Speaking of Nazis
August 16, 2018 § 58 Comments
The left doesn’t actually care about nazis, because there are no nazis. They care about destroying you. Your history, your culture, your traditions, your future, your family, you. That is their operational principle. Even their own are capable of recognizing it in other forms—and yet so many of you are not.
So stop bleating about not being racist to enemies who racially attack you. Stop believing that colluding monopolistic corporatism equals free enterprise. Stop believing that legal immigration won’t swamp you just the same. Stop applauding wildly wasteful military misadventures on behalf of Our Greatest Ally. And finally, stop thinking that a government instruction pamphlet is the basis of civil Western society. There’s only so many maladaptive mistakes a side can make before it is defeated with finality. No one is going to praise your virtues once that side is yours.
Maybe you are a freedom-loving equality-before-the-law liberal yourself – which is what makes you a good and respectable person.
This will not save you, nor will it save anything or anyone that you love, from utter destruction. Conservation of the things you love requires the unapologetic exercise of authority. Exercise of authority under liberalism is always sociopathic, carried out via unprincipled exceptions, because of the way liberalism frames the question of authority.
There are no Nazis. There is only you.
Zippy Catholic 
At last you are coming around, Zippy! It means the unapologetic exercise of MY PERSONAL authority, under only the law of God (which is the ONLY thing that enables us to reject Nazism). This is like the White Rose resisting Nazi Germany. It is like Afghan tribesmen resisting the Soviet Union. It is like innumerable Americans silently resisting the CPS, even though they are “mandated reporters.”
In other words, authority that resists Nazism is disobedience to secular authority while obeying the law of God. (This is also true liberty.) As for the sociopathic exercise of authority by liberals, it is called servility.
As for the sociopathic exercise of authority by liberals, it is called servility.
No, that’s missing the point. When a liberal says they’re bringing freedom by forcing you to bake a cake so that homosexuals can have their so-called weddings, that’s sociopathic. It’s a use of authority while claiming to not be authority, claiming to really just be an act of liberation of the oppressed (gays) from an oppressor (baker who doesn’t want their business).
LarryDickson,
In other words, authority that resists Nazism is disobedience to secular authority while obeying the law of God. (This is also true liberty.)
Liberal Nazis don’t spring forth spontaneously from the forehead of Zeus; liberal nazis spring forth from liberalism. What a person should do when he and his loved ones are literally being rounded up and murdered by the secular authority is a reasonable thing to ask oneself. But I took the OP to mean that regardless what one should do to combat liberal nazis, the one that that should NOT be done is to double down on liberalism – a politics whose primary prerogative is to maximize indiscriminantly (hundreds of millions of) MY PERSONAL authority.
LarryDickson:
Rather than using the question-begging liberal slogan to characterize your own political beliefs, why not just forthrightly own the fact that you believe that your concept of the just exercise of authority should be forced on everyone who resists, good and hard?
The words “true liberty” as used here are – like all liberal slogans – a giant neon sign pointing to wherever a particular liberal is sociopathically begging the question of authority.
Pleasantly surprised you linked to Porter. Today is a good day.
Good point Zippy. Using the word true at all in that way is a claim of authority over the meaning of that word, it needing to be inserted at all an indication that this meaning is contested by some.
[…] Source: Zippy Catholic […]
Your conception of liberalism is too broad. Nazi Germany and the current Democratic Republics in Europe and America are not really the same thing. You could say that freedom and equality are the cause of all the problems in the world. But why stop there? Why not say human nature is the cause of all the problems in the world?
I believe it is not our host that is conflating those two dissimilar things, but large sections of the population of Europe and America. Abstractions in the heads of liberals don’t cause anything outside of those heads, but your final sentence is pretty close to accurate.
In other words, if liberalism can cause everything from Nazism to 1950s America, perhaps liberalism is too broad a category to be meaningful.
winstonscrooge:
I understand. True liberalism is when liberal slogans are used to beg the question in favor of good authoritative discrimination. Whenever liberal slogans are used to beg the question in favor of bad authoritative discrimination, that is not true liberalism.
Blaming liberalism for when its slogans are used to beg the question in favor of bad authoritative discrimination is tantamount to blaming everything that is wrong with the world on liberalism. Why not just blame bad thoughts or fallen human nature in general? Why pay any attention to the specific role liberalism plays in specific atrocities? Doing so involves too much generalization, because by definition any such “liberalism” – any liberalism which produces bad results – is not true liberalism.
Winstonscrooge: That’s the nature of a contradiction. This has been discussed before.
I did not say anything about true or false liberalism.
winstonscrooge:
You used the word “meaningful”. It is easy enough to modify the comment to address your preferred wording: when liberal slogans are used to beg the question in favor of good authoritative discrimination, that is a meaningful concept of liberalism. When liberal slogans are used to beg the question in favor of bad authoritative discriminations, that is too general to be meaningful.
As KevinD said, this has been addressed extensively.
You could say that freedom and equality are the cause of all the problems in the world. But why stop there? Why not say human nature is the cause of all the problems in the world?
Equality doesn’t exist, and trying to conform a real thing (human nature) to a made up thing always leads to irrationality.
My argument is not in favor of liberalism or that true liberalism has not been tried. My argument is that your concept of liberalism is too broad to be meaningful.
You’d also be wrong if you wanted to claim that ‘freedom and equality’, or better, liberalism is the cause of all the problems in the world. There were plenty of problems in the world before the political ascendancy of liberalism, and there are plenty of problems in the world still which are not caused by liberalism (though many of these are in some way exaggerated or worsened by liberalism).
For example, if a landlord steals from his tenants and then drives them out with the connivance of a judge when they seek redress, that’s not a problem caused by liberalism. That’s a problem caused by greed and arrogance. If a landlord steals from his tenants and then drives them out with the connivance of a judge while loudly proclaiming piously about freedom of association and his right to end their social contract at any time he feels like it because of that freedom, that’s a problem caused by greed and arrogance but cloaked in and worsened by liberalism. If a landlord steals from his tenants and then drives them out with the connivance of a judge because he and the judge both believe that Communism will lead to a more equal relation between the classes and this is one step in the Revolution against the Bourgeoisie and their centennial grinding oppression of the proletariat, that’s a problem caused by liberalism.
My argument is that your concept of liberalism is too broad to be meaningful.
And I think Zippy would tell you that “freedom” is too broad to be meaningful as a coherent political value. That’s why everyone uses some flavor of “freedom, properly understood” to mean “the things I want to allow as opposed to the things I consider not really freedom and worthy to be prosecuted as crimes.”
Speaking of Nazis, PM Trudeau has some interesting views:
“The very concept of a nation founded by European settlers is offensive to me. Old stock White Canadians are an unpleasant relic, and quite frankly, replaceable. And we will replace them.”
I would say that holding such a view of the people you are supposed to govern crosses a line where it does dissolve your authority over them. If a ruler passionately despises his own realm, his very presence in a position of authority is inimical to all authority and the natural order. It’s akin to allowing a known psychopath to adopt a child and then expect the child to conform to the psychopath’s will because on paper, he’s the step-father.
Mike T:
Looks to me like you got trolled with that unsourced “quote”.
Fake, but accurate.
This is awesome.
I’m convinced. Running water can build up massive piles of silt, and running water can also erode stone into nothing. It can build up and tear down.
And, therefore, hydrodynamics is far too broad a concept to be meaningful.
Zippy,
Interesting blog post on free speech by VD. Relevant to some of your criticisms of liberalism.
He’s wrong, by the way. You don’t have to jettison the idea of the superior social utility of truth nor the idea of truth to believe in free speech; rather, the most philosophically interesting (because actually possibly subtle) argument for free speech relies itself on confusing the body politic with a market and then relying on the unexamined presumption of market efficiency for the ultimate predominance of agreement upon truth.
Needless to say, this is even crazier than the other options. The efficient market hypothesis didn’t keep Athens from killing Socrates, nor Rome and the Jews from crucifying Christ.
In general, I think free speech is a bag of many good (and some bad) policies held together by a faulty set of principles.
It’s axiomatic that no one has a right to believe or promulgate false things. It is, however, often not the case that the authorities themselves are competent or able (due to lack of facts) to adjudicate “the truth” themselves.
For example, politicians can see as readily as we can that there are two genders. We would not want the state “settling the debate” using the political process on an issue like global warming because Congress and the President have no special competence there.
In other words: Free speech is fine as long as the Unprincipled Exceptions favor us.
In other words: Free speech is fine as long as the Unprincipled Exceptions favor us.
No, free speech ideologues have produced good policies despite their ideology being a mess of unprincipled exceptions.
One of those happens to be skepticism about the competence of particular authorities to infallibly adjudicate matters of truth. Look at the scientific establishment and you’ll see that they are correct. Science would be crippled in its development if every little petty nerd could appeal to The Authorities to settle things a la Galileo and Kepler.
Sorry, did I ring Pavlov’s bell again?
Suffice to say as a rebuttal to your point that both Galileo and Kepler were staunch Catholics.
@Rhetocrates:
Can’t find a reliable source on Kepler, but “staunch” may be a bit of a stretch for Galileo:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06342b.htm
Great mind that he was, he nevertheless went a bit too far in yanking the chains of the powers-that-be. (Of course, compared to the New Atheism of most of today’s science worshippers, the man deserves to be canonized.)
Professor Q,
Kepler was a priest.
The outcome of Galileo’s trial was, and I quote in translation, “In all other things he answers as a good Catholic.” Furthermore, he obeyed the Church’s directive to observe house arrest without complaint.
Thieving scoundrel and bombastic ass he certainly was, but he obeyed the order for house arrest without murmuring, and received the Eucharist to the end of his days. His publication in the face of the censor liborum’s disapproval was, he admitted finally, a mistake. Furthermore, the Church’s objections to Two New Sciences were not regarding the science – plenty of heliocentrists had published before – but in his reductive and absurd philosophy of science on the one hand, and in his insulting structuring of the dialogue (for example, constantly putting insulting caricatures of classical science in the mouth of one “Simplicio”) on the other.
So, yes, we may object that he was no saint. Of that I agree. But neither was he a Lutheran.
No, free speech ideologues have produced good policies despite their ideology being a mess of unprincipled exceptions.
This is just a wordier restatement of what I said.
The good policies produced are the unprincipled exceptions that favor us.
“Free speech” dishonestly frames the question of what speech should be favored (and how), and what speech should be suppressed (and how), as if it were a question of whether any speech should be favored or suppressed.
The good policies produced are the unprincipled exceptions that favor us.
The unprincipled exceptions to “free speech” are those things prohibited from being said. We benefit from those in only the banal sense that we benefit from military secrets being kept, extreme pornography banned, etc. Those unprincipled exceptions are just normal habits of healthy societies.
One area where we benefit from the full force of free speech is that it is objectively illegal under the 1st amendment to fully stop the preaching of our beliefs. Look at Canada as a counter-example. In the US, there are criminal charges attached to a government employee setting out to censor religious speech. So we at least have the formal law which forces our enemies to twist themselves into pretzels.
The sciences benefit immensely from free speech because there are few people more censorious than a person who was a nerd in K-12 and now has power over people and budgets. The scientific elite would absolutely bring the full force of the state to bear on enemies so petty that if we allowed it future generations would reference that and not the inquisitions for ruthless suppression of perceived heresy.
“Free speech” dishonestly frames the question of what speech should be favored (and how), and what speech should be suppressed (and how), as if it were a question of whether any speech should be favored or suppressed.
This.
It’s also illustrative to see that free speech ideologues are often much more aware of their unprincipled exceptions even if they are not particularly bothered by them.
Regarding the censorship of religious speech, one could certainly make an argument in favor of it. I didn’t mean that to be an unalloyed good because it certainly isn’t. It’s just wrong to say our benefit comes from the unprincipled exceptions when with free speech the main problem comes in that it often allows evil and corrosive speech to go unchecked (such as the character assassination favored by powerful media outlets)
Mike T:
That in itself is a truncated, one sided view though. The unprincipled exception is empowering certain speech while simultaneously disempowering other speech. Viewing the UE merely as the disempowering side of the coin is to already concede to liberal question begging about authority (a.k.a. “rights”).
It’s just wrong to say our benefit comes from the unprincipled exceptions when with free speech the main problem comes in that it often allows evil and corrosive speech to go unchecked (such as the character assassination favored by powerful media outlets)
So the problem with free speech is that some of the unprincipled exceptions don’t benefit us. It would be fine if it just allowed unprincipled exceptions that benefited us.
This has been the point all along.
You’re basically making the same point backwards.
Unrelated, but y’all will appreciate Glenn Reynolds’ sarcastic response to the rapey teacher situation here.
@Rhetocrates:
Fair enough. (And to be even fairer, even my original counter-point was a quibble.)
The central issue, which you have pointed out very precisely, is that it is not at all impossible to conceive of science or scientific progress in the absence of the (modern, liberal, “Enlightenment”) notion of free speech.
In fact, given the amount of junk science that we see these days – from atheistic evolution to the worst excesses of secular psychology – one could argue that restraints of a moral kind (and yes, I refer to traditional Catholicism here) actually aid the development of the right kind of science – the science that is driven by a desire for truth and order rather than the political fad du jour.
One ‘could’ argue such a thing, but that would put one in the unique position of asserting that sunlight is necessary for plants, and that these monstrous white growths in the closet aren’t like real plants but rather aberrations, while everyone else screams and raves that you’re a lying bigot who hates plants and wants to kill them all and plunge all of them into something called ‘the Dark Ages’ by smashing the incandescents.
If we were to repeal all of the measures allowing women to vote, run for office and serve in the courts, we could probably revoke the first amendment and note even notice a meaningful uptick in censorship.
Mike T:
If true, that is a terrible condemnation of Current Year men.
I was implying that by removing women you’d remove so much unnecessary censorship of speech that you wouldn’t notice a statistical increase in overall censorship if men wielded that authority to censor evil speech.
Which is a terrible condemnation of current year men, because even without women there’s so much that needs censorship for the good of the body politic. All those bodies advocating freedom of religion, for a start.
A society needs censorship in some form or another; liberalism attempts to build a society without censorship, but such a society would collapse; so it imports censorship by other means.
All those bodies advocating freedom of religion
I could get behind that as long as we’re committed to not refighting the 30 years war in North America. God would be perfectly justified in tossing his entire North American flock to the wolves if we did something that stupid.
The obstreperous part of me wants to say that we’re going to fight it soon enough anyway.
But no, I do agree. These things should be worked out peacefully, to a Catholic victory.
https://ozconservative.blogspot.com/2018/08/is-left-really-collectivist.html
https://ozconservative.blogspot.com/2018/08/is-left-really-collectivist.html
Zippy, I think you will like Mark Richardson’s latest post. This seems consistent with your understanding (I think) of the relationship between right and left liberalism and how the former inevitably becomes the latter.
That’s a good article Bruce.
The speed at which the commentators get to the appropriate shibboleths is phenomenal.
But no, I do agree. These things should be worked out peacefully, to a Catholic victory.
Given the current state of the Catholic Church in the US, do you really think that would happen? Remember what the Lord said about hearing the law vs doing it and which son was actually faithful to his father.
Consider the McCarrick scandal. The Pope knew damn well what he was and elevated him.
As my wife likes to point out about her Catholic relatives, they knew the priests in their parish were molesters back in the 1960s. It’s why the kids in her family weren’t allowed to go on trips with the priests like with the boy scout troop. One of those relatives was a nurse. There were plenty of cops in that parish. These were, in many cases, competent authorities in their own right who stood by and did nothing as the wolves fed.
Even if the RCC is right in its claims, the Lord will not subject the rest of the Body tot hat sort of evil.
Even if the RCC is right in its claims, the Lord will not subject the rest of the Body tot hat sort of evil.
If the RCC is right in its claims then, “it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff” (Pope Boniface VIII, Unam Sanctam).
Our Lord, the Almighty and ever-living God, subjected Himself to the likes of Caiaphas during His time on Earth. Think about that before you start spouting nonsense about how God would never subject His people to authorities as dissolute and reprehensibly incompetent as the current crop of ecclesiastical leaders.
Ah, yes, the old, “The solution to the mortal wounds in the body of Christ is to dismember it entirely,” argument.
Back to the original subject, this casual defamation shows precisely why the left loses its collective #$%^ at the thought of defamation laws that require you to actually justify why a reasonable person would believe your name calling is based in reality:
That same month, the ACLU defended white-supremacist troll Milo Yiannopoulos’ right to advertise his book on D.C.’s metro system.
Milo Y is such a white supremacist that he “married” a black man.
No jury worth a damn would believe the writer that it is reasonable to call Milo a “white supremacist” when he chooses to publicly commit himself to a black man.
All this discussion made me think of a thought experiment, and how tied we are to certain labels without really understanding what they mean. I asked a decidedly politically left leaning colleague whether she would prefer to live under a democracy that is bad for her, or a dictatorship that is good for her (allowing her to define good or bad however she wants – financially, morally, etc.). Unsurprisingly chose “democracy because freedom is good.” I am willing to bet that I would get the same answer from a right-leaning liberal (e.g., politically conservative American). But I will have to first find one in my neck of the woods to ask.