Sunday, November 27, 2005

Romantic Origins of Left Dhimmi Fascism

Islam threatens the existence of the modern world and each and every individual living today and all to come. Islam is a primitive fascist poligion, a dirty little tribal practice that's gotten out of hand and become a world-wide mind-trap for peasants and dysfunctional authoritarians. Islam is a garbage ideology for the stupid and the violent and the hateful. It's the perfect mind-set for the mentally disordered savage who needs total order to survive at a primitive subsistence level. It's spread across the globe and picked up minds like a magnet collecting iron filings. And somehow we in the West are falling for it, accepting it as some kind of benevolent alternative to our own historical values of Israel, Greece, Rome, and Modernity. The question is why we accept the rantings of a 7th century psychopath as acceptable at all, even for a man of Mohammed's time and place. He is obviously, to any thinking and feeling person, one sick piece of work. And yet we are inundated with Muslims, dumped on daily by Islam, and are made dhimmis by self-will in our appeasement of it. Why would we allow ourselves to be swamped by garbage? What is the appeal for so many of our leaders whom so many of us follow blindly and trustingly?

Our position is that this Islamic filth we're fed daily is wrapped in Romanticism. No matter how high it stinks, no matter how foul it is to swallow this Islamic slime, we accept it from fear of being anti-social. Most of us grin and smile and die on commuter trains going to work or sitting in office towers or taking our children to school or dancing in nightclubs or just being alive in the presence of Muslims. We dare not speak aloud of our doubts about Islam because our societies are based on common assumptions about the good will of all religions other than Christianity, Satanism, for example. And we are terrified of being called racists, though anyone who cares to know will already know that Islam is a poligion not a race, and that most Muslims are Indonesians and Pakistanis, not ethnic groups one finds often on the front lines of race abuse. No, those people would be Jews. So, don't we find it often easier to be tolerant of Satanist Jew hating child-molesters? "Why, yes we do, Dag," you say. And of course we're all embarrassed. Something is really badly wrong. Our position is that much of the wrong stems from the very beginnings of the Romantic movement of the late 18th century, a movement that continues to this, our own day. The apples of our wisdom are rotten due to the roots coming from Romance.

We need a working definition of Romanticism if we are to follow this thesis, and today we include definitions from Barzun, a dictionary, and the ever nearly worthless wikipedia. Even this tiny introduction to the concepts of Romanticism will give us a better understanding of why we tolerate the sickness of Islam at all, let alone why we tolerate it in our homelands. With that view of Romanticism giving us a clearer understanding of why we hold the opinions we hold, why we have the attitudes we have, why we say the things we think we mean, we might find that upon some better understanding we don't like the things we hold to be true by virtue of not disagreeing with the commonly held assumptions of our societies. If we see that many of our opinions are held simply because we never gave them any real thought, and that now we do and see them as shop-worn and dirty, maybe we'll toss them out for some new and better opinions. Maybe, knowing the make-up of our beliefs we'll choke on the next dose of Islam poured down our throats. Maybe we'll gag on it and refuse anymore of that filth. But let's look at the origins of our ideas regarding the religion of peace as just another valid expression of the world's Peoples' cultures. Let's look at Romance.

You have lovely eyes, I'm sure, since you're reading this, and I brought flowers. Yes, it's true Romance:


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[R]omanticism was not a movement in the ordinary sense of a program adopted by a group, but a state of consciousness exhibiting the divisions found in every age. Hence all attempts to define Romanticism are bound to fail. [It is] a Zeitgeist and not an ideology. [Barzun: p. 466]

As soon as it is seen that Romanticism was a phenomenon like the Renaissance, the need for a definition disappears. [p. 466.]

The span of years when Romanticism was the spirit of the age is roughly the last decade of the 18C and the first half of the 19C. [p. 469.]

The use of romantic in English goes back to the 17C when it was used to denote imagination and inventiveness in storytelling and, soon after, to characterize scenery and paintings. [p. 467.]

Behind the first unmistakable Romanticist works stands the thought of four men who by date and upbringing belong to the 18thC but were at odds with it: Rousseau, Burke, Kant, and Goethe. [p. 469.]

In many past posts here we've written about the Counter-Enlightenment movement, part of which is Romanticism, and according to me, not Kant. However, these quotations belong to Barzun, and allowing him space we'll continue by looking at what the general idea of Romanticism is:

[Not Reason but] mind-and-heart is the single engine of moral, social, and scientific progress.... Man, then, is conceived by Romanticism as a creature that feels and can think.... The Imagination emerges as a leading faculty, because it conceives things in the round, as they look and feel, not simply as they are conceived in words.... [P]oetry of the period is predominantly lyrical-- it speaks in the first person to report on its findings within the self. [p. 470.]

Romanticism, then, is a break from the Enlightenment and the search for Human truth through Reason for the universal. Romance becomes a personal quest, and often a community quest, one found in the volk rather than in the individual as individual. But it's more than that as we'll see. The individual becomes not a person but a genius:

He who is possessed by these ideas and can communicate his discoveries is the Genius. [p. 470.]

The Romantic rebels against the rationalist and celebrates the emotionalist. As we've seen in Herder and the nature of private property, the Romantic is at odds with the man as a private person: he must be part of a group to have identity as person. Therefore, to be a genius, one must be the genius of a nation, and that cult of genius that the Romantics developed leads to the cult of personality that we find in the leadership principle, for example in movie stars or in Hitler. The man, being nothing in himself, must be the paradigm of his group, a genius for the whole. The Romantic hero is such a genius. He doesn't merely think, he feels!

The feeling Romantic must return to the age of purity and the place of purity, to a time when the group was strong and happy. The return to Nature, the love of Nature, the fetishizing of Nature that we see today in ecology is rooted in early Romanticism. It is a hatred of cities and privacy and individuality cut off from the world of dirt and feudalism. Fort the Romantic it is a return to Eden where and when people were good because they were good, not because they had material wealth. Simple things, such as manna from Heaven, that is what they long for. There is none of that in the coldness of modern machines and cities. So for the Romantic there is a cult of genius and a cult of Nature. We see it today not only in ecology and hippie idiots dancing naked around the fire at Stonehenge on the summer solstice but in the average concern for healthy food and vitamins. We take the good and we take the bad, not often knowing the difference.

In a piece we ran last post there was reference to eating moose. The writer made it out to be a privilege to eat moose with native Indians in northern Canada. Why is it a privilege in that dim mind? Because of the fetish of Nature that comes down to us unexamined from Romanticism. Frankly, any wild animal is so filled with worms and germs that no one in his right mind would eat any of it if not from necessity. But, when one is told by the culture that it is very cool to eat moose with Natives in the wild, then it seems to taste OK, regardless of the sickness that follows. To refuse to eat wormy meat that tastes like garbage is to fall afoul of the majority opinion that natives living in a state of Nature are spiritually advanced. We buy into these lies and accept them in spite of our own good reason and good sense because we don't have the confidence to shout out loud that this is a load of crap. Our culture values ideas that came to us from men and women who were fighting Napoleon! There is nothing good about eating moose. It is not a spiritual thing, man.

Barzun continues:

In Rousseau's Emile, the eloquent profession of faith offers Nature-- the works of God-- as the proof of His existence and attributes. The concrete beauty of nature speaks directly to the receptive mind. And from the same source comes, as we saw, the cult of nature-- the love of trees and flowers, gardening for pleasure, bird-watch and camping, the the belief that one must leave the unnatural city at least once a year and restore in the countryside something essential to life. [p. 471.]

Flower children, for those old enough to be embarrassed by it, want to save the trees. Yes, and rightly so. But the Romantic ideology that pushes it is not known to be linked to the aesthetic response for most of us. We are not aware of the ideology of Romanticism that validates our aesthetic appreciation. With that Romance ideology that we accept as natural and right, that most of us like when we garden and hike in the wilderness, we do not link a philobarbarist ideology that makes us also swallow Islam. It's there, though. We take the good with the bad slipped in on us. If Nature is good, then those who live in a state of nature must also be good. And if they eat moose, then it must be a privilege to eat it with them. But it ain't. It's a con job. It's the ideology of Romanticism.

We are too often told that we Modernists are cut off from our roots, that we live sterile and meaningless lives in cities and that we should slow down and eat the roses. We should get back to nature. We should get in touch with our feelings. And so on. These things are fine. But it's when we don't realize the Romantic nature of the ideology that puts these ideas forward that we get sucked into accepting Islam and dhimmi fascism along with them.

In the reaction to the Age of Reason, in reaction to the revolutions of Modernity, the American, French and Industrial Revolutions, in particular the French invasions of neighbouring areas of Germans, there was a strong revolt against everything the French stood for: Reason and rationality, science and commerce, privacy and individualism topping the list. There was more: there was a hatred of universality, of men being equal in rights rather than being privileged by titles and birth. There was a hatred of making money rather than of having everything come from land wealth. There was a hatred of cities because they weren't estates with lords. There was a hatred of machines that took away the work of men who made things in their crofts by hand. The individual sold his labour for cash, and he was alone rather than part of a community. That romantic reactionary position of hatred is with us today, and it grows steadily. Both he so-called Left and the Right share that animosity to Modernity. In reaction against Modernity they all look back to the time of feudalism to see if they might not find those who are still living life that was before the time of the revolutions, and yes, dear reader, they find Islam.

Barzun goes on to describe some of the Romantic view thus:

As prophets, for the earliest days of the religion, they castigated the society in which they lived. It was sunk in the mire of commerce and industry, activities that blunted the senses, narrowed the mind, killed the imagination. With these tenets the campaign against the middle class had begun.

The mark of this contemptible creature is his incapacity to understand and enjoy art-- except the academic or sentimental kind. [p. 474.]

Romanticism is a snobbery. We are philistines. We live badly. We chase after oil and profits, and we don't care who we kill in our pursuits, nor that we destroy Mother Nature in the process. We are bad, and we are bad because we are petty, unlike our Romantic heroes who feel real feelings and are in touch with real people, those who live in squalor and eat wormy meat.

REgardless of the many flaws of Romanticism, we cannot claim they were stupid. Many were geniuses. Barzu writes:

With their searching imagination in literature and art, it could be expected that the Romanticist's intellectual tastes would be anything but exclusive.... This was a genuine multiculturalsim, the wholehearted acceptance of the remote, the exotic, the folkish, and the forgotten. [p. 481.]

Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decandence. New York: Harper Collins, 2000. pp 465-89.

There is a lovely line in a Herzen novel, Fathers and Sons, that comes to mind dimly, and in time I'll remember it rightly: The father cries out to his wife that their [obnoxious] son is an intellectual and that he's sophisticated, and that he won't spend time with them after his long abscence at university from which he's now returned because his parents are "boring."

Folks, we are the boring ones our dhimmi leaders and intelligentsia despise. They prefer the exotica of Muslim murderers. We are boring!

On that note, we'll leave Barzun and look at less frothy and prolix definitions of Romanticism below. We will see that our own society is caught up in an 18th century ideology of which we really don't have much understanding, and that from it we hold some pretty poor ideas as normal and right when in fact they really suck.
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Romanticism: The Romantic favours the concrete over the abstract, variety over uniformity, the infinite over the finite, nature over culture, convention, and artifice, the organic over the mechanical, freedom over constraint, rules, and limitations. In Human terms it prefers the unique individual to the average man, the free creative genius to the prudent man of good sense, the particular community or nation to humanity at large. Mentally the Romantic prefers feeling to thought, more specifically, emotion to calculation, imagination to literal common sense, intuition to intellect.
[....]
[Romantics] saw understanding, the intellect as it works in science and everyday life, as an inferior faculty supplying useful, but distortedly abstract, opinion about fragments torn from reality for practical purposes. Reason, on the other hand, was for them intellect in its highest form as an apprehension of the totality of things in their essential interconnectedness.
[....]
Non-philosophical Romanticism disdains ordinary rationality as a practical makeshift for the earth-bound, yielding only a truncated, superficial, and distorted picture of the world as it really is. The directly intuitive, even mystical, apprehension of the world which we owe to poets and to other such creative geniuses does not stand in need of any reasoned support of articulation....
The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Edited by Ted Honderich. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. p. 778.
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Romanticism
was an artistic and intellectual movement in the history of ideas that originated in late 18th century Western Europe. It stressed strong emotion....

In a general sense, "Romanticism" covers a group of related artistic, political, philosophical and social trends arising out of the late 18th and early 19th centuries in Europe. But a precise characterization and a specific description of Romanticism have been objects of intellectual history and literary history for all of the twentieth century without any great measure of consensus emerging. Arthur Lovejoy attempted to demonstrate the difficulty of this problem in his seminal article "On The Discrimination of Romanticisms" in his Essays in the History of Ideas (1948); some scholars see romanticism as completely continuous with the present, some see it as the inaugural moment of modernity, some see it as the beginning of a tradition of resistance to the Enlightenment, and still others date it firmly in the direct aftermath of the French Revolution.

Romanticism is often understood as a set of new cultural and aesthetic values. [A] new emphasis on common language and the depiction of apparently everyday experiences; and experimentation with new, non-classical artistic forms.

Romanticism also strongly valued exotic locations and the distant past. Old poetical forms, such as ballads, were revalued, ruins were sentimentalized as iconic of the action of Nature on the works of man, and mythic and legendary material which would previously have been seen as "low" culture became a common basis for works of "high" art and literature.

Origins and precursors

The term 'Romanticism' derives ultimately from the fictional romances written during the Middle Ages ("romance" being the medieval term for works in the vernacular Romance languages rather than in Latin). ...

In English literature, Coleridge and Wordsworth were the true architects of the Romantic movement, beginning with their Lyrical Ballads (1798), but the revival of 'romance' in this narrower sense was preceded by a cult of Sensibility. The ' Sturm und Drang' (Storm and Stress) movement in German drama was associated with Friedrich Schiller, and the early work of Goethe, in particular his play "Goetz von Berlichingen", about a Medieval knight who resists submission to any authority beyond himself. Goethe's novel "The Sorrows of Young Werther" (1774) had huge international success. This too concerned an individual who felt a strong contradiction between his own internal world of intense feeling, and the external world that failed to correspond to it. Werther eventually commits suicide. In later works Goethe rejected Romanticism in favour of a new sense of classical harmony, integrating internal and external states.

In English, the term 'Romantick' also embodied experiences of human inadequacy and guilt, quite separate from their traditional Christian grounding; such a sense of [ ] and ever-present dark forces seemed most appropriate in settings of Medieval culture. In Germany and France, Herder praised the Aurora borealis.

While these precursors partly explain the Romantic fascination with the Middle Ages, the pleasures of stressful emotions, and the thrill derived from wilfulness, the actual expression of the Romantic movement itself corresponded to the sense of rapid, dynamic social change that culminated in the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era. However, Romantic literature in Germany preceded these crucial historical events.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism
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Nosferatu is the first film version of the classic Romantic era novel Dracula.

1 comment:

Jason Pappas said...

The first part of the article is one of the most honest summaries of the meaning of Islam. No wishy-washy politeness; no good-but-out-moded nonsense! Just the harsh reality of Islam - and it is harsh!

I'm have to read more of your blog.