core, all theology is 'outmoded', and everything that comes from it is now in a state of hopeless decrepitude, etc. ...".

De Lubac: "When the generation of transmission had come to an end, a ceremony would 'finally inaugurate the new religious regime ...". In anticipation Comte had started his own calender (as we have seen in Mussolini a sign of megalomania): on 23rd Archimedes in the year 63 (22nd April 1851) Comte wrote: "I shall be preaching positivism at Notre Dame as the only real and complete religion".

Comte described the third state "as positive as any other science based on observation". Comte even came to perceive a fourth state, in which the mind frees itself even from science: the truly positive state. Perhaps predictably enough Comte's ideal fourth state results paradoxically in ... relativism! Comte saw those that reached this ideal state as "resolutely freeing themselves from the prejudice that leads us 'to place ourselves on a different footing from things' and 'to claim a special place in the universe". Sounds familiar?

Compare that with today's multicultural complaint based on relativism's tenets about Western ethnocentricity and the Christian view of our central place in the Cosmos. Auguste Comte saw it thus: Monotheism or the metaphysical state is opposed to both the first and the third stage, "so much so that the positive state can be considered as the reestablishment of the "normal state, interrupted during the Western transition ...". If that isn't true self-loathing, I don't know what is: Down With Us! It was with us, 160 years ago.

A measure of how just like relativism today, 'positive thought' pervaded Comte's contemporary intellectuals, De Lubac writes: "Right at the end of his life, he noted with satisfaction that his 'thirty years of work' had already secured the admission of this law by all thinkers really abreast of the times", much like today's relativist prophets are congratulating themselves with the pervasiveness of their own particular postmodern fallacy.

While much can be said about Comte's mistakes and the willful suppression of later discovered facts, De Lubac sums the main problems with positivism up as follows: "... his (Comte's) offence lies in ... wishing to reduce man to no more than the subject matter of sociology". The extraordinary things happening as a result of the fallacy when the mind is reduced to its object can be found here in two articles by my philosopher-hero Greg Koukl, "All Mind, no Brain" and "All Words in your Brain".

To wrap this up in the words of Henri De Lubac: "Having reached its final state of rational positivity ... the human mind abandons its quest of the absolute ... Comtean thought immured itself in the relative as a last resource after having found itself powerless to decide the question of the absolute. Separating 'positive knowledge' from 'belief', it took the terrestrial horizon as its boundary, without prejudice to what might lie beyond it ... Comte is said to have declared the problem of God unsolvable".

In Search of the Origins of Postmodern Self-Loathing (I)

I'm sure Dr Pat of the Sanity Squad would have one or two astonishing things to say about the origins of self-loathing, so common today in the West. But I approach matters from another angle. I beg to disagree with those who attribute it to a lack of confidence - because if so - then, what triggered the lack of confidence: this isn't an answer, but posing the question in another way.

Those who have gone a little deeper into the illogics of the ideology of multiculturalism and the underlying 'philosophy' of relativism, will be familiar with its bizarre tenet that Western civilization in general and Christianity in particular, are uniquely and inherently bad. I adorn philosophy with inverted commas, because I fail to see that it is even deserving of the term sophistry (for relativists: this was not meant as a compliment)! I have written extensively about relativism in The Lighthouse Blog. It only makes sense if the laws of science are temporarily suspended, so that logic is no longer a measure of true or false.

For some imperial reason best known to our European leaders, this piece of ideological junk has been elevated to the status of official sociological policy within the E.U. member countries, that being a bit of mystery in itself unless Eurabia makes any sense to you.

Americans must slowly prepare themselves for being subjected to possibly the worst excesses of the phenomenon, once the Democrats get their hands on the U.S. administration. This is at present the only thing standing between myself and the acceptance of the Eurabia Theory. Yes, I have single handedly promoted its status from conspiracy theory, to real theory. I'll come back to all that in later posts.

Okay, when the ideology of multiculturalism forces its way into you life, you're having to deal with the extraordinary notion that white occidentals are inherently more bad than other humans: something vaguely reminiscent of original sin, but exclusively for the Western hemisphere and its satellites.

Once you realise that an important basis of the multiculti hogwash lives on the molecular level - genes being so remarkably similar of all people, that they do not even want to make race distinctions anymore (hence the term multicúltural, as opposed to multi-racial or multi-ethnic), the unique exclusion of the Caucasion race can't be but another one of the ideology's breathtaking amount of paradoxymora [2]. This phenomenon is common as muck in relativism. To date it has given the adherents no rise to re-examine its tenets or its truth-value (but then, they don't believe in truth, so this attitude only stands to reason ....pfffff!).

Well, having wrestled with the question why occidentals should be inherently worse than say, Huns or Turks, I may have located a possible source for this idea. Henri de Lubac in his book The Drama of Atheist Humanism has written extensively about an Enlightenment precursor thought up some time, half way through the nineteenth century in ... you've guessed it ... France, that wonderful source of heaps of pernicious intellectualism. I shall be short about it, as details can easily be found in (online) reference works (for some major ones, visit The Lighthouse Store Room.

To be continued in Part II: Auguste Comte completed his vast work in re of Positivism in 1842. Comte believed in empirical knowledge only, and built a vast atheist pseudo-religion around it.

The Totalitarian Pseudo-Religions (III)

Continued from Part II:

A much better job was made of it on the right hand side of the totalitarian divide. It is imprecise custom to describe all varieties, Germanic Nazism and its Italian and Spanish counterparts, as Fascism. There are however important and specific differences.

The Spanish branch endeavoured to put itself on a par with the Catholic Church and fitted itself out with a sacred mission, which gave it much more push than the pseudo-religion Soviet style.

In Italy - although the former journalist Benito Mussolini proved his megalomaniac tendencies by introducing his own calender, marking the Fascist March on Rome in 1922 - the Italian variety originally didn't do race and pseudo-religion. Mussolini even criticized Hitler's racism. It was not until in1938 the Italo-German Pact of Steel came into effect that the Italian race laws were passed.

By contrast German Nazism did race, cultural political correctness and religion, and how! The pagan variety. Getting back to our hapless commentator of part I "since the original Nazis were self declared Christians, perhaps we should refer to them as Christos-Nazis": the Nazis weren't self-confessed Christians, it was the other way around: the Nazis mimicked religion, but not the Christian one, which - as we have seen - "bound man's ferocious side that prevented him from usurping God's throne". That - on the contrary - would be the last thing the Nazis stood for as far as the supremacy of Aryan man - the Overman - the Ubermensch was concerned.

The essence of Nazism lies in the extent to which it played the religious card in manipulating the German people. Unlike its mirror ideology communism, it succeeded in touching heart and soul at once. This gave it dynamic, the energy from hell and the cruelty that far exceeded the Italian and Spanish totalitarian varieties.

The writers of The Messianic Legacy speak of "the first mystic theocracy since ancient Rome ... the Fuhrer - not a politician or even a demagogue, but a shaman". It provided the German people with a tribal cosmology, a philosophy and an ideology at once. By the nightly Nuremberg mass displays of uniforms, flags, lights, symbols and hypnotising rhythms that caused a form of trance, manipulating heart, soul and nerve centre (the so-called Cathedrals of Light: see photo).

Hitler's rhetorical gifts were non-existent as far as content was concerned: it was simplistic and infantile, renowned for its banality, but it had mantra quality. His intonation had a poisoned energy, like "a jungle war drum". Once combined with the contagiousness of the mass hysterics and the tension of the thousands of people closely packed in an enclosure, the result may well be called altered consciousness, practically: a mystical experience.

Hermann Rauschning, an early and intimate aide of Hitler's got cold feet in 1935 and fled to America where he wrote two books in warning the world for the impending menace. It soon became apparent that Hitler knew exactly what he was doing. He's quoted as saying: "During the mass event thought is suspended. As this is the consciousness I need as a sounding board for my speeches, I order people to attend ... intellectuals, the bourgeoisie and the workers. I mix people. I talk to them as a mass", a collective soul of Overmen.

This collective soul - the 'Volk', or Germanic tribal spirit, was said to lose power and energy through the presence on its soil of the Undermen. That prevented their greatness from rising to sheer cosmic levels, their rightful destiny as a people. In 'Mein Kampf' Hitler writes in detail how to play the will of people: "we need a hierachical Order of a secular priesthood."

Parts of the secular religion were provided by the composer Richard Wagner, who in the nineteenth century had "glorified the uniquely sacred quality of the Germanic blood, believing with all his heart in the theatre as a temple of the Germanic art, where mystical rites would set the German soul free".

Tom Reiss in The Orientalist describes how in a fact of extreme irony Theodor Herzl got the idea of a modern Jewish state (Zion, Israel) while listening to Wagner's opera Tannhaeuser. A story that is witness to the fact that the romantic, mystical way of thinking, linking race and culture (Blut, blood) to the ancestral soil (Boden) was not exclusively a German one, but was also typical of the time [1].

The philosopher Friedrich Nietsche we have already mentioned as provider of the required basic mind-set..

Occultism and secret societies were also rife in the Third Reich: new Templars, Germanic Orders, the Thule Society, and the Freicorps (proto SS), the latter inspired by the medieval Teutonic knights and essential to the National Socialist cause.

Christian calender occasions were replaced by pagan celebrations: Jule Tide, the semination of the flag (Blutfahne), harvest and fertility rites, solstices, and the Indo-Germanic celebration of the return of the sun god: the Sol Invictus cult (Hitler as Sol Invictus: see photo).

The Orientalist provides us with a hilarious anti climax to the carefully constructed pseudo-religious National Socialist building: a prankish claim by one Putzi Hanfstaengl - the ultimate American version of the public school tie. He was a member of the core group responsible for the early Nazi Party political campaign - Hitler's Flying Circus - and head of foreign press relations. Reiss: "Among his many creative contributions to the early Nazi movement was turning the Harvard football song - 'Fight Harvard! Fight! Fight! Fight!' - into the model for the chant 'Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!' of the Nazi mass meetings".

Reality may out-weird fiction many times over.

The Totalitarian Pseudo-Religions (II)

Continued from Part I

Enlightenment inspired, first communism and after it Nazism, sought to release man from the grip of Christianity that had kept the human spirit captive in the endeavour to save man from himself, to bind and tame human nature's creative, ferocious, chaotic, predatory side, to save his very soul. The Nietzschean ideal wanted it released, to lift man up and usurp the position of the Christian God that had kept it within bounds, denying man his own greatness, or so he thought.

The essence of this ideal is captured by Henri de Lubac in his great work "The Drama of Atheist Humanism", quoting the reflections of Rainer Maria Rilke, recorded after enthusiastically reading the work of the new prophet, Friedrich Nietzsche:

""He whom men worship as the Messiah turns the whole world into an infirmary. He calls the weak, the unfortunate, the disabled his children and his loved ones. What about the strong? How are we ourselves to climb if we lend our strength to the unfortunate and the oppressed, to idle rogues with no wits and no energy? Let them fall, let them die, alone and wretched. Be hard, be terrible, be pitiless! You must thrust yourselves forward, forward! A few men, but great ones, will build a world with their strong, muscular, masterful arms on the corpses of the weak, the sick and the infirm!"
Others have repeated the cry: "The gods are dead, long live the Overman (Ubermensch)!", celebrate the new Nietzschean ideal in terms that none can afford to ignore as a clue to some of the dominant facts of contemporary history: Nietzsche predicts an early return to the ideal, but to an entirely different and new ideal. To understand this ideal there will be a category of free minds, fortified by war, solitude and danger. They will know the wind, the glaciers, the Alpine snows; they will be able to plumb the deepest gulfs without wavering. Endowed with a kind of sublime perversity, they will deliver us from loving our neighbours and from the desire of nothingness, that the earth may recover its purpose and men their hopes".

And so, instead of the ever transcending greatness in humility, as man measures himself against the demanding directions issued by God through Revelation, man became the measure of himself, of which we oversee the result today.

Over the years a few books have been written that sought to posit something quite different, but that in passing provide us with some wonderful insights into the origins and workings of the two totalitarian pseudo-religions: communism and Nazism. One of the works, we have already introduced elsewhere: Tom Reiss' The Orientalist, gives us pages of minute details of the times and the people involved, and who - in some cases - lived through both versions of the man induced hell.

Another work - perhaps remarkably so - is The Messianic Legacy, the second 1982 tome of the Holy Blood and Holy Grail trilogy, written by former BBC journalists, Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln. They set out to make the case of the original story that was later plagiarised, vulgarised, simplified and commercialised by Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code. Of course much later, the whole hoax of the Priory of Sion and the goings-on in Rennes-Le-Château were exposed as an elaborate fabrication by Pierre Plantard c.s. But that was after a whole industry of gullible esoterics had set up shop.

But that aside, the BBC authors must be recommended for making an excellent job of their homework. This fortunately leaves us, in the second tome of the trilogy, with an erudite description how religion and myth subconsciously influence heart and mind, and how the other New Prophets of the Enlightenment, Bakunin and Adolf Hitler for communism and Nazism respectively, willfully used religious trappings and paraphernalia to get the masses on their side. The authors term these constructs surrogate secular religions.

Bakunin for over twenty years, belonged to the rank and file of Free Masonry and - as we have seen - Joseph Stalin (alias the pockmarked one: see foto) for some obscure reason best known to himself, finished his education in a Tiblisi seminary. Not only did he rub shoulders with The Orientalist protagonist's revolutionary mother, he was also a regular house guest of the well known esoterist G.I. Gurdjieff. From both these sources he got to know humanity's religious impulse up close, and learned how to harness and manipulate it.

The Messianic Legacy describes the pseudo-religious oath sworn on the occasion of Lenin's death and how the body was preserved, displayed and adored in later years, reminiscent of Christian saints.

The value attached to the membership of the Communist Party - particularly during the thirties of the last century, was specifically religious in nature.

Membership of the Pioneers from the age of nine had all the hallmarks of a rite of passage and was on par with the Catholic's first communion. The red handkerchief - symbolizing the blood of the revolutionary martyrs - was perceived as a relic, crucifix or charm. Nobody was allowed to touch it.

The book posits however, that ultimately the Marxist-Leninist ideology was never very much more than just that. It flopped because a religion must appeal to the heart as well as the soul at the same time, give succor in times of distress and provide answers to life's cosmic questions. Communism as a pseudo-religion always remained materialist, abstract and ultimately emotionally sterile.

To be continued, Part III: A much better job was made of it on the right side of the totalitarian divide. It is customary to describe all varieties, Germanic Nazism and its Italian and Spanish counterparts, as ...