General – Page 150 – The Occidental Observer

A Government of Grovelling Goys: Boris Johnson, Friends of Israel and the Second Coming of Cummings

August 2, 2019/10 Comments/in Featured Articles, General/by Tobias Langdon

Why aren’t the British Left celebrating? The “one-man melting-pot” Boris Johnson has become the new prime minister. He has Turkish, Jewish, French and English ancestry. Johnson has appointed two politicians of colour to the most important posts in his cabinet: the Pakistani Muslim Sajid Javid is now chancellor and the Indian Hindu Priti Patel is now home secretary. And there are other politicians of colour in other posts, making this cabinet the most “ethnically diverse” in British history.

Boris Johnson gets his priorities right

However, the Left aren’t celebrating. Instead, they’re once again condemning Johnson and his party for racism. They’ve got the so-called Conservatives exactly where they want them: endlessly and fruitlessly chasing the approval of non-Whites. Although the Tories are, like the Republicans in America, completely dependent on White votes to win elections, they never try to advance the interests of Whites or to defend Whites against incessant accusations of racism, bigotry and selfishness. Instead, they embrace the profoundly unconservative and deeply stupid concept of the “proposition nation.” According to the Tories and the Republicans, anyone on Earth can become British or American if they embrace the right “values” and believe in the right ideas.

Serving the Tribe

Meanwhile, the Left harness the primal and potent forces of tribalism as they pursue the only thing that really matters to them: power. But tribalism is actually on plain display in the new Johnson government too. Or rather, it’s Tribalism, with a capital “T.” Johnson, Javid, Patel and Company are all dedicated servants of the world’s oldest, most selfish and most successful tribe: the Jews. However, no mainstream commentator will dare to label this a kosher cabinet. Nevertheless, that is exactly what it is. The dominant lobby-group Conservative Friends of Israel has praised Boris Johnson for his “long history of standing shoulder to shoulder with Israel and the Jewish community.” That’s rather like a puppeteer praising his own puppet for its devotion to duty. As I’ve pointed out in articles like “A Shameless Shabbos-Shiksa” and “How to Win Power and Riches by Betraying Your Own,” Boris Johnson, Sajid Javid and Priti Patel are expert practitioners of the goy-grovel, having endlessly ladled sycophancy on Britain’s tiny but very rich and powerful Jewish minority, and worked non-stop to advance Israeli and Jewish interests.

The Goy-Grovel: Sajid Javid, Priti Patel and Boris Johnson perform at Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI)

Metanarrative Collapse: Has the Christian Cosmology Invented by St. Augustine of Hippo Stood the Test of Time? Part Two

July 25, 2019/15 Comments/in Christianity, Featured Articles, General/by Prof. Andrew Fraser

St. Augustine [1]of Hippo (354–430)

Augustine’s Hellenistic Hermeneutic

Augustine’s interpretation of the biblical metanarrative portrays both the creation and the end of the world as the appearance and disappearance of corruptible material existence. He had no doubt that the New Testament writers were predicting the literal end of the earthly world when, as “[t]he whole Church” expected, Christ would “come down from heaven to judge the living and the dead.”[1] Augustine was clear that the Day of Judgement applied not just to the people of Israel but to “the rest of the nations as well.”[2] Faithful Christians, those who live according to the spirit, would exchange the perishable goods of mortal existence for the “Supreme Good” of an imperishable “eternal life” in the City of God. Other mortals, those who live according to the flesh, would suffer the “Supreme Evil” of “eternal death,” the nothingness inherent in the absolute privation of the Good.[3] It was out of just such nothingness that the world was created on Augustine’s understanding of Genesis One. Furthermore, Augustine’s understanding of Genesis 2–3 identifies Adam, not as proto-Israel, but as the first human being. Accordingly, it not just Old Covenant Israel but mankind as a whole which faces judgement at the end of the world.

Augustine’s neo-Platonic cosmology presupposed the absolute dependence of both mankind and the material world itself on an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent God. Seduced by the delights of our mortal life “we have wandered far from God,” losing sight of “the invisible things of God.”[4] The inherent difficulty mortal beings experience in apprehending such invisible divine “objects” must make us eternally thankful for the revealed Word of God. But a proper understanding of sacred scripture depends upon two things, according to Augustine: “the mode of ascertaining the proper meaning, and the mode of making known the meaning when it is ascertained.” Understanding the world generally requires that we distinguish between things and signs. “All instruction is about things or about signs; but things are learned by means of signs.” There are spiritual as well as material things and signs. Higher spiritual things are the true objects of enjoyment and use. A man should view his whole life as “a journey towards the unchangeable life, and his affections [should be] entirely fixed upon that.”[5]

The Bible is both a material and a spiritual thing which can be used or enjoyed in order to understand and participate in the imperishable City of God. Augustine reminds his readers, however, that not every spiritual or material thing can be judged by its outer form. On the surface, biblical prophecies of the Day of the Lord may appear to be addressed only to Old Covenant Israel, warning of the impending destruction of Jerusalem. The inner form of such scriptural signs of things to come can sometimes only be understood “by comparing all the similar passages on the subject which occur in the three evangelists Matthew, Mark, and Luke.” Augustine points as well to John “who tells us most clearly that the judgement should take place at the resurrection of the dead.”[6] Clearly, Augustine conceives the resurrection of the dead as a material and bodily, not a solely spiritual, phenomenon. No such event has taken place; therefore, he expects the fulfillment of that prophecy to occur at some still future time.

Augustine knew, of course, that many “wise men of this world” scoffed at any suggestion “that the earthly bodies of men” can “be carried over into a heavenly habitation.” To ward off such scepticism, he drew upon an idea that appeared quite suddenly in the late second century AD to defend the idea of a bodily resurrection. Augustine deployed the doctrine of creation ex nihilo to demonstrate that “He Who in making this world…has already accomplished something far more wondrous than the transformation in which our adversaries refuse to believe.” If God has already bound “incorporeal souls” to earthly bodies, why should we doubt “that bodies, though earthly, should be raised up to abodes which, though heavenly, are nonetheless corporeal.”[7]

During Augustine’s lifetime, such metaphysical speculation on the origins of matter had already become commonplace among neo-Platonic philosophers such as Plotinus. Augustine followed Plotinus in contending that “creatio ex nihilo was the expression of God’s omnipotent ability to create without need of supporting causes.” Such a doctrine was nowhere to be found in the New Testament.[8] Neither the New Testament writers nor Plotinus were responsible for the connection made by Augustine between the creation story and the eschatological hope of a still future resurrection of the body.

Augustine taught “that because every created intelligence had its origin ex nihilo, it also had to look beyond itself for its end. Every creature lacked God’s perfection and was therefore mutable. Because it was mutable it could fall away from that end and become evil.”[9] At the same time “the resurrection of our Lord from the dead” added “a great buttress of hope” to our faith. Our bodies, too, after the death we suffer because of sin “shall at the resurrection be changed into a better form…this corruptible shall put on incorruption, and this mortal shall put on immortality.” He urged the faithful to believe “that neither the human soul nor the human body suffers complete extinction but that the wicked rise again to endure inconceivable punishment, and the good to receive eternal life.”[10] Read more

TOQLive with Prof. Drew Fraser at 8:00 PM EDT on Sunday, July 28

July 24, 2019/in General, The Occidental Quarterly, TOQLive/by Kevin MacDonald

Subscribe to TOQ – and Mail in payment. Here is the link for subscriptions and back issues and Cultural Insurrections!:
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TOQ Live featuring Andrew Fraser will air on Sunday evening, July 28 at 8:00 PM EDT with Prof. Andrew Fraser (whose article is now the current featured article on TOO). Should be a great discussion. All of the details are at this link:

https://www.toqlive.com/

Summer 2019 Issue of The Occidental Quarterly: Vol. 19, no.2.

July 8, 2019/2 Comments/in General, The Occidental Quarterly/by Kevin MacDonald

The Summer 2019 journal Vol. 19, No. 2, The Occidental Quarterly, contains eight essays and 137 pages:

The Summer issue leads off with Dr. Andrew Joyce’s groundbreaking article on Jewish involvement in shaping American attitudes on race in the post-World War II era: “‘Modify the Standards of the In-Group’: On Jews and Mass Communication.” This article describes the successful effort of a major interlocking group of Jews in the elite media and universities to saturate the mass media with messages promoting positive attitudes toward non-White groups, particularly Blacks and Jews.
Grégoire Canlorbe interviews Dr. Ricardo Duchesne, reviewing Duchesne’s previous work on the Faustian spirit of the West in his classic The Uniqueness of Western Civilization as well as Duchesne’s recent insights and additions to this body of theory, particularly as it relates to the discovery of the self and self-consciousness by the peoples of the West.
Dr. Nelson Rosit revisits Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, presenting Murray’s data on the decline of the White working class within the framework of life history theory in biology based on a reading of Steven C. Hertler’s, Life History Evolution and Sociology.
Andrew Gladwell’s essay draws on psychological research on cognitive dissonance to explain the imperviousness of liberal attitudes to disconfirmation by, e.g., downplaying, ignoring, or rationalizing conflicting information.
Dr. Tomislav Sunic’s essay describes the history of Western thought on decadence, particularly as it relates to attitudes on miscegenation and race. Sunic traces this tradition from its beginnings in the Roman world of antiquity with the writings of Sallust and Juvenal, to its resurfacing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with writers such as Arthur de Gobineau and Oswald Spengler, and continuing into the present era characterized by the decadent behavior and attitudes on race typical of leftist intellectuals.
Dr. F. Roger Devlin contributes a review essay on Edward Dutton’s The Silent Rape Epidemic: How the Finns Were Groomed to Love Their Abusers. Although non-White migration came late to Finland, we encounter the typical phenomena seen repeatedly throughout the West: The silence of media and political elites regarding migrant crime, particularly large-scale rape of Finnish women, and regarding the negative effects of migration on social cohesion. Devlin deftly presents Dutton’s evolutionary life history perspective on the Finnish people’s intelligence, hyper-conformity, and susceptibility to guilt.
TOQ editor, Dr. Kevin MacDonald, contributes a review essay on Thomas Wheatland’s The Frankfurt School in Exile. Despite its many shortcomings, Wheatland’s book adds to the material on the Frankfurt School presented in one of Dr. MacDonald’s landmark books, The Culture of Critique.
Finally, Dr. Andrew Joyce reviews an apologetic book on Jewish involvement in communism: Paul Hanebrink’s A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism. Joyce presents Hanebrink’s work as typical of the fact-free claims promulgated by elite universities and intended to whitewash the reality of Jewish involvement in communism in the Soviet Union and throughout the West during much of the twentieth century.