Zemirah Loc: Sojourner En Route...

Is Liberalism a Dying Faith?
By Patrick J. Buchanan


Friday - October 20, 2017

Asked to name the defining attributes of the America we wish to become, many liberals would answer that we must realize our manifest destiny since 1776, by becoming more equal, more diverse and more democratic — and the model for mankind's future.

Equality, diversity, democracy — this is the holy trinity of the post-Christian secular state at whose altars Liberal Man worships.

But the congregation worshiping these gods is shrinking. And even Europe seems to be rejecting what America has on offer.

In a retreat from diversity, Catalonia just voted to separate from Spain. The Basque and Galician peoples of Spain are following the Catalan secession crisis with great interest.

The right-wing People's Party and far-right Freedom Party just swept 60 percent of Austria's vote, delivering the nation to 31-year-old Sebastian Kurz, whose anti-immigrant platform was plagiarized from the Freedom Party. Summarized it is: Austria for the Austrians!

Lombardy, whose capital is Milan, and Veneto will vote Sunday for greater autonomy from Rome.

South Tyrol (Alto Adige), severed from Austria and ceded to Italy at Versailles, written off by Hitler to appease Mussolini after his Anschluss, is astir anew with secessionism. Even the Sicilians are talking of separation.

By Sunday, the Czech Republic may have a new leader, billionaire Andrej Babis. Writes The Washington Post, Babis "makes a sport of attacking the European Union and says NATO's mission is outdated."

Platform Promise: Keep the Muslim masses out of the motherland.

To ethnonationalists, their countrymen are not equal to all others, but superior in rights. Many may nod at Thomas Jefferson's line that "All men are created equal," but they no more practice that in their own nations than did Jefferson in his.

On Oct. 7, scores of thousands of Poles lined up along the country's entire 2,000-mile border — to pray the rosary.

It was the centennial of the Virgin Mary's last apparition at Fatima in Portugal in 1917, and the day in 1571 the Holy League sank the Muslim fleet at Lepanto to save Europe. G. K. Chesterton's poem, "Lepanto," was once required reading in Catholic schools.

Each of these traditionalist-nationalist movements is unique, but all have a common cause. In the hearts of Europe's indigenous peoples is embedded an ancient fear: loss of the homeland to Islamic invaders.

Europe is rejecting, resisting, recoiling from "diversity," the multiracial, multicultural, multiethnic and multilingual future that, say U.S. elites, is America's preordained mission to bring about for all mankind.

Indeed, increasingly, the indigenous peoples of Europe seem to view as the death of their nations and continent, what U.S. liberal elites see as the Brave New World to come.

To traditionalist Europeans, our heaven looks like their hell.

Thus Poles fall on their knees to pray to the Virgin Mary to spare them from threats of an Islamic future, as their ancestors prayed at the time of Lepanto, and of Vienna in 1683, when the Polish King John Sobieski marched to halt the last Muslim drive into the heart of Europe.

European peoples and parties are today using democratic means to achieve "illiberal" ends. And it is hard to see what halts the drift away from liberal democracy toward the restrictive right. For in virtually every nation, there is a major party in opposition, or a party in power, that holds deeply nationalist views.

European elites may denounce these new parties as "illiberal" or fascist, but it is becoming apparent that it may be liberalism itself that belongs to yesterday. For more and more Europeans see the invasion of the continent along the routes whence the invaders came centuries ago, not as a manageable problem but an existential crisis.

To many Europeans, it portends an irreversible alteration in the character of the countries their grandchildren will inherit, and possibly an end to their civilization. And they are not going to be deterred from voting their fears by being called names that long ago lost their toxicity from overuse.

And as Europeans decline to celebrate the racial, ethnic, creedal and cultural diversity extolled by American elites, they also seem to reject the idea that foreigners should be treated equally in nations created for their own kind.

Europeans seem to admire more, and model their nations more, along the lines of the less diverse America of the Eisenhower era, than on the polyglot America of 2017.

And Europe seems to be moving toward immigration polices more like the McCarran-Walter Act of 1950 than the open borders bill that Sen. Edward Kennedy shepherded through the Senate in 1965.

Kennedy promised that the racial and ethnic composition of the America of the 1960s would not be overturned, and he questioned the morality and motives of any who implied that it would.

So, why is liberalism dying?

Because it is proving to be what James Burnham called it in his 1964 "Suicide of the West" — the ideology of Western suicide.

What we see in Europe today is people who, belatedly recognizing this, have begun to "rage, rage, against the dying of the light."

pafret Loc: Northeast

The rise to prominence of right wing or conservative elements, in country after country is heartening. I fear it may already be too late for some countries, the Scandinavian ones particularly. Demographics show that in a brief period of time the natives in any nation that accepts unlimited hordes of moslems will find themselves a subjugated minority. The Liberal, multicultural mentality, with its emphasis on the brotherhood of man is willfully blind to the reality that they are embracing a cult which desires their destruction above all else. Worse, they have persisted in world domination as an article of the religious beliefs.

It is another instance of collective mania, akin to the Tulip Bulb insanity or Germany's drive to conquer Europe. Only this time it is an expiatory, suicidal mea culpa.

Here in America we are already seeing the prospect that our national political scene is being subverted by the influx of illegal aliens. In the near future, voting by illegals will overwhelm the democratic process and permanently skew control to the Socialist/Communist end of the spectrum. The people who elected Trump have probably issued their last hurrah because we too are being overwhelmed by demographics. Our folly is in not ejecting every illegal we come across and issuing draconian laws and penalties for employing such illegals. Only those people who are in this country legally, whether as visitors or legal alien residents should have any rights under our laws and the children of such illegals born here are in reality citizens of some other country. Birthright citizenship should not accrue as a benefit of criminal behavior and the Constitution already indicates that children of parents subject to a foreign soveriegnty are not citizens

Zemirah Loc: Sojourner En Route...

The "Liberal, multicultural mentality," propagated by those who protested the Viet Nam war in the 60's, and are now the self-proclaimed possessors of all sophistication and wisdom, as well as their share of governmental authority, still, after all these years, believe the United States government is their greatest threat and enemy... and, we the citizens, who do not now march with them, are equally targeted by their loathing.

The civilized, sophisticated savage children and youth who are their progeny, and are now occupying the schools and colleges of our land are being readied to complete their dreamed for socialist utopia.

They too, will welcome with open arms the illegals, and the pseudo-refugees, especially the Islamic, as they cheerfully legalize a nation-wide program of Euthanasia to hurry our demise.

Our country's only hope for longevity is anchored in how well we in this country, who are arguably still in our right minds, virtue, values and faith in God intact, have steered, guided and nurtured our own children and grandchildren, and whether we have taught them not to surrender or be passive, but to earnestly contend for this land of beauty with which we have been blessed.

A national weekend of sack cloth and ashes, with total national repentance as was seen in Nineveh 3,700 or so years ago would be good, but that is not going to happen.

It brought them an extra 86 years before God brought their curtain down.