Waitone
July 9, 2001, 08:23 AM
www.newsmax.com will provide wall to wall coverage of the UN's Small Arms gabfest. The guy reporting is Lawrence Auster. I know nothing of the guy but I am impressed with an editorial he wrote. Based on one editorial he seems incisive, thoughtful, and not afraid to be controversial.
America No Longer Exists
Lawrence Auster
Wednesday, April 25, 2001
Aside from the important debate over whether the United States humiliated itself to retrieve its people from China, was I alone in sensing the vague air of unreality that hung over the entire hostage situation? During those 11 days, I kept getting the odd impression that the standoff with China was occurring at some great remove and was of little concern to us – whether the "us" were the media, the American people, or the U.S. government itself.
I'm not talking about such alienist media figures as Peter Jennings, with his coyly contemptuous sneer toward all things American. No, what I'm talking about – what was truly new and strange – was the subdued, detached tone used by almost all TV commentators, administration spokesmen, and even President Bush.
The president himself set the softball mood. "There comes a point at which our relations with China could be damaged," he muttered after nine days during which U.S. service personnel had been held captive by a foreign power. In the passive construction of that sentence, you could not find any suggestion that a great nation was being sorely mistreated by another nation and was resolved to do something about it. There was only some undefined "point" where "relations" might be "damaged." Thus, while China was brimming over with righteous anger and uncompromising demands, America seemed amazingly mushy and unfocused.
It would be hard to imagine such a laid-back response during any previous – or rather any pre-Clinton – administration. Under Bush the Elder, certainly under Reagan, perhaps even under Carter, there would have been, both in the government and the national media, some appropriate recognition of the seriousness and urgency of the situation. Even if they weren't sure what to do about it, those earlier presidents would at the very least have presented the American side of the story – refuting the false charges of the Chinese, insisting that the U.S. reconnaissance flights were entirely legitimate, and pointing out that it was the Chinese pilot who brought on his own death and almost killed 24 Americans.
The absence of such normal reactions by the current administration cannot be wholly explained by a desire to prevent an international crisis or even by some inordinate fear of China. The real explanation, I would suggest, goes deeper: It is that, on a fundamental level, America doesn't exist anymore. Obviously I do not mean that America does not exist in a physical and institutional sense. What I mean is that there is no longer a social and political entity that believes in itself as a nation distinct from other nations, that defends itself when attacked or insulted by other nations, or that even has the shared will to go on existing as a nation.
A nation is not just a collection of people, laws and institutions. It is a spiritual entity in which its members participate, generation after generation, and which they find worthy of an overriding loyalty because it somehow transcends them and their particular concerns. And that America, I submit, no longer exists.
We can even pinpoint the precise moment in our recent history when this process of national destruction, which had been progressing and accelerating over the last 50 years, was completed: the Senate's acquittal of President Clinton in February 1999, followed six weeks later by the U.S.-provoked war in Kosovo.
These two cataclysmic events complemented each other. The nation's refusal to remove from office a depraved and criminal president consummated the decades-long destruction of America's moral order and its replacement by a nihilistic form of society in which judgments based on traditional morality would no longer have any authoritative role in public life. Clinton's lawless war on Serbia (which, let no one forget, began with the Clinton administration's arrogant demand that Serbia submit itself to NATO occupation) consummated the decades-long transformation of America's national order into a global, multiculturalist empire. Under this new regime, we Americans get seriously indignant only when our concern for humanity and ethnic diversity – but not our national interest – is at stake.
Our loss of national identity, and our loss of the will to make judgments about right and wrong, are symptoms of the same spiritual disease: the loss of the belief in objective truths larger than the self. Without a belief in the objective reality of the good, we have no wish to "impose our judgments on others," since, as we see it, our own judgments cannot be grounded in anything beyond our personal preferences. Similarly, without the instinctive faith that our nation possesses a transcendent character or value, we feel no urgency to defend and preserve our nation. The moral suicide and the national suicide proceed in tandem.
Thus, whether it is a truculent foreign government capturing our airmen and demanding apologies from our president, or a continuing tidal wave of legal and illegal immigrants transforming our society in undesired and irreversible ways, or white middle-class teenagers at Columbine High and elsewhere announcing their plans to slaughter their classmates, or an epidemic of black-on-white hate crimes spreading across the nation from Seattle to Cincinnati, Americans seem unable to respond to open threats to their well-being, or even to their very existence.
While this suicidal loss of moral and national will has been primarily the work of liberals, we need to understand that conservatives have also been involved in it.
Liberals, for their part, believe in two things: the individual's unrestrained right to define his own notion of truth (as the Supreme Court famously put it in Planned Parenthood v. Casey) and, in pursuit of this total freedom, the gradual elimination of all the larger moral and social wholes – marriage, family, church, community, ethnicity and nation – by which human beings have historically organized their existence. The logical end of the liberal vision is a borderless, Godless world consisting of nothing but radically free individuals. In reality, of course, such a global society won't be free at all, since, in the absence of all traditional forms of collective order such as the self-governing nation, order will inevitably be imposed by some tyrannical bureaucracy such as the one already taking shape in Europe.
In contrast to liberals, most mainstream American conservatives believe in some notion of transcendent truth higher than the self. The problem, however, is that modern conservatives define this transcendent truth solely in terms of individual rights. For such conservatives, it is the universal, God-granted right of all individuals to pursue their dreams, and not any larger cultural tradition inherited from the past and giving meaning to people's lives, that is reflective of higher truth. Lacking any concept of an abiding social order or national identity that transcends the values of individual opportunity and economic efficiency, American conservatives – much like liberals themselves – find it increasingly difficult to defend our nation as a nation, or to make distinctions between it and other nations.
The only value they can fully embrace is the right of all people everywhere to make their own choices and advance their economic interests – even if those choices and economic interests are inimical to America. This is certainly the view of those Republicans who have embraced close relations with China despite its open desire to harm America.
And that is why America no longer exists. Liberals and many mainstream conservatives accept national humiliation in pursuit of economic ties with a Communist regime that is blatantly hostile to our country. Liberals and many conservatives subscribe to the globalist project that is steadily draining our national independence and sovereignty. Liberals and many conservatives remain silent in the face of a nationwide scourge of racially motivated violence by blacks against whites. Liberals and many conservatives support the continued mass influx of culturally unassimilable immigrants and accept (or even celebrate) the impending loss of our European-based national identity and the larger Western civilization of which it is a part.
The chief difference between liberals and these mainstream conservatives was shrewdly stated last year by the conservative activist Howard Phillips. The Democrats, said Phillips, will take us over the cliff at 80 miles an hour. The Republicans will stay within the speed limit, but they'll still take us over the cliff.
***
America No Longer Exists
Lawrence Auster
Wednesday, April 25, 2001
Aside from the important debate over whether the United States humiliated itself to retrieve its people from China, was I alone in sensing the vague air of unreality that hung over the entire hostage situation? During those 11 days, I kept getting the odd impression that the standoff with China was occurring at some great remove and was of little concern to us – whether the "us" were the media, the American people, or the U.S. government itself.
I'm not talking about such alienist media figures as Peter Jennings, with his coyly contemptuous sneer toward all things American. No, what I'm talking about – what was truly new and strange – was the subdued, detached tone used by almost all TV commentators, administration spokesmen, and even President Bush.
The president himself set the softball mood. "There comes a point at which our relations with China could be damaged," he muttered after nine days during which U.S. service personnel had been held captive by a foreign power. In the passive construction of that sentence, you could not find any suggestion that a great nation was being sorely mistreated by another nation and was resolved to do something about it. There was only some undefined "point" where "relations" might be "damaged." Thus, while China was brimming over with righteous anger and uncompromising demands, America seemed amazingly mushy and unfocused.
It would be hard to imagine such a laid-back response during any previous – or rather any pre-Clinton – administration. Under Bush the Elder, certainly under Reagan, perhaps even under Carter, there would have been, both in the government and the national media, some appropriate recognition of the seriousness and urgency of the situation. Even if they weren't sure what to do about it, those earlier presidents would at the very least have presented the American side of the story – refuting the false charges of the Chinese, insisting that the U.S. reconnaissance flights were entirely legitimate, and pointing out that it was the Chinese pilot who brought on his own death and almost killed 24 Americans.
The absence of such normal reactions by the current administration cannot be wholly explained by a desire to prevent an international crisis or even by some inordinate fear of China. The real explanation, I would suggest, goes deeper: It is that, on a fundamental level, America doesn't exist anymore. Obviously I do not mean that America does not exist in a physical and institutional sense. What I mean is that there is no longer a social and political entity that believes in itself as a nation distinct from other nations, that defends itself when attacked or insulted by other nations, or that even has the shared will to go on existing as a nation.
A nation is not just a collection of people, laws and institutions. It is a spiritual entity in which its members participate, generation after generation, and which they find worthy of an overriding loyalty because it somehow transcends them and their particular concerns. And that America, I submit, no longer exists.
We can even pinpoint the precise moment in our recent history when this process of national destruction, which had been progressing and accelerating over the last 50 years, was completed: the Senate's acquittal of President Clinton in February 1999, followed six weeks later by the U.S.-provoked war in Kosovo.
These two cataclysmic events complemented each other. The nation's refusal to remove from office a depraved and criminal president consummated the decades-long destruction of America's moral order and its replacement by a nihilistic form of society in which judgments based on traditional morality would no longer have any authoritative role in public life. Clinton's lawless war on Serbia (which, let no one forget, began with the Clinton administration's arrogant demand that Serbia submit itself to NATO occupation) consummated the decades-long transformation of America's national order into a global, multiculturalist empire. Under this new regime, we Americans get seriously indignant only when our concern for humanity and ethnic diversity – but not our national interest – is at stake.
Our loss of national identity, and our loss of the will to make judgments about right and wrong, are symptoms of the same spiritual disease: the loss of the belief in objective truths larger than the self. Without a belief in the objective reality of the good, we have no wish to "impose our judgments on others," since, as we see it, our own judgments cannot be grounded in anything beyond our personal preferences. Similarly, without the instinctive faith that our nation possesses a transcendent character or value, we feel no urgency to defend and preserve our nation. The moral suicide and the national suicide proceed in tandem.
Thus, whether it is a truculent foreign government capturing our airmen and demanding apologies from our president, or a continuing tidal wave of legal and illegal immigrants transforming our society in undesired and irreversible ways, or white middle-class teenagers at Columbine High and elsewhere announcing their plans to slaughter their classmates, or an epidemic of black-on-white hate crimes spreading across the nation from Seattle to Cincinnati, Americans seem unable to respond to open threats to their well-being, or even to their very existence.
While this suicidal loss of moral and national will has been primarily the work of liberals, we need to understand that conservatives have also been involved in it.
Liberals, for their part, believe in two things: the individual's unrestrained right to define his own notion of truth (as the Supreme Court famously put it in Planned Parenthood v. Casey) and, in pursuit of this total freedom, the gradual elimination of all the larger moral and social wholes – marriage, family, church, community, ethnicity and nation – by which human beings have historically organized their existence. The logical end of the liberal vision is a borderless, Godless world consisting of nothing but radically free individuals. In reality, of course, such a global society won't be free at all, since, in the absence of all traditional forms of collective order such as the self-governing nation, order will inevitably be imposed by some tyrannical bureaucracy such as the one already taking shape in Europe.
In contrast to liberals, most mainstream American conservatives believe in some notion of transcendent truth higher than the self. The problem, however, is that modern conservatives define this transcendent truth solely in terms of individual rights. For such conservatives, it is the universal, God-granted right of all individuals to pursue their dreams, and not any larger cultural tradition inherited from the past and giving meaning to people's lives, that is reflective of higher truth. Lacking any concept of an abiding social order or national identity that transcends the values of individual opportunity and economic efficiency, American conservatives – much like liberals themselves – find it increasingly difficult to defend our nation as a nation, or to make distinctions between it and other nations.
The only value they can fully embrace is the right of all people everywhere to make their own choices and advance their economic interests – even if those choices and economic interests are inimical to America. This is certainly the view of those Republicans who have embraced close relations with China despite its open desire to harm America.
And that is why America no longer exists. Liberals and many mainstream conservatives accept national humiliation in pursuit of economic ties with a Communist regime that is blatantly hostile to our country. Liberals and many conservatives subscribe to the globalist project that is steadily draining our national independence and sovereignty. Liberals and many conservatives remain silent in the face of a nationwide scourge of racially motivated violence by blacks against whites. Liberals and many conservatives support the continued mass influx of culturally unassimilable immigrants and accept (or even celebrate) the impending loss of our European-based national identity and the larger Western civilization of which it is a part.
The chief difference between liberals and these mainstream conservatives was shrewdly stated last year by the conservative activist Howard Phillips. The Democrats, said Phillips, will take us over the cliff at 80 miles an hour. The Republicans will stay within the speed limit, but they'll still take us over the cliff.
***