The Center Cannot Hold

 

Yesterday got kinda derailed because an old friend, now a bishop, sent me an infovid of a parrot goosestepping across a kitchen counter to Erika. Stirring stuff, but let's get serious. 

Can the center, as in our globalist managerial elites, their satraps in the media and their, ahem, brain trust in academia and on, can this hold or will it be swept away. Rod Dreher, writing in the European Conservative, thinks its days are numbered.

Here's a snapshot:

Until Joe Biden took the stage in last week’s debate with Donald Trump, the most catastrophically stupid presidential political decision of the year was Emmanuel Macron’s calling a snap election after the National Rally’s impressive showing in European parliamentary elections. After events over the past few days, it is still uncertain as to which blunder will have been the most consequential. Whatever the outcome, we are all watching corrupt systems collapse in real time. Amid this apocalypse—literally, an unveiling—we are seeing a kind of Reformation, the messy birth of a new order.

This is more the case in France than in the United States. The strong National Rally results in Sunday’s first round of voting occasioned an outpouring on France’s streets that could have been scripted by Camp of the Saints author Jean Raspail. 

In some French cities, Antifa and other leftist protesters set fires to express outrage at the results. In Paris, thousands of Islamists and leftists rallied against the ‘far right.’ Look at this clip captured by Luc Auffret. In this vast left-wing crowd, some protesters have raised various standards—the flag of Palestine, the flag of Pride, and so forth—but notice: you cannot see a single French tricolor there. 

Compare this to the image from a National Rally victory party on Sunday. Thousands upon thousands of French voters waving the tricolor, and singing the Marseillaise. 

What does the contrast tell you? It hardly needs elaboration, does it? Among other things, it is visual confirmation that le Grand Remplacement is no conspiracy theory, but established fact. Renaud Camus defines the Great Replacement as “the change of people, the substitution of one or several peoples for the people whose ancestral roots are there, whose history had for hundreds or thousands of years coincided with the territory in question.” All those native Frenchmen in that leftist mob, the ethnically Gallic too ashamed of France to raise her flag, demonstrate that the Great Replacement is also a state of mind. 

France is now in the middle of a fight for its future as a nation. France’s enemies are the Frenchmen who hate her, and the aliens they have brought in to replace the French who resist. This could not possibly be clearer now. Until Sunday, France’s enemies also included the elite establishmentarians of both Left and Right who facilitated le Grand Remplacement, and who counted on the French public’s fear of Vichy to blind them to the emerging reality. 

 

Strong words, and Dreher's clearly employed by the Ministry of Truth. He goes on to quote Rénaud Camus, who predicts the Balkanization of Europe and "future violence," before focusing on the UK and US. He concludes:

We remember the Summer of 1914 as the last idyllic season before the West blew itself to bits with World War I. Will we recall the Summer of 2024 as the last idyll before the West destroyed itself with civil war, even if fought primarily through increasingly radical politics? That conclusion seems rash—for now—but one thing is undeniably clear: the center of Western politics no longer holds. It is dead, and the ones who killed it are not Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, and other politicians of the real Right, but rather the managerial liberals (including Republicans, Tories, and Gaullists) who lived by lies—and who, crucially, believed their own lies.

The historian Barbara Tuchman, writing about the folly of the Renaissance popes in provoking and failing to contain the Reformation, criticized their “obliviousness to the growing disaffection of constituents, primacy of self-aggrandizement, [and] illusion of invulnerable status.”

“They could not change” the system, Tuchman wrote, “because they were part of it, grew out of it, depended on it.” So it is with the liberal governing elites of the Western democracies. And now, a Reformation is upon us. 

I reckon Dreher's right in the X-Ring with this. You can and should read the whole thing here. Are we in that 1914 idyll? Your call.

Cheers,

LSP

Word

 

A friend sent this, via Rod Dreher's substack:

"It is not that they love the millions of migrants and illegals more than their own countrymen. They hold us both in contempt: they are content to see the migrants exploited and trafficked, and to see us swamped and erased. Their approach signals their inmost selves, cruelty masquerading as compassion. The desperate girl trafficked from the Darien Gap to Dallas, raped and sold along the way, laboring to pay a fraudulent debt at an off-the-books job, is the apotheosis of progressivism’s achievement."

 

Wish I'd written that,

LSP

Resist Antichrist

 

Pope Benedict XVI feared the Antichrist was expanding his power and wrote this in a letter in 2015, “As one sees the power of Antichrist spreading, one can only pray that the Lord will give us mighty shepherds to defend His Church against the power of evil in this hour of need.”

Mighty shepherds to defend His Church. Yes indeed. Benedict also wrote this, via Rod Dreher:

The true threat for the Church, and thus for the Petrine service, does not come from this sort of episode: It comes instead from the universal dictatorship of apparently humanistic ideologies. Anyone who contradicts this dictatorship is excluded from the basic consensus of society. One hundred years ago, anyone would have thought it absurd to speak of homosexual matrimony. Today those who oppose it are socially excommunicated. The same holds true for abortion and the production of human beings in the laboratory. Modern society intends to formulate an anti-Christian creed: Whoever contests it is punished with social excommunication. Being afraid of this spiritual power of the Antichrist is all too natural, and what is truly needed is that the prayers of entire dioceses and of the world Church come to the rescue to resist it.

 

Imagine, if you can, any leader of Western Christianity, whether Protestant or Catholic, saying such a thing with such force. Was Benedict forced into retirement? Picture the roiling of the rainbow-hued snakes as he ascended to the pontificate. Yes indeed, a problem, and the solution?

Being afraid of this spiritual power of the Antichrist is all too natural, and what is truly needed is that the prayers of entire dioceses and of the world Church come to the rescue to resist it.

Do not fear,

LSP

Benedict Option - Thoughts

 

Have you heard of Rod Dreher's Benedict Option, in which the author suggests Christians set up communities to preserve the culture, tradition, sanity and virtue of the West, of the Church herself, in a sea of barbarism? No matter if you haven't, the idea's not new, think "righteous remnant."

All that and more in mind, we heard a talk on just this at Mission #2 this morning. Good stuff, and big thanks to our Baylor doctoral speaker for giving it. But let's get down to practical solutions. Here we are in a sea of apostasy and secularism, it's the air we breathe. And with that, we're fragmented, atomized.

Case in point. Set up your local church as a true community of faith and sanity against the rising tide of increasingly obvious barbaric wickedness. Good call, but how, when your church is spread across territory half the width of Wales, in Texas. Hardly the local solution Dreher recommends. Problem.

Solution? Catastrophe. What brought Benedict of Nursia to Monte Casino? The call of God, obviously, but also the decay, devolution and catastrophic fragmentation of the Roman State. It wasn't working anymore and, in fact, had been ravaged by war, plague and just about every other terror.

So Benedict, a nobleman, renounced his wealth and withdrew, with a servant, let the reader understand, to what became the foundation stone of western monasticism and the salvation of its civilization and faith. And my point was this. 

If we're to form true counter cultural communities it might just take a disaster to force us into it. That said, wealthy patrons wouldn't hurt.

As a doomer, I wager the former, ask the dam Monkey.

Your Old Pal,

LSP

War

 

Seems like war's on. But consider the religious aspect. Read this, it's important:

As Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, the head of the ROC, explained in early 2019, “Ukraine is not on the periphery of our church. We call Kiev ‘the mother of all Russian cities.’ For us Kiev is what Jerusalem is for many. Russian Orthodoxy began there, so under no circumstances can we abandon this historical and spiritual relationship. The whole unity of our Local Church is based on these spiritual ties.”

What spurred Patriarch Kirill to make that statement was the separation of much of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church from Russia in early 2019 with the creation of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, with go-ahead from the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople (i.e., Istanbul: who is the not-a-pope of world Orthodoxy, where national churches are self-governing). This involved the transfer of thousands of parishes and millions of believers from the long-existing Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, which has been under the ROC since the seventeenth century, to the brand-new OCU. The UOC-MP is self-governing under Moscow and there wasn’t much spiritual demand in Ukraine for independence from Russia, what Orthodox term autocephaly.

However, the pressures of the not-quite-frozen conflict with Russia after 2015 made church issues a political football, and Ukraine’s then-President Petro Poroshenko made autocephaly his pet project, with backing from Ukrainian nationalists, who found it offensive that the UOC remained under Moscow, where the church is a vehicle for Putinism, Russian nationalism, and anti-Ukrainian aggression. Advocates of the new OCU had a valid point there, and they were also correct that, since autocephaly is the norm in the Orthodox world, why didn’t Ukraine have its own, fully independent national church?

The answer there, that Orthodoxy tends to move on “Orthodox time” which appears glacially slow to secular minds, thinking more in terms of centuries than years or even decades, was unedifying to advocates of the OCU, who got their wish in early January 2019, when the Ecumenical Patriarch granted autocephaly to Ukraine’s new national church. What followed was predictably messy and politicized, with fights across Ukraine over parishes and clergy. This issue is neither simple nor clear-cut: the OCU is considered broadly nationalist (with exceptions) while the UOC, despite its Russian connections, has many laypeople who are Ukrainian patriots who don’t feel they belong to a “foreign” church. Moreover, this issue birthed a schism in global Orthodoxy that has reverberated on several continents, most recently in Africa. The OCU-UOC split has even caused heartburn among American Orthodox believers.

Above all, the schism rendered Moscow white-hot with rage. The ROC viewed this as a direct attack on its “canonical territory” and on world Orthodoxy itself. The Kremlin, too, made no effort to conceal its outrage here. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov quickly denounced the Ecumenical Patriarch as Washington’s puppet: “His mission, obviously, is being prepared by the Americans and they do not hide that they are actively cooperating with him, using the slogan of ‘freedom of religion and belief’…Bartholomew’s mission, obviously, is to bury the influence of Orthodoxy in the modern world.” A few weeks later, Lavrov added fuel to the fire by castigating the OCU as “this travesty of history, and pursuing the objective of sowing discord between Russia and Ukraine in addition to preventing our peoples from being friends are essentially a crime [by the current Ukrainian regime] against their citizens.” A few months after that, Lavrov reiterated that this tragedy was all America’s fault: the ROC “is currently under tremendous pressure from a number of Western countries, primarily the United States, which set itself the goal of destroying the unity of world Orthodox Christianity.”

It’s an article of faith in the Kremlin that the creation of the OCU is an American project designed to destroy world Orthodoxy and harm Russia. It’s painful for me to state this but the Russians have good reason to think this. Unlike absurd Kremlin propaganda lines about “Ukrainian Nazis” perpetrating “genocide” against Russians, the idea that Washington wanted the split of Orthodoxy in Ukraine is a reasonable inference upon examination of recent U.S. Government conduct. What’s the evidence?

Our Kyiv embassy congratulated the OCU for its birth and the selection of its first primate, then the State Department in Washington amplified the same. Celebrating Constantinople’s grant of autocephaly, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo hailed it as a “historic achievement for Ukraine” which represented America’s “strong support for religious freedom.” Pompeo’s statement left no doubt about America’s backing the OCU against the UOC. Pompeo’s position in the worldwide Orthodox schism was made clear by his subsequent meeting with the Ecumenical Patriarch, whom the Secretary of State hailed as “a key partner as we continue to champion religious freedom around the globe.” Neither was this a partisan project, since the position of the Biden administration on this issue is identical to its predecessor’s. Four months ago, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken also met with the Ecumenical Patriarch, reaffirming U.S. commitment to religious freedom, which in Moscow unsurprisingly looked like support for the OCU.

Since very few Americans, and functionally no non-Orthodox ones, noticed any of this, it’s worth asking why the State Department felt compelled to take a public position on any of this. Does Foggy Bottom side with Sunni or Shia? What about Lutheranism versus Methodism? Who in Washington thought it was a good idea to throw its weight behind the OCU, since anybody who knew anything about Putinism and its religious-civilizational mission had to be aware that such statements were guaranteed to raise Moscow’s ire.

That ire has now taken the form of air strikes, missile barrages, and advancing tank battalions. Just last month, Lavrov restated his government’s position that the United States stands behind the “current crisis in Orthodoxy.” As he explained without any word-mincing, Washington caused “the most serious dispute in the entire Orthodox world,” adding, “The United States of America had an immediate hand in the current crisis in Orthodoxy. They created a special mechanism, a special agency for the freedom of religious confession, which actually is not dealing with freedom but most actively set up and financed Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew so that he conducted a device for schism, particularly in Ukraine, in the first place, for creating there the schismatic, uncanonical Orthodox Church of Ukraine.”

We should not indulge Muscovite conspiracy theories nor countenance Russian aggression. However, the facts are plain enough. Simply put, by recognizing the OCU and hailing its creation, Washington changed the Kremlin’s game in Ukraine, making Putin’s long-term plans for his neighbor untenable. Without a united Orthodox Church across the former lands of Rus, answering to Moscow, the “Russian World” concept falls apart. Every secular geostrategic challenge cited as a reason for Putin’s aggression – NATO expansion, Western military moves, oil and gas politics – existed in 2014, yet Putin then chose to limit his attacks on Ukraine to Crimea and the Southeast. What’s changed since then that makes his effort to subdue all Ukraine seem like a good idea in the Kremlin? The creation of an autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine in 2019, with official American backing, is the difference, and Moscow believes this was all a nefarious U.S. plot to divide world Orthodoxy at Russia’s expense. Clearly Putin has decided that reclaiming Ukraine and its capital, “the mother of Russian cities,” for Russian Orthodoxy is worth a major war. Make no mistake, this is a religious war, even if almost nobody in the West realizes it.

 Make no mistake, this is a religious war, even if almost nobody in the West realizes it. Good call.

Your Pal,

LSP

 

Undoing Whiteness

You may or may not have noticed, racists, that there's a nationwide movement afoot. That's right, it's called "undoing whiteness," and it's all about making white people feel bad for being, well, white.

Being white, you see, is evil and oppressive, so you've got to "undo" it or you're a racist, which you are already, you white racists.

Here's a partial list of resources to assist you in interrupting your white racism and reversing it: "Little White Lies – An Interview with anti-racist activist Tim Wise" and "When Whites Just Don’t Get It."

Feeling bad about yourself? Don't worry, there's more:

11 Ways White America Avoids Taking Responsibility for its Racism

White Supremacy Culture Characteristics and Antidotes

Why White People Freak Out

How white people handle diversity training in the workplace

Interesting, isn't it. Now do a small thought experiment per Dreher, and replace "White" with "Jewish." Speaking of which, a clever group of academics rewrote a chapter or two of Mein Kampf. You might enjoy Joe Rogan's interview, here's an excerpt:

I remind you, it's almost an axiom, that pretty much everything the Left effects produces the exact opposite of its intended result. The backlash, when it comes, will be immense. 

Caveat,

LSP

Apocalypse China And Everywhere Else

By now we all know the Coronavirus has reached Europe, with some 50,000 people quarantined in Northern Italy. Good luck Lombardy, to say nothing of Iran, Lebanon, South Korea, Japan and everywhere else. This thing obviously isn't contained, but what about here in the US?

Rod Dreher writing at American Conservative quotes, at length, an American doctor whose Chinese wife is keyed into apocalyptic conditions in her homeland, where they're running out of medicine. The doctor slams the "elites" of "both parties" who've "failed and betrayed" us. Read on:

Now: to what is going on in the USA...

And as a physician, the first instances of medication shortages are now happening in earnest. A memo from the hospital’s pharmacy committee arrived yesterday. It specifically named the following drugs – IV antibiotics such as gentamicin, tobramycin and streptomycin – IV drips from the ICU dobutamine, dopamine, and norepinephrine – and the following pill medications – diltiazem, verapamil, amlodipine, losartan, valsartan and irbesartan. Also mentioned were all of the usual narcotic opioids used for pain – morphine, dilaudid, hydrocodone and fentanyl among others. The memo stated that while there was stock in the hospital on all of these at this moment — the intermediate suppliers had sent warnings that supplies were quickly diminishing — and that further supplies from the manufacturer were not going to be reliable into the foreseeable future. Therefore, we were strongly urged to immediately begin making sure that every prescription was appropriate — and to replace it with something else if possible.

Well, some of these things are not replaceable. Some of them are — but with much more dangerous alternatives. And just try doing surgery without morphine — I dare you. All I can say is you have been warned. This is here — this is now and this is real and very likely to get much worse. Shipping all your critical drug manufacturing to another very unreliable country is so dumb that only the elites could have thought of it. And all you snowflakes thinking that we can just magically build factories here immediately — well you are oh so wrong. First of all — manufacturing drugs on a large scale takes immense engineering, and will not be done on a whim. Secondly, when we exported all our manufacturing away, all the jobs went away as well. There is a human know-how that is critical to this kind of enterprise, and that went away when the factories went to China. And it takes years — maybe decades — to get that back. MY FELLOW AMERICANS — YOU HAVE BEEN FAILED AND BETRAYED BY THE ELITES IN BOTH PARTIES – PLEASE KEEP THAT IN MIND IN THE COMING MONTHS.

YOU HAVE BEEN FAILED AND BETRAYED BY THE ELITES IN BOTH PARTIES – PLEASE KEEP THAT IN MIND IN THE COMING MONTHS. 

You can and should read the whole thing here. Perhaps our traitorous, transnational, Illuminati, tasseled-loafer, club-chair-sitting, Mammon worshiping asset-strippers need to be brought to account. Did I say "nooses down the Mall"? No, you must've imagined it.

In the meanwhile, you are a fool if you haven't at least begun to lay in a month's worth of food, water, and necessary supplies. Look at it this way, if worst comes to worst and the escaped ChiCom bioweapon hits, say, Dallas in the next month you'll be able to eat. If it doesn't, well and good, you can cook up the food and shoot the ammo at leisure.

Pray this doesn't get any more out of hand, more on prepping for the Eschaton as the spirit moves.

Stay safe,

LSP

*****

Via Zero:

*South Korea reports 123 new cases, 1 new death
*Italy announces 79 cases, declares "national emergency"; Nothern  Italy put on lockdown.
*Japan cases triple in a week to 121
*Japan confirms "seriously ill" patient in Tokyo
*Hubei reports daily numbers
*Chinese scientists find virus in urine
*Experts propose 27 day quarantine, say 14 days likely not long enough
*Cases outside China go exponential
*32 UK and European citizens arrive back in UK on evac flight
*Outbreak reported in South Korean psychiatric ward
*WHO team visits Wuhan; will give Monday press conference
*Iran reports 10 new cases, deaths climb to 6
*San Diego says 200 under 'medical observation'
*Young woman infected five relatives without ever showing symptoms

*South Korea cases surge 8-fold in 4 days to 433; country reports third death

Transfiguration

Tomorrow's Gospel describes the transfiguration of Christ on the mountain, in which "Christ, like the sun, too bright to look upon, reveals his luminous power by the fresh colours he awakens in the wide garden of the world." (Farrer, Saving Belief)

With that in mind, you might like this, from First Things via Rod Dreher:

The glory of Christ on Mount Tabor embodies a joy that is unspeakable. In order words, the transformation of human affections impacts bodily states, causing a change in countenance. There is a radiance on the face of the joyous that pulls out the beauty of the divine image, which lays buried underneath the veils of the passions. If holiness concerns reintegrated and redirected emotion and desire so that perfect love reigns in the heart, then it creates a joy that alters human existence. The transfiguration symbolizes the Psalmist’s admonition to taste the Lord and see that he is good. Every moment of joy is but a foretaste of that deeper bliss, and it breaks through in serendipitous ways as C. S. Lewis discovered.

The transfiguration, then, symbolizes the life to come and thus the goal of ascetic pursuit. It reminds the believer that the vision of God unfolds amidst the splendor of holiness while also pointing toward the way in which the final movement to ecstatic wonder is always grace-filled and joy-laden. It is the sudden burst of divine light as when Helios peaks over the horizon casting his rays on all creation so that the world glows in the golden haze of dawn, translucent and transformed.

I like that a lot but bear in mind that the transfiguration isn't something stupid, like a reworking of the mithraic cult of Sol Invictus, a "cleverly devised myth."

On the contrary, the symbol exists because of the event as opposed to the other way around. As St. Peter reminds us, he was an "eyewitness" on the "holy mountain."

God bless,

LSP