Reflections

Tags

Blog, Defend the modern world, Islamism, politics, race, writing

I spent a large part of the weekend revisiting this old project of mine, the first time I have logged in for several years, re-reading what I used to call – with some pretension – my ‘articles’; quickly written opinion pieces about civilisation, Islam, race, politics and the like. It has been a weird, moving experience, as it was always sure to be. I have cringed, smiled, recoiled, occasionally glowed with pride. 

Such is the effect of time, I disagree with a lot of what I wrote then. My priorities are different. Some bad things have become good to me, some good things have become bad; many issues, once critically important, now seem greatly diminished.

I suppose the greatest mea culpa to perform involves the central theme of this blog. I wrote for close to three years in a mood of hot panic over Islamism, believing it was playing a slow, clever game and would, if ignored for too long, eventually triumph over the sleeping cultures of Europe. I wrote in a negative style of negative things, ideas around which a whole blogging subculture had crystallised, such was the uniformity and agreement.

But Islamism, happily, will not conquer Europe, only cause horrible and unnecessary trouble for it. Just the other week, an Islamist nobody went on a stabbing spree in the commuter town of Reading, Berkshire; such is what they have been reduced to – amateurish, Victorian violence; local vandals, neighbourhood nuisances. 

Needless to say, I oppose anyway the subjugation of man, anything that diminishes him, puts shackles on his imagination, forces him to live in a way contrary to his nature. And the stupid and nasty project of Islamism does this professionally enough. But there were then – and surely are now – equally grand and urgent and depressing questions to consider. Isolating Islamism from other processes was a mistake. It would be out-of-date to continue to make it.

We are short-sighted if we pitch the crisis of our age, like the slippery polemicist Christopher Hitchens once did, as a neo-Enlightenment battle between theocracy and reason. Islamic immigration and violence represent only one part of a far bigger issue, rooted as much in the West as the East. Not seeing this clearly enough was my great failing, the parent of all the others.

The religion of peace is crowded out in my thoughts these days. Here in Spain, I have encountered only a few believers in several years. New immigrants from exotic shores are in no short supply; but they do not bring caliphates, just complications. They have night-black skin and wear tribal shawls from the pre-ideological serenity of Africa. There are also little crowds, slowly swelling, of Peruvians, Chinese, Koreans and Vietnamese.

The future of the West will be dominated by questions of race, gender, economy and generation. Islamism, though it will play a destructive role, will not be the predominant theme. This is the reality as I now see it.

The big things are happening outside of the 9/11 universe, the narrow, dimly-lit mind-space in which too many, for too long, were trapped and accordingly limited.

***

My dear father, who passed away at Christmas, was a gentle, conservative man; a rector for many decades in the Church of England. One of his living and dying wishes was for me to embrace the faith that guided him, and which provided him with such amazing courage during those final months of illness. Since then, over a mad period of global unrest,  I have been duly reflecting on what I actually believe in. Re-opening this project is part of that self-interrogation.

Looking back at my blogging here, I find not a slight aspect of performance. I wrote material I believed added to what I had already written, that built upon the same theme and promised to reconfirm the same ideas. I wrote to be consistent, in short, not to explore in earnest issues of real importance. 

Performance politics is the curse of our age; in England, America and doubtless elsewhere, people are arguing and marching and fighting for things they do not, in their heart of hearts, take to be true. I see this more on the left than on the right – which is natural enough – but there are performance artists across the spectrum, as harmful at one point of it as at any other.

On anonymous forums intelligent debate mixes freely with nonsense. Users embrace ludicrous fetishes and equally ludicrous figures to fill the office of interpretation left vacant by a dishonest and corrupted media.

What do people really believe? What would we say if we were forced to speak without thinking, free of care and cant, unconcerned with the pursuit of glamour or acceptance into some intellectual culture or another? The chances are we would not fall neatly into any group or hive but would outrage them all equally. There is great honour in that.

I am not so blindly arrogant to believe I have retained an audience after this much time. People move on, as they should. I am grateful to have had my work considered worthy or readable by anyone at all.

David

Advertisement

Thank You & Goodbye

Tags

3 years, 500, BBC, Blog, blog blog, blogger, blogging, Civilisation, Counter-Jihad, David, Defend the modern world, Demographics of Europe, DTMW, dtmw dtmw, England, Facebook, hotmail, Internet, internet blog, Islam, london, mail, million, Multiculturalism, net, Notice, notice dtmw, notice of, published, publishing, stuff, Thank you, Twitter, UK, web, wordpress, words, writing

I began this blog in January, 2013, largely on a whim. I can still remember coming up with the idea as I waited in the rain for a bus in Wimbledon, London (the bus, as is London tradition, was absurdly late.). Since then, ‘Defend the Modern World’ has been visited over half a million times, chiefly by Brits and Americans, but also by thousands of Australians, Africans, Asians and Middle Easterners, too. I am immensely proud of the work that I have done. I hope that it has done some good.

Last week, I received an offer of a teaching position in Europe. When I taught English in northern Spain last year, mainly to small groups of infants, I managed to carry on the blog simultaneously. However, I have come to the conclusion that it will be difficult for me to do the same this time around.

In light of this, and with regret, I am suspending DTMW from this week forward.

The blog will remain online – I have no intentions of deleting it – and I have scheduled a selection of the old posts I am most proud of to be published over the next few Mondays.

To those who have been loyal readers of this blog, I want to say a heartfelt and sincere thank you. Though the quality of my writing has been greatly uneven, you have always been too kind to point out my failings. I do appreciate that.

It is possible I may pick up the blog again sometime in the future, but this is uncertain. I will try to post on occasion – when the news compels me to say something; say, after a terror attack in the UK or US – but the weekly format is just not something I can keep up.

It would, of course, be impossible to adequately sum up the work of three years in a few paragraphs, so I’ll just say this; my sole motivation in writing DTMW has been an uncomplicated loyalty to Western civilisation. It is, to me, the only culture on Earth worth a penny. Nothing else has inspired me. I have not hated anything. I have sought to help protect something I love.

The contest with Islam is not going away any time soon. I do, however, have faith that we will triumph in the end. Even the most fanatical Muslim knows in his heart that the modern world is superior to the mud-huts and mutilations of the Dar-al-Salaam. We need only be loud and proud about this and eventually even the most stubborn will come around.

I wish you all the greatest possible happiness. Thank you once again for your generosity and encouragement.

David (Defend the Modern World)

D-Day

Tags

America, America 911, American Liberty, Barack Obama, BBC, Blog, Civilisation, clinton polls, Coffee, coverage, Defend the modern world, DTMW, election, Facebook, global politics, Guardian, international, Internet, MSNBC, Multiculturalism, newspaper, NYT, political, politics, polls, Race and ethnicity in the United States Census, Times, trump polls, trump vs clinton, Twitter, United States, White House, world, writing

Nervous? I am. In fact, to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure I’ve ever been so on edge before an election in my life. On Wednesday morning, barring some unforeseen chaos, America will have a new president elect. As to whether that president will wear a tie or a pantsuit is still anyone’s guess.

I have stopped paying attention to the polls. The last couple I saw, published only a few hours apart, predicted a Clinton victory and a Trump victory respectively. This tells us nothing except that the contest really is down to the wire.

The New York Times is, as far as I know, the only notable publication daring to predict a landslide for one particular candidate. In today’s online edition, the paper’s resident statisticians give Hillary Clinton an 84% chance of winning the election. For context, the paper notes that (according to this calculation) “Mrs. Clinton’s chance of losing is about the same as the probability that an NFL kicker misses a 38-yard field goal.”

I don’t need to tell you that such brazen overconfidence is terribly unwise at this point.

We have, whatever the media may fill time by saying, no real way of knowing what the final imbalance will be on Wednesday morning. We know only that two radically different Americas will have fought with purpled-faced passion for the right to determine the national (and, in some ways, global) future – their preferred visions as different from each other as can possibly be imagined. Perhaps not since the Civil War has there been such stark and violent disagreement between the peoples of the (ostensibly) United States.

There remains nothing more to say now other than to hazard a final prediction. Before I do, I must first make clear the difference between what I think will happen and what I am personally hoping for. These are, as I will explain, sadly out of sync.

I believe (perhaps I should say – I fear) that Hillary Clinton will edge the contest on Tuesday. My reasoning for this is based not on the polls, but on the strange logic (if it can even be called logic) of the US electoral college. As you’ll be aware, it ultimately doesn’t matter who leads the national polls. America’s presidents are elected by a much more convoluted mechanism. Based on unbiased (non-US) media analysis, the road to a Hillary victory appears at present much clearer than the road to a Trump triumph. In order to pull off an upset, Mr Trump must ‘flip’ numerous states in which the Republican support base is traditionally weaker than the Democrats’ – and do so in spite of a massive blitz of hostile propaganda in those states (Clinton’s attack ad spending in this election has resembled more the budget for a military invasion than for a political campaign).

True, a Trump victory is still possible, and we mustn’t lose hope. I was, you may remember, wrong about the outcome of the Brexit vote (along with pretty much everyone else in Britain). However, there is nothing to gain from wishful thinking, and I prefer to state my opinion truthfully.

Whoever wins on Tuesday, America has been undeniably altered by the long, gruelling contest up to this point. A forgotten and despised community – the White working class – has organised into a coherent and readily deployable political force. This force will outlive Trump’s candidacy and go on to influence many elections to come. This is bad news for both parties, but in particular for the Republican mainstream – a tired-out, uninspiring and treacherous collective more concerned with dollars and cents than with people and destiny. If Trump does indeed lose, therefore, there are still a lot of reasons to be thankful for his having stood at all.

The Democrats, even if they win, will be greatly wounded by Clinton’s effect. Almost singlehandedly, the nominee has peeled off a previously loyal base of youthful idealists, casting them adrift into the political wilderness in search of a third party able to satisfy their lust for European socialism and big government. It would be no surprise to me were these idealists to coalesce with the stray Republicans mentioned previously. Both groups do, after all, have the same complaint in kind. They both understand all too well that the elite no longer gives a damn about their welfare or identity. Never has a genuine third alternative looked more realistic than now.

I will post a celebration or condemnation of the result as soon as possible after it has been announced.

See you on the other side of this madness. Breathe slowly. It’s almost over!

D, LDN

PS: I am very interested to hear if the readers of this blog concur with my prediction. Perhaps I’m being unduly pessimistic?

Milo Yiannopoulos: The Good and the Bad

Tags

America, American Liberty, analysis, BBC, breitbart, catholic, Christianity and Islam, Civilisation, Coffee, Conservatism, Conservative, Defend the modern world, DTMW, EU, Facebook, gay, greek, homosexuality, Immigration, Internet, Iran, Iraq, ISIS, Islam, Islamism, Jewish, migration, milo, milo yiannopoulos, milo yiannopoulos orlando, Multiculturalism, neil degrasse tyson stupid, orlando, politics, politics politics, right-wing left-wing, trump, trump support, tyson, United States, War, writing

Few stars are rising faster at the moment than that of conservative writer/broadcaster Milo Yiannopoulos. Virtually unknown just three years ago, the Greco-British journalist, 32, is now fast approaching the kind of iconoclastic status attained by such writers as Gore Vidal and HL Mencken (both of whom expended considerably more time and effort to achieve it).

What can explain this success?

Well – for one thing, Yiannopoulos is a quite formidable debater, and it is for this talent that he is primarily known. Type in ‘Milo Yiannopolous’ into YouTube and many of the videos returned to you will have titles containing words like ‘destroys’, ‘eviscerates’, ‘owns’ and so on… These are not exaggerations. Yiannopoulos has a unique way of making the people he engages seem naive, foolish and weak-minded. He is even – I have found – able to achieve this effect when the other person is in the right; and there is surely no greater testament to a debater’s skill than that.

Yiannopoulos is not merely good with words, he is good with emotions, presenting his side of any argument in a relaxed, self-assured and matter-of-fact style that naturally makes the arguments of the other side seem less certain, more bizarre and fundamentally weaker. In this sense he reminds me in speech of Mark Steyn in print. Both put to use the same rhetorical trick – the insinuation – quite deliberate – that they know they are right. Both treat contrary points of view as amusing, forgivable, even charming eccentricities. Yiannopoulos and Steyn are not trying to make the other side look stupid, so they have us believe, they are trying are help them understand reality – and by arguing this way, they do make them look stupid. There is surely no better way of wounding an intellectual’s reputation than to sympathise with his failures and politely excuse his errors.

Yiannopoulos’s writing, though less spectacular than his debating, still passes with ease any quality test for the journalistic mainstream. Here is a representative excerpt from an article taking down the goodwill-bloated ‘astrophysicist’ Neil Degrasse Tyson:

“Neil deGrasse Tyson is a philistine with no love of learning except for popularisations and oversimplifications that serve his political purposes… (He) constantly situates himself in the big brain league, but he has done nothing in his life to demonstrate that he belongs there — and a lot to suggest he doesn’t…. (He) claims to have been “mentored” by Carl Sagan, for instance. Yet it appears this “mentorship” boils down to little more than a couple of traded letters. If Tyson thinks that qualifies as mentorship, I wonder what he’d call my nocturnal liaisons with other men who share his skin colour. Adoption?… As dumb as Tyson is, his fans are even more preposterously thick, which is probably to be expected given that they’re all liberals. But the extent to which they hoover up and retweet his contradictory and brainless provocations is matched only by the hilarity of the occasional social justice car crash, in which the politics of grievance that Tyson likes to encourage comes back to bite him.”

But neither Yiannopoulos’s skill in writing or debating can fully explain his meteoric ascent. Beyond the mechanics of his profession, Yiannopoulos is himself remarkable. For one thing, he is gay. Indeed, if homosexuality can be graded, he is very gay; audaciously, flamboyantly so. He is also Greek, Jewish and Catholic. This exotic quality, brim-full of apparent contradiction (Gay, Jewish, Catholic, Conservative – are not words used to being in each other’s company), has combined with Yiannopoulos’s oratorical (and occasionally bitchy) style to produce a ready-made object of media fascination. Yiannopoulos gets ratings up in a way no other public commentator has since the death of Christopher Hitchens, a person with whom the journalist bears many important similarities.

Like Hitchens, Yiannopoulos expresses with intelligence arguments traditionally expressed with stupidity. Though I do sympathise with many right-wing concepts, it is nevertheless a fact of politics that the conservative side of the political spectrum attracts more dullards than the liberal side. Many – perhaps the majority – of those inclined to oppose Islam, for example, do so in a crude, yobbish style that puts off the discerning classes and fails to excite anyone else.

Yiannopoulos is successful precisely because he refines gut-sentiments into intelligent arguments. People watch Yiannopoulos debate Islam on television and scream ‘That’s what I think!” or “That’s what I’ve always said!”. He articulates feelings many desperately want to – but cannot – put into words.

So, that’s the good. Now for the bad.

Despite the considerable talents I have described, Yiannopoulos is not without his faults. He has, for one thing, consistently demonstrated a worrying lack of intellectual discipline; a tendency to seek controversy (for its own sake) over positive political impact. On twitter the writer has repeatedly engaged in pointless arguments with entirely apolitical pop-cultural figures, most recently Leslie Jones, the simple-minded comedienne and star of the much-maligned 2016 Ghostbusters remake. After a brief back and forth over various trifles, Milo made a joke implying that Jones (who is admittedly unfeminine looking) is actually a man. This comment then led to Yiannopoulos’s twitter account being deleted by the administrators of the site – (he is still banned).

Was this necessary? Did it serve a purpose? I don’t think so.

Like this author, Yiannopoulos is an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump’s 2016 bid for the US Presidency and has written countless articles explaining this support, most of which have been reasoned and compelling. But on this matter, too, he has a tendency to drift into inexplicable weirdness. Yiannopoulos often refers to Mr Trump in a sexualised voice as ‘Daddy’ and once stated that the “trashier” the Republican nominee becomes the more he loves him.

Now, I have no moral objection to any of this, but surely such unseriousness runs the risk of undoing the good work the journalist has done elsewhere. Once again I ask, is it necessary? Does it serve a purpose? Does Milo wish to be a neo-Orwellian truth-teller or a contestant on Celebrity Big Brother? Christopher Hitchens or Pete Burns? One cannot combine the two aspirations indefinitely.

The atheist Voltaire once remarked that the only prayer he had ever offered was ‘O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous’. I can well imagine Islamists and Leftists offering this same plea to the Almighty in view of current political circumstances. On the issue of Islam – as on many others – we are so far in the right that a misstep on our part is probably the best the opposition can hope for. Milo and others would do well to bear this in mind.

On balance, I am of the opinion that Milo Yiannopoulos can be a very effective soldier for the anti-Islamist cause. His oratorical skill, humour and minority-status make him a very difficult target for the Left to hit with their favoured weaponry. They cannot possibly call Milo, a gay man of partially Jewish descent, irrational or paranoid for worrying about the advance of ISIS. They cannot possibly accuse him of being a Nazi, a White nationalist, or a possessor of ‘privilege’ (the Left’s favourite buzzword of the moment). Milo’s exotic qualities form a wall of confusion around his arguments, giving them a better chance of being considered for what they mean rather than as an extension of who formed them.

And while there are those who will object outright to the inclusion of an actively gay man in the conservative movement, one must strive to remember that the threat of Islam is so broad that it will necessarily require an equally broad coalition to prevent its success.

If you find the right’s embrace of Yiannopoulos strange, you’ll be even more surprised by what the future holds.

D, LDN.