THE ENEMY

Jul. 21st, 2014 10:48 am
fpb: (Athena of Pireus)
The narrow defeat of the Obama administration in the Hobby Lobby case has sent its supporters into ecstases of rage and hate that have to be seen to be believed, and that in some cases can only be described as murderous. I am glad I don't live in the USA. But this fury, that bewilders many conservatives and independents, does not bewilder me. The Mandate was criminal from the beginning, criminal in its prehistory. Remember how deliberately the President lied to poor Bart Stupak and destroyed his career. And the Mandate is really much more basic to the Obama project than people realize, because they can't see its actual purpose. Le me draw a historical parallel.

Ireland has one of the saddest modern histories of any country in the world. Repeatedly invaded and devastated by the larger neighbouring island, its Catholic majority was reduced to a pulverized peasantry, paying tax they could not afford to Protestant landlords and being tithed for Protestant parsons; a miserable swarm of penniless, ignorant and leaderless grubbers of the soil, fed by potatoes, with no middle class or aristocracy or any consistency. But what you have to realize is that, the destruction of the Irish educated classes, in spite of the frightful massacres and repeated wars, were not the result of military oppression or even of mass murder; they were, in the main, the result of laws. England wrote dozens, indeed hundreds,of laws, to destroy the Irish nation as elaborately and as legally as possible. As the Irish Protestant Edmund Burke said, the English laws against Irish Catholics - or "penal laws", as they are shamefully called - were "a complete system, full of coherence and consistency, well digested and well composed in all its parts. It was a machine of wise and deliberate contrivance, as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a people, and the debasement of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man.”

The Mass, of course, could not be said: to have it said or to say it meant life imprisonment. But neither could Catholics be educated: to set up a Catholic school was equally a matter of life imprisonment. And Catholics were to be robbed by law: "Every Roman Catholic was... to forfeit his estate to his nearest Protestant relation, until, through a profession of what he did not believe, he redeemed by his hypocrisy what the law had transferred to the kinsman as the recompense of his profligacy." The law encouraged Protestants to steal from their Catholic relations, or even pretended relations; and not just large amounts, but everything - every bit of property they had. "When thus turned out of doors from his paternal estate, he was disabled from acquiring any other by any industry, donation, or charity; but was rendered a foreigner in his native land, only because he retained the religion, along with the property, handed down to him from those who had been the old inhabitants of that land before him."

"....Catholics, condemned to beggary and to ignorance in their native land, have been obliged to learn the principles of letters, at the hazard of all their other principles, from the charity of your enemies. They have been taxed to their ruin at the pleasure of necessitous and profligate relations, and according to the measure of their necessity and profligacy,"

"Examples of this are many and affecting. Some of them are known by a friend who stands near me in this hall. It is but six or seven years since a clergyman, of the name of Malony, a man of morals, neither guilty nor accused of anything noxious to the state, was condemned to perpetual imprisonment for exercising the functions of his religion; and after lying in jail two or three years, was relieved by the mercy of government from perpetual imprisonment, on condition of perpetual banishment. A brother of the Earl of Shrewsbury, a Talbot, a name respectable in this country whilst its glory is any part of its concern, was hauled to the bar of the Old Bailey, among common felons, and only escaped the same doom, either by some error in the process, or that the wretch who brought him there could not correctly describe his person,—I now forget which. In short, the persecution would never have relented for a moment, if the judges, superseding (though with an ambiguous example) the strict rule of their artificial duty by the higher obligation of their conscience, did not constantly throw every difficulty in the way of such informers. But so ineffectual is the power of legal evasion against legal iniquity, that it was but the other day that a lady of condition, beyond the middle of life, was on the point of being stripped of her whole fortune by a near relation to whom she had been a friend and benefactor; and she must have been totally ruined, without a power of redress or mitigation from the courts of law, had not the legislature itself rushed in, and by a special act of Parliament rescued her from the injustice of its own statutes..."

It says enough about the power of brute prejudice, of a kind we see in the highest places today, that this unanswerable attack on a disgraceful law lost Burke an election he should have won. The English had been taught to hate Catholics so much that they evidently thought that nothing done to them could be wrong or unjust.

What the Mandate is designed to do, mutatis mutandis, is exactly this. This is why the political and media leadership of your country has fought for it so obstinately, so savagely, and so underhandedly; this is why it took even a narrow defeat with murderous rage. It is because the real purpose of this abomination is to exclude Christians and especially Catholics from economic life. In a world in which money is the only power that can really affect politics - as Obama and his people know all too well - it is intolerable to them that there should be a number, however small, of rich people and of company owners who take their Christianity seriously. In this day and age it is not yet possible to make it legal for a man of the government's party to simply steal the property of his dissenting relatives; and besides, there is not - or not yet - a simple test of identity to separate the government's friends from its enemies, as membership in the "Protestant" church was in Burke's time. But they can impose a tax for a purpose that no Christian can accept, and then savagely penalize them - not by jailing them, which is not what they want, but by fining them into ruin.

Look at it in this light, and the whole mechanism becomes lucid, clear, rational and perfectly designed for its purpose. It is intended to make it impossible for Christians to have any independent economic activity in the USA, by making sure that they either have to resign their principles or be taxed into bankruptcy for them. Of course, they could not possibly declare their purpose; of course they lied from beginning to end. But that, and nothing else, is what this Mandate does.

Incidentally, this also gives you an insight into the real view that Obama and his henchmen have of the political process in your country, and of the nature of political power. This law is not meant to strike at Catholic or Christian faith. It does not try to obtain conversions. It does not set up anything like the imposing apparatus by which republican France, after 1875, worked tirelessly to break the ancestral Catholicism of its masses. The only thing that matters, the thing for which they have fought, the thing for which they have lied, the thing for which they ruined Bart Stupak and compromised the word of the President of the United States of America, was to be sure that no rich Catholics or Christians should exist. Wealth had to remain exclusively among people who had no problem with paying tax to distribute IUDs and abortifacients with a shovel. Because in the eyes of Obama and his crowd, only the very rich are politically significant. This attempt to winnow the Christians from their numbers makes it perfectly clear.
fpb: (Default)
The absurdity of the political and media reactions to the Fort Hood murders is palpable. (And, to his credit, President Obama made a clear and deliberate move away from it in his speech, attacking by implication the religious motivations of the murderer and denying his notion of God and of eternal justice.) So: set yourself that absurdity not as a given, but as a problem - and you will see that certain conclusions inevitably arise.

Problem: are the people who deny the obvious (the religious reasons for the murders, and the cool and evidently pre-planned way in which they were carried out) stupid, ignorant or blind? Answer: none of the above, so far as anyone can tell. They are professionally successful and prominent persons in positions (military command, journalistic profession, political leadership) in which access to information is a given. Stupidity beyond the norm is imaginable in one such person; not in a whole mass. Likewise blindness. Ignorance is not even in the picture.

Problem: you therefore have a number of public persons, persons prominent in the public eye, who deliberately talk nonsense, and do so in a chorus. What is more, they do so in order to be heard, in places and times where the general public must hear them. Why do they do that? Because they expect to be believed? Answer: unless they are indeed all stupid, they do not expect to be believed. And indeed, most of them put their denials not in the form of denials, but of questions - things to be considered before anyone comes to a "hasty" conclusion. And yet they go before the general public with this kind of, well, stuff.

Problem: if they do not expect to be believed, why do they express themselves thus, why do they seek prominence and publicity for their statements, and why do they do it in a chorus? Answer: they are obviously, as a group, trying to achieve a certain result. They are applying pressure, as a group, to a group - namely, to the public. It is obvious that they are using their positions of prominence and visibility to achieve a certain result with the public.

Problem: what are they trying to achieve? Answer: all too obvious. They really and truly are afraid that the general public will go out and start beating up innocent Muslims, or indeed anyone who looks like a Muslim. And let us notice one remarkable fact: this is a fear that, to them, trumps even the need to acknowledge obvious truth in a disastrous crime. They would rather look like a gaggle of babbling dolts than fail to do what they can to stop the lynch mob populating the streets. And remember, we have already concluded that most if not all of them are perfectly aware that they are talking nonsense. They know that they are looking like a gaggle of babbling dolts.

Problem: is the issue really so serious? Answer: in real life, not in a million years. The belief in equality, the revulsion against group prejudice and intolerance, the contempt for group violence, are as widespread among the common public as they are among the societal leadership. There are fringe and underclass groups who are in fact capable of such behaviour, but they are both small and despised. Some violence there can indeed be - I have seen the results of a queer-bashing attack on friends of mine - but it is not the work of the mainstream of society. The groups that carry it out are despised, isolated, often criminal, and at any rate hardly likely to pay attention to the pronouncements of journalists, politicians and generals. Resisting the temptation to group violence in our time and world is hardly necessary, and in so far as it is necessary at all, such public self-abasements are wholly irrelevant to it.

Problem: if making complete fools of themselves in public is neither going to achieve their goal to prevent public violence, nor do anything to reinforce their standing, why do these privileged persons do it? Ahh, now we have come to the centre of the riddle. They do so because they believe they have to; and they believe they have to because they really believe that the mass of citizens under their feet is violent, uncivilized, ever in danger of bursting into group violence. They regard the average American (or European) citizen as both morally and intellectually their inferior; a kind of ill-trained beast, ever in danger of reverting to violence and ever looking for "others" to hate.

Problem: why do they indulge such an unrealistic view of the average American or European citizen? Answer: if they did not, where would be the difference between them and the ordinary citizen? And if there is no difference, what would justify their vast wages, their houses and servants, their position of influence, power and pampering? An aristocracy must justify their position by being ready to defend the society it dominates. And to take a common position mutually reinforces their positions.

I have long been complaining about the rise of the new aristocracy. Here is another good reason to dislike it.

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