“We should expect tyranny to result from democracy, the most savage subjection from an excess of liberty”.

-Plato, Republic, Book VIII, 564 a

This December, as many Americans attended to their rituals of shopping, spectator sports and celebrity voyeurism, the 2012 fiscal year’s National Defense Authorization Act was passed by the U.S. Congress. It has now been signed into law by President Obama. This legislation has attracted some controversy, if characteristically muted, thanks to one of its provisions in particular. The U.S. military will be granted the power to detain citizens on the soil of the Land of the Free for indefinite periods of time. All that’s needed to do away with due process is the suspicion of involvement with “terrorism,” an activity elastically defined[1].

Well-meaning commentators have expressed some shock at the passage of an act that enables martial law and interminable vacations to Guantanamo. America was founded on the concept of inalienable rights! Critics and opponents of the liberal order, however, are in no way surprised at this development, for it was decades in the making. With the NDAA, our policy elites have appropriated a mask of legality to manage the chaos they themselves engineered. The rights once upheld as inalienable were ultimately a fanciful construct, a fiction employed in the service of enlightened government.

As Western democracy evolves and extends its power across the world, its ascendance must be secured and made absolute. Serious resistance abroad and at home will surely be crushed. With hearty approval of the new act, Senator Lindsey Graham remarked that America had now assumed its place as a segment of a much larger battlefield for freedom. Old fairy tales of civic virtue have outlived their usefulness in an age of globalism; the new narrative of universal terror assures us liberty and equality forever. A CIA officer-turned-security consultant explains the need for ubiquitous surveillance and government intrusion into all spheres of life:

If we watch – in the United States, in Germany, Sweden, the U.K. – things are constantly at a low boil and we always need to be on our guard…This can take place just about anywhere.

Terror and tyranny are inevitable byproducts of democracy, the one legitimate form of rule permitted by Washington to the tribes of humanity. Our struggle for the rights of man must by necessity incur some casualties, but such bloodshed waters the tree of liberty. Tabulated (or not) as collateral damage, Pashtun villagers are ripped apart by Hellfire missiles launched by drones so that one day girls from that very community may go to an NGO-run school and learn about voting and contraception. Yet when a Pakistani who has taken U.S. citizenship attempts to blow up Times Square in revenge, no one in America’s political and media establishment seems the least bit curious as to his motives. The entire affair is written off as business as usual in the Open Society--after all, it could have taken place anywhere. This regime is the culmination of liberalism’s logic; it is what U.S. forces patrolling the Hindu Kush and all other corners of the earth defend. We fight them over there to invite them over here, for peace and unity in our world must first be enforced through universal war.

I am a child of the Cold War, so I spent most of my life in an epoch where the 'Year 2000' was synonymous with ‘The Future’—a time when, provided we averted a thermonuclear apocalypse, people would be wearing silver spacesuits and bases would have been long established on the moon.

When the year 2000 finally came, however, it was anti-climatic: I spent New Years Eve in the company of investment executives, whose host never cared to keep track of the time in order to witness the year change at its precise moment. I was the only one to notice the stroke of midnight while sitting at the dinner table. When the date changed, I elbowed my neighbour to point out that we had entered the year 2000, but she only gave me a brief, distracted, half-lidded glance and an indifferent “Ah, yea… Hm.”

Twenty years earlier I would have been exasperated, but by 1999, amidst the hype surrounding the so-called “millennium” (which was not due until the following year anyway, since there was no year zero), I had began to think about the dating system we currently use in the West.

In the middle of a summer in which Black flash mobs have ambushed and terrorize unsuspecting Caucasians at public events and a mulatto President speaks placating words to militantly racist Mestizos intent on reclaiming “Aztlan” from the gringos, it just figures that the heartwarming, inspirational and “relevant” new family film is about the abiding cruel perfidy of…White Southerners!

But then some things never change, at least not among the image-makers and opinion-shapers of Hollywood, where simplistic segregation-era morality plays featuring murderously mean-faced rednecks and saintly, martyred magic Negros are forever de rigueur. From To Kill a Mockingbird through Mississippi Burning and now The Help, with several lesser productions in between, we can chart the history of this singularly monotonous cinematic trend. Movies of this genre are typically as shorn of nuance as any Goebbels-approved Nazi propaganda film, except with the exact opposite racial message. Still, the aim is identical: to fill the viewer with righteous indignation against the enemies of the Zeitgeist, who also just happen to be enemies of the state.

If our Hollywood masters are eager to draw our attention away from the messy and miserable failure of present-day multiculturalism for favor of a smarmily black-and-white portrayal of a past supposedly rife with White racism, these same cultural commissars seem oddly fixated on the once prevalent, now thoroughly exorcised, bugaboo of sexual repression. Contemporary Western pop culture is endlessly saturated with sexy pop songs, sexy music videos, sexy TV shows, sexy movies, sexy magazines, and sexy books (for those few still functionally literate); try as you might, you pretty much can’t escape the sight of leggy, buxom starlets miming fellatio while drunkenly exposing their bare crotches, or the sound of mind-numbingly raunchy dance anthems in which the singer orgasmically celebrates his or her unapologetically libertine lifestyle, or the sight and sound of gleefully fornicating teenagers in the latest “provocative” reality show or “hilarious” sex comedy. Yet for all that, moviemakers still apparently felt the need to remake Footloose, a movie which even in the '80s seemed to belong in some kind of weird Twilight Zone America located in an alternate universe.

The population and leadership of the United States may be more sincerely Christian today than it was at the nation’s founding. Despite, or perhaps because of that, Christianity is on the brink of being driven from public life.

When the nation’s most prominent self-proclaimed “Christian” is probably Katy Perry and most effective policy advocate is Lady Gaga, it’s nonetheless remarkable to consider the strength and relative militancy of Christian belief in this country. The United States is unique among developed nations in the persistence of religious feeling. Solid majorities of every faith believe that “it is important” that a presidential candidate have strong religious beliefs (regardless of what they are). While poll takers either don’t care (or don’t want to talk about) their views on the racial makeup of their grandkids, almost half confidently say that if their daughter brings home a date with a Darwin fish, he’s going to be sent packing. Every single American President of the recent past, including Obama, has made sure to meet and pray with Billy Graham and publicly affirm their Christian beliefs, if only as a political maneuver.

Let’s go further. Can anyone imagine any of the presidential candidates, Republican or Democrat, writing a version of the gospel that had taken out the miracles and explicitly denied the divinity of Christ? Furthermore, can one imagine such a book being presented to every new member of Congress? While among movement conservatives it is fashionable to claim that the Founding Fathers were actually religious conservatives, this is the same kind of revisionist history that tells us that Martin Luther King Jr. was actually a great intellectual conservative, that only conservatives are truly against racism, and that the real victims of affirmative action are Blacks on the liberal plantation.

Of course, it was the author of our Declaration of Independence who wrote the aforementioned “Jefferson bible,” which was printed by and presented to members of Congress early in the last century. Jefferson contemptuously classified the Virgin Birth as a fable to be “classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter” and doubted the divinity of Christ. While Jefferson claimed adherence to the teachings of Jesus, he seems to have ignored, or not cared, that these moral teachings only make sense if Christ was the Son of God, else they were simply the ravings of a lunatic.

Fellow Alt-Righter Matthew Parrott was kind enough to offer his thoughts on my response to the recent atrocity in Norway. His criticisms deserve a hearing, and so I would like to provide an answer to them. Mr. Parrott first asserts:

You’ve essentially dichotomized the Greater War and the Lesser War, broadly condemning bold action in defense of the West as inferior to authentic Christianity.

The spiritual combat is indeed the Greater War. Yet if history is our teacher, physical defense is also required for the survival of a people and culture. Pacifism is out of the question. In no way would I condemn ‘bold action in defense of the West’—the action simply must be justified and ethical. Breivik’s deed was certainly bold, and he perceived it in defense of the West. But beyond that, it was the murder of unarmed civilians, no matter their destructive worldview and political program. Were White Russian agents to massacre a Komsomol camp of future apparatchiks in the Stalinist USSR, such an operation also could not be justified. Killing Stalin and attacking the NKVD would be. To cite Ivan Ilyin once more, resistance to evil with force is necessary, and this notion itself derives from the spiritual principle.

In the desperate war for the soul of the West, we witness another atrocity. And this time the perpetrator was neither a Bolshevik nor a disciple of Mahomet. Last week Anders Behring Breivik, a 32-year-old Norwegian, gunned down 68 unarmed Labor Party youth activists on an island camp outside Oslo after bombing government offices (where eight died). The deed, he announced, had been wrought in the name of traditional Europe. Breivik’s massacre seems designed to inflict maximum damage to the European cause, but at this point it looks to be the well-planned and executed work of a dedicated madman.

Breivik claims to have acted on behalf of Christendom, and so appropriated its heroes and imagery in his propaganda. In this we uncover the tragedy of his recourse to murder, as well as an element of the diabolical. Speaking on the inversion of symbols, the great French traditionalist René Guenon would warn:

“It sometimes so happens that people who imagine that they are fighting the devil, whatever their particular notion of the devil may be, are thus turned, without any suspicion of the fact on their part, into his best servants!”

On Palm Sunday of this year Charles Martel, victor of Tours, could smile upon his descendants. A small band of Franks wielding hammers again rose in defense of the West. The action was local-scale and humble; there was no smashing of the Saracen horde. Four young men entered art mogul Yvon Lambert’s gallery in Avignon and destroyed the Piss Christ, a world-famous image of a crucifix submerged in a jar of urine (It had previously been attacked in Australia; the coup de grace fell to the French). Their raid does nothing to shift the odds against traditionalists- it is rather an emblem of resistance, akin to stealing a general’s banner from the enemy camp. In such symbols the struggle endures.

The story of 20^th-century art is one of subversion, the use of creative media for purely destructive ends. Painting, music, literature and sculpture were used as refined weapons in the avant-garde’s rebellion against Christendom. The enterprise was wildly successful- a witch’s brew of Freud and Marx prepared by the Frankfurt School would only accelerate the dominant liberal trajectory toward cultural dissolution. By 1987 an “artist” like Andres Serrano, with the patronage of collector-oligarch Charles Saatchi, could display his Piss Christ in America to the widespread approval of the elites. Its veneration in public as an object of beauty only highlights the Revolution’s progress.

Before the onset of post-modernity, art diverted from its original purpose, transcendence, still had the capacity to seduce. Escaping the boredom of late 19^th-century bourgeois Europe, stockbroker Paul Gauguin could cast idyllic scenes of Tahiti’s primitive splendor and indulge himself with its native women. And the bored bourgeoisie back home were captivated, at least for a time. Under Gauguin’s influence Pablo Picasso would then paint the lascivious and animalistic Les Demoiselles D’Avignon, portending the rise of a cruel and inhuman spirit that would characterize the coming decades. Fedor Dostoevsky had already spoken of beauty’s elemental danger in The Brothers Karamazov:

Beauty! I can’t endure the thought that a man of lofty heart and mind begins with the ideal of Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom…Is there beauty in Sodom? Believe me, that for the immense mass of mankind, beauty is found in Sodom. Did you know that secret? What’s awful is that beauty is a thing mysterious and terrible. God and the devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.

The battles won and lost in these dark recesses produce visible consequences. In our time Sodom would triumph; rejecting the Madonna, civilization proudly set its faith in reason while pursuing desire. Gauguin would die of syphilis, and within the generation Europe experienced a new phase of revolutionary politics and the savagery of mechanized war so well depicted in Picasso’s Guernica. Traditional culture and polity in the West, what Fr. Seraphim Rose termed the Old Order, recognized beauty as an expression of divine hierarchy. Yet the forces of the new era worked to annihilate any such notion. Sic transit gloria mundi- the glory of the modern was truly fleeting, and the false beauty of Sodom would be unmasked in spiritual alienation and death.

With today’s regime committed near-religiously to transgression, there is no further need for seduction in art. Refined weapons have become blunt instruments of demoralization. The repulsive and perverse are simply proclaimed beautiful, and all are expected to accede to the lie. Nobility is mocked, higher love altogether denied, and Eros grotesquely parodied in pornography. Art and its applications in mass entertainment are best identified as profit-driven psychological warfare. In concert with the machinery of political economy, contemporary culture robs the peoples of the West of their identity and denigrates their ancestral faith. In return it offers filth and fun. The alleged consummation of human development, the Open Society has descended to a condition of sub-humanity.

The Piss Christ was exhibited in the United States and Europe for years and served as a testament to the values of the new era. Calculated blasphemy became a holy relic of “our treasured freedoms” for leftists, and American conservatives did nothing besides run through well-rehearsed motions of hapless opposition to gain votes and raise campaign funds from gullible donors. Republicans would never violate the dogmata of secular pluralism in order to defend Christianity and the Western heritage. Their ultimate loyalty has always been to Mammon, the god of liberal democracy. One need only witness calls by U.S. senators to outlaw Koran-burning, as Washington’s trillion-dollar mission to transform Afghanistan into a Muslim Mayberry could be jeopardized by one such stunt! Meanwhile our finest art galleries maintain warehouses of sacrilege and obscenity, with similar content beamed daily to the proles via television.

It is not farcical elections and their attendant theatre that will save the West; it is the strength of will of a blessed few. The now-mangled Piss Christ confirms this. How heartening it is that the men of Avignon evinced not the least concern with sacrosanct rights of expression, the marketplace of ideas, or any other regime methods of division and control. They showed the courage to shatter a minor idol of the age and dent, however slightly, the liberal order’s myth of invincibility.

A genuine Counterrevolution in the Occident will be creative, and moved by the force of love- not just for beauty, Truth and the Good, but for their reflections in our brothers and friends, our kith and kin. In all its glamour and power, the regnant anti-culture will have wrought only its own negation; so it was attested on a Palm Sunday with the defiant swing of a hammer.

It is fitting that the initial phase of the U.S. attack on Libya was overshadowed in the media by college basketball finals, popularly and quite appropriately known as March Madness. Wars, akin to dated sitcom reruns, have no hope for ratings share considering the competition. And a company like Sony won’t pay to advertise its new Playstation game Kill Zone 3 during scripted and predictable news of another desert intervention. Perhaps the press should have just phoned in coverage of the action by playing clips from the films G.I. Jane and The American President, both depicting a conflict with Tripoli. The public would doubtless be comforted that Commander-in-Chief Michael Douglas has sent Demi Moore and her fellow-SEALs to teach the Libyans a lesson in democracy.

Our absurd fantasy state reflects the approach of a monstrous reality- a world empire, declaring itself the embodiment of universal good, moves to subjugate any points of opposition to its rule. From this chaos emerges a counterfeit order, and before us appears a premonition of Yeats’ rough beast, “with a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun”.

In his thought-provoking article “The Rise of Anti-Western Christianity,” Matthew Roberts boldly tackles a subject which has become a source of vexing, contentious, and at times bitter debate among the various factions which make up the contemporary alternative Right.

Indeed, the discussion which played out in the comment section accompanying Robert’s piece at AltRight is illustrative, in that it reflects the typical trajectory of the rancorous back-and-forth one commonly overhears among those who, while sharing a common sense of disgust with the Zeitgeist’s relentless ideological war on Whiteness, have differing outlooks regarding the Christian religion and its supposed culpability in this course of events.

Unfortunately, as all too often happens in the heat of a fierce debate, subtlety of argument and nuance of thought tend to go by the wayside for favor of flailing rhetorical broadstrokes and ill-conceived strawman assertions. Self-styled “race realists” have long been at the receiving end of such logically fallacious ripostes, most of which boil down to some variation on the following: “You believe in inherent genetic racial differences? Then you’re no better than HITLER!”

It need hardly be pointed out that recognizing divergent levels of intelligence among racial groups has no necessary correlation with advocating tyranny and genocide. Yet this fact never seems to sway those who fling such accusations at dissenters from the Zeitgeist’s enshrined and requisite doctrine of racial egalitarianism. This glaring nonsequitur is, in fact, formulated almost automatically, in breathtaking defiance of common sense. And one can sympathize with race-realists in this regard (who are outrageously saddled with the moral baggage of historical mass murder)… if not for the unfortunate fact that many of them have a proclivity to be just as incautious in their dismissal of the Christian faith.

Indeed, it is often said that Christianity’s universalist creed is somehow an inherent impediment to a Westerner’s healthy drive to embrace and take pride in his own heritage. In fact, if looked at properly, it is precisely the catholic (with a small “c”) orientation of the Church that lends moral legitimacy to the appropriate ethno-racial perspective. Absent the anchor of faith, and the accompanying notions of natural law and justice, one founders on nihilism, an outlook which in no time leads into the maelstrom of terror and chaos.

The January 24^th terrorist bombing at Domodedovo Airport in Moscow serves as a reminder of why Russia throughout its history has dwelt in a state of mobilization. The vast spaces of the Eurasian heartland have concealed a wide array of adversaries, from Poland’s Winged Hussars and the Grande Armée to Turkic nomads and rebellious Caucasian mountaineers. War is a reality that manifests itself here with depressing regularity, and it has been firmly impressed in the Russian historical memory. From fields of battle to the dark recesses of the soul, Russia more than other cultures is defined by struggle.

And so the carnage persists into our brave new twenty-first century; this time a suicide bomber killed 35 innocents during the hours of Monday-morning travel. The attack was most likely carried out by a cell of the Caucasus Emirate, a jihadist umbrella organization. It was calculated to further destabilize the republics of the North Caucasus and possibly drive inter-ethnic tensions in Russia’s major cities to a breaking point. Retribution, as Prime Minister Vladimir Putin remarked, will be inevitable. But in calibrating a response, the Kremlin is placed in an extraordinarily difficult position, as it must attend to a situation that could quickly spin out of control.