THE CHURCH MILITANT - BELEAGUERED BY BERGOGLIANISM

Closed fists and genuflection
by Marcello Veneziani
Translated from

June 12, 2020

If symbols and rites mean anything and convey reality more than facts and words, then those closed fists, those cities set ablaze by the Antifa, that parody of religion with genuflection and wearing a rainbow stole during 8:46 minutes of silence [staged by Democratic congressmen], could mean that a new fanatical religion and a new communism are rising in the West.

A ‘premeditated’ religion that goes far beyond the intentions of those who embrace it. Because for so many who have gone down on one knee for the telecameras, simulating a religious gesture, there was a base objective: to crush under one’s knee The Enemy, The Beast, Donald Trump. And so, this great international mise-en-scene because the US presidential elections are a few months away.

Trump is being blamed for an assassination with which he had nothing to do, a killing that is not uncommon when policemen anywhere exceed their powers, something that has happened in the USA under both Democratic and Republican administrations. But it must be said that American policemen are likewise being blamed in general for homicidal delinquency.

Because America is still a violent society, at times savage, under its veneer of progress and technology, flab and indulgence. To get down on one's knee for one victim, when everyday, common delinquency, religious persecution and dictatorships everywhere are killing thousands, is sheer bad faith.

[It is also a virtue-signalling expression of idealistic righteousness, and possibly, on the part of the thousands of young white protestors, who far outnumber their black counterparts and having been brainwashed by the US educational system to hate their country for the wrong reasons, expressing a collective ’mea culpa’ to their black co-nationals for all the injustices that black people have experienced in the USA.]

But a new religion is really taking shape in Western societies based on the catechism of political correctness. That religion is the moral support of something colossal that is taking part in our day, above our heads and under our noses. That which for years was called One-Thought (i.e., intellectual orthodoxy) is becoming One-Power.

Like every totalitarian system, it is based on an absolute. In the case of Italy, it is the absolute of Health, the imperative to save ourselves from death and disease at any cost: to protect ourselves from something bad is OK; it is infecting others that is bad.

But the pandemic has presented itself in two forms: Covid-19 and factionalism. That is, the virus itself, and civil insubordination in the form of unallowed assembly, social protest, and conscientious objection to vaccination, to the most absurd restrictions, to the attempt to make these restrictions permanent, and to the most fanatical and senseless prophylactic (preventive) proposals.

The dogmas laid down by science and the virologists are used by those in power to widen their power and make this last as long as possible. The implicit model is the source of the virus itself, whose serious responsibility for all this is daily being exposed: the totalitarian People’s Republic of China.

The spread of the contagion and omerta [the silence and secrecy about it in the first weeks of the epidemic], the consequent long-lasting restrictions, militarized populations, totalitarian control, prohibition against demonstrations, repression of dissent, the totalitarian use of science and technology, global commercial dominance – all with communism as both foundation and horizon. The Chinese model has become the paradigm in Italy and in many progressivist sectors of the West.

After decades of collusion between capitalism and radical progressivism, that marriage is now openly in public view. The bridge between capitalism and communism is the imperative use of science and the totalitarian application of control. The end, as in communism, is always supposed to be the good of mankind, a better world, a new man, perhaps even trans-human to be even newer.

I spoke about the health-dictated totalitarianism in March when it was just starting to emerge. Italy was vying to become its pilot country, the guinea pig for the experiment. Today, after three months of it, we have an oversupply of analyses and denunciations. I wish to cite two philosophers who are quite different from each other, though both are far from reactionary, Catholic-traditionalist, much less fascist in their thinking.

I refer to Giorgio Agamben, who has denounced the uneasy marriage between the new medical religion and capitalism that are at the base of a new totalitarian system inclined to suspend freedoms and democracy. Catholic clergy, it seems, in particular, the church of Bergoglio, have succumbed to the system’s health diktats and now consider physical health a priority over salvation.

On the other hand, there is the young philosopher Michel Onfray who has theorized on atheism and criticized religion, but now denounces, following Orwell, the advent of a global dictatorship based on seven commandments:
- destroy freedoms and designate all dissidents and insubordinates as ‘fascists’
- impoverish language in order to manipulate minds
- abolish truth by encouraging One-Thought
- suppress history and rewrite it according to present needs
- deny nature, starting with human nature
- propagate hate, and
- establish a progressivist and nihilist global imperium.

According to Onfray, we have no recourse but to profess social atheism, in order not to ‘kneel’ before the new rainbow gods. He uses the verb ‘to kneel’, long before its current mystico-political use these days, aping religion. (In the Bible, the devil is simia dei, the monkey of God.)

Both Agamben and Onfray denounce the theological matrix of the new totalitarianism, the attempt to replace God with a new divinity. The new fanatics call themselves Antifa, a contraction of anti-fascist. The fact that the element of hate, implicit in ‘anti-‘, overrides the noun, says it all. The global enemy is Trump, the complementary enemy is Putin, and the ideological enemy is anything that can be construed as sovereignism [the desire of a country to acquire or preserve its national independence].

The plan foresees three essential substitutions:
- medico-progressivist faith replacing faith in a sacred and transcendent God;
- a mobile population of migrants in place of peoples or nations who are geogrqaphically rooted; and
- post-humanism 'man', according to science and willful design, in place of man according to nature and procreation.

But there is no pre-established global plan nor are there planners – some of its movers act knowingly, but many others unknowingly. [The pre-established global plan is really the Bergoglio-supported United Nations one-world-government program.]

Italy, because of her weakness, her theatricality, her transformism and servility, the unpreparedness of her current government, the ideological residues left by communism and fascism, makes for an exemplary sample. In us, sloppiness, as I have written before, tempers totalitarianism with inefficiency and comicality.

Whereas the closed fist is the enemy of an open mind.

June 14, 2020
I thought the following a good companion piece for the above. Both articles ultimately denounce the growing trend towards a One-Thought regime where any view or voice that is not politically correct - i.e., aligned with, supportive of, and openly advocating only the One-Thought - must absolutely be silenced. Indeed, writer Andrew Sullivan gets into it far more explicitly than Veneziani's mostly generic considerations. More to the point, he describes the situation in the USA concretely as it is today.

Douglas McClarey of American Catholic pointed me to this article with a post that he introduced with only one line: "When Andrew Sullivan is a voice of reason, you know how out of joint the times are".

For those who may not be familiar with Sullivan's name, he is a self-described conservative whom Time magazine once featured as one of the top 25 liberal thinkers of our time, though he disputed the label 'liberal'. He has written and bloggd for leading liberal outlets like Time itself, the New York Times magazine, New York magazine, the Atlantic, the Daily Beast and Huffington Post. A British-born American, Roman Catholic but openly gay, he is best known for his gay activism and for his strident support of Barack Obama, claiming in 2012 that "Against a radical right, reckless, populist insurgency, Obama is the conservative option, dealing with emergent problems with pragmatic calm and modest innovation. He seeks to reform the country's policies in order to regain the country's past virtues. What could possibly be more conservative than that?", ignoring, of course, that Obama did none of that in his first term.

Is there still room for debate?
by Andrew Sullivan
Intelligencer
June 12, 2020

In the last couple of weeks, as the purges of alleged racists have intensified in every sphere, and as so many corporations, associations, and all manner of civic institutions have openly pledged allegiance to anti-racism, with all the workshops, books, and lectures that come with it, I’m reminded of a Václav Havel essay, “The Power of the Powerless.”

It’s about the dilemma of living in a world where adherence to a particular ideology becomes mandatory. In Communist Czechoslovakia, this orthodoxy, with its tired slogans, and abuse of language, had to be enforced brutally by the state, its spies, and its informers. In America, of course, with the First Amendment, this is impossible.

But perhaps for that very reason, Americans have always been good at policing uniformity by and among themselves. The puritanical streak of shaming and stigmatizing and threatening runs deep. This is the country of extraordinary political and cultural freedom, but it is also the country of religious fanaticism, moral panics, and crusades against vice. It’s the country of The Scarlet Letter and Prohibition and the Hollywood blacklist and the Lavender Scare. The kind of stifling, suffocating, and nerve-racking atmosphere that Havel evokes is chillingly recognizable in American history and increasingly in the American present.

The new orthodoxy — what the writer Wesley Yang has described as the “successor ideology” to liberalism — seems to be rooted in what journalist Wesley Lowery calls “moral clarity.” He told Times media columnist Ben Smith this week that journalism needs to be rebuilt around that moral clarity, which means ending its attempt to see all sides of a story, when there is only one, and dropping even an attempt at objectivity (however unattainable that ideal might be).

And what is the foundational belief of such moral clarity? That America is systemically racist, and a white-supremacist project from the start; that, as Lowery put it in The Atlantic, “the justice system — in fact, the entire American experiment — was from its inception designed to perpetuate racial inequality.” (Wesley Lowery objected to this characterization of his beliefs — read his Twitter thread about it here.)

This is an argument that deserves to be aired openly in a liberal society, especially one with such racial terror and darkness in its past and inequality in the present. But it is an argument that equally deserves to be engaged, challenged, questioned, interrogated. There is truth in it, truth that it’s incumbent on us to understand more deeply and empathize with more thoroughly. But there is also an awful amount of truth it ignores or elides or simply denies.
- It sees America as in its essence not about freedom but oppression.
- It argues, in fact, that all the ideals about individual liberty, religious freedom, limited government, and the equality of all human beings were always a falsehood to cover for and justify and entrench the enslavement of human beings under the fiction of race.
- It wasn’t that these values competed with the poison of slavery, and eventually overcame it, in an epic, bloody civil war whose casualties were overwhelmingly white.
- It’s that the liberal system is itself a form of white supremacy — which is why racial inequality endures and why liberalism’s core values and institutions cannot be reformed and can only be dismantled.

This view of the world certainly has “moral clarity.” What it lacks is moral complexity. [But you cannot expect complexity of thinking in people who willfully and literally see everything as either black or white - nothing in between - in which black equals everything good that is also oppressed, downtrodden and abused, and white equals pure evil with no redeeming virtue at all, never mind if the person who thinks this is white as driven snow himself. One-Thought brainwashing really washes out completely all common sense and the ability to think for oneself.]
- No country can be so reduced to one single prism and damned because of it.
- American society has far more complexity and history has far more contingency than can be jammed into this rubric.
- No racial group is homogeneous, and every individual has agency.
- No one is entirely a victim or entirely privileged.
- And we are not defined by black and white any longer - we are home to every race and ethnicity, from Asia through Africa to Europe and South America.

Moreover:
- A country that actively seeks immigrants who are now 82 percent nonwhite is not primarily defined by white supremacy.
- Nor is a country that has seen the historic growth of a black middle and upper class, increasing gains for black women in education and the workplace, a revered two-term black president, a thriving black intelligentsia, successful black mayors and governors and members of Congress, and popular and high culture strongly defined by the African-American experience.
- Nor is a country where nonwhite immigrants are fast catching up with whites in income and where some minority groups now out-earn whites.

And yet this crude hyperbole remains. In yesterday’s New York Times, in a news column, there was a story about the attempted purge of an economics professor for not being adequately supportive of the protests of recent weeks. It contained the following sentence, describing research into racial inequality: “Economics journals are still filled with papers that emphasize differences in education, upbringing or even IQ rather than discrimination or structural barriers.”
- But why are these avenues of research mutually exclusive?
- Why can’t the issue of racial inequality be complicated — involving many social, economic, and cultural factors that operate alongside the resilience of discrimination?
- And wouldn’t it help if we focused on those specific issues rather than seeing every challenge that African-Americans face as an insuperable struggle against the hatred of whites?

The crudeness and certainty of this analysis is quite something. It’s an obvious rebuke to Barack Obama’s story of America as an imperfect but inspiring work-in-progress, gradually including everyone in opportunity, and binding races together, rather than polarizing them. [??? A rebuke? Really? Would the 'newspaper of record' risk doing that and willingly 'offend' all-too-tender black sensitivities? Or maybe, the writer thought 'black Americans' would be too dense to read behind the lines?]

In fact, there is more dogmatism in this ideology than in most of contemporary American Catholicism. And more intolerance. Question any significant part of this, and your moral integrity as a human being is called into question.
- There is little or no liberal space in this revolutionary movement for genuine, respectful disagreement, regardless of one’s identity, or even open-minded exploration.
- In fact, there is an increasingly ferocious campaign to quell dissent, to chill debate, to purge those who ask questions, and to ruin people for their refusal to swallow this reductionist ideology whole.

The orthodoxy goes further than suppressing contrary arguments and shaming any human being who makes them. It insists, in fact, that anything counter to this view is itself a form of violence against the oppressed.

The reason some New York Times staffers defenestrated op-ed page editor James Bennet was that he was, they claimed, endangering the lives of black staffers by running a piece by Senator Tom Cotton, who called for federal troops to end looting, violence, and chaos, if the local authorities could not.

This framing equated words on a page with a threat to physical life — the precise argument many students at elite colleges have been using to protect themselves from views that might upset them. But, as I noted two years ago, we all live on campus now.

In this manic, Manichean world you’re not even given the space to say nothing.
- “White Silence = Violence” is a slogan chanted and displayed in every one of these marches.
- It’s very reminiscent of totalitarian states where you have to compete to broadcast your fealty to the cause.
- In these past two weeks, if you didn’t put up on Instagram or Facebook some kind of slogan or symbol displaying your wokeness, you were instantly suspect.

The cultishness of this can be seen in the way people are actually cutting off contact with their own families if they don’t awaken and see the truth and repeat its formulae.
- Ibram X. Kendi insists that there is no room in our society for neutrality or reticence.
- If you are not doing “antiracist work” you are ipso facto a racist. By “antiracist work” he means fully accepting his version of human society and American history, integrating it into your own life, confessing your own racism, and publicly voicing your continued support.

That’s why
- this past week has seen so many individuals issue public apologies as to their previous life and resolutions to “do the work” to more actively dismantle “structures of oppression.”
- corporate America has rushed to adopt every plank of this ideology and display its allegiance publicly. If you do this, and do it emphatically, you can display your virtue to your customers and clients, and you might even be left alone. Or not.

There is no one this movement suspects more than the insincere individual, the person who it deems is merely performing these public oaths and doesn’t follow through.
- Every single aspect of life, every word you speak or write, every tweet you might send, every private conversation you may have had, any email you might have sent, every friend you love is either a function of your racism or anti-racism.
- And this is why flawed human beings are now subjected to such brutal public shamings, outings, and inquisitions — in order to root out the structural evil they represent.
- If you argue that you believe that much of this ideology is postmodern gobbledygook, you are guilty of “white fragility.”
- If you say you are not fragile, and merely disagree, this is proof you are fragile.

It is the same circular argument that was once used to burn witches. And it has the same religious undertones. To be woke is to wake up to the truth — the blinding truth that liberal society doesn’t exist, that everything is a form of oppression or resistance, and that there is no third option. You are either with us or you are to be cast into darkness.

And that’s where Havel comes in. In his essay, he cites a greengrocer who has a sign he puts up in his window: “Workers of the World, Unite!” If he did not put one there, he’d be asked why. A neighbor could report him for insufficient ideological zeal. An embittered employee might get him fired for his reticence. And so it becomes, over time, not so much a statement of belief as an attempt to protect himself.

People living under this ideology “must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.”

Mercifully, we are far freer than Havel was under Communism. We have no secret police. The state is not requiring adherence to this doctrine. And it is not a lie that this country has some deep reckoning to do on the legacy of slavery and segregation.

In so far as this movement has made us more aware and cognizant of the darkness of the past, it is a very good thing, and overdue. But in so far as it has insisted we are defined entirely by that darkness, it has the crudeness of a kind of evangelist doctrine — with the similar penalties for waywardness.
- We have co-workers eager to weaponize their ideology to purge the workforce.
- We have employers demanding our attendance at seminars and workshops to teach this ideology.
- We have journalists (of all people) poring through other writers’ work or records to get them in trouble, demoted, or fired.
- We have faculty members at colleges signing petitions to rid their departments of those few left not fully onboard.
- We have human-resources departments that have adopted this ideology whole and are imposing it as a condition for employment.
- And, critically, we have a Twitter mob to hound people into submission.

Liberalism is not just a set of rules. There’s a spirit to it.
- A spirit that believes that there are whole spheres of human life that lie beyond ideology — friendship, art, love, sex, scholarship, family.
- A spirit that seeks not to impose orthodoxy but to open up the possibilities of the human mind and soul.
- A spirit that seeks moral clarity but understands that this is very hard, that life and history are complex, and it is this complexity that a truly liberal society seeks to understand if it wants to advance.
- It is a spirit that deals with an argument — and not a person — and that counters that argument with logic, not abuse.
- It’s a spirit that allows for various ideas to clash and evolve, and treats citizens as equal, regardless of their race, rather than insisting on equity for designated racial groups.
- It’s a spirit that delights sometimes in being wrong because it offers an opportunity to figure out what’s right.
- And it’s generous, humorous, and graceful in its love of argument and debate.
- It gives you space to think and reflect and deliberate.

Twitter, of course, is the antithesis of all this — and its mercy-free, moblike qualities when combined with a moral panic are, quite frankly, terrifying.

“We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values,” President Kennedy once said. “For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.” Let’s keep that market open. Let’s not be intimidated by those who want it closed.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 15/06/2020 18:54]