Quadrant Magazine
Western Civilisation and its Irrational Critics
14th May 2021
Eugene Alexander Donnini
The Enlightenment philosopher John Locke’s notions of government with the consent of the governed and the idea of natural rights had a profound influence on the Enlightenment and the growth of Western civilisation. Locke believed all human beings were equal before the law, regardless of their religious, cultural, racial or political affiliations, and were entitled to equal opportunities and justice. He believed each human being had basic natural rights to life, liberty and property, and that these rights are rights that one is born with and nobody can take away, for political, religious or other reasons. The right to live means you have the right to be born and live your life in peace. The right of liberty basically means nobody can enslave you or control your thoughts or actions. The right to property means that anybody can buy or own property.
In his most famous work, The Treatise on Civil Government, Locke argues that sovereignty (supreme authority) resides in the people, and explains the nature of legitimate government in terms of natural rights and the social contract (the voluntary agreement among individuals): “Men being by nature all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of this estate and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent.” Locke recognised the primacy of human freedom and that a legitimate government needs to be established on that basis.
This essay appears in the current Quadrant.
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In Locke’s time nationalism—if it meant anything—meant being subordinate to your local landlord (aristocrat), the monarchy and organised religion, which were not based on any notions of equality of opportunity, freedom of expression, voting, or any other rights, but on keeping the population without rights and property and mostly poor. The civic nationalism Locke and others were in the process of developing was very different, based on the Enlightenment values of the sovereignty of the individual, bipartisan secularism and universal rights, and most importantly, the rule of law, that today underpin most Western constitutions and presuppose all human beings are born free and created equal.
Civic nationalism vs racism
Civic nationalism, through trial and error, has proven historically the most successful, equitable form of government ever devised. What guarantees its success is the equal value of every person based on a voluntary agreement to put Enlightenment values above all other values and laws that relate to religion, culture or anything else. Locke believed these were basic requirements for people who wish to live in peace and harmony. But in Western nations today Enlightenment-derived law and values are being attacked and eroded by governments that treat the sovereignty of their people with contempt, by legislating beyond the mandates they were elected to implement.
Attacks against civic nationalists by the Left and Right are two-pronged. The minuscule ethnocentric Right (ethnonationalists) considers Enlightenment values a threat to the European race, while the Left sees Enlightenment values as a mechanism of the capitalist class to control the workers and exploit their labour. Both these views are false and derived from eighteenth-century mechanistic philosophy (which likens the universe to a large machine) and antiquated tribal nonsense, not historical fact. There has, however, since the 1960s, been a primary shift by the Left away from the capitalist-versus-proletariat classical Marxist theory—which is still used to incite hatred in new recruits but has been almost totally abandoned in terms of ideology and function.
The ethnonationalist far-Right fringe’s use of identity politics as a fundamental marker for human categorisation is as dangerous as it is on the Left—but not as all-pervading and influential as the Left’s command over identity politics and its cancel culture of “wokism” that today has reached saturation level in social media, universities and the corporate world, where skin colour is of primary importance, more so than one’s capacity to do the job. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary describes identity politics as: “politics in which groups of people having a particular racial, religious, ethnic, social, or cultural identity tend to promote their own specific interests or concerns without regard to the interests or concerns of any larger political group”. Identity politics is a form of ethnocentrism, in other words, the racism of the kind Hitler imposed on the Jews. James Kirchick published an article in Tablet Magazine in August 2019 on the recent tidal wave of left-wing racism in America which exposes this cancer at a systemic level:
The way the left talks incessantly about “white men”, or openly puts membership in victim groups above individual rights and virtues, is the essence of what most people mean by racism. Not “reverse racism”—but real, actual, racism.
The identity politics almost the entirety of the Left and the far-Right fringe are propagating does nothing but generate hatred and divide and destroy whole communities for political ends.
There is nothing stopping any cultural community living in a civic Western nation from practising the traditions of their culture and religion, as long as such practices do not interfere with the rights, freedom and safety of fellow citizens which is guaranteed under the law—fundamentally derived from Enlightenment values. This is one of the primary reasons the West has been so successful and prosperous; why people from all cultures and races migrate to the West and seldom away from it. In other words, the freedom they enjoy also comes with a responsibility to recognise the freedom and rights of others in their community, regardless of religion, culture or skin colour.
Left establishment, alliances and fake news
There is an anti-Enlightenment alliance today that wants to destroy Western civilisation and replace it with a collectivist Marxist dictatorship, an alliance between the intelligentsia, the media, universities, politics and big business, whose ships, ideologically, are all sailing in the same direction (away from Enlightenment values) and whose policies are fundamentally left-wing (E. Harris. Exposure of the Vast Left-Wing Establishment. Huffpost. 26/2/2016). Mainstream media are, to this end, mostly “fake news” (liars), globalist agitators and propagandists. By fake news, I mean a type of yellow journalism or propaganda that consists of deliberate misinformation or hoaxes spread via traditional print and broadcast news media or online social media. Consider the mainstream media coverage and support for the lies circulated by the Bush White House administration, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and that Libya was slaughtering its own people, which was the excuse used by the leftist Obama administration and its allies to destroy and plunder that nation and its resources, costing the lives of 60,000 Libyan civilians.
CNN is historically one of the most unabashed and obvious disseminators of fake news along with most of the mainstream left-leaning media, like MSNBC, the ABC, and most blatantly the BBC. One of the most informative books (now a documentary) about fake news is called Hoaxed: Everything They Told You is a Lie, by Mike Cernovich.
Political scientists and foreign policy experts have used the term “Deep State” to describe individuals and institutions who exercise power in collusion with or independent of national political leaders. Today such individuals and institutions proliferate as non-elected policy-makers in positions of leadership both inside and outside Western nations. It is they who set the basic agenda, who insidiously guide policies and promote mandates that do not have the support of the people. Organisations like the UN, WHO, and EU (all controlled by Marxists) are primarily Deep State enablers whose anti-democratic agendas are enforced or imposed by deception, propaganda and stealth. (See The Deep State. Mike Lofgren, 2016). Also, The Deep State of Europe “Welcome to Hell”, (April 18, 2017) by Basil Coronakis. The Deep State agenda is further imposed by trans-national committees such as the Marxist-inspired “human rights commission”: a department, body or committee constituted by a state or its local government. This may seem harmless, but it’s not, because the commission derives its authority from the United Nations and can usurp the authority of civic nations. Protection for human rights is by definition built into Enlightenment values and law and doesn’t require an outside, non-elected commission to implement, particularly one that is discriminatory, that has a globalist Marxist agenda and whose definition of human rights is defined by that agenda and not applied without discrimination. Where, for example, was the human rights commission that should have stood up to defend the human rights of those tens of thousands of European women and children raped and abused by Muslim grooming gangs, abuses that are still occurring today? Where is the human rights commission that will raise its hand against the current dispossession and mass murder of white South African people? Or the practice of human slavery in Muslim countries? Or the deaths of over 250,000 Christian Middle Eastern Arabs living in Islamic countries? These are but a few of many examples.
Propaganda and lies
The Left establishment (which today in Western nations includes most of the establishment Right) often accuse civic nationalists of being racists, neo-Nazis and fascists, but this is a deliberate and blatant lie. What these collectivists omit to say and which history demonstrates beyond any shadow of a doubt is the exact opposite: the combined civic-nationalist nations of Europe and beyond defeated the Nazis and the Fascists during the Second World War, and also encouraged and assisted the Eastern Bloc nations to liberate themselves from the equally oppressive and barbaric Soviet Marxist regime.
They also omit to inform people that Nazism and Fascism were, like the Soviets, brutal collectivist regimes (closed political systems) that described themselves as socialists, who had nothing but contempt for the values of the Enlightenment—values close to the hearts and minds of those men and women who fought and died so their nations and others would, in future, be free from the collectivist folie à deux tyranny and oppression of left and right-wing collectivism. As Edward Hudgins wrote in D-Day and Enlightenment Values (June 6, 2014):
Fundamentally, fascism and communism both arose because of an eclipse of the Enlightenment principles. Fascism and communism held the group—the “race” and the “proletariat” respectively—as superior to the individual. They rejected reason as a guide to life in favour of mindless, emotional obedience to authority.
Today, mainstream opinion (propaganda) pieces that tell us to stop obsessing over socialism’s past failures, and start to get excited about its future potential, have almost become a genre in their own right. For example, a New York Times article (June 26, 2017) claimed that the next attempt to build a socialist society will be completely different, a claim made by every Marxist buffoon who has ever existed, and with the same disastrous consequences:
This time, people get to vote. Well, debate and deliberate and then vote—and have faith that people can organize together to chart new destinations for humanity … Stripped down to its essence, and returned to its roots, socialism is an ideology of radical democracy.
What utter poppycock! History offers no proof for these statements and demonstrates that those who make them are naive and irresponsible, or conniving ideologues, or just plain ignorant. These neophytes bring nothing new to the debate. In fact, they stifle debate and new ideas at every opportunity. The collectivism they aspire to has not changed ideologically, economically or otherwise. Nevertheless, what they are implying is that all those bloody Marxist regimes that failed in the past were not real Marxism; and when they and their comrades are in charge things will turn out differently. In other words, they’d like us to believe, they are uncontaminated by any proclivity to darkness or sin and thus would bring on the virtuous utopia. When one witnesses the deep hatred, anger and intolerance that permeates much of left-wing politics today, the first impulse anyone should have when confronted by these paragons of virtue is to turn and run.
Collectivism and mass murder
Their remarks about debating and deliberating also need to be clarified. For example, would debating and deliberating come before or after the Marxists are in power and freedom has been abolished? And will those who are critical of collectivism or opposed to it have a voice in a socialist government, in other words, an equal say? Of course not! The very idea of voting is done within a limited context. In other words, all change has to be made within the confines of a socialist government: one of the major hallmarks of a closed political system, which effectively removes one of the fundamental principles of the Enlightenment: the people’s right to vote a government out of office.
Once this right is removed (which fascist/Nazi/Marxist regimes have done and always aim to do) the possibility of rampant nepotism and corruption escalate because the people have no legal redress against them from “outside” the government in terms of a neutral universal law or constitution. In the past, this arrangement has led to the imprisonment, torture and massacre of millions of people—those, for example, who opposed the Nazis (the National Socialist German Workers’ Party), the Fascists, and the Marxists. There have been many books written about right-wing collectivism and a good place to start is Richard Bessel’s Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: Comparisons and Contrasts (1996). Right-wing collectivism was responsible for the mass murder of millions of people. It is not however widely known (and today is suppressed knowledge) that left-wing collectivism, in Russia alone, murdered over ten times as many people in an equally brutal fashion as the Nazis, for which there are ample primary source documentation and eyewitness accounts.
The Soviet gulags were filled with people who were critical of or opposed the collectivists. Gustaw Herling-Grudzski wrote A World Apart (1951), in which he describes life in the gulag in a harrowing personal account and provides an in-depth, original analysis of the nature of the Soviet Marxist system. Lenin’s Gulag by Richard Pipes (June 2014), also gives an in-depth account that draws on primary source documentation. The most famous account was Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
The primary source evidence in relation to the similarities of other Marxist dictatorships is overwhelming. For example, look at the Documentation Center of Cambodia, Mapping the Killing Fields. Through interviews and physical exploration, DC-Cam identified 19,733 mass burial pits, 196 prisons that operated during the “Democratic” Kampuchea (DK) period, and eighty-one memorials constructed by survivors of the DK regime. If you look at the history of the USSR and its occupied states in the Eastern Bloc (see Nikolai Dekker, Genocide in the USSR, 1958), you will see a familiar pattern of mass murder and oppression emerging. Many of these regimes called themselves “democratic” socialist republics.
A pattern of socioeconomic failure extends to every single Marxist state that has existed, the latest variant is Venezuela, where starvation is rampant and people are eating pets and zoo animals to survive, as Forbes reported in April 2017.
Collectivists are not anti-capitalist, they are anti-freedom
It is a myth and a smokescreen selectively disseminated by the Left that somehow the majority of corporations are anti-Left, in other words, opposed to globalisation and aligned to the interests of nation-states. This preposterous idea is used as propaganda when it suits, but is a long way from the reality of corporate-global-banking-political inter-connectedness. In Jihad vs McWorld (July 30, 1996), Benjamin Barber correctly states:
By many measures, corporations are more central players in global affairs than nations. We call them multinational but they are more accurately understood as post-national, transnational or even anti-national. For they abjure the very idea of nations or any other parochialism that limits them in time or space.
Corporations play a major role in leftist globalisation processes, which involve the integration and control of not only a nation’s resources but also its communication systems, ideas, culture and economy into a one-world corporate network. In terms of communication and media, look at the role played by staggeringly wealthy giant corporations like CNN, ABC, MSNBC, SBS, BBC, FOX, Al Jazeera, Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, PayPal, Patreon and others. These are massive global corporate business concerns that have a hegemony over human communication and the spread of ideas worldwide. Most of them are left-wing progressives (collectivists) with a pro-globalist bias, who are now active in the process of de-platforming (censoring) any ideas critical of or opposed to their global agenda, as Samuel Westrop points out in Silicon Valley Censorship (July 26, 2007):
The same level of discrimination and censorship is incorporated into anti-Enlightenment, undemocratic toxic laws, that are being imposed by Western governments, attacking free speech, freedom of the press, the spread of new ideas and laws that compel citizens to use certain words and phrases and forbid them from using others under the threat of prosecution and/or imprisonment.
And as Jordan Peterson noted in The Hill (10/18/16), in relation to Canada’s new CA legislation:
There is, however, a crucial difference between laws that stop people from saying arguably dangerous words and laws that mandate the use of politically-approved words and phrases. We have never had laws of the latter sort before, not in our countries.
The West is the best
The basis of rational, reasonable, empirical, scientific Western thought grew out of the Enlightenment and was all founded on a lack of belief in authority: the authority of the church, the aristocracy, and the state. Instead of “faith”, Enlightenment philosophers demanded investigation and evidence to seek the truth. They had confidence in humanity’s intellectual powers, both to achieve systematic knowledge of nature and to serve as an guide in practical life. This confidence is generally paired with scepticism towards forms or carriers of arbitrary authority (such as superstition, prejudice, myth, ideological possession, propaganda and miracles), insofar as these are seen to compete with the authority of one’s own reason, evidence and experience. The message of the Enlightenment is that the process of becoming self-directed in thought and action through the awakening of one’s intellectual powers leads ultimately to a better, more fulfilled existence, and for this we have overwhelming proof.
The arts and sciences of the West within the context of civic nations have flourished, resulting in the greatest scientific advancements and inventions in human history. The abolition of diseases, poverty and slavery, the creation of the internet, putting human beings on the moon, sound infrastructure construction, and technology, air travel, the wonders of nanotechnology and quantum physics … the list goes on. Why do you think people migrate to the West, mostly from anti-democratic (Marxist) and other (Islamic) closed societies? It is because the West, with all its imperfections, is free, creative and prosperous. The bulk of modern inventions are products of the West, not of closed societies who already believe they have the truth from an authority, who cower before their tribal gods and the dictates of tyrannical clerics, intelligentsia and governments infested with nepotism who rob the people of their rights and freedom, expecting blind obedience, giving nothing in return but utopian fairy-tales, torture, socioeconomic failure and death.
