The Witch Doctors

Ross Bagdasarian Sr. was the most famous Armenian-American in show business prior to the Kardashians, if show business is the proper term for what the latter do.   He got his start in acting before switching to singing and song-writing in the 1950s.   Late in that decade, he thought up the gimmick of speeding up the voice track on recordings to make the singers’ voices sound high and squeaky as if they had been performing in a studio full of helium.  He began recording songs using this technique and giving the attribution to a trio of cartoon chipmunks – Alvin, Simon, and Theodore.   Needless to say, it was successful and fairly soon a television series featuring his cartoon band premiered.  Bagdasarian would interact with Alvin and the Chipmunks as a cartoon version of himself who acted as their manager and went by the name David Seville.

 

Immediately prior to creating Alvin and the Chipmunks, Bagdasarian, already using the stage name David Seville, released a single which soared to the top of the charts.   The song’s title was “Witch Doctor”.   In the song, Seville as narrator addresses the object of his unrequited affection, and tells how he went to a witch doctor for help with this situation.   The witch doctor offers him the following advice:

 

ooo eee ooo ah ah ting tang walla walla, bing bang,

ooo eee ooo ah ah ting tang, walla walla bing bang.

 

Who was this person with such lucid and helpful advice?

 

A witch doctor or shaman is an important figure in most tribal societies, and in a few that have developed well beyond the tribal stage as well.   These are the people to whom the members of the tribe traditionally turn when they need healing and for a number of other reasons.   The healing the witch doctor offers involves him performing rituals and entering into a trance to make contact with the spirit world.   In the language that has become de rigueur in our age of political correctness, this would be described as an “alternative” form of medicine.   Being a traditionalist, I prefer the language with which both testaments of the Christian Scriptures condemn this sort of thing, terms like “witchcraft” and “sorcery”.

 

We, in our advanced technological civilization, like to think that our medical system bears no relationship to this sort of thing.   Our medicine, we keep telling ourselves, is scientific, and therefore based upon logic, facts, and evidence.   To compare it to shamanism is like comparing apples and oranges – or rather, since apples and oranges are both fruit, like comparing apples and thumbtacks.

 

I think, however, that we are very much deluding ourselves about the amount of witchcraft present in our own medical system.

 

If you turn in your Bible to St. Paul’s epistle to the Church in Galatia, and go to the fifth chapter, you will find, starting at the nineteenth verse, a list of the manifest “works of the flesh” which the Apostle contrasts with the fruit of the Spirit listed in the twenty-second and twenty-third verses.   After “idolatry” and before “hatred” in the list of the “works of the flesh” is “witchcraft.”   The Greek word translated “witchcraft” in the Authorized Bible here is φαρμακεία.   This word is also found in the ninth chapter of the Revelation of Jesus Christ given to St. John the Divine, in the twenty-first verse where it is translated “sorceries” and listed alongside “murders” “fornications” and “thefts” as among the things which the idol worshippers did not repent of, despite all the plagues that have been sent on them so far (at this point they are up to the sixth trumpet judgement).   Later in the same book, in the twenty third verse of the eighteenth chapter, it is again rendered “sorceries” and said to be the means by which Babylon deceived the nations of the world.

 

If you are unable to read the Greek alphabet, φαρμακεία is transliterated into English letters as pharmakeia.   Does that look like any English word you are familiar with?

 

You have undoubtedly answered that it looks like “pharmacy.”   Unlike with the word ai, which in English means “a South American three-toed sloth” and is a word borrowed from Portuguese, but in Japanese and Chinese has the meaning “love”, this is not a case of two different language traditions having developed words that are identical in spelling and pronunciation but completely different in meaning.   Pharmacy in English is derived from the Greek word.  

 

If we look up φαρμακεία in the venerable and trusty Greek-English Lexicon of Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott we find that the first definition given is “use of drugs, esp. of purgatives”, which is supported by references from the Aphorisms of Hippocrates.  Specifically they cite where Hippocrates says “use purgative medicines sparingly in acute diseases, and at the commencement, and not without proper circumspection” and “Persons in good health quickly lose their strength by taking purgative medicines, or using bad foods.”    It would sound, from these references, like Hippocrates of Kos – this is the Hippocrates to whom the oath which physicians are required to swear is attributed – was not exactly a fan of φαρμακεία.   Remember that, because we will return to it and draw out its significance later.  Liddell-Scott, continue the definition by clarifying that emetics are the type of purgatives specifically meant, adding that the term also has special reference to abortifacients, i.e., drugs that induce abortions, before saying “generally, the use of any kind of drugs, potions, or spells” of which usage they give multiple examples from Plato.   The second definition offered is “poisoning or witchcraft”.  

 

It might seem at first glance like the translators of our Bible used the same words “witchcraft” and “sorcery” to translate words expressing different concepts in the Old and New Testaments.   In the Old Testament, witchcraft and sorcery clearly refer to trafficking with the spirit world, and if the roots of the Hebrew words are not always clear about this, the context will generally spell it out.   The most famous example of a witch in the Old Testament is the witch of Endor, who summons up the spirit of Samuel the prophet for King Saul in the twenty-eighth chapter of I Samuel.   She was what is most often called a medium today.  The New Testament, as we have just seen, uses a word that has the use of drugs as its primary meaning.   The word for witchcraft used in the verse which prescribes the death penalty for it in Exodus is כָּשַׁף and its origins are unclear.   James Strong in his concordance and Wilhelm Gesenius in his Hebrew lexicon appear to be of the opinion that it originally meant to “whisper” or “mutter”, and so referred to softly chanting an incantation.   Others see it as being derived from the word for herbs and having a meaning almost identical to the Greek φαρμακεία.   The translators of the LXX evidently were of the later opinion for that is how they consistently rendered it.

 

The difference in meaning is not as great as it first seems.   What brings the idea of trafficking with the spirit world together with that of using drugs is the altered state of consciousness that is common to both.   Many drugs put a person into an altered state of consciousness, opening that person up to the spirit world.   Given the Biblical prohibitions against this sort of thing, it is evident that the spirit world that people enter in this state of consciousness is the demonic rather than the angelic.    Apart from use in their own making contact with the spirit world, of course, witches traditionally had a sort of apothecary business going on the side in which they dispensed drug concoctions to those who sought their aid, whether to heal their ailments or poison their enemies.

 

Now my point, if you recall, in bringing all of this up, was to argue that we are deluded, in our modern, technological, civilization, in thinking that witchcraft or sorcery might have been part of the medicine of the shamanism of primitive societies, but has nothing to do with our modern, “scientific” medicine.    On the contrary, our modern medicine is thoroughly dominated by the pharmaceutical industry.  

 

There are those who will counter by saying “yes, but the pharmaceutical industry doesn’t practice witchcraft, it uses science to manufacture drugs that help people.”    This is similar to, although not entirely the same thing, as the idea that drugs come in two types, the good, which are legal and used for medical purposes, and the bad, which are illegal narcotics used for recreational purposes.   Both viewpoints are incredibly naïve.

 

Drugs are, essentially, poisons.   All drugs have side effects, and while these vary, of course, in their nature and severity, all drugs, even the popular pain killers acetaminophen, ASA, and ibuprofen, are potentially fatal.   Medical drugs work, not by doing positive good to your body, but by doing harm, albeit harm that impedes not only the ordinary functions of your bodily systems, but also the condition that you have been diagnosed with.   The physician who prescribes them, does so in the hope - a reasoned, evidence-based, hope if the physician is at all competent - that the harm done by the drugs, will be less than the harm that would otherwise have been done by the condition, if left untreated.   Or, to put it more morbidly, they hope that the poison administered will kill what is killing you, rather than killing you.   That this is the essential nature of drugs has been recognized since ancient times, and the ethics of such an approach to healing was debated as far back as Plato’s Protagoras.

 

Which brings us back to Hippocrates of Kos.   As the quotations from his Aphorisms given above demonstrate, this legendary physician and medical ethicist, a contemporary of Socrates and Plato, who is remembered as the “Father of Medicine” was not a fan of the medical use of drugs.   He stressed the harm that they did, and in his own practice emphasized techniques that maximize the body’s own natural healing properties.   Although the maxim often attributed to him – primum non nocere (first do no harm) – does not actually appear in those words in his extent corpus, it does represent the basic principle of his medical ethics, and his famous Oath includes a pledge to inflict no harm.

 

The significance of this cannot be stressed enough.   Today, those who promote healing techniques that rely upon the body’s natural healing powers, like Hippocrates, and eschew the use of drugs in most situations, also like Hippocrates, are labelled “unscientific” by the medical establishment, and lumped together with the shamans.  Yet to the extent that there is a medical tradition in Western Civilization of which it can be truly said that it is based on a scientific foundation rather than witchcraft, that tradition began with Hippocrates of Kos.   Meanwhile, the very medical establishment that regards naturalistic and holistic approaches to medicine as “unscientific”, has for a very long time existed primarily to peddle the poisons of the pharmaceutical corporations, which, other than the big tech companies, are by far the most corrupt and shady sector of corporate industry, and which make their billions in profits from the technologically updated production of the very things which traditionally defined witchcraft’s approach to healing.

 

In other words, within the larger tradition of medicine and healing, the modern day heirs of the witches and sorcerers, who employed drugs and trafficking with demons to provide healing, have stolen the scientific credentials of the tradition which begins with Hippocrates and have become the establishment within the medical community.   That those credentials have been stolen has been very obvious this year, as the medical establishment has constantly told everyone who applies logic in questioning the totalitarian restrictions and public health orders that have been imposed upon their recommendations to “shut up” and “listen to the science” or “listen to the evidence.”   Obviously, those who talk this way, as if “evidence” and “science” were authorities that speak with a monolithic voice, demonstrate thereby that do not have even the most basic understanding of what these terms have historically meant in the intellectual tradition that goes back to Socrates and Plato.   They also illustrate precisely what the great Oxbridge don C. S. Lewis meant when he warned that the popular attitude towards science, already ubiquitous in his day, made people incredibly susceptible to being duped, because they would believe anything coming from the experts if dressed up in the language of science, and that therefore, when the next tyranny came, it would come in the name of science.  (1)

 

Indeed, by its behaviour this year, the medical establishment had clearly demonstrated that it is following the tradition of witchcraft rather than that of Hippocrates.   Primum non nocere has obviously been completely defenestrated since everything the medical experts have recommended this year has done an incredible amount of harm, and only very questionable amounts of good.   Keep in mind that all of this has been done in order to prevent the spread of a coronavirus which produces mild-to-no symptoms in the vast majority of people who contract it, is a significant threat only to those who are both very old and very sick, and which has failed in every way to live up to the alarmist hype surrounding it.

 

Shutting down every economy on the planet, threatening the global food supply and potentially starving millions if not billions of people, destroying people’s businesses, livelihoods, and savings, taking away everyone’s most basic rights and freedoms and placing them all in what amounts to a universal house arrest, without arrest, charge, trial, conviction, or even a crime having been committed, all constitutes harm on a colossal scale.   They shut down all the Churches – the ancient foes of witchcraft – all around the world, weeks prior to Holy Week, and left them closed for months.    The Jews, Muslims, and adherents of other ancient religions were similarly persecuted.  They left the abortion clinics open, of course, declaring the horrific procedure to be an “essential service.”   The resemblance between this physician-performed procedure and the ritual sacrifice of infants to devils is so obvious that further comment seems unnecessary.    Most recently, they have been telling everyone to wear face masks everywhere they go.   These masks are dangerous for some people (such as those with asthma or COPD) all the time, and for all people some of the time (such as when engaged in strenuous exercise), always have the effect of lowering the amount of oxygen and increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the air you breathe in and so are not safe for anybody when worn everywhere and all the time, and, furthermore, breed and spread infectious microorganisms when protocols such as washing your hands before and after putting them on, not touching them while wearing them, and discarding them as hazardous material after each use, are not followed.    The medical experts are now claiming that they significantly reduce the spread of the coronavirus, based upon what they call “new evidence” but which is merely a selective cherry-picking and re-interpretation of old studies in order to fit them into a new narrative.  Actual new evidence which conflicts with that narrative, such as that which the Danish study from this summer presumably contains, is being suppressed.   Even if we accept these claims, however, the good done is far outweighed by all the harm they do.  The masks are intended as symbols, symbols of acceptance of and submission to, the totalitarian “new normal”, and ultimately to the author of the “new normal” who is Satan.   All of this is witchcraft. 

 

Furthermore, the direction in which all of this is heading, seems rather obvious.  At some point, probably in the next few months to a year, the medical establishment will announce that their puppetmasters in the pharmaceutical industry have concocted a witches’ brew that will save us all from the Big Bad Coronavirus if we allow them to inoculate us with it.   The ingredients of that witches’ brew will probably make Shakespeare’s “eye of newt, and toe of frog, wool of bat, and tongue of dog, adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting, lizard’s leg, and owlet’s wing” recipe seem positively wholesome in comparison.   Adjuvants and preservatives in previous vaccines have included aluminum salts, which are suspected of contributing to Alzheimer’s, MSG, formaldehyde and thermerisol, which contains mercury, all toxic, none of which any sane person wants injected into his bloodstream.   Will the bat flu vaccine contain aborted foetus cells, like the vaccine commonly used for measles, mumps, and rubella?   Will it contain some sort of nanotechnology brewed up in Bill Gates’ cauldron?   Whatever it contains, judging from the immense pressure being placed on people to conform to the mask requirements, there will be a push to make it mandatory.    Whether they make it mandatory outright by passing a law requiring everyone to get the needle, or sneakily by getting every public service outlet and business to require proof of vaccination, it will constitute forcing people to receive the injection of foreign substances into their bodies against their will.   Such a universal rape would be the ultimate culmination of the long list of evils done in the name of protecting us from the coronavirus.   It would be a lot easier to fight against that evil, if more people were firmly opposing the tyrannical measures that are already in effect.

 

If there is any good that has come out of this scam it is that it has divided the sheep from the goats, so to speak, in the medical community.   The true heirs of Hippocrates are the dissident physicians, speaking out against the lockdowns, the masks, and all the other tyrannical measures.   The others are the heirs of the ancient witches, taking their orders, through the intermediary of the pharmaceutical industry, ultimately from the devil himself.

 

If, of course, you prefer to follow the advice of a witch doctor, that is your choice.   I recommend, however, if that is your choice, that you consider the advice of David Seville’s witch doctor.   “Ooo eee ooo ah ah ting tang walla walla bing bang” makes a heck of a lot more sense than forcing people to practice social distancing, stay at home, and wear masks.

(1)   Lewis addressed this attitude towards science, usually called “scientism”, in many places.    The third of the King’s College, Newcastle lectures, that were published together as his The Abolition of Man in 1943 is particularly worth mentioning here.   In this lecture, which bears the same title as the published work as a whole, Lewis discussed modern applied science as “man’s conquest of nature.”   He drew out the totalitarian implications of this, noting that the exchange man make’s in return for this conquest of nature is a “magician’s bargain.”   From here he launched into a discussion of how science and magic sprang out of the same impulse.   “The fact that the scientist has succeeded where the magician failed has put such a wide contrast between them in popular thought that the real story of the birth of Science is misunderstood. You will even find people who write about the sixteenth century as if Magic were a medieval survival and Science the new thing that came in to sweep it away. Those who have studied the period know better. There was very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins.”   He pointed out the similarities between Sir Francis Bacon and Faustus as the latter appears in Marlowe’s play, noting that neither man valued knowledge as an end in itself, contrary to much misrepresentation.   Bacon “rejects magic because it does not work; but his goal is that of the magician” he wrote, and, especially relevant to my topic here “In Paracelsus the characters of magician and scientist are combined.”   The man to which he refers was a sixteenth century Swiss physician who is known as the “father of toxicology.”   He practiced both medical science and various forms of occultism, including alchemy and divination, being an important transition figure between alchemy and modern chemistry.   He was also one of the earliest of modern pill pushers among Western physicians, liberally prescribing laudanum long before the use and abuse of opioids became common.    For a fuller discussion of C. S. Lewis’ insights into both science and scientism, see John G. West, ed., The Magician’s Twin: C. S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society, published by the Discovery Institute in 2012.

Only Morons Try to Flatten Curves

Straightenin' the curves
Flattenin' the hills
Some day the mountain might get 'em
but the law never will.

- Waylon Jennings as "The Balladeer" in the theme song to the Dukes of Hazzard. This quote has absolutely nothing to do with what I am discussing in this essay and is thrown in merely for my amusement.

In most – not all – countries, public health authorities have responded to the Wuhan Flu pandemic by issuing “shelter in place” or “stay at home” orders to the entire population, closing public facilities, shutting down all businesses and services that they declare to be “non-essential” and requiring that people stay at least six feet from each other when they must go out to buy groceries, get medical attention or the like. The end to which these are the means is expressed in that ubiquitous phrase, one of many that I wish never to hear again in my life after this pandemic is over, “flattening the curve.”

The curve that they are trying to flatten is that of the graph indicating the projected pattern of numbers of persons infected with COVID-19 from when the coronavirus first enters a population – or at least when it is first detected there – to when the pandemic peters out and ends. As is usual for an epidemic/pandemic the numbers infected are small at the beginning, then as it begins to spread faster they rise, at some point reaching a peak, before dropping back down again. Plotted on a graph, it forms the familiar bell shaped curve that statisticians use to represent a normal distribution in probability theory.

To “flatten the curve” means to alter the pattern by slowing down the spread of the virus so that the peak is much lower. This does not necessarily mean that the total number of people infected will be any less – just that the largest number of people who will be infected at the same time will be less. The point of doing this, is to prevent the medical system from being overburdened all at once and collapsing.

It should be observed that this strategy is designed to save the health care system rather than to save lives. It is important that we remember that, as much as our public health officials would prefer that we believe otherwise, these things are not synonymous. When it comes to saving lives, the big question with regards to flattening the curve is which is most likely to produce the most fatalities – a short-term, temporary, overload of the health care system during which treatment will not be available to everyone who requires it or an artificial extension of the duration of the pandemic and the lifespan of the virus giving it more opportunities to mutate and do more harm. To flatten the curve is to produce said artificial extension of the duration of the pandemic.

Our governments are being rather less than honest with us about the fact that the absurd time frames – up to two years - that we are seeing in their projection models are the result of the strategy of flattening the curve rather than the reason for it. The only way to push the peak of curve down is by slowing down the rate of infection and thus extending the duration of the pandemic long past the virus’ natural cycle. Even if doing this were to prove to be less fatal in terms of those who ultimately die from the virus it is an incredibly stupid and insane thing to do because it maximizes the myriad sorts of other damage that will be done by the shutdown.

Shocking as it will be for the many Canadians who worship at the altar of Tommy Douglas to hear this, the collapse of the health care system would not mean the end of the world. The hospitals would recover from such a collapse a lot quicker than the economy will recover from the shutdown, our social and communal lives will recover from our being brainwashed into fearing ordinary human contact, and our heritage of Common Law rights and freedoms will recover from our having willingly surrendered all of our most basic freedoms the moment some Hitler with a stethoscope told us to do so to avoid catching and spreading a bad bug.

The long-term negative consequences of the means being employed to flatten the curve of the coronavirus pandemic so outweigh the benefit of saving the health care system that those who for whatever reason have decided upon this strategy have been trying to sell it to the public by pretending that it is the only option for dealing with this pandemic that is available. Consider, for example, the way in which our Dominion and provincial governments have released over the past couple of weeks the projection models that they have been working with. In the press conferences where these models were released contrasts were drawn. On the one hand, we were given the numbers of those that these models predict will be infected with the virus and die under the measures currently being taken. On the other hand, we were given the numbers of those that according to the model would have been infected and died had we done nothing at all.

All of this is, of course, an obvious example of bifurcation, of the logical fallacy of the false dilemma. It is hardly the case that the only options available to us were to do what we are presently doing or to do nothing. A strategy of protecting the most vulnerable, while letting everybody else go about their daily lives, would reduce the number of deaths expected from the pandemic without the numerous ill effects of flattening the curve. The Kingdom of Sweden is following such a strategy and it appears to be working for them. It has not been often in the last century that Sweden has been a model of sound and sane public policy. It figures that after following their bad example on any number of other issues, usually having something or the other to do with gender politics and political correctness, that when they actually get something right we would ignore them.

Dissenting epidemiologist, Dr. Knut Wittkowski, who was the head of Rockefeller University’s Department of Biostatics, Epidemiology, and Research Design for twenty years, has argued that there is no good reason to extend the duration of a respiratory disease’s run through the population and that the present regime of extreme social distancing and shut down, far from being the best or only response to the pandemic, is the worst. He is far from being the only epidemiologist to think this way and to disagree with the strategy being pursued by most public health authorities. As is generally the case, when the mainstream media claims that a consensus of scientific experts is behind a policy which they and the government support, they are lying through their teeth.

That there is a great deal of uncertainty about this virus and pandemic is acknowledged by all. That the measures being taken to combat it will have devastating effects of their own, which will only get worse the longer they are kept in place, is a certainty. Yet the strategy which underlies these measures, requires that they be kept in place for a very long time. This is hardly grounds for the blind confidence in our public health authorities that they are demanding from us at this moment.

Indeed, they are starting to give the impression that we would have been better off seeking the advice of that alternative medicine practitioner whose answer to everything is “ooo eee ooo ah ah, ting tang, walla walla bing bang.”

Bring Back Bron!

There has been an awful lot of finger pointing going on in the aftermath of the unfortunate incident in Texas a couple of weekends ago. The question “who is to blame” has been on everyone’s minds. Nobody is much interested in the obvious answer, i.e., that the shooter himself is to blame, as that answer, however truthful, is lame and boring. So the blame has been shifted onto virtually everybody else. I use the qualifier “virtually” because I have yet to hear anyone blame country and western singer/songwriter and NASCAR speed demon Marty Robbins for the shooting. Yet the case against him is as sound and logical as the case which progressives, liberals, and other left-wing kooks and weirdos have been pressing against Donald the Orange.

The song that established Robbins’ country and western career and won him his first Grammy award was “El Paso”, written and recorded for his 1959 album “Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs.” The song is a first person narrative in which the character of the narrator sings about falling in love with a Mexican girl named Feleena, a singer at Rosa’s Cantina in the “west Texas town of El Paso.” When another cowboy comes to town and he sees the two of them together in the saloon he jealously challenges the newcomer to a duel and shoots him dead. He steals a horse and flees to New Mexico, but is unable to resist the urge to see Feleena again. On his return he encounters several mounted cowboys who are out looking for him and runs the gauntlet to get into town, being severely wounded in the process. He makes it to the backdoor of Rosa’s, only to be shot down, and dies in Feleena’s arms moments later.

Here we find the inspiration for the unhappy turn of events that has been all over the news as of late. Clearly, Whatever-the-heck-his-name-is, was listening to this song one day and the idea popped into his head “Hey, this song is saying that in El Paso, the thing to do when you are mad is to go around shooting people” and the massacre ensued.

What’s that you say? “Preposterous!” “Absurd!” “Nonsense!”

Of course it is. No more so, however, than the ridiculous claim that Donald the Orange’s supposedly “racist” rhetoric is to blame.

The accusations against the American president utilize the same sort of illogic that progressives here in Canada, as well as in the UK and Europe, have used for decades to justify laws against so-called “hate speech.” According to their way of thinking, hate speech, which does not mean expressions of literal hatred such as “I hate you” so much as statements which reflect negatively on an identifiable group of people leads to violent actions and so should be treated as a violent act itself and prohibited and punished by law. This sort of thinking is very similar to the basic concept that underlies the practice of magic, the non-sleight-of-hand-type of magic that is, - the idea that you can produce effects in the physical world simply by uttering the right word or combination of words. A lot of progressive thinking is like this. Note how they seem to believe that governments have the ability to alter reality by passing laws and that an individual is whatever sex or made-up gender he, she, it or whatever declares himself, herself, itself, or whatever to be. Given the way the left-wing mind seems to operate, perhaps, if you ever find yourself in the situation of being afflicted with unrequited love for a person of the progressive persuasion you should follow the advice of David Seville’s shaman and try uttering the words or syllables or whatever they are: “oo ee oo ah ah ting tang walla walla bing bang” – it might actually work.

It is at times like this that we really feel the loss of the late, great Auberon Waugh, who knew no equal – with the exception of Michael Wharton aka Peter Simple – in his ability to poke fun at this sort of thing. Mercifully, an article he wrote many years ago can be applied to the situation at hand. It appeared first in the July 10th, 1976 issue of The Spectator and was later included in the anthology Brideshead Benighted, published by Little, Brown and Company in 1986, where it can be found on pages 153 to 156. The title is “Che Guevara in the West Midlands.”

In the article, Waugh begins by talking about an interview, which had just been published, with John Tyndall, the leader of the National Front, and goes on to discuss Robert Relf, whose difficulties with the Race Relations Board were highly-publicized at the time and who is the “Che Guevara” alluded to in the title. “I don’t know why it is that race relations should attract so much foolishness and pomposity on both sides of the fence”, Waugh began one paragraph and in the next added “For myself, I see nothing to choose between the National Front and the Race Relations Board. Both are a collection of bores and busybodies and both are harmful to the extent they are taken seriously.” In his concluding paragraph he wrote that “I feel certain that the only thing which gives the National Front glamour or popular appeal at the present time is the attempt by foolish, well-meaning people to suppress its views and treat its language as unfit for publication” and of the Race Relations Board “The kindest and wisest thing to do is to laugh at them.”

This, for those who have forgotten, which is probably most people since there is so much of the opposite floating around these days, is what sanity looks like. The part of the article that is most relevant and which is what brought it to mind is the following excerpt:

They [the National Front] may well be a nasty, boring and humourless collection of fanatics, but I have never seen that there was anything more wicked about race hatred than there is about class hatred or religious hatred or the peculiarly intense and inexplicable hatred which my dear wife feels for Jimmy Connors, the tennis player. They are all part of the rich panorama of life. If I forbade my wife to express her true feelings for Jimmy Connors, I have no doubt they would fester inside her, creating little black eddies of resentment and paranoia which would eventually burst out in some hideous drama on the Centre Court at Wimbledon when Connors would expire, coughing blood, in front of the television cameras, with a lady’s parasol sticking between his ribs; public subscriptions would create a Jimmy Connors Memorial Trust and we would be stuck with a hideous modern statue of the young man somewhere on those green and pleasant lawns. So, wisely, I let her have her say.

The insight this shows is truly profound. The verbal expression of hatred is not the cause of violence but a safety vent that helps prevent it. I am persuaded that Waugh was on to something here and that if civilization ends up being consumed in a race war it will be progressive anti-racists who demand that the law be used to force those they disagree with to shut up who will be to blame for it.

In addition to saying that the current American president’s rhetoric inspired the El Paso shooter, progressives also maintain that he has been promoting “white nationalism.” “White nationalism” is an expression which has been used to mean anything from white people engaging in the kind of racial identity politics that the progressive Left promotes for every other race to the violent ideology of National Socialism but it is the latter end of that spectrum that progressives have in mind when they make this accusation against Trump. They are as wrong in the one accusation as they are in the other and for the same reason. Their own promotion of identity politics for all other groups together with their vilification of whites as a race makes white identity politics legitimate as a defensive, response. Their denial of that legitimacy, is what creates the risk of white racial identity politics turning radical, revolutionary, and violent. Someone like Trump, who provides a voice within the system whereby whites can air their legitimate racial grievances, is the best safeguard against that outcome. Only a total moron could fail to realize that.

Of course progressives are wrong about this just as they are wrong about everything else that has to do with race. Eleven years ago Barack Obama ran on a platform that basically amounted to “vote for me because I am black, you have to vote for me because I am black, oh, and by the way, did I mention that I am black.” This proved to be a winning strategy and American voters responded by electing their first president chosen on the basis of the colour of his skin. When this happened, progressives hilariously declared that his election signified that the United States had entered into a post-racial era. In reality, it was Obama, not Trump, who ushered in a new era of highly racialized politics. Progressives are pointing to El Paso and Christchurch as proof that a wave of white supremacist terrorism is upon us when in reality these incidents completely disprove their argument. Since every time a white person anywhere in the world commits a violent act which can possibly be attributed to racial motives the media makes it the top story for weeks if not months on end we can be certain that we have heard of every such incident that has ever occurred and they are a miniscule fraction of a fraction of the violent incidents that occur on a daily basis. Neither the Christchurch nor the El Paso killer was part of any organized movement. Both incidents were carried out by deranged loners and in both cases in order to create the narrative spin they desired the liberal media had to cherrypick the killer’s manifesto. By contrast, the anti-racist terrorism that the liberal media and progressive political leaders refuse to condemn even while they demand that all right-of-centre political leaders disavow and condemn white advocacy whether violent or not is systematic, organized and widespread.

Yes, this sort of insanity is crying out for the return of Auberon Waugh to once again satirize the unsatirizable. While raising him from the dead is beyond my abilities, Naim Attallah of Quartet Books has done the next best thing by publishing a new anthology of his writings entitled A Scribbler in Soho. For any sane person looking to lighten his spirits in these dark and gloomy days I highly recommend it.

Be careful, however, about the messages you soak in while listening to 1950’s era country and western music. I would hate to hear that any of you had shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.