The Slow Collapse of Western Civil Structure

Civilisations come and go: they have done in the past and notable was the lack of perception of most of their peoples. They did not drive the rise of their own and they barely noticed its fall.  These events happen over long spans of time, in places that are further away than the next town and village and most people are too 'immersed' to take note anyway. But we live in a very different age, marked out by our vastly superior communications and ability to see and talk to one another over vast distances. We see what previous generations could not see. 

Our current and so well established civilisation with its legal, governmental, ethical and religious structures has been around a long time and most have forgotten how it started, was built and developed.  The folk of today took little part in the sacrifices. Today though they can take part in sacrificing it all at the behest of society's wreckers.

Few understand building regs. The natural ones. The trenches that need to be dug, the stones laid down, the Foundations painstakingly constructed, the Keystones where they need to be. Such is the way a civilisation is made.  Our Foundations are made from  the Catholic Faith, laid in trenches lined with Roman stone. The walls and doors, the windows and floors went in with strength and firmness of Faith, and upper floors were added. These enabled Freedom, Law, Science, Education, Democratic Government et al to take place and be fitted.

For 1500 years the Foundations were laid and the structures laid out. Then the past five hundred years have seen effort put into higher and higher upper floors  to reach the pinnacles, but at the gross neglect, even canabalisation of the Foundation. That Faith is weakened. Diluted. The Ethical underpinnings have been eroded. Some have been taken to with sledge hammers to prise out stones put to building statues to faithlessness. 

The result is around us. We are starting to see the entire civilisational edifice crumble for lack of 'base'. The upper floors are tumbling. Education, science, Law, even Freedom, are crumbling and failing.

Several folk stood glumly in the Tavern pointing out this issue and that, amongst them one I had not seen in a while and a new face or two as well. The previously missed was Melanie Phillips. Glad to see her back again.  She stood to tell of some symptoms of the dis-ease afflicting us. The white-ants in the woodwork. She identifies who are walking eyes wide shut and who are tearing the place down to build a mud hut. Her focus was on Politics and Values. She almost misses the point, seeing the symptom as the disease. 

Easy to do.

TOTALITARIANISM IS WINNING IN THE WEST

Credit to the left-leaning Atlantic magazine for running a piece by Peter Beinart, who has actually looked at what is happening in American society and reached an uncomfortable conclusion which would be hard to find elsewhere in the media – and which is all-too pertinent in the wake of Charlottesville.

For Beinart warns that the left is lurching into totalitarianism and violence. “Antifa” purport to be anti-fascist. But they define as fascist anyone they disagree with including mainstream conservatives. Hence their violent suppression of commentators and scholars such as the conservative columnist Ann Coulter, the Breitbart controversialist Milo Yiannopoulos and the political scientist Charles Murray.

 http://www.melaniephillips.com/totalitarianism-winning-west/

What Antifa most certainly do not do is defend democracy, freedom and liberal values. As Beinart observes:

“Since antifa is heavily composed of anarchists, its activists place little faith in the state, which they consider complicit in fascism and racism. They prefer direct action: They pressure venues to deny white supremacists space to meet. They pressure employers to fire them and landlords to evict them. And when people they deem racists and fascists manage to assemble, antifa’s partisans try to break up their gatherings, including by force.”

If this was just a bunch of anarchists, the problem wouldn’t be so bad. What takes this onto a different level altogether is the fact that the mainstream left does not disavow Antifa but tolerates, sanitises and condones it. Referring specifically to the assault last January on the white supremacist Richard Spencer, Beinart continues:

“Such tactics have elicited substantial support from the mainstream left. When the masked antifa activist was filmed assaulting Spencer on Inauguration Day, another piece in The Nation described his punch as an act of ‘kinetic beauty.’ Slate ran an approving article about a humorous piano ballad that glorified the assault. Twitter was inundated with viral versions of the video set to different songs, prompting the former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau to tweet, ‘I don’t care how many different songs you set Richard Spencer being punched to, I’ll laugh at every one.’

“The violence is not directed only at avowed racists like Spencer: In June of last year, demonstrators – at least some of whom were associated with antifa – punched and threw eggs at people exiting a Trump rally in San Jose, California. An article in It’s Going Down celebrated the ‘righteous beatings.’”

As I wrote in The Times yesterday, this has produced an unholy alliance between the left and the far right:

“A white supremacist called Richard Spencer invented the blanket term ‘alt-right’ to associate his ilk with conservatives seeking merely to defend American identity and core values. Through this tactic, Spencer intended to boost the far right and simultaneously smear and thus destroy regular conservatives.

“The left has seized upon this smear with unbridled joy, routinely using the

‘alt-right’ term to try to destroy the national identity agenda by bracketing it with white supremacism. The result is a powerful boost for the far right. From deserved obscurity, they suddenly find the left are transmitting their every utterance to the world.

The phrase “useful idiots” comes inescapably to mind.”

Far from the left fighting the far-right, it is in fact inadvertently giving it the most powerful boost it has received since Nazism was defeated in 1945. This is not just because the left is using the far-right to smear and undermine mainstream conservatives, whose aim to defend western culture has been viciously equated over many decades now with white racism.

Not that there is any real 'far right'. The left can be scorned for decrying 'nazis' when for anyone with eyes to read history and ears to listen to fascist speeches of that era, the nazis WERE the left. 

National Socialist Workers Party of Germany. 

Hello!

It’s also that – just as we can see over Islamisation – the fascist right has moved into the vacuum left by mainstream cultural and political establishment, which either shuts its eyes to the undermining of western values (US Republican Party, UK Conservative Party) or has put itself at the vanguard of the attempt to replace the west and even human identity itself by a new world order (US Democratic Party, UK Labour Party). {Oz is in the mix too}

The outcome is as predictable as it is terrible. This is why.

The equation of mainstream “national identity” conservatism with white supremacism is a foul lie. 

“National identity” conservatives want to uphold core western cultural values they deeply cherish and share with each other. The racist and fascist far-right is driven by loathing of racial and ethnic groups deemed to be inferior. The former is based on love; the latter is based on hate.

'Cultural Values' that lack the Foundations were bound to fail though. 

But here’s the awful thing. The more the mainstream establishment abandons or undermines western national identity, the more the fascist right postures that it alone is defending it. The more the fascist right flexes its muscles, the more the left seizes on those people as cultural aggressors, falsely presents the totalitarian left along with the Islamists as their victims and the heroic defenders of freedom, and assassinates the character of anyone who dares protest that the left along with the Islamists are in fact the twin destroyers of freedom and the major threat to it. The more mainstream society flees in terror from this cultural battleground, the greater the vacuum into which the fascist right will increasingly march. If mainstream society doesn’t get its act together, totalitarianism will win.

This fearsome situation is the reason Donald J Trump came to power. 

The west has simply come off the cultural rails. 

Or, rather, it has undermined the Foundations. 

Conservatism, the attitude of mind which conserves what is valuable in a society and defends it as the cultural legacy to be handed down to generations as yet unborn, no longer knows what it is supposed to be defending.

The West has lost its Faith. Its original Faith Foundations were hacked at and stones removed. 

Faced with the focused and implacable onslaught of secularism and left-wing ideology aimed at undermining and destroying the cultural legacy of the west, conservatives have scattered in total bewilderment, confusion and fear.

As a result the west, the crucible of reason, freedom and order, is repudiating these altogether and reverting to a Hobbesian war of all against all.

I have repeatedly stated my concern about Trump’s psychological flaws and his patent inadequacy for the great office he holds. But I separate the man from what he represents: the promotion and defence of American and western core values. That’s what his 63 million voters were saying they wanted when they elected him.

Those ranged against him are the apogee of what has been happening for the past fifty years: the willed undermining of the west by the totalitarian left. The gross and suicidal disorder of the age has thrown up a president who stands outside the boundaries of what is acceptable because 

western society itself has inverted truth and lies, right and wrong, 

justice and injustice. Trump is the creation of the left – and the more ugly their attempt to destroy him, the more they remind us just why this man was elected.

Trump is very far from what I would have chosen as the holder of any public office. But when I see the contempt for democracy shown by those trying to lever him out, the vicious lies and frankly deranged character assassination deployed against him and his team, the violence and intimidation used by his opponents – and the way in which the media keep the public in widespread ignorance of all this because the media, along with the rest of the intelligentsia, have their minds hermetically sealed by the same group-think – I know who frightens me more. 

Melanie is not wrong insofar as the political symptoms stand, but she does not get to the heart of the malaise. 

I listened as someone much closer to the Tavern - one who lives not far away - spoke to symptoms too, but in his case he has his eyes almost closed: not so much closed as having a mote in it. Mr Campbell Markham. 

Just a point here: Many speak in the Tavern and they do not always reflect the Tavern Keeper's views. I serve the ale. I admire many here, while having my own views too.

He is also more hopeful and personal.

Our friendships are shattering

My heart aches.  Friendships everywhere are shattering.

Tonight I spoke to some dear friends.  One described how his parents confronted him over the marriage issue.  They had read one of my articles and asked:  “Is this what you believe?” 

The other said that her sister in Brazil, and a long-time friend in Mexico, are angry for her Christian beliefs about marriage:  “LGBT people are born that way, but you choose to be a Christian!”

https://campbellmarkham1970.blogspot.com.au/2017/08/our-friendships-are-shattering.html

Today my daughter described a group chat where friends rage against Christians for their convictions about LGBT issues.  It is excruciating for her.

A lady in my church told me how angry her husband is about these things, and she can no longer talk about her faith at home. 

A man in our church community thinks of leaving us.  He is loved, but he has a different view about marriage and feels that he can’t stay.

These are five drops in an ocean of broken relationships, and every drop is bitter. 

It doesn’t matter how often  we say that we don’t hate anyone, and that we can disagree without hating.  It doesn’t matter how often we show by our actions that we love and don’t hate. 

Australia has made up its mind: 

 if you won’t accept the LGBT program, then you are hateful and you deserve to be put in your place.  Old and precious friendships lie wrecked.

And here’s another thing. 

 Christians are no longer being left alone with their beliefs. 

 We are now asked about them; people want to know.  “What do you think about marriage?”  We must make our beliefs known, and be treated accordingly.

It’s going to get a lot worse.  Opinion in our society is accelerating, it is becoming more intense, more polarised.  Disagreement is felt instinctively to equate with hatred and unreasonable bigotry, and a corresponding outrage erupts.  

I am not saying that relationships are going to fracture—they are fracturing right now.  The shards of splintered attachments are raining down hard around us.

Here, one could gently remind this Protestant but Good man, that perhaps he is part of a long-term problem. He is not a Catholic, but one who follows a church - indeed is a person of significance -  which undermined the Foundations 500 years ago and removed solid stones hewn by Catholic predecessors, in order to 'go his own way' and build his church.

There may have been some justification in excavating the Foundations and putting in a damp-course, to stop the rot that was occuring, but the Council of Trent did that. The Protestants nevertheless refused to return the stones to their place and return to the fold themselves.

500 years of nit-picking undermining and ego-driven 'seperate churches has resulted in a severe dilution of Faithful people, and laterly an infiltration of those absconders into the woodwork again, bringing fresh rot to the Church. The Catholic Church is suffering again.

And so the words of Jesus, that we have heard two-hundred times, now emerge into deeply disturbing reality.

“Whoever acknowledges me before others, I will also acknowledge before my father in heaven.  But whoever disowns me before others, I will disown before my father in heaven.  Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. 

 I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. 

 For I have come to turn, ‘a man against his father, and daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law – a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household’” (Mat 10:32-36).

Jesus said that he would divide humanity, and now we live that.  And the LGBT movement has apparently become the touchstone for this division. 

One cannot over-emphasise this enough. This whole mess was caused by a division in the first place, and NOT one brought by Christ, but by those who disagreed with the Church that Christ Himself established and promised to guide and preserve.

To them, the ones who diverged, Christ, apparantly, broke His promise !!

Let me explain what I mean.

Jesus’ total plan for sex and marriage and family is distinct and unambiguous:  “A man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate” (Mat 19:5-6).   

LGBT sex, marriage, and family ethics flatly contradict Jesus’ plan.  To be a Christian, therefore, is necessarily to stand distinctly against LGBT ethics.

We are at heart dividing over Jesus, and this means dividing over two distinct world views and a constellation of differences.  But Jesus’ sex, marriage, and family design is the most prominent boulder on which the society’s cultural and ethical river breaks, to roll and rage its separate ways.

This has become especially clear to me with the Baby Boomers.  Even those who are not LGBT have come to be angered with those who reject the LGBT ethic.  Why, when even just five years ago it was something that they hardly gave a thought to? 

 Because it has become a flag that stands for their whole world view: 

  a standard for their autonomy, self-determinationand self-constructed spirituality; of all the things that Jesus demanded we repent of.

Hello ! 

Does he hear himself?

Whether I’m right or wrong about this, the division that Jesus promised is here.  How do we respond? 

Be glad that the fog of complacency is blowing away.  Ten years ago no one really cared about God and the Bible and Jesus.  No one wanted to talk about it.  People were dying in droves having given barely a thought to God and judgment and eternity.  Now these are hot topics:  these are the beliefs that deeply offend and anger.  Rejoice for conversations about Jesus, as thorny and rugged as they might be.

God makes everything Right, in His own time.

Don’t trade Jesus’ truth for friendship.  The greatest need for people in our lives is not our friendship, but Christ.  The greatest need is not peaceful and quiet relationships, but Jesus’ saving death.  Yes fight hard to keep your relationships, but never at the expense of truth, or by keeping the kind of silence that communicates ambivalence about the truth. 

Yes we must speak wisely and “with gentleness and respect.”  But forget clever and sophisticated-sounding arguments that try to salvage common ground where there is none. 

 There is no give and take when it comes to Jesus.  “He who is not with me is against me” (Mat 12:30).

Accept with sorrowful hearts that many of your relationships will break.  Jesus promised it.  It is a sign that his truth is being heard and wrestled with.  And though we should weep for lost friends, we should never despair.  Our friendships may one day be restored, bringing about something far better.

Indeed. As a Catholic, I look to the day when the freindship between Catholics and Protestants will be restored. What he says of those (LBGTers) who revile Christians is but an echo of what Protestants have said about Catholics for 16 generations, and for which most have no idea why ! Habit and upbringing have a lot to answer-for.

Expect to be shamed.  It was not enough for Jesus’ enemies to do away with him.  First they had to spit on him, regale him in a purple robe and a crown of thorns, strip him, nail him to a cross, and hurl insults at him.  Jesus told us to expect the same shame (Mat 10:25).  It’s one thing for someone to hurt you or shout at you.  Shame brings a whole different realm of bitter feelings.  Expect it, and prepare to respond with surprising joy: 

“Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.  Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you” (Mat 5:11-12).

Let us honour our parents, sacrificially love our wives, submit to our husbands, work hard for our masters, and treat our children with patient tenderness.  But love Christ first—for this is right, and is the most loving thing that we can do for those around us.  And if loving Christ and submitting to his teaching means shattered relationships, then we must not be surprised, but weep and pray and leave it in the hands of Him who knows best. 

And he will do wonders.

I do not take issue with this fine man. He speaks well and is currently under severe attack for speaking out. He has my admiration and support.

Would that men such as he would return to the Foundation, to the Church, as a Catholic. 

Until the day when the 'friendly-fire' ceases and we all join together against the lies and cant, the deceptions and the insults, the assaults and the destructions of the Liars,  we will continue sliding down the slippery slopes to the end of our Civil and Spiritual World.

The multiplicity of 'Christian churches' has taken many fine, upstanding men and women away from the One True Faith and enabled poor and even 'bad' people to be deceived. The rise of such minor yet quite large churches has enabled a fifth column which embraces heretics and even clearly anti-christian people to pass themselves off as christians - the Westboro' mob spring to mind - which in turn gives ammunition to the LGBT crowd to point to 'hatred'.

Christians do not hate. 

Truely Christian people that is.

One such effort at joining together, in Oz at least, is the Australian Christian Lobby. The ACL.  They (we) do not hate, and in fact go far to show love and kindness, while being 'strong'.

While the LGBTers whine about being scared that Christians will say horrid, hateful things about them, one of their own did far worse and bombed the ACL offices.

The police initially denied any 'motive' that might look anti-Christian. But now they cannot. 

Gay activist did bomb ‘research’ before ACL hit

The man accused of driving a burning van laden with gas bottles into the Australian Christian Lobby headquarters was a gay activist who disliked the group because of its “position on sexuality” and had searched online how to make plastic explosives and a pressure-cooker bomb.

 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/gay-activist-did-bomb-research-before-acl-hit/news-story/53500c374454344cc24a29b3303dd26c?nk=1dc4d9f3f2a05effc85fce79fb2efc8a-1502945006

The face of LGBT

Court documents tendered to the ACT Magistrates Court yesterday reveal Jaden Duong had also run searches about gay marriage in other countries and, a month before the alleged attack at 10.45pm on December 21 last year, had searched for the “Australian Christian Lobby”.

After the blast at the group’s Canberra headquarters in Deakin, which gutted the ground floor and caused $100,000 of damage, police said the 

attack was not “politically, religiously or ideologically motivated” and referred to it as a “car fire”.

According to documents tendered in court, soon after the explosion, police asked Mr Duong why he had picked the location. “Because I dislike the Australian Christian Lobby,” he allegedly replied. 

The Australian understands he previously had volunteered on the political campaign of a gay activist politician and for an LGBTI organisation in San Francisco.

The former IT manager’s LinkedIn profile, which was taken offline earlier this year, said he had volunteered on California State Assembly member and gay activist David Chiu’s 2014 campaign for office and on Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf’s 2014 campaign.

A person describing himself online as Jaden Duong was also a contestant in the Mr GAPA 2014 pageant hosted by the Gay Asia Pacific Alliance Foundation in San Francisco.

Mr Duong’s LinkedIn profile says he volunteered for political organisation San Francisco Moderates and San Francisco-based social entrepreneurship organisation StartOut, which offers “education, networking, mentorship and access to capital in order to foster entrepreneurs and great business leaders in the LGBTQ community”.

The Australian can also reveal that a Jaden Duong joined the ACL’s email list on July 7 last year before unsubscribing on August 23.

Online, Mr Duong said he had worked in IT for law firms including Freehills, Mallesons and Sparke Helmore in Sydney and Canberra, as well as at the University of Technology Sydney.

He also claimed he previously worked at the Australian Taxation Office, Centrelink and the Department of Health and Aged Care.

Australian Federal Police Commissioner Andrew Colvin told a Senate estimates hearing earlier this year that authorities believed Mr Duong knew the building he drove into in December was the ACL office, but that he was not driven by an ideology based on anything the Christian lobby had said or done.

Clearly the Police lied and tried to provide cover for this paragon of 'please don't hate me' modern faux-virtue.

Not that we can expect the Police to be held to account.

It is coming the time when Christians will need to come together, back into one Church. The above issues are almost all 'internal' to our civilisation but there are external threats looming and threatening to overwhelm.

The Islamists. Mohammedans. Moslems.

It was Catholics 1000 years ago that took up the sword to fight off the same threat back then. Not a divided christianity.  Not 'christians'. We may need to take up the sword again. United.

Drink deep of Grace.

Get thee to Confession.

Take Communion.

Gird for the Fight.

Return to the fold. 

Then.......

only then......

Pax.