Essays in Idleness

It is again the fourth Thursday in November, which is to say, the very eve of Black Friday — the modern American custom of dishonouring (or, “cancelling”) Thanksgiving. The American economy may be in serious inflationary decline, and choking on the usury that apparently all have chosen for themselves; American freedom (not unlike American enterprise) is being abandoned, without much fight. But these are not reasons to despair. They would be only if the losses were “definitive”; but of course they are not. We have merely “opted” to make the good unlawful, and evil mandatory, in our public policies. This can last only for a time.

America’s universities, media, bureaucracies, and increasing proportions of her courts and military have been surrendered to the Left. Satanic demonstrations roll through the streets — currently for “Palestinian” terrorists and murderers. It is a dark, irreligious political extravaganza, reversing every principle that had once defined American federalism.

But politics will not provide the answers to this. It never has. The Democrats will not lose any foreseeable election, now that they are permanently married with the Left, and thus explicitly with the source of all worldly corruption. Old-school Americans will get used to defeat, and must expect it, until the Democrats have been uprooted and destroyed. There are tiny signs of hope, abroad in Argentina and Holland, I will grant; but in America the FBI, State Department, and Homeland Security are vigilant against recovery. Having a man of the calibre of Biden as president is a kind of guarantee that the America we once knew, is finished. We have hobbled into a post-America.

But thanks to God, there is still much for which we can be thankful. There is truth, and it will withstand every ideological lie; there is the possibility of goodness in every aspect of human life; and there is beauty in all things that God has created, and is still creating, in counterpoint to everything that He has not. Men continue to have marvellous options.

That they may be punished for choosing them should not surprise us. Christ was crucified, after all. And yet, even in the face of this setback, Christ is King.

I would not say a word against flinching from some evil, but a long scholastic treatise might be incaminated against flinching from some good. This struck me last evening while checking for news from Argentina. Having read that Mr Javier Milei — a run-off candidate in their presidential election who was not simply another Peronist, but according to the media “far-right,” and some kind of “libertarian,” and was “threatening” to make the result close — I was curious to see what happened. I was delighted to learn that he had in fact won, by such a landslide that the BBC was now flinching from reporting it.

This morning my Chief Argentine Correspondent has provided some necessary details. Mr Milei not only swept the “youth” vote, but he did that while declaring: “Killing children is not a human right!” He mocked an accumulation of political corrections, while dropping a few more “flinch bombs” worthy of the XVIIth-century bishops who evangelized that country.

The outgoing president, another tedious Peronist like our pope, shared the old presidential palace with decorative plants. Carlos, my correspondent, claims that he could make Justin Trudeau look intelligent. If true, this would be an extraordinary accomplishment. He also leaves an amazing national debt, hyperinflation, energy shortages, &c.

Mr Milei seems to have won as Mr Trump once did in the United States: by not flinching. A point may be reached in national decline when even the young will pitch out the Peronistas. Godspeed to them, when they reach this point.

Nevertheless, one must continue to despise politics. Carlos echoes Borges: “No matter how bad an Argentine government is, the next will be worse.”

Ahmad Shukeiri, founding chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964, was kind enough to explain the saying “from the river to the sea” that has been uttered by every subsequent chairman and such organizations as Hamas and Hezbollah. The river in question is the Jordan, and the sea is the Mediterranean.

Ahmad: “This is a fight for the homeland; it is either us or the Israelis. There is no middle road. The Jews of Palestine will have to leave. … Any of the old Palestine Jewish population who survive may stay, but it is my impression that none of them will survive.”

Other chairmen, such as the current one, Mahmoud Abbas, have stated that there must be, apart from diplomacy, a “final solution” in which the Jews will cease to exist. When he or his predecessor Yasser Arafat were quizzed on such statements by sympathetic Western journalists, they explained that they could not possibly remain in politics if they put it any other way. The “Palestinian people” wouldn’t have it.

But the “Palestinian people” (i.e. the Arabs living now or once-upon-a-time between “the river and the sea”) are not all of one mind. More than live in Gaza are, for instance, Israeli citizens, who have proved loyal to the “colonialist” regime. They did not make themselves into refugees when Israel was founded, and they have flourished within the Israeli state. That there are more than two million of them (fairly represented in the Israeli Knesset) is worth noting: for there are zero Jews living under the PLO, and almost zero in all the other Arab countries combined, from which Jews were essentially evicted when Israeli independence was declared.

These are facts worth remembering on this Remembrance Day, when “Palestinians” and their supporters will be demonstrating for the sixth consecutive Saturday around the world, shouting slogans such as, “Gas the Jews!” Nearly eight decades after the defeat of the Nazis, we have, as it were, a worthy successor.

Curiously, I think Ahmad Shukeiri was right. There is no room between the river and the sea for two states, as a consequence of the way Arab leaders have behaved, through eight decades. Arabs in this location should be given a path to Israeli citizenship, if they want it and will choose fidelity to the Israeli state. But many of them, perhaps a few million, would refuse such an offer.

That they are not wanted in Egypt, Jordan, or any other Arab country, has been made plain, repeatedly, by each of the respective governments.

But they have to go somewhere, and I would suggest Yemen, which has plenty of open space. It is ruled as an Iranian proxy, and the arrival of several million “Palestinian” refugees (presumably by sea from Eilat to Aden, avoiding a controversial passage through the Suez Canal, or the waste of fuel circumnavigating Africa) would keep the ruling Houthis busy for a while. The various aid organizations could redirect their supplies for the “Palestinians” to their new home.

____________

POST SCRIPTUM — The “Palestinian” motto is, incidentally, more or less identical to Canada’s. Ours was extracted from Psalm 72:8 (or 71:8, in Catholic), which promised Dominion from sea to sea — et a flumine usque ad terminos terrae. That is to say (to cite the King James Version) “from the river unto the ends of the earth.” Now, our river was the Saint Lawrence, which we have meanwhile more or less surrounded; and our seas are not limited to just the one.

There were accredited journalists, including certain Hamas propagandists working for the Associated Press and Reuters, who were embedded with the forces that invaded south Israel on October 7th — killing outright approximately 1,500 civilian non-combatants, then raping, torturing, and kidnapping hundreds upon hundreds more, and desecrating the corpses. They took photographs and videos of the Hamas atrocities, which they proudly distributed through the “Palestinian” community, and (lucratively) to Leftists and Muslims worldwide. Many were also sent, via “social media,” directly to the friends and relatives of their victims, and haphazardly throughout Israel by way of intimidation.

Many of these journalists were, at the very least, carrying weapons for the terrorists, which makes them complicit under international law. Israel, happily, has a tradition of hunting down every war criminal who has contributed to the extermination of Jews; and godspeed to them as they search for these “flacks.”

I have often been ashamed of my participation in journalism, which by the dawn of this century was deeply degraded. The average journalist is, at his most honourable, a prostitute, or rather something worse, for poor prostitutes engage in reprehensible acts to support their families. Journalists commonly circulate knowing lies, gratuitously, to advance their political causes, or to smear their ideological opponents. In my experience, they often do it for sport.

Moreover, this is what we must consistently expect of them. Only a fool will trust the news. While not all journalists are viciously evil, in their private lives, the great majority have been debauched by their profession. I would not make an exception for anyone employed in the  “mainstream.” The few honest are hidden away, “professionally” cancelled.

But very well, for the rest. At last, we have a pretext to begin hanging them.

“The modernists in the Church believe that they can bring man closer to Christ by insisting on Christ’s humanity. They have forgotten that we do not trust in Christ because He is man, but because He is God.”

This is from the Scholia (to an Implicit Text) of Nicolás Gómez Dávila, 1913–1994, the incomparable Colombian reactionary, previously mentioned in these Idleposts. I am just reading him again, for he is always topical, and better, he can be topical without ever referring to the news. He is habitual in stating the truth, plainly and persistently in a few words. That was the length of his ambition: he did not try for any kind of fame, and would not have been published, even in the few copies he had printed, had he not inherited considerable wealth, and had just the tiniest wee hint of narcissism. (Like me, except for the inheritance.) He never found the time to attend a university, though he helped to found one. He lived in a house wherein he collected a few tens of thousands of books, and for his research, he read them — in most of the modern European languages, and Latin and Greek.

The quotation above is rattling through my head, almost painfully. It explains, for instance, what is happening in Rome. We live in a time when the Christianity that influenced our minds through recent generations, has slipped almost out of circulation. Our clerisy has, at its best and most inspiring, even at its most sincere, discovered a method by which Christianity will not recover.

The human Christ; the biological, fleshly Christ, who isn’t there: We cannot “recover” what was always beyond our knowledge.

But it will recover, for the reality is, Christ is God. Secretly, we still know this.

It will be a pity if we have to fight a war against everyone outside NATO, the EU, and the OECD (which are pretty much the blended “white” bureaucracy). Had it happened in the “good old days,” when our enemy was just the Communists, we might have hoped for the best. The Commies were technologically somewhat inferior, having spent the better part of a century making economic mistakes. It is true that nuclear weapons are bad (remember “Nuclear Winter”?) but not nearly so erasing as an asteroid hit, and as I was once mocked for observing, there are other worse things. Death is generally overstated in our materialist, neo-pagan culture; but in various situations, including what I was then reporting from India, death is the only way forward. And in the West, we insist on advance.

But bona fide Communists are no longer well enough organized to conduct a plausible war. Primitive and yet adaptable prejudices have returned to the fore, and politics everywhere provides the satanic leadership that the people in this world tend to ask for (whether democratically, or not). The alliances are based on the “make The Other pay” principle — which is the opposite of religious teaching in the world’s ten leading faiths.

This is how things have usually been; it is the condition that we are returning to, and the only thing that distinguishes our time is the marvellous efficiency of the weapons. For a few generations one might have said “our” weapons, but the diffusion has become more broad, and with the terrorist tactic of surprise (like the famous Welsh art of self-defence: hit him before he has even thought of hitting you), our “natural advantages” have fallen into decline.

Which makes it more frustrating that the prevailing “ideology” in the West has become the “woke” ideology, dedicated to the destruction of our economic order on environmental whims, including the reduction of every form of production. As Ukraine, and Israel (and soon, Taiwan) will find, as they face enemies designed for perpetual war, we are running out of ammunition.

That is why we might pine for the good old days, for with nuclear missiles we would never run out. The world would run out of targets first.

All Souls, as my more careful readers may realize, has been, for me, the anniversary of my first visiting a church, as a knowing Christian — forty-seven years ago. The good friend to whom I admitted this at the time (a great giant, red-haired atheist, with an Edinburgh education), died recently. Beloved Michael Berry, eight years older and in many ways wiser, had also listened in some amazement to my earlier account, of conversion; to my assertion that Christ had answered me when I pleaded with Him for a response, on Hungerford Bridge over the Thames, in London. I had now entered an Anglican church, and seemed to be relaxing into the polite, bourgeois life of the Church of England.

Mike, however, saw things differently. “If I had had your experience,” he said, “I wouldn’t be screwing about. I’d go straight to Rome.”

Well, this I did, but it was a quarter-century later. But Mike was right, rather as usual. Christianity, par excellence, is Catholic, and that is where the Christian is sure to end up, though perhaps not in this life. It is necessary, sometimes, to take a long view, when one is starting “a journey of a thousand miles,” or more: a dimensional change from what is temporal, to what is immortal.

To mark yesterday’s Feast of All Saints, Pope Francis published his latest denial of Catholic teaching, Ad Theologiam Promovendam (“to promote theology”). It proposes yet more of his “profound cultural transformations,” indeed a “paradigm shift,” that revises the statutes of the Pontifical Academy of Theology “to make them more suitable for the mission that our time imposes on theology.” It announces, in other words, an alternative dimensional change, from the eternal to the glibly temporal.

Patient Catholics must take the long view. Eventually this shameful pope will be gone, and Christ will yet again right the many inversions that revolutionists in His Church have effected; and we will formally return to Faith and Reason.

Perhaps a new organization is required, to replace NATO. It would include all the current NATO members, minus Erdogan’s Turkey; but would add Taiwan, Japan, the Korean republic, the Philippines, Eretz Yisrael (to the Jordan), and eventually India and a few more nation-states. It would be explicitly trans-national, but expressly opposed to any form of “world government”; a military alliance, not an infinite bureaucracy. Members would withdraw from the United Nations, upon joining.

The Czech defence ministrix, Jana Černochová, might be among the first movers of this proposal. Like all the allied defence ministers, she has seen the Hamas attack videos from October 7th (filmed largely by Hamas itself); the Israelis made copies. But alone among them, she has pointed out that these images are not only in bad taste. They indicate that a new Holocaust has begun against the Jews; and resigning from the U.N., which “diplomatically” supports it, is incumbent upon every civilized state.

One could be tedious and add vignettes from the pro-Hamas, pro-Jew murder demonstrations of Islamists and Leftists right around the world. This would include scenes of mobs, hunting unambiguously for Jews to kill in places like Dagestan and Pakistan; but also filling the streets in the urban West with their sympathizers. The scheme of importing quite unexamined Muslim immigrants into Europe and North America on an incredible scale should itself be definitively “re-examined.”

For our “anti-terrorist” laws need force. Supporters of Hamas and of other terrorist entities must be deported, if they are not citizens, or imprisoned if they are. The argument for imprisoning them is far more lucid than Roosevelt’s, who was putting Japanese immigrants in prison camps during World War II. For this is not a question of mere ethnicity, but of their conscious criminality.

Needless to say, my proposals are unlikely to prevail in the foreseeable future.

The pope and my archbishop have called for a day of prayer, today. They request “all Christians and all people of good will to pray for the people of Israel, Palestine, and the entire region that we know as the Holy Land.”

I am reminded of the days, some years ago when I was parked in Jerusalem, of all the tee-shirts and posters that read, “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem.” If you were a vendor of trinkets for tourists, this message would be prominently displayed in your stall. As seemingly every Palestinian resident of all religions was a salesman of trinkets to tourists, this message was oppressively common.

Hamas slaughters 1,400+ Jews and their guests, and desecrates their bodies; we pray for “peace, peace,” in anticipation of the reply.

My own instruction would be, instead: “Pray for the destruction of Hamas.”

I sometimes berate my firstborn because, while he has an advanced degree in electronic engineering, and the powerful advantages of the cis-male gender, his lily-white privilege, and a few text books with pretty illustrations, he has failed to invent a portable device for drawing hydrogen from water.

Eheu: perhaps my instructions were insufficiently clear.

You see, I have long been convinced that water — plain, no additives — contains hydrogen and oxygen, just as the manuals say. Aware of the difficulties of transporting hydrogen (which tends to evaporate quickly at room temperature), I have further noticed that water is the most reliable carrier, far in advance of expensive high-tech alternatives. Now on the U-Boob, you will find several videos suggesting that my mechanical gizmo has already been constructed, but frankly, I don’t trust them. The same for Meta, Instagram, and Facebook, which have attracted lawsuits in most of the states of America and Europe: they are entirely unreliable. But my son I would trust.

The invention I desire would be modest in scale. It would be a small portable device that splits water into its components (hydrogen; oxygen) such that the hydrogen could then be used in fuel cells to power land vehicles, such as cars and carts, at, say, one hundred nautical miles to the gallon. I imagine that variations would provide home heaters and a thousand other “consumer durables.” All would be powered exclusively by water, which I think is cheaper than oil, petrol, lithium, or uranium. It is also by reputation safer, although there is the ever-present risk of drowning.

Indeed, the “beauty” of this invention, as soon as my son has made it, is that it will put most of the big-league capitalists out of business, along with most of their eco rivals. However, governments would naturally intervene, to raise taxes on water to five dollars per liquid ounce, citing the emergency of Global Drying. So we would still have to overthrow them.

The people who manufacture our spiffy (yet cosmically simple) new engines would flourish, mightily. They are the craftsmen upon whom, together with the farmers, God usually smiles.

I suppose I should give my son more time. Patience is a virtue. Meanwhile, those who travel short distances should continue to walk; and those who would travel long distances may use horses and tents in their pilgrimages.

At least five thousand Hamas rockets have landed within the boundaries of the Gaza strip, during the current campaign.

Of course,  this is another thing the Jews can be blamed for: Palestinians are being killed by rockets that were intended for the Jews. If the Israelis would only allow free trade to the Palestinians, with, for instance, Iran, the Palestinians could buy rockets with much better technology, instead of relying on home-assembly from plumbing pipes and other primitive materials, delivered in aid programmes. They could then hit targets with greater accuracy, and therefore murder Jews more efficiently.

Perhaps this analysis is too glib. Hamas isn’t especially interested in accuracy, and if they kill mostly Arabs, or cause Arabs to be killed (in reprisals), their purposes are probably better served.

One thinks, for instance, of the BBC, among the world’s leading Palestine promoters. Day after day they headline casualties from the Israeli assault, in which they have included, for instance, the (misfired?) Hamas rocket that struck a Christian hospital, and the large number of secondary explosions from the Hamas tunnel network, in which explosives are stored.

The Hamas strategy is, more simply, to kill a lot of people, for instance a lot of Jews on the morning of Saturday, October 7th — to the praise of their international allies — but also many Muslims, day in and day out.

Such, however, are the politics in this world, that they will always find supporters — among Islamists and Leftists, currently, and among other devils in human flesh, when another murderous cause is to be served.

And politics includes the art of compromise, with such devils. Land for peace, the bifurcation of states, and subsidies for fake humanitarianism, are among the concessions that nice liberals and conservatives make. That is why I am neither a liberal nor a conservative; but a reactionary, and apparently a war-monger.

For I think the purpose of wars, including many of the wars that Jews and Christians have been getting into during the last few centuries, is Victory. Defeat is always a mistake.

There will always be more wars — among humans and the other killer apes — but they must be fought, with attention, one battle at a time, with an eye to victory and the extinction of the evil that must be fought. Wars can be quite unpleasant.

But the good news is that they can generally be avoided by a side that has a reputation for winning them, quickly and decisively.

It was very sad that the German people had to be seriously inconvenienced during the Second World War, but the brutal bombing and invasion of German territory proceeded, without consulting them. This followed from German non-consultation about the invasion of Poland, &c, but to coin a phrase, “war is war.”

The inhabitants of Gaza have been told to clear out of the northern half of their rather small homeland, and deprived of electricity and a few other things which were previously supplied (for free in many cases) by Israel — food, drinkable water, and common medicines being among the greatest necessities. However, Jewish like Christian religious principle insists on making arrangements, and international law, founded on Judaeo-Christianity, demands that efforts shall be made. Institutions like the Red Cross (and its Muselmann partner, the Red Crescent) may be called into service.

Nevertheless, the inconvenience is likely to cost several thousand lives, not all of them Hamas agents, though most of them Hamas supporters, judging from reports. Similar reports came out of Germany after 1939: that the majority of Germans were loyal to the Nazi regime; and there was little to contradict this appalling fact. That many Germans didn’t know what was happening in Auschwitz, let alone Berlin, has been charitably received as a tall tale.

An immense tunnel complex running under Gaza city environs, and extended beyond Israeli and Egyptian borders whenever there is opportunity, will simply have to be excavated and filled. So will all the rocket-making and launching facilities and indeed, all the other “assets” of Hamas and friends.

This will cause quite terrible inconvenience but, just like the Second World War, it will be over, eventually.

The “Iron Dome” has been, for the last decade or so, protecting Israelis from rockets fired at them from, e.g., Gaza. It is a remarkable piece of technology, invented by Rafael Systems and improved by Israel Aerospace: a showpiece for the sheer goodness that can be achieved by the defence industry — in solving the problems it has itself created. This Iron Dome launches its own rockets to intercept the enemy’s. It can tell from the trajectory which of the “incoming” would land in a populated district, and eliminate at least nine in ten of the rest.

Hamas psychopaths have collected many tens of thousands of rockets, designed by Iran and smuggled in; but most are now constructed in Gaza itself, where they benefit from American and European “compassionate” foreign aid. This displays what the Gazans might be capable of, technically, were the culture not morally degenerate. As it is, Jew-killing is the only successful export from the enclave.

It happens I was first dawdling around Israel in the early 1970s. I have the fondest memories of my life in “Cairo House,” near the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem, still not very long after the “West Bank” was conquered. Peace prevailed in those days (defining “peace” as freedom from the threat of war), and I found from the many Palestinian Arabs I met a much gentler disposition than was apparent in my visits later.

Indeed, I was struck by how well the two sides — still called “Arab” and “Israeli” — got along. Both Israeli-citizen and “occupied” Arabs seemed, in high proportion, actually to admire the Jewish Israelis, and more than one told me he hoped that his children would grow up to be not only faithful Muslims, but the equal of the Jews. Economic opportunities for Arabs were much greater than they had ever been before, and the disappearance of corrupt, petty Jordanian officialdom was appreciated — by the Arabs themselves. Honesty, in business, was beginning to be possible.

How sad that the next generation — and now there have been two of them — should have been intensely politicized instead.

Israel had a colonizing task, a civilizing task, towards the people who had come under Jewish rule, and they failed in it. This was largely because, under modern political conventions, they did not accept the responsibility; yet under old-fashioned arrangements they would have had to. The Palestinian Arabs were now with them permanently; no Arab state would take them in as refugees (only Christian Lebanon let in a few), and a separate “Palestinian” state was out of the question. For Israel already had enough mortal enemies around her borders.

Making the best of things meant making them good Israelis; and this was the most reliable route to regional peace and prosperity. Instead, inspired or directed by naïve post-Christian idealists in the West, Israel embarked on what became an utterly unrealizable “two-state solution.” The Palestinian Arabs were put under the tutelage of bloodthirsty, moral monsters.