The Ideology of Failure
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The migration crisis was such a mess that when the Swedish Prime Minister announced the reversal of his idiotic open-door policy, he and his deputies cried like babies in front of the cameras. Apparently, the ‘multicultural dream’ was not such a dream after all. Two years later, a failed asylum seeker drove a lorry down one of the main thoroughfares in central Stockholm, killing five people and seriously injuring many more. In times like this, our leaders showed themselves to be totally feeble and helpless. They have lost their way, unable to draw the obvious conclusions even when they stare them in the face. The consequences of these disastrous actions show what we should make of these stooges who have attempted to force people to accept the perverse moral diagnosis that their traditional way of life is flawed, and that their society is inherently based on evil prejudice.
Very similar events took place in Germany: thick crowds of tearful Germans embracing ‘refugees’ on railway platforms were months later dealing with mass rapes, suicide bombers, machete-wielding immigrants, lorries being driven into Christmas markets and an Afghan asylum seeker with axe in hand whose actions were inspired by the brutal atrocities in southern France (Nice) a week earlier. In the month of July 2016, Bavaria, the part of Germany that took in most of the Syrian asylum seekers, looked like it might slip into some kind of intifada. With each attack, the German media tried to persuade the public that the attackers were mentally ill, and that they could have just as easily have been Germans. It is a familiar pattern in Germany (and Sweden): there is a ‘refugee’ induced terrorist event, the German media blames its own people and the politicians respond by slowly chipping away at the freedom of the ethnic population with odious hate-speech legislation or censorship of social media, which is put in place to criminalise the discourse of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) opposition. Unwelcome political opponents will be rendered illegitimate, but this will be dressed up as a measure to protect helpless minorities. Merkel who wears a solemn personality made for a Requiem Mass, and her globalist peers seem with these initiatives to wish to aspire to a European-wide oppressive mass guardian-state which they can therapeutically control through managerial government. The cultural Left seems to wish to use immigrants to change fundamentally society in the West. There appears to be a desire amidst certain groups on the Left to use immigrants as an instrument to turn upside down the social order in Europe.
In this book, I deal with the issue of obfuscation. One example of this is when a terrorist ran his lorry into a heaving crowd of party-goers celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, killing eighty-six people and critically injuring many more, and the police responded by destroying the CCTV footage of the event. Perhaps we should just pretend the atrocity never happened. This book does not attempt to detail or describe the long list of horrendous attacks by Islamists who were invited to our countries, but instead attempts to understand the reasons why our political leaders have turned against us in this fashion, feeding us lies and misinformation and using the ‘racist’ slogan as a means of closing down all discussion. It tries to show that our democracies and the principles that define them are in danger. The book is a collection of short essays, a factory of ideas and thoughts, written at a time when political events are changing faster than anybody could ever imagine. There is a sense of urgency here; a feeling that in the West we are losing control, that we are sliding into an age of techno-authoritarianism. I am writing at a time of crisis and that is perhaps reflected in the book’s style. The essay style has been chosen as short self-contained chapters are nimbler than discursive argumentation, and permit me to move from topic to topic with pluralistic thought. Some of the essays are enlivened by the occasional aperçu, interlaced with short ethnographic vignettes. I deal with a multiplicity of subjects in an anti-systemic way (one might say with a distinctive timbre) without forcing these into a single object of enquiry. I prefer not to organise my thoughts into tight, logically ordered systems, but instead to tip-toe between illusion and disillusion.
In July 2016, the Pope declared the world to be in a state of war, and had said previously that he believed this might be Christianity’s last Christmas. This is not a war of religion, he pointed out. Indeed, that is so. This is a civil war; a war between people who want to preserve their traditions, cultural heritage and freedom and those who preach liberalist multiculturalism and who will defend a whole schema of freedom infringements in order to achieve it. Home has become the locus of a silent, uncanny war. European nations are divided between those who want to preserve historical modalities of belonging, and those who wish to extirpate them; those who want continuity and identity, and those who aspire to a Rousseauesque social tabula rasa.
There will no doubt arise in some readers the temptation to accuse me of hyperbole, but President Putin has said himself repeatedly that we are on the brink of nuclear war; and yet this is curiously never reported in the Western media. One might think if the President of Russia gathered journalists to tell them about what he believed was the nuclear threat, then that might be worthy of an article, especially given Putin’s reputation for speaking frankly. Journalists are quick to gloss over anything that might disturb the image of the safe, world order that President Obama insisted we enjoy even if mass shootings in America now seem to happen on an almost weekly basis. ‘Unorthodox’ views are not welcome which in itself tells us something about the relationship between Western Governments and the media.
Islamist atrocities have been committed in places where just a few years ago they would have been unthinkable. The arrogance shown by some immigrants towards their host society is a new phenomenon, and not a feature of previous refugee crises. Our politicians are in denial about the threats that face us. The former Swedish Prime Minister told Swedes to ‘open their hearts’ to the ‘refugees’, and now some of the migrants are committing rape and murder on a daily basis in the parts of Germany, Sweden and France which accepted the highest number. Those who spoke out about what they perceived to be a gross error were called ‘racist bigots’, and were subject to verbal abuse. Legislation was introduced to silence them, so that the project could continue unheeded.
But, the real theme that connects the click-clacking pieces of this book is the increasingly wooly notion of globalist liberalism and in extremis its orthodoxy of cultural nihilism, a concept which is explained fully in the ‘Introduction’. In terms of the latter, the critique is simply that one cannot begin to integrate people from very alien cultures into Western society if one educates them by telling them that their European hosts (be it Swedes, Britons or Germans) are collaborators, racists, colonialists and fascists. That is no way to establish fraternity. And yet Europe has bought into the notion of cultural nihilism, and such an ideology of failure is weakening and dividing the Continent.
Having prowled through the geo-political shrubbery, some of my thoughts have emerged as a Nietzschean plea (without the anti-Christian features) to think for oneself, to rise above the herd. Nietzsche would have believed that the ideals of contemporary Western society (equality, tolerance and diversity) favour the unexceptional and the mediocre. Equality has no place for genius. It is fine to raise valleys, but why try and lower peaks? We have created the society of the autonomous herd where greatness is regarded with suspicion, where feeling pleased and proud as a champion is not an altogether-good-thing. But, it is herd-like in another way: people dare not question these ideals even if, as I hope to show, they are far more contentious than they appear. They dare not speak out about the changes happening in our societies. We risk creating a society that is doubly weak: it is based on flawed social truths, unquestioned and supposedly irrefutable ideological truisms; and the herd enmeshed in these ideals will not challenge the truths.
The liberal herd morality has become too strong in our societies, dismissing independent thinking and undermining our freedom. The essays in this book explore in a roundabout way some of the mechanisms by which this has been achieved. It concludes by saying the West needs to resurrect the ‘n
oble’ instinct, the feeling of power without having to rely on the moral ideal of universal equality. It needs to remember that basic social structures such as the nation-state, the family and a faith do actually matter.
I hate being a pessimist. One cannot change the world by telling people that they are all going to die, that their herd morality will end up in cultural loss. One has to trudge through the Weltschmerz, and make sure there is a hook at the end. A hook to hang some kind of positive thought on. I ask the reader not to perceive this as a Schopenhauerian thesis, but as an appeal to speak out, to rise above the herd, to trust one’s instincts and for Swedes to take immediate action to save their fine country from collapse. In that sense at least, I have a smidgen of something positive to say, and attempt to look ‘over the horizon’ in the final essay to days where the world takes on a blush hue in the context of recent anti-globalist successes.
I support a multi-polar world, an anti-universalist, anti-globalist political philosophy that does away with the herd consciousness as a form of self-preservation and promotes individual actions. I am promoting creative autonomy hic et nunc. Western politicians like President Obama talked about ‘universal values’, but I doubt they exist. I wish to promote localism, and not globalism which feeds off this herd consciousness. We should be empowering local communities, and not giving power away to bureaucratic strangers with Bond-villain-like dreams. The localism/globalism distinction underpinned much of the Brexit debate, even if the Bremainers insisted on framing it in a different way. There were those who wanted political accountability to be local, and those who were comfortable giving power to an unelected elite in order to have a stronger collective ‘say’ in the world. For many the rationale of voting for Brexit was at least to maintain the familiar structures of political accountability that have served us well enough over time in the context of a sovereign state.
Brexit showed that the Establishment could be beaten despite all the doomsday threats from the globalists and even President Obama. The opponents to this, those who were too keen to cede sovereignty to the likes of Merkel, Schulz and Juncker proved to be very bad losers indeed. Many signed a petition in the following days insisting that the result be overturned. They had become enemies of democracy, and now it is clear that many of the anti-democrats sit in the House of Lords (the upper house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom) and are hell-bent on stopping Brexit instead of doing their job and implementing it.
A person’s view on Brexit now represents not just an index for an entire repertoire of political opinions. In accordance with the Left’s attempt to correlate personality with world vision, it is also a gauge for what kind of person he is: good, educated and rational or irrational, irresponsible and ill-educated. We have discovered a tapestry of conflict, but it is a tapestry that goes beyond political thinking. A strange, and rather haunting chasm in our society has been suddenly exposed. Psychological walls built around the doubts and suspicions that linger in an environment of groupthink (a concept discussed in the essay ‘The Groupthink Trap’) leave people wondering whether they have been alienated and unsure whether it is acceptable to raise such and such topic. Many who describe themselves as ‘tolerant’ become immediately intolerant of opposing views.
The politicising ideology that is discussed in all of these essays affects every aspect of social life. It is oppressive and bordering on totalitarian. An extreme liberal narrative is being merged with institutional fascism to create some curious thought-bubble. But is the thought-bubble bursting? Mainstream media (MSM) ignored it, predictably enough, but the 2018 Italian general election result suggests people can see through the mendacious ‘liberal’ speech codes that make up the slogans of this ideology. The migration crisis has led to the emergence of slave markets in Libya and child marriage in Sweden. And yet it is clear that those that caused the migration crisis three years ago have not experienced any kind of metanoia about what they did. The consequences are far too traumatic to admit. In September of this year, Sweden will go to the polls again. This might be the very last chance to save Sweden from the scars of multiculturalism, censorship and the authoritarian Left — topics which are discussed fully in this book.
Introduction
And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.
— Nietzsche
This book is an ideological journey through the murky waters of cultural nihilism. The journey is a fragmented, non-continuous one with no itinerary, but it is real and not vicarious. It is an experiential, phenomenological wandering that drifts in and out of the Swedish woods, only to reappear in urban Russia, Oxford, Kiev, north-west Greenland, Paris and southern France. One might call it unconventional in that sense. It is a journey of solitude, a slightly Bergmanesque chronicle, undertaken by a man alone with his thoughts, rather preoccupied by the fact that something is not quite right.
By nihilism, Nietzsche had in mind ‘a transvaluation of values’ at the extreme of modernity. In the consumerist, globalist society that we live in, one might take this in a Nietzschean context to mean one desires what one desires and what one desires is the product of stimuli, not ‘will’. However, my concern in this book is to embed Nietzsche’s thinking into the contemporary politico-cultural framework where a nihilistic tendency vis-à-vis cultural categories has become something of an orthodoxy; and it is the nature of the orthodoxy which is of particular interest. What I am writing about here is the rejection of the authority of long-established social and cultural categories which have become somehow the symptoms of a defective Western mythos. These categories are being undermined by a collection of heavy politicised whims whose only appeal is often the destruction of the previous social fabric. Spengler (1991) showed how these features of nihilism were a feature of collapsing societies, and as an ethnographer I am keen to find out if he was correct.
By the orthodoxy of cultural nihilism in contemporary Western society, is meant a veiled imperative to devalue certain aspects of our cultural life if these features are not able to appeal to some victimology or other. The term nihilism in this book is used in the Nietzschean sense (and not the Heideggerian or Sartrean sense) to refer to a critique of modernity in an age where the highest (the sheer notion of higher values is anathema to liberalism) values have been problematised, and where mediocrity and conformity are privileged over individualism. Nihilism is where everything is permitted, and nothing is worth anything. To take one contemporary corollary to this, one might infer that we are approaching the ultra-liberal end game when pan-sexual promiscuity is so totally saturating that there is no thrill or frisson left. Nothing can any longer be illicit, for everything is available on the metaphorical supermarket shelf.
Cultural nihilism is an explicit anti-Western cultural typology, a product of cultural Marxist thinking peddled most aggressively by French intellectuals. It is selective in terms of the cultural categories it wishes to break down, and is full of contradictions. It is secularist and anti-Christian but supportive of an Islam which speaks in totalising narratives. Its enemy is well-functioning, developed, relatively homogeneous communities in the West: societies that have produced wealth for more or less everybody. It is difficult to find any philosophies as perverse and peculiar as this, but cultural nihilism might share something with Jewish anti-semitism in terms of structures of self-hatred. As part of cultural nihilism, secularisation undermines the highest values posited in Western culture, but also its foundations. It negates transcendental beliefs and replaces them with modernist slogans that collectively underscore liberalist thinking.
No attempt is made in this book to theorise nihilism beyond what has been written already from a rather monological perspective (Rosen, 1969; Löwith, 1995; Vattimo, 2004). But, instead the book intends to show how nihilism plays out in the twenty-first century, and particularly within a Swedish context which can only be described as noir. I hope it exemplifi
es how this kind of cultural nihilism can in fact be a danger to the human condition.
This is a meta-crisis because the values that imbue life with meaning are being undermined in the name of politically correct secularism at a time when the incoming culture (to Sweden at least), Islam, absolutises the same values. We are withdrawing from the rooted, autochthonous world of significance, the Lebenswelt, to the point that it is no longer clear what our basic cultural commitments are. At the same time, we are embracing a culturally nihilistic creed built on the narrative of emancipation, and labelling it ‘progress’: an oratorically persuasive way of saying ‘change’ (cf. Gehlen’s ‘Sekulärisierung des Fortschritts’, 1967). It is an orthodoxy because the manner in which it is presented makes it extremely difficult to refute, as to do so one would simply be ‘unprogressive’ and thus in accordance with politically correct determined social norms ‘illegitimate’. These essays look at how structures of meaning which have stood the test of time are being broken down, and being replaced with faux-connections. Reference will be made to academia where in some corners intellectual traditions are being perverted, and the prevailing discourse used to do it is both homogenising and silencing.
This book unpacks a little what ultra-liberal modernity in Sweden actually looks like. In this respect, Baudrillard’s (1993: 133) likening of liberal modernity as hypertelic extension of spheres of culture to a vast orgy seems apt:
The orgy in question was the moment when modernity exploded on us, the moment of liberation in every sphere. Political liberation, sexual liberation, liberation of the forces of production, liberation of the forces of destruction, women’s liberation, children’s liberation, liberation of unconscious drives, the liberation of art.