Had a rather interesting day on Twitter (or is it Xitter, now?). It started with me seeing an NRO article which condemned Aldean’s tune by saying we need songs about virtue, not violence. That started me off by saying that one of the manly virtues is the use of violence to defend the community. Next up was a Tweet asserting that what ails us is that so many of the very best in the West died in the two World Wars and so we’re just breeding from the dregs. To that I objected that while it is true that the best die in the highest portion in war, what was really the poison was our lack of honoring the fallen.

Oh, to be sure, we’ll build them a monument. We’ll say we honor the troops – but we don’t honor what was most important about them: their valor. Bravery. Guts. The fact that they went into the worst situation, behaved like lions, and defeated evil enemies. That is what we should be talking about, and quite endlessly, because it is worth talking about. It is an example and an aspiration for all of us – to show even a tenth of the courage of those who prevailed in war.

But, instead, our stories are all about how lousy it was and what were we fighting for and dammit that guy died and all we want is for this to be over with. All of these are true enough sentiments as any combat veteran will tell you but they aren’t the story.

I think this stems from the aftermath of World War One and especially the play Journey’s End. Some years back I spoke about this play in relation to a recent adaptation and it really is a good play but when I saw it I felt that it was missing the key aspect of the setting.

The play, itself, is set in the days just before Operation Michael was launched by the Germans. This was the start of Germany’s Spring offensive of 1918. Their supreme effort to win the war in France before the full power of the United States could be brought to bear. The basic German plan was to destroy the British army and in service of this goal they put together an army of picked men, specially trained and equipped for the offensive. They culled out of all German divisions the very best men, gave them the best weapons, backed them up with the most massive artillery Germany could create and then launched them against a British army which was worn down by years of fighting and was being denied reinforcements from home for fear of the British command launching more fruitless attacks against the German front. It was, as Churchill wrote, the most powerful onslaught in military history. Still is to this day; no particular offensive in World War Two can compare the the power the Germans directed against British line on March 21st, 1918.

And the Brits held. Sure, they had to withdraw, pretty deeply by Western Front standards, but at no time was their front broken. At no time did the troops panic and flee. Outnumbered at the point of attack two or three to one, the British soldiers bled that German assault, with many British units fighting until exterminated. In the end, this massive attack representing the very best Germany had pushed forward into a completely useless salient about 15 miles into the British lines. It was without a doubt the most sublime defensive stand in history.

And what does the world know about it? Journey’s End – it was all just a waste.

But it wasn’t a waste. It was a victory. It was bravery. To this day young British children should thrill to oft-retold tales of their ancestors standing up to the most powerful army ever and giving it a drubbing so that freedom could live. I’ll bet not one in a thousand has ever even heard of it…and if they hear anything about World War One it was that it was just nothing but bad. This isn’t to excuse the political and military leaders of Britain or the other combatants in the war – they truly were downright awful on all sides for the most part. But to take the courage of men pitted against the fires of war and insult it is more disgusting than the worst strategic or tactical blunders of the leaders. It is a betrayal of the warriors.

And now I’ll get to the last thing which got me sitting here writing – that was after I had defended the brave and the fulfillment of duty I got the pushback that things like the strategic bombing campaign of Germany was a crime and the men who did it evil – one person actually comparing them to Auschwitz camp guards (“weren’t the guards doing their duty? Huh; what about that, smarty pants!”). And that is when it really hit me; we’ve been heavily propagandized, especially since the end of World War Two. Propaganda which has made us forget and/or denigrate bravery and doubt ourselves – “maybe we weren’t any better than the Nazis?”. It was the putting of Journey’s End on steroids. At least in the play the protagonist is shell-shocked after years at the front…but now the very best we’ve ever had sent out into the worst thing to ever happen are either pathetic victims or criminals in their own right.

This is very insidious and I have to figure it was cooked up in Moscow – because the USSR really was no better than Nazi Germany in most respects and it was terribly weak compared to us and so something had to be done to make sure America never flexed its power. What better way than a campaign of slander against our troops and against our nation? How better than to say that the bombing of Dresden or the atomic bombing of Hiroshima were just the same as a Nazi concentration camp? The merest bit of thought shows they weren’t remotely alike. Even if we in the aftermath decide that the strategic bombing campaign was wrong, the fact remains that we did it for the right reasons: we were trying to end the war by the swiftest means available (thus reducing the overall death total) while defeating inhuman tyranny. Meanwhile, the Nazis were trying to exterminate people who couldn’t possibly fight back. Not even remotely the same sorts of actions – but they were compared, with a subtle implication that somehow we were a little worse (“we’re better than that!”).

We have to get back to honoring bravery. To look at our troops and see what they did. Sure, you can point out that they weren’t all saints, but it must immediately be said that it doesn’t matter. What matters as regards our soldiers is that they went out and fought for us and did it well and beat evil enemies. I have wondered for years why no movie was ever made about Ernest Evans and the USS Johnston – I’ve mentioned Evans before: to remind, he was the skipper of the Johnston and when he sighted the enemy battle fleet – which included the super-battleship Yamato – he immediately charged the enemy and fought like mad – him and his whole crew – until the Johnston was shot out from under them. We can’t make that movie – because all we can do with it is show how incredibly brave they all were and that isn’t the sort of story we’re allowed to tell these days. If we ever did anything with it, it would probably be to find some poor survivor who suffered PTSD over it. But it was brave; and the actions of that crew – and the crews of other small ships who also joined the charge – saved the day at Leyte Gulf…after the admirals had screwed up and got themselves decoyed by the Japanese, leaving small ships like the Johnston out on a limb, with only their hearts and their blood to stand against the Japanese.

But we must relearn those stories. We must relearn to honor heroes. It is the only way we can survive – the only way to have hope.

Taken from his book, Heretics:

The family may fairly be considered, one would think, an ultimate human institution. Every one would admit that it has been the main cell and central unit of almost all societies hitherto, except, indeed, such societies as that of Lacedaemon, which went in for “efficiency,” and has, therefore, perished, and left not a trace behind. Christianity, even enormous as was its revolution, did not alter this ancient and savage sanctity; it merely reversed it. It did not deny the trinity of father, mother, and child. It merely read it backwards, making it run child, mother, father. This it called, not the family, but the Holy Family, for many things are made holy by being turned upside down. But some sages of our own decadence have made a serious attack on the family. They have impugned it, as I think wrongly; and its defenders have defended it, and defended it wrongly. The common defence of the family is that, amid the stress and fickleness of life, it is peaceful, pleasant, and at one. But there is another defence of the family which is possible, and to me evident; this defence is that the family is not peaceful and not pleasant and not at one.

It is not fashionable to say much nowadays of the advantages of the small community. We are told that we must go in for large empires and large ideas. There is one advantage, however, in the small state, the city, or the village, which only the wilfully blind can overlook. The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique. The men of the clan live together because they all wear the same tartan or are all descended from the same sacred cow; but in their souls, by the divine luck of things, there will always be more colours than in any tartan. But the men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell. A big society exists in order to form cliques. A big society is a society for the promotion of narrowness. It is a machinery for the purpose of guarding the solitary and sensitive individual from all experience of the bitter and bracing human compromises. It is, in the most literal sense of the words, a society for the prevention of Christian knowledge.

…

This is, indeed, the sublime and special romance of the family. It is romantic because it is a toss-up. It is romantic because it is everything that its enemies call it. It is romantic because it is arbitrary. It is romantic because it is there. So long as you have groups of men chosen rationally, you have some special or sectarian atmosphere. It is when you have groups of men chosen irrationally that you have men. The element of adventure begins to exist; for an adventure is, by its nature, a thing that comes to us. It is a thing that chooses us, not a thing that we choose. Falling in love has been often regarded as the supreme adventure, the supreme romantic accident. In so much as there is in it something outside ourselves, something of a sort of merry fatalism, this is very true. Love does take us and transfigure and torture us. It does break our hearts with an unbearable beauty, like the unbearable beauty of music. But in so far as we have certainly something to do with the matter; in so far as we are in some sense prepared to fall in love and in some sense jump into it; in so far as we do to some extent choose and to some extent even judge—in all this falling in love is not truly romantic, is not truly adventurous at all. In this degree the supreme adventure is not falling in love. The supreme adventure is being born. There we do walk suddenly into a splendid and startling trap. There we do see something of which we have not dreamed before. Our father and mother do lie in wait for us and leap out on us, like brigands from a bush. Our uncle is a surprise. Our aunt is, in the beautiful common expression, a bolt from the blue. When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world that we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale.

This colour as of a fantastic narrative ought to cling to the family and to our relations with it throughout life. Romance is the deepest thing in life; romance is deeper even than reality. For even if reality could be proved to be misleading, it still could not be proved to be unimportant or unimpressive. Even if the facts are false, they are still very strange. And this strangeness of life, this unexpected and even perverse element of things as they fall out, remains incurably interesting. The circumstances we can regulate may become tame or pessimistic; but the “circumstances over which we have no control” remain god-like to those who, like Mr. Micawber, can call on them and renew their strength. People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are. Life may sometimes legitimately appear as a book of science. Life may sometimes appear, and with a much greater legitimacy, as a book of metaphysics. But life is always a novel. Our existence may cease to be a song; it may cease even to be a beautiful lament. Our existence may not be an intelligible justice, or even a recognizable wrong. But our existence is still a story. In the fiery alphabet of every sunset is written, “to be continued in our next.” If we have sufficient intellect, we can finish a philosophical and exact deduction, and be certain that we are finishing it right. With the adequate brain-power we could finish any scientific discovery, and be certain that we were finishing it right. But not with the most gigantic intellect could we finish the simplest or silliest story, and be certain that we were finishing it right. That is because a story has behind it, not merely intellect which is partly mechanical, but will, which is in its essence divine. The narrative writer can send his hero to the gallows if he likes in the last chapter but one. He can do it by the same divine caprice whereby he, the author, can go to the gallows himself, and to hell afterwards if he chooses. And the same civilization, the chivalric European civilization which asserted freewill in the thirteenth century, produced the thing called “fiction” in the eighteenth. When Thomas Aquinas asserted the spiritual liberty of man, he created all the bad novels in the circulating libraries.

On vacation for the next few days!

But, I won’t leave you hanging.

First off: Book VII: Empress will release on June 15th. If you haven’t started the Mirrors series, you can pick it up with Book VI: Heirs. This is because in Heirs the story line starts to be taken over by the children of our heroes – but, don’t fret: the original heroes still play big roles!

They hosted a “pride” event at the White House and relegated Old Glory to a supporting role. This is simply un-American. Our flag always takes primacy…but the new secular religion of our government admits of no equals.

Now, lets lighten it up:

The Trump vs DeSantis war is heating up – but I do caution that a lot of it does seem to be driven by terminally on-line people looking for social media clout. But there is a worry in that it is getting people not just to stake out positions, but really dig in their heels on it…which is likely orchestrated by Democrats with the intent of getting people to hate the other guy. As I said before: I will support the GOP nominee and I urge everyone to dial it back. From Trump to the most neo-con shill, all GOPers are the moral and intellectual superiors of Democrats. Whatever we get it is better than Pudding Brain or anyone they might replace him with.

Memorial Day is Monday and people are posting a lot of military stuff. This is appropriate but one which popped up for me was not about a man who died in combat, but who did a small deed of decency in the hell of war. It was Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds – taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge he was the senior non-com at his POW camp and when the commandant ordered all Jews to identify themselves – likely for at least hideous treatment, if not murder – Edmonds ordered every man to identify as Jewish. The commandant backed down. It was a small thing, as I said. In the grand scheme of things, it at best saved a couple hundred lives out of the millions who perished. But it was still important. And it took some guts. It is easy to look away, after all.

But that then brought me to Yad Vashem and the Righteous Among the Nations: these are gentiles who have been honored by Israel for helping Jews during the Holocaust. It is quite a list of heroes but something rather sticks out for me: that they were all just regular folks. There weren’t highly decorated soldiers who charged into the enemy – these were just people who saw what was going on and did whatever they could, no matter how small, to just throw a wrench in it. And then you realize two things: if every decent person had just thrown a wrench, the Holocaust could never have happened…and since all the wrench-throwers were regular folks with no special, inside knowledge everyone could have been a wrench thrower. They all knew – but most chose not to act on the knowledge. Many out of ideological commitment, of course, but the regular run of people simply because they didn’t want to be bothered.

And so it has been since then – we’ll likely never see the unique evil of the Nazi regime ever again, but we will certainly contend with evil until God in His good time brings it all to an end. Evil does walk the world today – ever more openly. And it is able to do so because most of us, most of the time, are just hoping it passes us by. The drug addicts rotting in the streets. The illegals being abused. The children being groomed. We for the most part pretend we don’t see it – pretend it isn’t happening. Because if we see it, we have to act. So we talk ourselves into believing that we don’t see it.

But, take heart: some times evil is so brazen that it wakes everyone up. And I think we have now reached that point. The Pelosi Democrats knew when to tap the brakes and allow people to continue to not see until it was too late. The modern Democrats are driven by ideological commitment and they are pressing forward on a variety of fronts to implement their evil. And so brazen is the attempt that regular folks can’t miss it…and just here and there but in my view in growing numbers, people are standing up and saying, “I will not participate”. No, none of us will have a chance to be as brave as Edmonds…but we are increasingly brave enough to say out loud that we will not participate. Sure, we still risk social opprobrium and our jobs are at risk…but none of that matters. We see it. We must say it is wrong…and as more of us do so, others gain the courage to stand up and be counted.

Lets get 2023 rolling the way you expect it!

We’ve got a couple “firsts” here. Over here in the USA we might be executing our firstly openly transgender person – the reality is that this murderer was looking for his way to dodge the hangman and “transgender” is, actually, a fairly clever ruse given how much attention it is getting…but as it looks like he really did cruelly murder his girlfriend (a real girl, btw) he’s likely to get whacked. As you know, I’m opposed to the death penalty – but this is an obvious dodge.

Our other first is the first openly non-binary vicar in the Church of England. The main thing about this story is that it at long last answers the question as to just why the Catholic Church used to burn heretics. That aside, what we’ve got is a guy who likely just found out that he liked homosexuality but only made this discovery after being married, having three kids and being about half way through vicar training…and this was his means of combining flying the freak flag, keeping the Missus to look after the kids and also stay employed as a vicar. The Church of England has long been a joke and this just kinda finishes it off.

We must stop treating obvious insanity or obvious cowardly dodges as other than what they are. Stop pretending that this is other than sick jokes. Now, don’t get me wrong: I have encountered some trans people who say they are perfectly happy as they are, don’t demand anyone change their views and are also opposed to things like drag queen story time. To me, they are adults who decided that that’s how they want to live and I have no reason to stick my nose into their business. This isn’t about being anti-trans…or anti anything except anti lunacy…and anti-con artist. The man saying “hey, I’m non-binary” because he wants to get with a guy while also staying married is a liar. A con artist. Someone working an angle. And if he’s not that, then he’s just insane. In neither case can we afford to bow to it…we start tolerating lies and insanity, and we’ll really be doomed. Call things what they are.

CBS’s 60 Minutes dredged up Paul Ehrlich – you know, the Population Bomb con artist – as an expert on how we’re all gonna die if we don’t give Commies all our money and liberty to appease the Weather God. They can do this because most people – especially young people – simply don’t know about the Population Bomb and how it was wrong in every particular. The MSM, you see, is never helpful in providing the track record of their approved Experts. So, now we’ll see a whole bunch of 20-somethings and we’ll have to spend weeks just telling them to look up the Population Bomb.

Looks like the Ukrainians whacked a significant number of Russians in the first major action of 2023. This war drags on – I doubt the Ukrainians can win an outright victory which pushes the Russians out of all Ukrainian territory. I doubt the Russians can take all of Ukraine. Part of it has to be the general feebleness of Europe. They’ve been breeding from the milksops since 1945, after all. The most physically and mentally energetic Europeans were largely killed between 1914 and 1945 – those left were those who were most determined to survive, rather than win. You know: cowards. But, hey, still not my problem: I hope they do make peace.

Why is Woke around? Because we’re paying 500k grand for a “equal outcomes” consultant. You get what you pay for: and what we pay for is what lobbyists get inserted into bills. Until we make a conscious effort to de-fund the Left, we’ll never stop this.

The Kraut’s are offering to help us protect Democracy. What could go wrong?

Team Biden will release all available vaccine doses right away. This is a change from Trump which is holding some back to ensure people get their second shot. The possible benefit: more people gain immunity faster. Possible downfall: not enough people go for the second dose and thus immunity only lasts a short time. Personally, it is probably six of one, half dozen of the other. My guess is that the change is so that they can merely do something different from Trump.

Biden will go after guns, on that we can rely. What form the action takes remains to be seen, but the Democrats are salivating at the thought of going after those backwards yokels in Flyover America. Now, to be sure, this is one issue which can unite the various elements of the GOP and lead to severe punishment of the Democrats in 2022. But I don’t think they can help themselves.

The Lincoln Project: yeah, they’re pretty much what you expected them to be.

Richard Dawkins is also pretty much what you expect. That’s the thing about these “free thinkers”…they are actually slaves to fashion.

Pompeo is one of the few standing firmly by Trump right now. That means he’s going to give it a shot in 2024.

What is to be said? We couldn’t stop the steal. And now the Ruling Class is working up the riot at the Capitol as some huge thing – which, as one wise man I know points out, is really an indication of how cowardly the Ruling Class is. A few yahoos breaking windows had them running for safety. These are not people who will stand up and fight for their power: the only thing standing between them and overthrow is the conviction of armed security that guarding them is better than walking away from them.

The fundamental problem we have is that tens of millions of American citizens are convinced that the election was stolen. For those on the other side of this issue, it doesn’t matter how sure you are that it wasn’t stolen. Millions believe otherwise. And here’s the thing: as they believe it was stolen, they are no longer inclined to work within a system which they believe maliciously excludes them. And people who believe they are excluded from the system will start to go outside the system for redress of grievances. The past four years, now capped off by the shrieks about the riot, are merely providing a fertile field for political radicalism to flourish.

We on our side don’t have much to say in favor of the Black Panther Party or BLM: but I think all of us now better understand what it feels like to be governed by an instrument which doesn’t appear to care about our concerns. Which, in fact, treats us with contempt. It isn’t a joyful feeling. In fact, it is downright infuriating. We are here. We are Americans. We have rights. We demand these rights be respected.

Right now, we don’t feel they are.

What the other side must do – this is Democrats, Never Trump and GOPe types – is offer concessions. At the moment, it wouldn’t take much. A commission to create secure voting nationwide would do wonders at the moment to calm things down. But what the other side is offering, at the moment, is efforts to remove Trump from office and threats about expelling Republicans from Congress. In other words, what the other side is doing is precisely what those on our side expect: show hatred and a desire to punish us for daring to disagree. Keep this up, and the radical right groups which have only been a figment of Ruling Class imagination will become real.

Have I mentioned that these tens of millions of people who feel excluded own millions of guns?

What will follow won’t be Antifa, it will be genuine rebels. Unless the disaffected can be brought to believe that they are still part of the system. And only their opponents can do that. We’ll see if there’s any wisdom over there.