Entries in What is to be done? (65)
Hitchens on the Obama win
Peter, thank God, not the execrable Christopher.
I am glad to see the doddering, ill-tempered warmonger McCain sent back to the Senate, where he can live out what's left of his political career as the addled Maverick. Those of us who feel that way should not welcome the advent of Obamanation, however. Hitchens tells us why in this "must read." Some salient points:
Anyone would think we had just elected a hip, skinny and youthful replacement for God, with a plan to modernise Heaven and Hell – or that at the very least John Lennon had come back from the dead.
The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced civilisation. At least Mandela-worship – its nearest equivalent – is focused on a man who actually did something.
Ireally don’t see how the Obama devotees can ever in future mock the Moonies, the Scientologists or people who claim to have been abducted in flying saucers. This is a cult like the one which grew up around Princess Diana, bereft of reason and hostile to facts. . . .
If you can believe that this undistinguished and conventionally Left-wing machine politician is a sort of secular saviour, then you can believe anything. He plainly doesn’t believe it himself. His cliche-stuffed, PC clunker of an acceptance speech suffered badly from nerves. It was what you would expect from someone who knew he’d promised too much and that from now on the easy bit was over.
He needn’t worry too much. From now on, the rough boys and girls of America’s Democratic Party apparatus, many recycled from Bill Clinton’s stained and crumpled entourage, will crowd round him, to collect the rich spoils of his victory and also tell him what to do, which is what he is used to. . . .
I was in Washington DC the night of the election. America’s beautiful capital has a sad secret. It is perhaps the most racially divided city in the world, with 15th Street – which runs due north from the White House – the unofficial frontier between black and white. But, like so much of America, it also now has a new division, and one which is in many ways much more important. I had attended an election-night party in a smart and liberal white area, but was staying the night less than a mile away on the edge of a suburb where Spanish is spoken as much as English, plus a smattering of tongues from such places as Ethiopia, Somalia and Afghanistan.
As I walked, I crossed another of Washington’s secret frontiers. There had been a few white people blowing car horns and shouting, as the result became clear. But among the Mexicans, Salvadorans and the other Third World nationalities, there was something like ecstasy.
They grasped the real significance of this moment. They knew it meant that America had finally switched sides in a global cultural war. Forget the Cold War, or even the Iraq War. The United States, having for the most part a deeply conservative people, had until now just about stood out against many of the mistakes which have ruined so much of the rest of the world.
Suspicious of welfare addiction, feeble justice and high taxes, totally committed to preserving its own national sovereignty, unabashedly Christian in a world part secular and part Muslim, suspicious of the Great Global Warming panic, it was unique.
These strengths had been fading for some time, mainly due to poorly controlled mass immigration and to the march of political correctness. They had also been weakened by the failure of America’s conservative party – the Republicans – to fight on the cultural and moral fronts.
They preferred to posture on the world stage. Scared of confronting Left-wing teachers and sexual revolutionaries at home, they could order soldiers to be brave on their behalf in far-off deserts. And now the US, like Britain before it, has begun the long slow descent into the Third World. How sad. Where now is our last best hope on Earth?
It's going to be a helluva ride, boys and girls. Better cowboy up.

Caedmon is pleased to have St. George Blog linked at SerbBlog
I received a couple of compliments from the owner of SerbBlog, Melana Pejakovich, who is doing the yeoman's work (well, yeowoman's, actually) of keeping the plight of the Serbian nation in view of the public, not only through her blog, but through other venues as well. I mentioned this blog here some time ago and linked it over on my Links page. It is just a superb piece of work, and I highly recommend it to all.
It's no secret that my sympathies are with the Russian and Serbian nations. There are two reasons for this: 1) I am Orthodox (though of a very quirky, Western sort); and 2) as a paleoconservative, I see in those two nations the potential for traditional Christian culture to be reborn, in a way that currently seems impossible here in the West.
As well, my sympathies for Russia and Serbia are fueled by my utter disdain for the empire that the United States have (yes, that's "have", not "has") become. America was never meant to be such, as our Founding Fathers clearly argued. Washington DC has been in the hands of usurpers since the middle of the 19th century, and I lament not only what that damnable Rome on the Potomac has done to our republic, but what it is currently doing overseas in the name of "spreading democracy."
The realizatiion of what happened to America has propelled me in a "neo-Confederate" direction. Though that is clearly a pejorative term to many people, I'll own it, though it's really more accurate to call me a "confederalist" or a "neo-secessionist." My principal concern is a return to America as orignally conceived, and not so much the CSA (though, as a Son of the South and of Confederate veterans, I fly her banners with pride).
I see the causes of a free and sovereign America and a free and sovereign Serbia as linked. That's why I recently wrote that it's equally true to say that "the cause of Serbia is the cause of us all" as it is to say, with CSA VP Alexander Stephens, "the cause of the South is the cause of us all." Both causes are currently stymied by the Federal regime here and the powers of Western Europe. But there is reason for hope, as those two Leviathans may soon be undone, a result of their own internal rot.
So, thank you Melana. I am honored to have my blog linked at yours, and yours linked here. Long live Serbia.
Moscow Patriarchate tells the US what's what about Georgia and other matters
A senior official of the Russian Orthodox Church has made a scathing attack on Western countries and has said they should not impose their standards on other nations. "We should have a strong State and a strong military, for we would then have the will and ability to repel any invasion against our way of life and interests, and our ability to influence events developing in the world," said the Rev. Vsevolod Chaplin, deputy head of the Moscow Patriarchate's Department for External Church Relations.
In an interview broadcast on Russia's Soyuz television channel, the church official urged his country to defend "its free, original political choice" and reject Western models, "setting its laws and rules the way which is natural for our nation, its destiny, mentality and historical ways".
Speaking of Western countries, Chaplin said, "In spite of all their talk of adhering to international law and respecting self-determination, these countries have always acted solely in their own interests and applied quite contrary principles. . . ."
Defending the Russian army action (in Georgia), Chaplin said the United States and NATO had sent troops to countries where "the people have never asked for it, and neither referendums nor votes were held on the question".
He added, "Why does the West believe, as [U.S. President George W.] Bush has clearly stated, that only one form of democracy and of people's participation in decisions, the Western form, is compulsory and should be set out for all nations and countries?"
Chaplin asserted, "Survival is impossible for a society deprived of faith as a foundation of public life and of any purpose except consumption, and which embraces the ideal of imposing a particular form of democracy around the globe simply because it is expedient for American banks, Western governments, and the world economic and media elite."
Which is why we can only hope this is true.
Death to neoconservatism and the American empire; long live the restored American republic(s).

Don't mess with the Bear.
The cause of Serbia is the cause of us all
If I might dare to quote that American patriot, Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederate States of America:





