Luxury Beliefs And Class Hatred Part One

This is a long one, so I will post it in two parts.

Alexander II, Tsar of Russia between 1855 and 1881, was a great man. He extricated Russia from the ludicrous Crimean War, freed the Russian peasantry from serfdom and introduced elected local government and trial by jury. Despite all this, the Great Emancipator was murdered by radicals from the People’s Will (Narodnaya Volya) who only achieved the replacement of a reforming emperor with his brutal and autocratic son.

Alexander II is a textbook example of the failure of the monarchical principle since despite all his achievements, his father, his son and his grandson (Nicholas I, Alexander III and Nicholas II were all unequal to the task of ruling Russia in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. But that is not the reason I have shared this biographical sketch. Alexander’s murderers remind me of a certain type of pseudo-radical and narcissistic purist who is so prevalent in our own times.

The decline in the influence of religion in the West is, in my opinion, an entirely positive development. Ending the baleful influence of the death cult of Christianity is long overdue; the only problem I can see is that some of the most vocal opponents of Christian bigotry are more than willing to accommodate similar bigotry from the followers of an almost identical religion because most of them are non-white. Ho hum. But whilst the old religions are dying, the religious impulse is alive and well in the new religions of anti-racism, transgenderism and ecofascism (by which I mean the anti-scientific doom-mongering of the weekend hippies of Stinky Conformism).

Some readers may be surprised to hear me use the word ‘religion’ to describe anti-racism, transgenderism and ecofascism. But I honestly believe that it is a legitimate way to describe the more demented followers of these ideologies. Witness the same dogmatism, the same refusal to compromise and the same nitpicking over minor points. And, just like the murderers of Tsar Alexander, these self-satisfied purists are willing to attack the slightest deviation from their holy writ, even by those who are broadly on their side. Look at the way world famous feminist Germaine Greer has been pilloried as a misogynist (!) because she refuses to accept the demands of certain transgender activists or how the word ‘racism’ has been twisted out of shape to protect followers of the deeply misanthropic cult of Islam.

As ever when I come up with an idea, far cleverer people than I have already anticipated it. In his brilliant polemic God Is NOT Great, Christopher Hitchens described his days as a Marxist thus…

“When I was a Marxist, I did not hold my opinions as a matter of faith, but I did have the conviction that a sort of unified field theory might have been discovered. The concept of historical and dialectical materialism was not an absolute, and it did not have any supernatural element, but it did have its messianic element in the idea that an ultimate moment might arrive, and it most certainly had its martyrs and saints and doctrinaires and (after a while) its mutually excommunicating rival papacies. It also had its schisms and inquisitions and heresy hunts. I was a member of a dissident sect, which admired Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky, and I can say definitely that we also had our prophets…Those of us who had a sort of rational alternative for religion had reached a terminus which was comparably dogmatic.”

The French philosopher Michel Foucault commented…

“The polemi­cist…pro­ceeds en­cased in priv­i­leges that he pos­sesses in ad­vance and will never agree to ques­tion. On prin­ci­ple, he pos­sesses rights au­tho­riz­ing him to wage war and mak­ing that strug­gle a just un­der­tak­ing; the per­son he con­fronts is not a part­ner in search for the truth, but an ad­ver­sary, an en­emy who is wrong, who is harm­ful, and whose very ex­is­tence con­sti­tutes a threat. For him, then, the game con­sists not of rec­og­niz­ing this per­son as a sub­ject hav­ing the right to speak, but of abol­ish­ing him as in­ter­locu­tor from any pos­si­ble di­a­logue; and his final ob­jec­tive will be not to come as close as pos­si­ble to a difficult truth, but to bring about the tri­umph of the just cause he has been man­i­festly up­hold­ing from the be­gin­ning.”

Just read part of that second quote again – that a polemicist does not wish to “[recognise] this person as a subject having the right to speak” but want to “[abolish] him as interlocutor from any possible dialogue.” Does that sound very much like the ‘no platforming’ idiots at universities or mainstream journalists like Owen Jones who demand the silencing of ‘fascism’ (in modern usage, the word ‘fascism’ has come to mean ‘that with which I disagree’).

Part Two here