Liberal World Order, R.I.P.

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The word "liberal" has been so badly abused and had so many meanings that it is now a useless word. There is Modern Culture which can be divided into the Modern Left and Modern Right. And there is Traditional America which was Christian and is now dead. Traditional America was a great culture which allowed freedom of religion and economic freedom (capitalism). The freedom enjoyed by Muslims in America is mostly due to laws put in place by Traditional America. Modern Culture is pure evil and hates all forms of freedom including religious freedom, economic freedom, and freedom of speech. This applies equally to the Left and Right. The only reason that the Left supports Islam is as a way of attacking the Right. The Left shares no values with Islam and fundamentally hates tradition and morality. The best path for Muslims is to be nonpartisan. Vote for whoever is most tolerant of Islam and ignore the Left/Right divide.

This is a point, foundations of America is built on the old culture, whats disturbing with the rise of secularism/liberalism/leftism/(capitalism?) is that now this culture has gone into serious decline we see a corresponding rise of authoritarianism and cultural degradation (In the UK but can apply elsewhere). I agree that the whole Right/Left paradigm is a relic of the 'enlightenment' thought, it should be dispensed with (but I'll use it anyway ).

I think the main problem with Liberals and Leftists they have a hard time excepting that people might not want to agree with them and want to live in a different way according to their own customs, culture, traditions. I was initially was attracted to them because they were a lot more tolerant and accepting of minorities etc than those on the right but my experience with them left me disappointed, realising how much I would have to 'conform' to gain their 'approval', they are very good at wearing masks and can be very manipulative.

Contrast this with those on the 'right' who even though we disagreed on a lot of things they were more upfront and direct in many respects.

In the UK Muslims were an 'approved' minority among liberals while they served their purpose (they thought we were going to over time secularise ourselves out of existence and become 'good' liberals), but now they realise this is going to happen they are now mewling on about 'equality and diversity', 'integration' and 'social cohesion', meanwhile making conditions 'hard' across the board to make Muslims 'conform'.

Syria, Gaza and the Criminalisation of Islam

Its all very confusing, I think it will take me a lifetime to understand this :hmm:.

Some more book recommendations.

There was a great review for this book that has since been removed, :heated:. he summed the book up nicely that contrary to all the talk of liberals being inherently tolerant and all that, they are more inclined to behave like 'moral totalitarians' particularly when they gain influence and power.

Blurb

Mill and Liberalism was first published in 1963. Initial reactions varied from the uncomprehending to the splenetic.

In the intervening quarter-century the intellectual climate has changed as reflected by its greatest exemplar, to warrant fresh consideration. Unlike many commentators, before or subsequently,

Maurice Cowling endeavours to view Mill's thought as a coherent whole with a specific proselytising purpose, geared to the emasculation of Christianity and its replacement by a libertarian public doctrine. This interpretation aroused much contemporary hostility, and in a new introduction Cowling locates Mill and Liberalism within the broader intellectual history of post-war Britain, looking at the various strands of the 'new Right' and relating the academic to more specifically journalistic or political manifestations.

This book really purged my mind of any naive views I had of liberals.

Blurb

Dawkins and Hitchens have convinced many western intellectuals that secularism is the way forward. But most people don't read their books before deciding whether to be religious. Instead, they inherit their faith from their parents, who often innoculate them against the elegant arguments of secularists. And what no one has noticed is that far from declining, the religious are expanding their share of the population: in fact, the more religious people are, the more children they have. The cumulative effect of immigration from religious countries, and religious fertility will be to reverse the secularisation process in the West. Not only will the religious eventually triumph over the non-religious, but it is those who are the most extreme in their beliefs who have the largest families.

Within Judaism, the Ultra-Orthodox may achieve majority status over their liberal counterparts by mid-century. Islamist Muslims have won the culture war in much of the Muslim world, and their success provides a glimpse of what awaits the Christian West and Israel. Based on a wealth of demographic research, considering questions of multiculturalism and terrorism, Kaufmann examines the implications of the decline in liberal secularism as religious conservatism rises - and what this means for the future of western modernity.

Tim Farron was 'eased' out as leader of the Liberal democrats because of his Christian views.

One way of dealing with a liberal.

 

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Another update

End of Liberal World Order?

Though the press is obsessed with President Trump defining a change we are seeing, that is a classic case of mal-educated Amerocentrism. The shift started before him. He is just a symptom, not a cause. It isn’t even an American phenomenon. If anything we are lagging the global trend.

What period started to come to an end at the start of this century? The end of the post-Cold War as a period by itself? I don't quite buy it. There is a lot of talk of an end to the post-WWII, “Liberal World Order” (LWO). I think that might be right.

The LWO began at the end of WWII. The period after the fall of the Soviet Union that people call as the Post-Cold War Era wasn't really an era. It was either the final or the penultimate chapter of the long running LWO that the Cold War was just a longer chapter of. Even while the Soviet Union was on its death bed we saw the next chapter, AKA Bush41’s “New World Order” (NWO).

One could argue the NWO was the penultimate chapter, and 2001-2008 the final chapter of the LWO.

Hard to say right now, but if forced, I’d put my chips on that argument.

The NWO lasted less than a decade, if that. It was a period of unchallenged American dominance, but that rode on the back of the “The Liberal World Order” built in the post-WWII period.

What I would call the final chapter, somewhere from the attacks of September 2001 and the newly elected President Obama's apology tour and welcoming of a rising China, I'm not sure - but it marked a shift to something new. The pivot is not yet complete - it is a slow turn that took awhile to get here.

The last two chapters of the LWO saw the falling apart of those structures – the EU, ascendency of Western culture, extra-national international legal bodies, American dominance of the high seas - that defined the success of the old age. The vacuum left behind by them, and the fragility of remaining ones like NATO, is feeding change.

This new era is a movement of returns, reckoning, and realization. Strangely, end of the LWO can probably can be traced back to the Muslim world. They were an the early adopter or canary in the coal mine of the structural culmination of the LWO. There you find the first place where the assumptions of the ruling Western elite began to fail.

Just look at the pictures of Cairo and Kabul in the 1960s and 1970s. Western dress, cultural norms, secularism, and political systems (socialist, capitalist, or a mixture of both) dominated. At the end of the 1970s the wave crested first there when you saw decades of progress for women in the public space begin to retreat from Islamabad to Alexandria.

Those were indications that the West had lost its confidence and its appeal. Once that support goes soft, everything it underpins weakens. Much of the weakening started with the anti-Western efforts in our own universities and popular culture. Jesse Jackson’s “Hey, hey, ho, ho; Western Civ has got to go” was just one of a long series of notes to the outside world that things were well along the way to being not quite right.

If you value Western values of tolerance and progress, how do you expect them to grow and expand abroad when you cannot support them at home? In their absence, something will fill the void.

https://cdrsalamander.blogspot.com/2018/10/from-berlin-beijing-to-brasilia-new-era.html

 

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MSM are acknowledging it.

 

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Insight into how the liberal order operates.

“The Liberal Order Is the Incubator for Authoritarianism”: A Conversation with Pankaj Mishra

FRANCIS WADE: You have emerged as a prominent critic of empire and its foundations in liberal ideas of freedom and progress. Can you outline how your thinking has evolved, from your early writings on the topic to the present, and describe the major events that either reinforced or altered your position?

PANKAJ MISHRA: I know from experience that it is very easy for a brown-skinned Indian writer to be caricatured as a knee-jerk anti-American/anti-Westernist/Third-Worldist/angry postcolonial, and it is important then to point out that my understanding of modern imperialism and liberalism — like that of many people with my background — is actually grounded in an experience of Indian political realities.

In my own case, it was a journalistic assignment in Kashmir that advanced my political and intellectual education. I went there in 1999 with many of the prejudices of the liberal Indian “civilizer” — someone who simply assumed that Kashmiri Muslims were much better off being aligned with “secular,” “liberal,” and “democratic” India than with Pakistan because the former was better placed to advance freedom and progress for all its citizens. In other words, India had a civilizing mission: it had to show Kashmir’s overwhelmingly religious Muslims the light of secular reason — by force, if necessary. The brutal realities of India’s military occupation of Kashmir and the blatant falsehoods and deceptions that accompanied it forced me to revisit many of the old critiques of Western imperialism and its rhetoric of progress. When my critical articles on Kashmir — very long; nearly 25,000 words — appeared in 2000 in The Hindu and The New York Review of Books, their most vociferous critics were self-declared Indian liberals who loathed the idea that the supposedly secular and democratic Indian republic, which prided itself on its hard-won freedom from Western imperialism, could itself be a cruel imperialist regime.

Writing about Kashmir was a strange and painfully isolating experience, but an absolutely crucial one. It made me see that, whether you are Indian or American, black, brown, or white, it is best not to get morally intoxicated by words like “secularism” and “liberalism” or to simply assume that you stand on the right side of history after having professed allegiance to certain ideological verities. Rather one should try to perceive the scramble for power, the clash of interests, that these resonant claims to virtue conceal; one should ask who is using words like “secularism” or “liberalism” and for what purposes.

The mendacity and hypocrisy of Indian liberals and even some leftists about Kashmir made me better prepared for the liberal internationalists who helped adorn the Bush administration’s pre-emptive assault on Iraq with the kind of humanitarian rhetoric about freedom, democracy, and progress that we originally heard from European imperialists in the 19th century. It was this experience in Kashmir that eventually led me to examine figures like Niall Ferguson, who tried to persuade Anglo-Americans that the occupation and subjugation of other people’s territory and culture was a wonderful instrument of civilization and that we need more such emancipatory imperialism to bring native peoples in line with the advanced West.

“Liberal modernity,” you’ve argued, “has prepared the ground for its destruction” by unleashing forces that are “uncontrollable.” Have these forces contributed to the resurgence of the right in countries where, thanks to modern liberalism, a premium is placed on the autonomy of the individual?

There are many ways to answer this question, and one’s choice will inevitably be determined by the political context of the day. There is no doubt that the individual freedoms central to liberalism ought to be cherished and protected. The question is how, and by whom? Are many self-declared liberals the best defenders of individual liberties? As it happens, many powerful and influential people who call themselves liberals are mostly interested in advancing their professional ambitions and financial interests while claiming the moral prestige of progressivism for themselves. They are best seen as opportunistic seekers of power, and they exist in India as much as in the United States and in Britain. Bush’s “useful idiots” (Tony Judt’s term) had their counterparts in India, where some liberals chose to see Prime Minister Modi as a great “modernizer.” They are happy to whisper advice to power, and they recoil from the latter only when power rejects or humiliates them — as in the case of Trump and Modi, who have no time for eggheads in general. The dethroned “liberal” then transforms himself into a maquisard of the “resistance” and prepares the ground for a Restoration where he’ll likely be hailed as a great hero. It’s a nice racket, if you can get into it.

As Trumpism and other authoritarianisms become powerful, their liberal critics engage in a kind of moral blackmail based on a spurious history: “Are you against the ‘liberal order’ which guaranteed peace and stability, and other wonderful things for so long?” The obvious answer is that your much-cherished liberal order was the incubator for Trumpism and other authoritarianisms. It made human beings subordinate to the market, replacing social bonds with market relations and sanctifying greed. It propagated an ethos of individual autonomy and personal responsibility, while the exigencies of the market made it impossible for people to save and plan for the future. It burdened people with chronic debt and turned them into gamblers in the stock market. Liberal capitalism was supposed to foster a universal middle class and encourage bourgeois values of sobriety and prudence and democratic virtues of accountability. It achieved the opposite: the creation of a precariat with no clear long-term prospects, dangerously vulnerable to demagogues promising them the moon. Uncontrolled liberalism, in other words, prepares the grounds for its own demise.

Weren’t liberal ideas of freedom and progress, as far back as the 19th century, being explicitly pressed into the service of racialized science, with its demarcation of “civilized” and “non-civilized” peoples?

Yes, liberalism as an ideology of the propertied white men comes into being together with institutionalized hierarchies of race and class and bogus distinctions between civilized and uncivilized peoples. It was clear, from John Stuart Mill as well as Thomas Jefferson, that individual rights and universal reason were the prerogatives of a tiny minority — settler colonialists who expanded and indulged their freedom at the expense of other people. Their victims, nonwhite peoples, were pointing out these fatal contradictions in the rhetoric of liberalism as early as the 19th century.

Today, of course, the question of liberalism’s relationship with imperialism — whether the former is contingent on the morally tainted successes of the latter and therefore tends to weaken when the empires totter — has become particularly urgent as non-Western powers emerge and an endless economic and political crisis forces Western liberal democracies to expose their racial and inegalitarian structures, their leaders resorting to explicit appeals to white supremacism. I wrote in 2015, in a survey of liberalism’s record in the non-Western world, that “liberalism” has come to be seen “as an unaffordable plaything of rich Westerners: the elevation into universal values of codes that long favoured a tiny minority, and are unlikely to survive the rise of everyone else.”

In this regard, one doesn’t need to draw upon the tradition of Asian and African thinkers. Listen to Max Weber in 1906:

The question is: how are freedom and democracy in the long run at all possible under the domination of highly developed capitalism? […] The historical origin of modern freedom has had certain unique preconditions which will never repeat themselves. Let us enumerate the most important of these. First, the overseas expansions. In the armies of Cromwell, in the French constituent assembly, in our whole economic life even today, this breeze from across the ocean is felt […] but there is no new continent at our disposal.

The Nigerian scholar Biodun Jeyifo has lamented the state of “arrested decolonization” in which many former colonies find themselves, whereby a native elite has furthered the imperial project by abetting Western economic expansionism. Did the arrival of liberal capitalism not end imperialism but rather extend it — perhaps in a quieter, more insidious way?

The postcolonial experience is a very complex one. The political movements against capitalist imperialism in Asia and Africa were often led by elites intellectually and emotionally shaped by the ideologies and epistemologies of their masters. At their most antagonistic and hubristic, they wanted to beat the West at its own game. Others wanted to survive in a world made by the West. They were all in a hurry to modernize, industrialize, urbanize, and somehow catch up with the Western powers that seemed to have taken such a long lead over their countries.

The problem for nearly all of these leaders was the meager resources and often the state of devastation they started out with. Decades, if not centuries, of exploitation has left them in a very poor state. Their social systems had ossified; intellectual life had dwindled. The materials to build a coherent nation-state were often missing. And then the first generation of postcolonial leaders could not, despite their best attempts, shake off their economic dependence on the West — something created by imperialism’s division of the world into center and periphery. Most of them saw virtue in socialism and a strong state control of the economy; hardly anyone in Asia and Africa was enamored of capitalism after the experience of the Depression. By the 1980s, however, decolonization had run into trouble. The structural political and economic problems of many Asian and African societies had become even bigger. At that point, the collapse of communist states brought an unexpected bonanza to Western intellectuals and policy-makers who had for years been arguing for the free flow of capital and goods and railing against the protectionist economies of Asia and Africa. And they were of course helped by a new generation of ruling classes who were ready to embrace the American dream of free markets and private enterprise.

We still need a sociology of these new elites — their connections to the US and Europe through networks of colleges, universities, think tanks, NGOs, foundations, and fellowships, and their ideological indoctrination at various institutions. Anecdotally, I can confirm that in India a whole new American-educated — or America-philic — class emerged to argue for untrammeled markets and to institutionalize their ideas. They often called themselves liberal, but they were also to be found on the Hindu right, and the traffic between the two camps was brisk.

Embedded in your critique of liberalism is a deep skepticism of contemporary human rights discourse and its links to a liberal free-market agenda. Are the two wholly at odds, and why does the former so often champion the latter?

Well, if you have lived in an Asian or African country and are knowledgeable about the history of imperialism, then you are reflexively suspicious of any kind of moralizing discourse about individual rights emanating from powerful countries. Let’s not forget that the French and the British were presenting themselves, as early as the 19th century, as protectors of women’s rights in barbaric nations. The rhetoric of free trade and free markets was very much part of a larger discourse of emancipating the individual.

In our own time, this discourse has been very useful in not only sanctioning old-style imperialist campaigns (tiresomely disguised, as before, as humanitarian interventions) but also in supplanting the aspirations for justice and equality between and within nations. Many people, especially Samuel Moyn, have argued rigorously and eloquently about the tendency to make a fetish of human rights while limiting its scope of operation to gross abuses by the state, using it to violate the hard-won sovereignty of nations, and giving a free pass to structural forms of violence, such as historically entrenched racial inequality or the inequality perpetuated by global capitalism. In that sense, it was too easy for political and corporate interests to champion human rights: it was a cause that did not challenge their power and influence; in many ways, it preserved them.

You say that economic inequality has been given a free pass by human rights advocates, but does that erase some of the agency at work here? Has it indeed been willfully neglected?

Yes, I don’t think inequality was a paramount issue until quite recently, when its politically calamitous consequences began to unfold. We were told, whether in India or the United States, that it is more important to make the economy grow and generate wealth, which will eventually trickle down, than to address substantive issues of inequality, how it comes about, how it perpetuates itself, what we can do to alleviate it.

One of the main cheerleaders of India’s economic liberalization was a deeply networked Indian American of the kind I mentioned earlier: a Columbia University economist and fellow of the Council for Foreign Relations named Jagdish Bhagwati. Bhagwati, who claimed to be the “world’s foremost free trader,” was as cozy with Modi as he was with the previous, more secular Indian prime minister. This man not only blatantly denied that there had been an increase in inequality or that India was turning into an oligarchy; he not only mocked people like Amartya Sen, who exposed inequality, as a wannabe Rosa Parks; he said that inequality is actually a good thing if you have mobility and that the poor tend to “celebrate” it. Arguing for less protections for labor, he upheld Bangladesh as an example that allows “firms to hire and fire workers under reasonable conditions and maintain a balance between the rights of both workers and employers.” This was after the collapse in April 2013 of a garment factory in Dhaka that killed more than a thousand people and exposed the way many unprotected workers in the globalized economy are reduced to slave-labor conditions. Bhagwati’s response to the decline in Indian calorie consumption, which obviously reflected increased hunger and poverty, was positively Marie Antoinette–ish: the poor were probably consuming more “rice and fruits,” and in any case, “malnourished families should be shifting their diet to more milk and fruits.”

It is probably unfair to single Bhagwati out, but you can find clones of him among ruling classes everywhere; his ideas bespeak an extraordinary callousness among policy-makers and opinion-makers. Of course, there were many small, under-resourced, and besieged human rights organizations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America that struggled against the injustice and inequality generated by neoliberal capitalism. But the well-funded human rights movement originating in the West did not challenge any of the verities of free traders and free marketeers, and the cruelties they perpetuated, until it was too late. Not doing so was a severe dereliction of duty. You could argue that the human rights movement became too much of an elite Western endeavor, naming and shaming selectively, as David Kennedy has put it. It became too aligned with the interests of the West’s political and corporate powers, and lost much of its insurgent energy.

https://www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-liberal-order-is-the-incubator-for-authoritarianism-a-conversation-with-pankaj-mishra

A critical review

Shrinivas Sohoni

One used cordially to dislike Pankaj Mishra's sanctimonious, motivated-sounding essays against India - in which country of his origin he had failed (miserably, despite rather desperate, repeated, and strenuous effort) to enter the corridors of power.

This one, however, comes across somewhat less dishonest, though not less biased, as he now opens his mouth to rant about Western Liberals, the Anglo-American West, being poorly disguised imperialism..
Has nothing to suggest, of course, that is constructive or corrective.

First you identify the problem, then find a solution.

 

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Blurb

The age of unfettered liberalism is coming to a close. For better and/or for worse. One way or another a corrective will and must occur. For several generations now, all resistance has been quashed outright. Opposition or dissent has been easily labelled as 'reactionary'. But the energy of liberalism is approaching exhaustion.

Here is an assembly of artists and thinkers (of various viewpoints) who, over the course of the last hundred years, have expressed 'reactionary' or ambivalent stances towards an ascendant or prevailing liberal orthodoxy.

Most of them are completely mainstream and some of course are enmeshed in the very same liberalism they venture to tame.

 

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This video attempts to look at some foundational problems with liberal ideology. There is a focus on how liberalism has also effected Muslim community in the West and elsewhere.

Blurb

The argument put forth in the article titled 'Biological Leninism', is that the lack of a coherent and unified ruling class under Liberalism is what allows for Leninism (single-party communist rule) to take over. Our question is, can this all be prevented, or is it just part of a natural flow of history and human nature?

 

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Related, like to share.

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Historian Niall Ferguson argues that today’s political polarization echoes the religious polarization of the Reformation. Both were brought about by technological disruption: The printing press, in the case of the Reformation; and the personal computer and internet, in the case of today.

 

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Like to share. Pithy and to the point.

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More comment on the nature of liberalism.

Blurb

Liberalism is a negative, feminizing, destructive force, divorced from cultural and national allegiances. It attacks human nature at a fundamental level, empowering only the selfish instincts, leaving society atomized and denuded of everything life-giving...

 

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More comment. The consequences of liberals sucessful takeover of the commanding heights of British culture.

The BBC once promoted a Christian worldview. Today it champions a very different philosophy

The Corporation has been an active agent of change, agitating for the new secular morality

The BBC has wholeheartedly thrown its lot in with the liberal reformers; there has been no “impartiality” on any of the big moral issues of the past half-century. In every instance, the socially conservative argument has been depicted as callous, reactionary and dogmatic. Any counterargument to the prevailing liberal consensus is now ignored altogether; social conservative voices are conspicuous by their absence on mainstream current affairs programmes. That is sometimes because there is no one in the production teams who understands the social conservative position, so it is no longer considered when programmes are in the making. The liberals now have a national culture moulded by their thinking and their laws; it is their world now – the old morality has been utterly vanquished.

Consider the way in which Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion was promoted by the BBC. The book was treated with reverence, and the lavish coverage helped to propel its author to the highest pinnacle of intellectual celebrity. He is now one of that small, glittering band of international intellectual superstars in demand around the world. The BBC was not his only promoter – the Times, the Guardian and the Independent, as well as most other serious television and media outlets, all paid homage to the new guru – but the BBC’s imprimatur is always worth more than the others.

The Corporation still commands respect among media professionals; there is a noticeable cultural cringe when other broadcasters, particularly those from places such as Australia and Canada, come into contact with it. Partly thanks to the BBC’s heady sponsorship, The God Delusion became a global phenomenon which – given its intellectual mediocrity – takes some explaining. The eminent American sociologist Peter Berger gave much thought to the general phenomenon of secularisation, and his observations are peculiarly apt as a way of explaining the success of Dawkins’s book:

“There exists an international subculture composed of people with Western-type higher education, especially in the humanities and social sciences, that is indeed secularised. This subculture is the principal “carrier” of progressive, Enlightened beliefs and values. While its members are relatively thin on the ground, they are very influential, as they control the institutions that provide the “official” definitions of reality, notably the educational system, the media of mass communication, and the higher reaches of the legal system. They are remarkably similar all over the world today, as they have been for a long time … I may observe in passing that the plausibility of secularisation theory owes much to this international subculture.”

So ubiquitous was the coverage that it felt at the time as if The God Delusion was being promoted as a quasi-official philosophy; away with the Book of Common Prayer, in with a book for the common man. And in the context of Berger’s “subculture”, The God Delusion has become one of the standard texts of the secularists; an enormously influential work colouring the opinions of millions of people around the world. The fact of its essential vacuity doesn’t matter because, with its reputation enormously inflated by an uncritical media, it has been promoted to the status of holy writ.

The old moral code is difficult to live up to; its stern injunctions run counter to human instinct in every respect. It calls for self-restraint and self-abnegation and does so in the name of a higher power. That’s why people find it difficult, and why many don’t like it. Mr Dawkins’s alternative Ten Commandments, as listed in The God Delusion, have the great advantage of not being at all irksome – they are, in fact, a very agreeable and flexible set of rules which allow an individual to do pretty much what they want. They certainly would not act as a brake on selfish impulses. The crucial point to grasp is that because they admit to no outside authority, but depend entirely on the individual’s own judgment (one might say “conscience”) of what is right and what is wrong, they validate an infinite variety of outcomes. Each man becomes his own “god”, and sets the rules accordingly. The obvious problem is that most people find it difficult to resist the temptation to self-justify their actions, and tend to give themselves the benefit of the doubt.

The noble lie at the heart of this new morality is that we can, as individuals and as a society, dispense with an objective moral code without harmful consequences.

The claim is that the old moral code was judgmental and harsh and based on a non-existent deity who had supposedly laid down rules about human conduct; in fact, say the atheists, the rules were concocted by power-hungry priests. The new moral code, they say, which dispenses with God altogether, allows everyone to live happier lives – free from the guilt that the traditional rules engendered. This idea has been successfully marketed to the country (after all, it’s not that difficult to persuade people to do what their instincts urge them to do) and, exercising our democratic free will, we have enshrined in law measures that overturn the old moral code.

The countless discussions of Dawkins’s book provided easy fodder for the pocket-intellectuals who make BBC talk shows, but the practical effect of this unilateral moral disarmament were never addressed. In recent decades millions of people have become unmoored from the country’s traditional moral code with sadly predictable consequences, not least on the nation’s mental health.

Increasing incidence of mental illness has been apparent in recent years, not surprisingly because the UK has one of the highest rates of mental health problems in the world. According to an NHS survey reported in 2017, at any one time, a sixth of the population is suffering from a mental health problem. As reported by the BBC website: “It seems to be getting more common – or at least among those with severe symptoms. While the proportion of people affected does not appear to have risen in the past few years, if you go back a little further there has certainly been a steady increase.”

The result of our national, transgressive moral revolution is now apparent: a horribly diminished sense of security for millions of children and a coarsening and debasement of our attitudes to sex, plus a rise in mental illness across the population. In addition, there has been a profound change in the value we put on human life itself. It is often said that contemporary Britain is a post-Christian country; if so, the ills that afflict the nation today cannot be laid at the door of the old belief system. This country of unhappy children and uncertain adults – this is the world social liberal values have conjured into being.

The BBC which, once upon a time, understood its responsibilities differently and promoted a straightforward Christian view of the world, has been the midwife to this transformation; in fact, more than the midwife – an active agent of change agitating for the new morality. And, the change having been successfully realised – with permissive liberal values now triumphant – the BBC no longer even allows a social conservative challenge to the new dispensation. Any claim by the Corporation to be “impartial” in this debate is a lie.

https://catholicherald.co.uk/magazi...day-it-champions-a-very-different-philosophy/

 

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Another update.

The end of US liberal hegemony

In his New Year speech for 2019, Chinese President Xi Jinping warned that “we’re facing a period of major change never seen in a century.”

So what is likely to come to an end and what is likely to emerge in this “period of major change”?

According to a number of prestigious international relations scholars in the United States, such as Stephen M. Walt of Harvard University, Barry Posen of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, among all the things that are likely to disappear in the future is American hegemony.

In his new book, “The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities”, Mearsheimer has declared in no uncertain terms the end of the US “liberal hegemony”.

Mearsheimer noted that since the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, the US has been adopting a global strategy of facilitating its liberal hegemony in order to serve three goals: 1. to promote, around the globe, US democratic ideologies as a set of universal values; 2. to facilitate the integration of countries in the world into the global market and the free economic system, and 3. to establish supranational bodies to regulate other nations on American terms.

Mearsheimer contends that the reason why the US has been embracing this strategy over the past 30 years is that, subjectively speaking, both the Republican and Democratic elites in Washington are firm believers in a set of libertarian ideologies, and have acquired a sense of superiority.

As a result, these US elites would often attempt to shape the world based on America’s own facets.

Then, objectively speaking, under the unipolar world order following the disintegration of the former Soviet Union in 1991, the US has remained the world’s superpower which is basically free to do whatever it wants.

It is against such a unique historical background that the world has witnessed, over the past two decades, America’s active and successive military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, not to mention the suppression of Iran, the facilitation of the eastward expansion of NATO, as well as its roles in the “Color Revolutions” in Eastern Europe and the Arab Spring.

Under the US liberal hegemony, the sovereignty of other nations is often pushed to the sidelines.

However, ironically, the fact that the US has been throwing its weight around on the world scene hasn’t made it stronger.

Moreover, according to the statistics of some independent institutions, the number of countries around the world that practice liberal democracy has actually gone into decline.

As Mearsheimer has put it, what happened over the last two decades around the world has indicated that nationalism and pragmatism have always been able to prevail over liberalism.

And the American liberal hegemony has become increasingly unsustainable as today’s world has changed from being unipolar to multipolar, looking from an objective perspective of the world situation.

In particular, the 2008 global financial tsunami has taken a heavy toll on the soft power of the US.

And since US President Donald Trump was voted into office in 2016 with a strong public mandate of making America great again, he has radically deviated from the policy approach adopted by the traditional political establishment in Washington, and subverted the original goals of the US liberal hegemony.

Under his “America First” policy, Trump has replaced free trade with protectionism, and pulled his country out of international organizations and treaties one after another.

Mearsheimer believes Trump’s rise to power has officially marked the end of the global strategy of promoting liberal hegemony adopted by the US over the last 30 years.

Nevertheless, as some American scholars have pointed out, the demise of the US liberal hegemony doesn’t necessarily mean Washington would totally give up pursuing global predominance in the days ahead. Nor does it mean the US would stop interfering in other countries’ domestic affairs.

The US will have to adjust its policy in order to stay relevant in global affairs.

As to how America should adjust its policy approach in order to adapt to a multipolar world, it is a complicated issue that involves intense partisan struggle in Washington.

The recent political drama over the proposed wall along the US-Mexico border can be seen as an example of the intensity of the political struggle in the US.

http://www.ejinsight.com/20190214-the-end-of-us-liberal-hegemony/

 

[CuriousonTruth]

US people have moved from Liberalism to White Nationalism just like most in Europe. But the hegemony of the west is still there. It has partially just changed in ideology.

And also don't forget, the new ideology is also "liberal" in that it still champions gay rights, atheism, fake western high horse of "humanitarianism". Nothing changed, they just became more radical is all.

 

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Salaam

US people have moved from Liberalism to White Nationalism just like most in Europe. But the hegemony of the west is still there. It has partially just changed in ideology.

And also don't forget, the new ideology is also "liberal" in that it still champions gay rights, atheism, fake western high horse of "humanitarianism". Nothing changed, they just became more radical is all.

A rebranding exercise, reminds me of this scene.

 

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More on the liberal elite trying to create a 'new narrative' for Muslims to follow. Dont agree with all that is said but worth a read.

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“Islam Is Transforming” And Other Idiotic Views from The Economist

The Economist has always been the less subtle, more in-your-face anti-Islam publication compared to the likes of the NYTimes, Washington Post, Atlantic, et al. The benefit of this unvarnished animosity toward Islam is that Muslims can see very clearly what the elite Western political and media establishment really thinks about them and their religion, without all the fake political correctness and shallow nods to multiculturalism dripping from the pages of those other outlets.

Their latest piece, “The Little-Noticed Transformation of Islam in the West,” is the perfect example of such truth in midst of barely-masked derision.

The Economist:

Islam frightens many in the West. Jihadists kill in the name of their religion. Some Muslim conservatives believe it lets them force their daughters to marry. When asked, Westerners say that Islam is the religion they least want their neighbours or in-laws to follow. Bestselling books such as “The Strange Death of Europe”, “Le Suicide Français” and “Submission” warn against the march of Islam.

The editors at a more politically correct outlet would have insisted that this paragraph be followed with some assurance that the “version of Islam followed by most Muslims” is nothing to be afraid of and perfectly benign in the same way that a neutered pet is perfectly benign.

But not the folks at the Economist! People are justified in fearing Islam because Islam is fearsome. I tend to agree, but not in the sense that the Economist intends or the sense the poor geriatric nativist with bouts of dementia understands when he is reading, well, the Economist. Islam is fearsome in the way that, to a criminal, justice is fearsome. Islam is fearsome in the way that the truth piercing through the fog of self delusion is fearsome.

However, Western Islam is undergoing a little-noticed transformation. As our special report this week sets out, a natural process of adaptation and assimilation is doing more than any government to tame the threat posed by Islamic extremism. The first generation of Muslim workers who migrated to the West, starting in the 1950s, did not know how long they would stay; their religious practices directed by foreign-trained imams were tied to those of their countries of origin. The second generation felt alienated, caught between their parents’ foreign culture and societies whose institutions they found hard to penetrate. Frustrated and belonging nowhere, a few radicals turned to violent jihad.

First- and second-generation Muslims in the West were really lost, weren’t they? For them, Islam was either a bumbling cultural byproduct or the expression of seething, violent frustration, frustration born from the fact they couldn’t make it in enlightened Western institutions.

Today the third generation is coming of age. It is more enfranchised and confident than the first two. Most of its members want little truck with either foreign imams or violent jihadist propaganda. Instead, for young Muslims in the West, faith is increasingly becoming a matter of personal choice.

For the Economist, Islam doesn’t amount to much beyond foreign cultural practices, at best, terrorism at worst. Islam is only redeemable when Muslims adopt liberal values like personal choice and scriptural revisionism. This openness to transcend run-of-the-mill “foreign Islam” is what makes this new generation of Muslims so promising to the Western elite.

Their beliefs range from ultra-conservative to path-breakingly liberal. Some prominent scholars allow female converts to keep non-Muslim husbands; a few congregations conduct weekly prayers on Sundays, because the faithful go to work on Fridays; there are even women-led mosques. At the same time Western institutions are gradually opening up to Muslims. London and Rotterdam are both run by Muslim mayors. Two Muslim women, one of them veiled, were voted into the United States Congress last year.

So much garbage jam packed into these paragraphs. I wish I could say the Economist was making it all up. But unfortunately, we do have such trash promoted by self-described Muslims in this day and age. Thankfully, the Muslim community has rejected this nonsense for the most part.

What is a problem are the Muslim politicians. It is telling that the Economist ties liberal initiatives like women-led mosques to Muslim political involvement. Indeed, these two phenomena are intertwined because Muslim politicians have proven themselves to be the most liberal and, more importantly, have been the most effective force for introducing liberal tendencies into the mainstream Muslim community.

For example:

For decades, self-described “progressive Muslims” have tried to get mainstream traditional Muslims to adopt liberal views on homosexuality, women’s equality, religious pluralism, etc. But figures like Linda Sarsour or Sadiq Khan, through the conduit of political activism, have been able to accomplish more towards that goal in just a few years than all these progressive misfits combined.

It is quite insidious when you think about it. Sad as it is, some otherwise traditionally-inclined Muslims reflexively support and celebrate any Muslim who gets recognized in the Western political or media establishment. But the Western political and media establishment only recognizes and promotes Muslims who are sufficiently liberal. The result is as predictable as it is depressing.

How can Western governments encourage this transition? Their main task is to focus on upholding the law rather than try to force Muslims to change their beliefs. The West is enjoying a decline in attacks by jihadists. The number they killed in Europe fell from over 150 in 2015 to 14 last year. Attacks not only threaten lives and property, they also set back relations between Muslims and those around them. That is why criminality must be dealt with firmly by the law and the intelligence services.

How deliciously coy of the Economist to pretend like Western governments haven’t been forcing this transition with all their might for literally more than two centuries. Or is the Economist not aware of the colonial history of the Muslim world, where Western-backed religious agents in conjunction with their colonial masters, like Lord Cromer, worked hard to introduce liberal values to the average Muslim in order to make him more amenable to Western colonial rule? This project, of course, is still in full swing today.

The colonialists always described Muslim resistance to their genocidal colonial project as “terrorism.” In the same way, the Economist describes “conservative” illiberal Muslims as being more prone to violent terror. So, to suggest that Western government interest in liberalizing Muslims is solely or even primarily intended to curb terrorism is putting the cart before the horse.

The trouble is that governments frequently lump in criminal actions with regressive norms. Germany is leading a drive to curb foreign influence of mosques, train imams and control funding. France wants to cajole Muslims into a representative body. They are echoing the Muslim world, where Islam is often a state religion that is run, and stifled, by governments.

Conveniently no mention of how these tyrants in the Muslim world are doing the stifling of Islam at the behest of Western governments and Israel.

However, the top-down nannying of religion risks a backlash. Heavy-handed interference will alienate communities whose co-operation is needed to identify potential terrorists and abusers among them. Put on the defensive, Muslims will deepen communal identities and retreat into the very segregation that intervention is supposed to reverse.

You see that? Heavy-handed repression of devout Muslims is bad because then they won’t cooperate with us in policing themselves. If only we could somehow get them to cooperate in spite of heavy-handed repression…

The word “abuser” is very conspicuous here. I haven’t seen this pairing of terrorism with abuse in a mainstream media outlet before, but it is significant. Over the past year and a half we have seen this vaguely-defined concept of “spiritual abuse” be introduced in Muslim community discussions by liberal activists who, like the Economist, seem to have a strange animus toward “foreign imams.” For all the self-righteous sanctimony surrounding the concept of “spiritual abuse,” most of what we have seen so far by those deploying the term is the policing of illiberalism. Of course, this has been the prime function of the concept of “extremism” as well. Countering extremism by Western governmental agencies and their Muslim agents has just amounted to countering illiberalism. It appears that countering abuse serves that same end.

Rather than intervene in doctrine, it is better to deal with social conservatism through argument and persuasion. That can make for testy debate. This week Ilhan Omar, a Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota, had to apologise for peddling anti-Semitic tropes. The trickiest balance is over how to counter the radicalisation of Muslims, whether online or in prisons. This often involves vulnerable young people becoming more devout before turning to violence. But there are signs of progress. Although young Muslims are conservative by the standards of Western society (eg, on gay schoolteachers), they are more liberal than their elders.

Ilhan Omar is a social conservative? The same Ilhan Omar that is regularly tweeting about her love for cross dressers and sodomites? That Ilhan Omar?

It’s not a mistake that the Economist portrays Ilhan Omar as some kind of radically conservative Muslim. If someone as nauseatingly liberal and assimilated as Ilhan Omar is on the edge of radicalism, then the vast majority of the non-LGBT-accepting, non-faux-turban-wearing Western Muslim community must be ISIS on steroids by that standard.

And as the Economist makes clear here, this conservatism justifies the surveillance and policing of the Muslim community. In the world of the Economist, this is because being devout is the precursor to violence, i.e., terrorism. Socially conservative, i.e., illiberal, Muslims are one step away from committing terrorism. Muslims who criticize Israel are one step away from committing terrorism. Therefore, monitoring Muslims in order to detect the first sign of illiberalism and/or anti-Zionism is critical to fighting terror. This has been the de facto anti-terror policy position in the West since 2001.

Of course, it is irrelevant to the Economist that numerous studies have shown no positive correlation between religiosity and a propensity to commit acts of terror. Even the US Pentagon issued a report in 2004 concluding that the main driver of terrorism is not religiosity. Why should such studies matter when the real intention behind policing religious Muslims is to stamp out their illiberalism? That has always been the goal. Fighting terrorism or curbing “abuse” just provides a convenient justification for that larger project.

https://muslimskeptic.com/2019/02/1...g-and-other-idiotic-views-from-the-economist/

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More 'moderate' Islam.

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Brother Malcolm on the ball.

Blurb

A must-see for those that are looking for the truth about left-wing ideologies.

 

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Like to share.

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This is a discussion with a liberal Atheist (James) who thinks that western enlightenment ideas are the most moral alternative for human beings in opposed to Islamic ones.

 

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Another update.

Why the ‘Left’ is Dead in the Water

It seems that there is not much left of the Left and what remains has nothing to do with ‘Left.’

Contemporary ‘Left’ politics is detached from its natural constituency, working people. The so called ‘Left’ is basically a symbolic identifier for ‘Guardian readers’ a critical expression attributed to middle class people who, for some reason, claim to know what is good for the working class. How did this happen to the Left? Why was it derailed and by whom?

Hierarchy is one answer. The capitalist and the corporate worlds operate on an intensely hierarchical basis. The path to leadership within a bank, management of a globally trading company or even high command in the military is of an evolutionary nature. Such power is acquired by a challenging climb within an increasingly demanding system. It is all about the survival of the fittest. Every step entails new challenges. Failure at any step could easily result in a setback or even a career end. In the old good days, the Left also operated on a hierarchical system. There was a long challenging path from the local workers’ union to the national party. But the Left is hierarchical no more.

Left ideology, like working class politics, was initially the byproduct of the industrial revolution. It was born to address the needs and demands of a new emerging class; those who were working day and night to make other people richer. In the old days, when Left was a meaningful adventure, Left politicians grew out of workers’ unions. Those who were distinguished in representing and improving the conditions of their fellow workers made it to the trade unions and eventually into the national parties. None of that exists anymore.

In a world without manufacturing, the working class have been removed from the consumption chain and demoted into an ‘under class.’ The contemporary Left politician has nothing to do with the workless people let alone the workless class. The unions are largely defunct. You won’t find many Labour politicians who have actually worked in factories and mixed with working people for real. No contemporary Left politician including Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders is the product of a struggle through a highly demanding hierarchical system as such a system hasn’t really existed within the Left for at least four decades.

In most cases, the contemporary Left politician is a middle class university activist groomed through party politics activity. Instead of fighting for manufacturing and jobs, the Left has embraced the highly divisive identitarian battle. While the old Left tended to unite us by leading the fight against the horrid capitalists rather than worrying about whether you were a man or a woman, black or white, Jew or Muslim, gay or hetero, our present-day ‘Left’ actually promotes racial differences and divisions as it pushes people to identify with their biology (skin colour, gender, sexual orientation, Jewish maternal gene etc.) If the old Left united us against the capitalists, the contemporary ‘Left’ divides us and uses the funds it collects from capitalist foundations such as George Soros’ Open Society Institute.

The British Labour party is a prime example of this. It is deaf to the cry of the lower classes. It claims to care ‘for the many’ but in practice is only attentive to a few voices within the intrusive Israeli Lobby. As Britain is struggling with the crucial debate over Brexit, British Labour has been focused instead on spurious allegations of ‘antisemitsm.’ It is hard to see how any Left political body in the West even plans to bring more work to the people. The Left offers nothing in the way of a vision of a better society for all. It is impossible to find the Left within the contemporary ‘Left.’

Why has this happened to the Left, why has it become irrelevant? Because by now the Left is a non-hierarchical system. It is an amalgam of uniquely ungifted people who made politics into their ‘career.’ Most Left politicians have never worked at a proper job where money is exchanged for merit, achievements or results. The vast majority of Left politicians have never faced the economic challenges associated with the experience of being adults. Tragically such people can’t lead a country, a city, a borough or even a village.

The Left had a mostly positive run for about 150 years. But its role has come to an end as the condition of being in the world has been radically transformed. The Left failed to adapt. It removed itself from the universal ethos.

The shift in our human landscape has created a desperate need for a new ethos: a fresh stand point that will reinstate the Western Athenian ethical and universal roots and produce a new canon that aspires for truth and truthfulness as opposed to the current cancerous tyranny of correctness.

https://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/2019/2/28/why-the-left-is-dead-in-the-water

Good point on the importance of defending your culture.

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How can the Left be defeated?

vinylsingleman

3 years ago

Ironically, cultural Marxism is much stronger today in the West than it is in the old Communist bloc, where it has long been discarded.


RockingMrE

3 years ago

+vinylsingleman It looks that way. Eastern Europeans know better.

A look at the darker side of leftwing politics.

Blurb

One consequence of the triumph of the political left is the proliferation of fanciful psychiatric diagnoses for all manner of conservatives. Now Kerry Bolton has written a factually based account of the pathology of the left - the vanity of Rousseau, the narcissistic personality of Karl Marx, the megalomania of Trotsky, the father-hating hedonist Mao Zedong, through to the paedophile promoting Allen Ginsberg, and the Oedipus complex of Louis Althusser who on release from a mental hospital strangled his wife. Kerry Bolton’s The Psychotic Left not only makes fascinating reading, but it provides an insight into the hypocrisy of many of the leading figures on the political left, who despite their rhetoric were totally devoid of compassion or empathy for their fellow man.

A common thread of many of the personalities discussed in this book is an overwhelming narcissism - the arrogance of people who are absolutely confident in their prescriptions for redesigning society and absolutely ruthless in putting their ideas into action - whatever the cost in human lives and suffering.

 

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Like to share, a vision of the future?

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Another update.

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Is LIBERAL DEMOCRACY in RETREAT?

Recent elections in India and Europe, societies with a range of cultures and levels of wealth, have provided further proof that the liberal world order, is retreating into one dominated by sovereignty and the nation state. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on his Hindu nationalist ticket, won an even bigger majority. In European parliamentary elections, what have become known as populist parties increased their share of the vote to 29 percent of the total, up from just 10 percent two decades ago.