William Butler Yeats

Things fall apart

When it comes to teaching the art of music, any good teacher would tell a student that focusing too much on the notes would result in a rigid and wooden performance, but focusing too much on the music’s feeling would cause a loss of rhythm. Both the notes as well as the feelings should be balanced to gain harmony and make the piece come alive.

Strange how we could easily identify with the abovementioned example when it comes to music, but when it comes to governing policies and political ideals, we fail dismally to see the same dynamic. It is either the strict law of the letter or a cacophony of disharmonious chords. The difference being that nowadays both have been elevated to levels of supreme aesthetics. Ugliness has become the new beauty and harmony is caricatured.

This has become the condition of politics and idealism in Europe today. No doubt, other parts of the world could also attest to this. However, Europe – being the cradle of Western mankind – this tendency reveals how the West has become old, sick and ready to implode. The Western satellite countries such as North-America, Australasia, and what’s left of South Africa, still try to radiate the once bright beam of enlightenment. For how long still is anyone’s guess.

Just as the Roman Empire of old, Europe has run out of steam. Where tolerance and apathy were the vices of old, they are the virtues of today. This cultural vacuum that it has left in its wake is now being filled with everything considered dysfunctional and pathological, yet dangerously filled with unbridled youthful vigour.

Wise words were once written by William Butler Yeats:

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

In this bastardised Fourth German Reich, aka the European Union, paedophilia is soon to be legalised. What first started off with gay rights has now opened the gates of hell to other deviant practices with paedophilia and polygamy being the next in line. Peculiarly enough, the EU has motioned to ban bestiality. Animals thus have achieved more legal protection against sexual predators than children.

In general, Yeats has reminded us that it is not the first time in history that we are dealing with such abominations. In fact, hardly a generation goes by without these tendencies occasionally crawling up through the crags. The difference being that European civilisation seems to have lost the will to fight this off. The European has lost his fighting spirit. Whereas crimes against children would become legal in Germany, crimes against children in the UK such as grooming gangs who kidnap and prostitute hundreds of underage white girls get away with impunity. Gone are the days when mob justice took care of these problems.

More emancipation for women appears to give rise to more emasculation for men. Whereas feminists, paedophiles and gays are fighting their way to the top, Western man has been forced to introspect on his historical wrongdoings and has lost his ability to fend for his family, his sense of honour and duty both confined to history.

The plot sickens though.

Sociologist Doug McAdam mentions in this clip how he once attended a revolutionary gathering where the killing of newborn white babies was discussed, and how a fellow attendee was ‘booed down’ after he apologetically dared to utter that killing white babies seemed to be pushing matters a bit too far. The one-dimensional revolutionary mindset is reaching star status in the West, and one wonders if the Russian artist Marat Guelman’s depiction of Christ and Lenin holding hands with Mickey Mouse is not blasphemy after all, but an omen of what’s to come. In revolution, confusion reigns supreme, with everything being right and wrong at the same time. In Guelman’s sculpture we see Christ (love and humility), Lenin (hate and arrogance) and Mickey Mouse, the figurehead of Disneyland, the world’s most successful paedophile child grooming facility.

The spirit of destroying the Western world has clearly reached a turning point and the auto-destruct timer has been set. Our cultural elites have turned the West into a virtual suicide cult, not unlike Jim Jones’ People’s Temple Movement, where the handful of deviants who refused to be poisoned were dragged into the fray and killed nonetheless. Only by identifying these ills could we be made aware of the tactics that are used and how to counteract them.

However, for a more closer study of these tactics, it would be a good idea to start with the spiritual father of the US democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, who wrote her Master’s thesis on the works of Saul Alinsky (1909 – 1972). His twelve rules for radicals are undoubtedly part of the whole package designed to destroy the West. These rules are:

* RULE 1: “Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.” Power is derived from 2 main sources – money and people. “Have-Nots” must build power from flesh and blood. (These are two things of which there is a plentiful supply. Government and corporations always have a difficult time appealing to people, and usually do so almost exclusively with economic arguments.)
* RULE 2: “Never go outside the expertise of your people.” It results in confusion, fear and retreat. Feeling secure adds to the backbone of anyone. (Organizations under attack wonder why radicals don’t address the “real” issues. This is why. They avoid things with which they have no knowledge.)
* RULE 3: “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.” Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty. (This happens all the time. Watch how many organizations under attack are blind-sided by seemingly irrelevant arguments that they are then forced to address.)
* RULE 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules. (This is a serious rule. The besieged entity’s very credibility and reputation is at stake, because if activists catch it lying or not living up to its commitments, they can continue to chip away at the damage.)
* RULE 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions. (Pretty crude, rude and mean, huh? They want to create anger and fear.)
* RULE 6: “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.” They’ll keep doing it without urging and come back to do more. They’re doing their thing, and will even suggest better ones. (Radical activists, in this sense, are no different than any other human being. We all avoid “un-fun” activities, and but we revel at and enjoy the ones that work and bring results.)
* RULE 7: “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” Don’t become old news. (Even radical activists get bored. So to keep them excited and involved, organizers are constantly coming up with new tactics.)
* RULE 8: “Keep the pressure on. Never let up.” Keep trying new things to keep the opposition off balance. As the opposition masters one approach, hit them from the flank with something new. (Attack, attack, attack from all sides, never giving the reeling organization a chance to rest, regroup, recover and re-strategize.)
* RULE 9: “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” Imagination and ego can dream up many more consequences than any activist. (Perception is reality. Large organizations always prepare a worst-case scenario, something that may be furthest from the activists’ minds. The upshot is that the organization will expend enormous time and energy, creating in its own collective mind the direst of conclusions. The possibilities can easily poison the mind and result in demoralization.)
* RULE 10: “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.” Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog. (Unions used this tactic. Peaceful [albeit loud] demonstrations during the heyday of unions in the early to mid-20th Century incurred management’s wrath, often in the form of violence that eventually brought public sympathy to their side.)
* RULE 11: “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” Never let the enemy score points because you’re caught without a solution to the problem. (Old saw: If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. Activist organizations have an agenda, and their strategy is to hold a place at the table, to be given a forum to wield their power. So, they have to have a compromise solution.)
* RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)

It would take quite a sick but committed individual to come up with this, yet this indicates how the enemies of the West are at pains to destroy it. Dare we not mention the worrisome fact that the contender for the White House has this as an ideological backbone, perhaps more so than the US Constitution.

It’s fairly obvious that these tactics are working in full swing. Add a dash of Marcusian repressive tolerance – that tolerates only opinions from the left – and we can conclude that there are elites at work in destroying the Western way of life very thoroughly. Not to mention how the once hallowed corridors of academia have been filled with tenured radicals who are writing and lecturing on topics that are quintessentially unsavoury for Western posterity, dumbing the youth down and hardening them under the guise of enlightenment.

The West today is culturally rich but spiritually weak, and cannot see the trees from the forest anymore, their stunted spiritual development possibly preparing them for the next generation of fascism, brought on by computer games, narrow-minded conformity and an inability to see beyond the facade of feigned public opinion.

Let’s hope it’s not too late then, so we can once again rejuvenate in the sounds of great composers and poets who have an understanding how harmony and spirituality could be reunited again, advancing our sense of humanity to the next level.

To quote Yeats once more:

And what rough beast, it hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Mistah Kurtz

In previous contributions to Praag, mention was made of the modern tendency to career helter skelter after all manner of doctrines and ideologies, mostly peddled by the fashionable media and their muftis, the “opinion formers”. In the paragraphs that follow a few brief remarks will be made about interesting and influential figures of the modern era who reacted against, what one may call, the popinjay syndrome. ( a popinjay is a parrot!)

The intellectual and cultural climate of the Twentieth Century was marked, above all, by an ever increasing sense of absurdity and senselessness, arising not only from a loss of faith, encapsulated in Friedrich Nietszche’s famous announcement that God was dead, but also from a general and growing awareness of the ultimate futility of man’s best and worst endeavours.

On the road towards nihilism no small role was played by the church itself, including the (Holy!) Inquisition and the wars of religion, with as its glorious climax, the infamous Bartholomew night when the flower of French protestantism was massacred Dingaan style by a crazed and fanatical Catholic mob. The great blood-letting of the French Revolution was as much a revolt against a corrupt and self-serving religious establishment as it was against the aristocracy. The colonial experience and the unspeakable barbarity of the two world wars in the last century gave the coup de grâce to what little was left of modern man’s belief in our civilization and its values. Were the forces of evil then to be victorious in the end? Was the heart of man the “Heart of Darkness” after all?

The Irish poet and mystic William Butler Yeats wrote these lines in 1921, three years after the end of the First World War:

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

Wherever we look around us we can recognise what Yeats is talking about. Societies in decay, family life disintegrating, marriage cheapened, nations abandoning their identity and their birthright, culture becoming more and more vulgar and superficial, language corrupted and perverted to serve some or other obscure political agenda, economies in tatters. And then, “The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” What can be more real and more true than that? One simply has to open a newspaper.

(The fact that Yeats ascribed the situation of our world largely to the growth of democracy, we shall leave aside for the moment.)

Closer to our time there is the ideologically-driven obsession of the churches with social justice and racial equality which alienated millions more. Since the social gospel preached by the churches can be served so much better by politicians, academics and the media, why trouble oneself with warming the hard church benches for a watered down version of Karl Marx?

In a letter to a friend Joseph Conrad wrote: “Faith is but a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of tomorrow. In this world – as I have known it – we are made to suffer without the shadow of a reason, of a cause, or of guilt. There is no morality, no knowledge and no hope; there is only the consciousness of ourselves, which drives us about a world that is always but a vain and floating appearance.” Conrad must have been in a particularly dark mood when he wrote this, because, if he consistently held these views, it is difficult to see how he could have written anything at all. As he says himself in the novel, Victory: “woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love – and to put his trust in life”. But are the two statements contradictory or do they merely illustrate the ambivalence of the modern psyche?

It is clear that the spiritual, existential, call it what you will, crisis of our age is first and foremost a crisis of faith and a loss of a sense of direction. Estranged from God, from nature, from our age-old values and rituals, from each other, from ourselves,

“We are the hollow men
We are the straw men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. “ (T.S. Eliot)

Note the head filled with straw.

We are witnessing at present the astounding spectacle of thousands of Western youths leaving their countries to go and fight for an Islamic state in Syria and Iraq. Absurd? Yes probably absurd, but made possible by a spiritually and morally bankrupt society no longer capable of offering young people the sense of purpose they need in order to exist.

Consciousness of the precariousness of our civilisation and the relativity of its values have become deeply engraved in the soul of modern man. What is right in one place is wrong in another, what is good for you, is bad for me, what is true today is false tomorrow.

Which brings us to Nietzsche. Friedrich Nietzsche is a landmark figure which cannot be avoided if one is to say anything about the modern age without burying one’s head in the sand. He was enough of a genius to see the impossibility of his statement that God was dead”: If God exists He cannot die and if He does not exist He cannot die either. No, Nietszche’s quarrel was not as much with God as it was with a society for whom Christianity had become an empty shell to which no more than lip service was paid, in search of respectability and a comfortable conscience, or even worse, for political and ideological expediency. (To borrow a phrase from Conrad: One of the dead cats of civilization). Then rather get rid of the shell as well and found a new ethic on different grounds. A full blooded atheist is to be preferred to a phoney Christian.

Was Nietszche therefore a nihilist? To a certain extent yes he was. But on the other hand he did not create nihilism. As someone put it somewhere, to describe nihilism is not exactly the same as being a nihilist. Nietszche is certainly not a nihilist in the sense that he rejects all traditional moral principles out of hand. His doctrine, if one may call it that, was rather that every man should create his own values or rediscover existing ones and stand by them, live them.

There is a lot about Nietzsche that we can disagree with. The last thing that he would probably have expected, is to be followed blindly. But we can learn lot from him too, above all to have the courage of one’s convictions, to say no, to disagree, to refuse to conform, to refuse to follow slavishly the prescriptions of ideology. For the greatest enemy of a meaningful existence is to subscribe, to agree, to conform and to obey.

Another landmark figure then is Joseph Conrad. On the 3rd of August, the Polish author, Teodor Jozef Konrad Korzeniowski (Joseph Conrad) died ninety years ago in Bishopsbourne, England. After a career at sea he started writing and produced a long series of novels, and novellas, among others Almeyer’s Folly, Lord Jim, Nostromo, Under Western Eyes, The Secret Agent and Heart of Darkness which served as the scenario for Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now.

In his novel, Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad describes two company officials: “… leaning forward side by side, they seemed to be tugging painfully uphill their two ridiculous shadows of unequal length, that trailed behind them slowly over the tall grass without bending a single blade”. One may be entitled to ask, was it they who were dragging their shadows or their shadows that were dragging them? But, whatever the case may be, it is certain that neither way did they manage to disturb the grass.

Elsewhere in the same novel Conrad talks about one of the same company officials: “….it seemed to me that if I tried, I could poke my forefinger through him, and encounter nothing but a little loose dirt.”

From the despair of his spiritual vacuity modern man clutches at all manner of straws (straw again!) whether it be materialism , “social justice”, democracy, egalitarianism or heart breaks over the oppression of (black) minorities. In South Africa a clique of black oligarchs have enriched themselves horrendously in the space of twenty years, mostly through nepotism, fraud, straight embezzlement and corruption, while millions of others have remained poor or have become poorer. But to this the human rightists, the egalitarians, the social “justicers”, the prayer groups and the media remain oblivious and impotent, ever so reminiscent of Joseph Conrad’s ineffectual fops.

When man had thrown off what he considered to be his moral and religious fetters and shackles he could have been expected to feel liberated and relieved. At last he had fulfilled the ideal of Adam and Eve and become the centre of the universe. Yet never before has man seemed more confused, forlorn and empty than since the “ death “ of God. Hence when the character Kurtz, in Heart of Darkness senses the end approaching, he can only hiss “The Horror, the horror” – the horror of a life and death without meaning.

Shortly afterwards when the manager’s servant announces: “Mistah Kurtz – he dead” the effect is: so what, he has been dead all along.

What room does all this leave for trust and confidence in the future? Not much. But do we have any other choice but to keep trying? As the Irish playwright, Samuel Beckett said somewhere: “Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter, try again, fail again, fail better”.