The Values Gap

The outcry over President Trump’s comments after the Putin summit July 16 began at a fever pitch and promptly turned up to eleven.

Within hours of Democrats champing at the bit to bury Trump with what they perceived to be the silver bullet: “evidence” of treason, the Republicans joined suit. In a press conference the following day, House Speaker Paul Ryan took pains to emphasize how Putin and Russia are bad actors with whom we share nothing in common:

“Vladimir Putin does not share our interests. Vladimir Putin does not share our values.” And furthermore, “... Russia is a menacing government that does not share our interests, and it does not share our values.”

Directly “correcting” Trump, he added, "The President must appreciate that Russia is not our ally. There is no moral equivalence between the United States and Russia, which remains hostile to our most basic values and ideals,"

Setting aside the obvious for a moment—that claims of Russians buying Facebook ads, hacking emails, possibly agitating at rallies of both Trump and Clinton, and other such various and sundry “meddling” in our election—had zero impact on the election and don’t constitute any real threat to our democracy ... isn’t this a little like the pot calling the kettle black?

One report claims that we have interfered in democratic elections in foreign nations 81 times between 1946 and 2000. More recently we shamelessly “weighed in” on the presidential elections in Ukraine, which borders Russia. We also gave a backdoor bribe via an IMF loan to “our” candidate, Boris Yeltsin, in their 1996 presidential elections.

We have also repeatedly meddled in Israel’s parliamentary elections to affect the election of the nation’s leadership, most recently during the Obama presidency.

Heck, in 2015 we even got caught bugging Angela Merkel’s phone while she was here on a state visit! Turns out we’d been doing it ... forever. After all, we’re the only country I’m aware of that employs the phrase “regime change” without sarcasm or shame—in fact, with candor.

In short, these “meddling” activities in foreign affairs constitute the underbelly of statecraft, practiced by all and admitted by none. Of which we, perhaps, are the world’s most prolific practitioners.

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But this is not my point. I was struck by Paul Ryan’s remarks, that Putin—and by extension, Russia—don’t share our ideals and values.

It got me thinking: What are our ideals and values? Specifically, the ones that Russians apparently no longer, or never, shared?

When I was growing up, the word “communist” was often prefaced with “Godless.”  The Russians were our enemies not just because they didn’t believe in private property—oh, and they hated freedom—but because they didn’t believe in God. Atheism was actively encouraged by the Soviet state. Religion was considered backward and superstitious. Christians were oppressed and persecuted, along with members of the world's other faiths. Heck, the “commies” weren’t just evil—they were damned!

So what were our values and ideals back then, and how have they changed?

Morals generally stem from religion. We were a religious nation, though the Founding Fathers were wise enough to draw a strict line between Church and State. The majority of Americans either expressed a belief in some form of Christianity (or Judaism), and a significant fraction attended Church on Sundays, or at the very least on Easter and Christmas.

“Freedom” certainly comes to mind as a professed value, perhaps the most exalted of them all. Of course, freedom is a vague term, and its functional meaning and limits when in contention with other rights is constantly being tested. Free speech is certainly a component. How often would we hear a patriotic American intone those clichéd words: “I disagree with what you’re saying but I’m willing to fight to the death to defend your right to say it.”

Then there’s the civic virtues we prized. Personal responsibility. The notion that a person’s success in life should only be limited by his or her own work and ambition. This dovetails with our belief in fairness as an innate American value. Fairness, especially in the Civil Rights era ... the recognition that it is wrong to deny someone an equal opportunity because of the accident of their birth, specifically: their race, ethnicity, or—to the extent that doesn’t contradict common sense—their sex. An individual should be judged by his abilities and the content of his character, not the color of his skin—to paraphrase the famous statement of a certain leading light of the era.

Hand-in-hand with the moral virtues we extolled (even if individually we weren’t always able to live up to them we at least agreed in principal on their merit) were the bad behaviors we collectively condemned, and when appropriate, punished. Morality cannot be legislated, we’re told. Our Founding Fathers clearly recognized this, asserting that our rights are God-given, not granted by any government. The civilized way to discourage destructive social behavior is through society’s own built-in mechanisms for self-correction: shame and stigma. In the absence of which the only alternative is the iron fist of the law, which is directly harmful to our highest value: freedom.

And so we stigmatized undesirable social behaviors: out-of-wedlock births, abortion, divorce, homosexuality. A man would be shamed for abandoning his family. A family for going on welfare. The message was clear: not just the best—but the only appropriate healthy environment for raising children was within the nuclear family: a husband and wife. Homosexuality, considered a behavioral and/or psychological disorder at the time, was heavily stigmatized. In many localities society had taken the draconian, and foolish, path of criminalizing it, though this was rarely enforced. Shaming was sufficient to discourage it and preserve the collective rational understanding that it took a man and a woman to create a baby, and a healthy family was the ideal building block for a sound economic atomic unit from which to build and maintain a healthy community.

Most Americans were sympathetic to those neighbors who for one reason or another were unable or unwilling to conform to the ideal family model, and recognized that the freedom of such people to pursue their lives, liberty and happiness in the manner they chose must be respected. Homosexuality was considered bad, counterproductive to the social necessity of producing the next generation, but it was tolerated. The notion of marriage being modified to include same-sex couples was ludicrous. The notion of rewarding homosexual couples with adoptive children would’ve been worse—perhaps an abomination, to give it the flavor of the religious sentiments still present at the time.

* * *

Are those the values and ideals Paul Ryan was thinking of when he denounced Putin and Russia for “not sharing our values;” when he angrily implied that President Trump believed in a moral equivalence between our two nations?

Well, hardly.

What exactly are our values ... today?

Some are relatively unchanged. Others are 180 degrees out of phase. We still value freedom of the press, but freedom of speech is on life support. Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past decade or so, free speech is largely a thing of the past in the academy. Thoughts or speech that violate the ever changing canons of political correctness is considered “hate speech.” And hate speech is considered “violence.” It is not much of an exaggeration to say that our colleges and universities have been taken over by a dogmatic, vulgar, violent, left-wing fascist political faction that has succeeded in silencing any contrary thought or speech. The word “fascist” is used here with prejudice. Words evolve, and this one has lost its prior connections with economics and is now used to mean any authoritarian movement that stifles opposition by force, including violence and threats of violence, as well as political intimidation. Antifa, campus “progressives," Black Lives Matter, feminists and their LGBTQ “intersectionalists,” are all fascist by definition.

What about the notion of a person being judged by the content of his character and not the color of his skin? Gone. Into the Orwellian dustbin of history. So-called affirmative action had transmogrified into virulent identity politics, which has now reached such levels of bullshit that on some college campuses students “of color” are demanding they be segregated from whites in student housing and even at graduation ceremonies. Identity politics demands that people be judged not by their abilities or their character, i.e., not as individuals, but by their group identity. We’ve come full circle, but now it is whites that are discriminated against in hiring and admissions policies ... and worse is coming for them.

With respect to civic virtues, half of this country doesn’t even believe in the concept of a national identity with borders and a universal language. At immigration-related rallies held by Hispanics, Mexican flags are waved. When Maxine Walters held a rally, her followers actually burned an American flag.

What about personal responsibility, and the work ethic? Largely gone. It’s been replaced by the entitlement culture. As the state continually finds new roadblocks to hamper small business creation through ever-growing licensing requirements and ridiculous regulations ...  and of course taxes ... it extends more and more free services to those that choose not to pull their own weight. Forty-four million Americans receive food stamps. Ten million Americans receive disability insurance. Over four million Americans under 65 receive SSI (mentally unable to work) benefits.

When considering our moral values, we’re forced to conclude that they have not just been softened—they’ve been completely corrupted and turned upside down. Vice is now virtue. Single motherhood is lionized. It’s the new norm. It’s even led to the creation of a new phrase replacing “husband”: the “baby daddy.” There is nothing more obvious than the direct correlation between our descent into social chaos and the absence of fathers in the home. On the basis of overwhelming circumstantial evidence it is not a stretch to say that our culture has been waging a war on fatherhood since the emergence of feminism.

Speaking of ... the decline in religious observance can at least partially be attributed to scientific advancement and the unavoidable conflicts with religious cosmological canon. But if religion is something that humans do ... something that humans need ... we now have alternatives that satisfy those existential needs. Feminism may not be a religion per se, but it bears too many of the trappings to liken it to anything else.

Fremen: Celebrated in the West; jailed by Putin

Feminism is a doctrine of hate. Like Christianity, it gives its adherents an explanation for all the misfortunes in their lives ... in fact for all the evil in the world. Its devil is man ... the patriarchy. The male sex is defined outside of the new moral universe. Like all religions, unbelievers are infidels. Attempts to counter any of its catechisms are met with virulent denunciation and violent fury. Offending individuals are immediately targeted for personal and professional destruction. The feminazi takes no prisoners.

With regards to sexuality, clearly we are in free-fall. We have passed the black hole’s event horizon and at this point no semblance of normalcy is safe. We have drag queens dressed in nightmarish costume, devil horns and all, brought into public libraries to read to pre-school children. We have gay teachers dressed in tutus prancing on stage at public school assemblies. We have LGBTQ representatives handing out information about anal fisting ... again, to school children. The list goes on, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the depraved movement to encourage children to undergo surgical mutilation to change their “gender.”

Drag Queen Story Hour at (L) Michelle Obama Long Beach Public Library, 10/14/17
and (R) Olean, NY Public Library 6/20/18

The next wheel to fall off is the normalization of pedophilia. The efforts are already afoot, and have been ongoing behind the scenes in the psychobabble communities (the APA, etc.) for at least two decades. We are just now beginning to see this disgraceful and depraved “lifestyle” jockeying for position as the next “cause” in the popular culture.

Shame and stigma, meanwhile, have become fighting words in the filth and depravity contingent and Gender Studies departments ... but I repeat myself.

Difficult as it is to accept, these are now our values, according to the arbiters of behavior, the professional experts who inform our educational and cultural enterprises.

So, if Putin and Russia don’t share our values—perhaps it is worthwhile looking into exactly what their values are now...?

* * *

One of the incidents under investigation by those trying desperately to undoTrump’s presidency is the meeting Donald Jr had with a Russian attorney. The ostensible issue prompting the meeting, adoption, is rarely mentioned—or when it is, never in specific detail. Since states removed the prohibitions on homosexual adoption it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a huge number of adoptions are now granted to homosexual couples, overwhelmingly lesbians. In Massachusetts, where it is actively promoted by the government agencies, it’s around half.

In 2014 Russia implemented a law banning adoption of Russian children by same-sex couples internationally. They went further, banning adoptions by single people who lived in nations that allowed same-sex marriage.

Since overthrowing Marxist-Leninism, the Russian Orthodox Church is thriving. Vladimir Putin has often decried what is now commonly referred to as “Europe’s suicide.” This is from a Christmas message Vladimir Putin delivered in 2016:

We see that many Euro-Atlantic states have taken the way where they deny or reject their own roots, including their Christian roots which form the basis of western civilization.

In these countries the moral basis and any traditional identity are being denied—national religious, cultural, and even gender identities are being denied or relativized.

There, politics treats a family with many children as equal to a homosexual partnership (juridically); faith in God is equal to faith in Satan.

The excess and exaggeration of Political Correctness in these countries indeed leads to serious consideration for the legitimization of parties that promote the propaganda of pedophilia.

The people in many European states are actually ashamed of their religious affiliations and are indeed frightened to speak about them. Christian holidays and celebrations are abolished or “neutrally” renamed, as if one were ashamed of those Christian holidays. With these methods one hides away the deeper moral value of these celebrations.

And these countries try to force this model onto other countries, globally. I am deeply convinced that this is a direct way to degradation and primitivization of culture. This leads to deeper demographic and moral crisis in the West.

What can be better evidence of the moral crisis of a human society (in the West) than the loss of its reproductive function? And today nearly all “developed” Western countries cannot survive reproductively, not even with the help of migrants. 

Without the moral values that are rooted in Christianity and other world religions, without rules and moral values which have formed and been developed over millennia, people will inevitably lose their human dignity (become brutes).

This from the previously “Godless communists.”

Who could’ve imagined fifty years ago that the remaining sane people of the western democracies would turn to an ex-KGB thug for moral guidance?

In Western Europe, the cradle of our civilization, the cultural and moral values are under attack at both ends of the spectrum. At the opposite end of the West’s own self-mutilation of morality is its embracing of a culture whose values and ideals are the very antithesis of our own—past and present. The social fabric of nations such as France, Sweden and Germany is being torn apart at the seams by the tidal wave of terrorism, murder, rioting, beheadings, acid attacks, rape, white slavery and the “grooming” of girls as young as eleven—all due to the massive influx of African, Middle Eastern and Asian Muslim immigrants.

But these are the values that are waiting to step in once the West’s Cultural Revolution has run its course, reaching the inevitable end that results from embracing moral anarchy.

No, Mr. Ryan, I don’t hold to our new values. They are not my values. They are a corruption of the very meaning of the word “value.” They need to be expunged. Where did they come from? Did I miss the invasion from Planet X? I want our old values and ideals back. And if Russia still holds them, I want the U.S. to gravitate toward Russia and away from Western Europe. They are even further down this spiraling path into the black hole’s singularity of cultural suicide, perhaps just one generation away from submitting to the rigid, 7th century patriarchal morality of Islamic law. 

Age is supposed to give wisdom. I’ve been alive long enough to know when my country is trying to manipulate me into joining a pig-pile. I read 1984, and I grokked its message. It’s clear that certain factions are scared shitless at the thought of a President Trump allied with a revanchist Russia against the West’s “Cultural Revolution.” We need to look deeper for their motivations, past the usual suspects, the industrial war machine. 

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Copyright 2018  © Marcus Clintonius

Review & Commentary: The Strange Death of Europe

The Strange Death of Europe

by Douglas Murray

I opened The Strange Death of Europe already cognizant of the tragedy unfolding in Europe. I hoped that within its pages I would find some reason for optimism... some glimmer of hope that the Europeans alive today would not see their world washed over by the Islamic tide within their lifetimes. As I approached the end, I sensed that the author himself may have struggled with what message he should leave for the reader. Alas, barring an unexpected natural or man-made cataclysm that upends the flow of history, I am forced to conclude, along with the author, that it is really difficult to conjure any serious hope for reversing Europe’s fate.

It is an understatement to call Strange Death an important book. It may be the most important book of the decade. It speaks to the very survival of Europe. We’re not talking about some kind of academic abstraction. This isn’t a cultural anthropological examination of a vanishing tribe in the Amazon. This is Europe, the home of western civilization itself. The United States, Canada and Australia are, after all, merely recent outposts of the civilization that shepherded mankind to unparalleled technological and artistic heights over the past several centuries.

Strange Death is an interweaving of two themes. Murray describes in detail the evolution of Muslim immigration into Europe over the last two decades. Likewise, atrocities committed by the Islamic jihadists and Muslim immigrants are cataloged. Murray is a pedigreed and well-traveled journalist. He augments his analysis of the Muslim presence in Europe with several personal anecdotes garnered from his work in the field.

Shocking as all this is, the second theme is actually even more disturbing, and from the standpoint of academic inquiry, far more interesting: Why is Europe allowing—even encouraging—this to happen? When discussing what is often referred to as the Great Replacement, the word “Europe” is now too often conjoined with “suicide.”

For readers whose self-selecting of news sources precludes contamination from xenophobic, alt-right “fake news” sources, this language may appear hyperbolic. 

If you’re about to stop reading this review and scratch Strange Death off your reading list, let me try to first lure you in with some unimpeachable facts. 

Following are several statistics that highlight the degree to which Muslim immigration into Europe in the past two decades has not only transmogrified the national character of those countries, but set them on a path to Islamic domination within, in some cases, as already stated, the lifetimes of people alive today.

• By 2016, 74,000 women in England had been subjected to genital mutilation.
• “Muhammad” was the most popular baby boy’s name in 2017, 2015, and 2014. (In 2016 it was edged out by “Oliver.”) In 2013 it was 28th. In the year preceding, 57th.
• The overall fertility rate in England and Wales in 2016 was 1.81. This includes all people identified as “British.” The rate for Somalis was 4.19, for Afghans 4.25, and Pakistanis 3.82. Given 28 percent of births were to foreign born mothers, it’s clear that the fertility rate of ethnic white British mothers must be close to 1.5, well below the replacement rate. Fertility rates began to nosedive in 1967, when abortion was legalized. To add fuel to the fire of moral and cultural decay, only half of births today are to married parents. 
• There are roughly six million Muslims in France, a nation of 65 million. That’s almost ten percent of the population.
• Over eight percent of Sweden, a nation of ten million, is now Muslim.
• In 2015, 163,000 Muslims entered Sweden claiming asylum. An unknown number of others entered the country and disappeared, with an estimated total as high as 180,000, almost two percent (1.8) of the existing population. 
• Malmo, Sweden’s third largest city, is now only half native Swedish. According to economists’ projections, within one generation native Swedes will be a minority in every major city in Sweden.
• Ethnic Swedes will be a minority overall in their own country within the lifespan of most of its present residents.
• In Germany, 200,000 immigrants claimed asylum in 2014. In 2015 the number rose to 1.5 million. The following year, Germany permitted only 680,000 refugees.
• In 2016, roughly five percent of Europe was Muslim. The Pew Research Center has produced a study of population projections for Europe in 2050 under three scenarios of continuing Muslim immigration: zero, medium and high growth rates. If immigration were completely halted today (the zero growth scenario), 7.5 percent of Europe would be Muslim by the middle of the century. In the high immigration scenario it almost doubles to 14 percent. In the high projection, one in five Germans and almost one in three Swedes will be Muslim. England and France would have Muslim proportions of 17.2 and 18 percent respectively.

# # #

To erase any doubts you may have of the disastrous effects this is having, let’s now take a look at the social and economic toll this demographic tsunami is taking on Britain and the nations of Western Europe. At further risk of being labeled “Islamophobic,” I’ll repeat some of the atrocities Europeans have been forced to endure at the hands of their guests, as detailed in Strange Death.

Sweden’s cost to provide for immigrants exceeds the budgets of both their Defense and Justice departments.

A school in Rosengard, a district in the city of Malmo, has not had a student with Swedish as their first language in 14 years. Ambulance and firefighters refuse to enter Rosengard without a police escort because the residents attack them.

At the Swedish “We Are Stockholm” music festival in 2014, gangs of Muslim immigrants surrounded girls as young as 14, molested and raped them. The practice was repeated the following year in Stockholm and other cities.

In 1975 police crime stats in Sweden noted 421 rapes. In 2014, 6,620 rapes were reported. By 2015 Sweden had won the distinction of being the rape capital of the world (technically second, to the tiny African nation of Lesotho).

In 2016, eighty percent of the Swedish police forces considered looking for a new line of work because of the dangers entailed in dealing with the increasingly lawless, migrant dominated areas.

In 2013 Lee Rigby, a young British soldier on leave from service in Afghanistan was attacked by two Muslim immigrants. They first struck him with their car, then got out and attacked him with machetes. They tried to cut off his head, but couldn’t quite complete the job. The two assailants were British citizens of Nigerian descent, raised as Christians, but converted to Islam. They were eventually shot by the police, but survived. A letter found on one of them, addressed to his sons, included this message:

“My beloved children. Know that to fight Allah’s enemies is an obligation... Do not spend your days in endless dispute with the cowardly and foolish if it means that it will delay your meeting Allah’s enemies on the battlefield.”

According to Murray, the letter closed with a footnote containing almost two dozen references to passages in the Koran.

Beginning in 2014, outbreaks of rapes of women and young boys by Muslims exploded across Germany coincident with the vast numbers of refugees welcomed for asylum. Rapes were committed everywhere: on the street, in communal buildings, public swimming baths and other public locations. Similarly across Western Europe.  Norway developed an education program, providing classes for refugee men on how to treat women. (Don’t rape them. Rape is bad... and illegal, I presume...) A 33-year-old asylum seeker from Eritrea is reported to have explained the lack of understanding thusly:

“Men have weaknesses and when they see someone smiling it is difficult to control.”

He further explained the sexual customs in his native country:

“If someone wants a lady he can just take her and he will not be punished.”

In Cologne on New Year’s Eve 2015, crowds of men estimated at 20,000 sexually assaulted and robbed 1,200 women in the main town square outside the railway station. It was later revealed that similar mass assaults occurred in other German cities that night. A Muslim ‘wilding’ to celebrate the New Year.

In 2016 the rapes and sexual assaults spread to every one of Germany’s 16 federal states. There were attacks literally every day. Prosecutions were extremely rare, largely because of the concerted effort by law enforcement policy makers to suppress the knowledge and data of crimes committed by Muslim immigrants.

A 24-year-old woman was raped by three migrants in Mannheim in 2016. She first claimed that her assailants were German nationals. Later she admitted she had lied because she didn’t want to “help fuel aggressive racism.” She went so far as to write an open letter to her rapists and apologized to them. Here is the excerpt that Murray includes:

“I wanted an open Europe, a friendly one. One that I can gladly live in and one in which we are both safe in. I am sorry. For us both I am so incredibly sorry. You, you aren’t safe here, because we live in a racist society. I, I am not safe because we live in a sexist society. But what truly makes me feel sorry, are the circumstances by which the sexist and boundary-crossing acts that were inflicted on me, make it so that you are beset by increasing and more aggressive racism. I promise you, I will not stand by idly and watch as racists and concerned citizens call you a problem. You are not the problem. You are not a problem at all. You most often are a wonderful human being, who deserves to be free and safe like everyone else.”

Rape as a “boundary-crossing act”... Hmmm...  Clearly, it is difficult to find hope for Europe when confronted with politically correct lunacy of this magnitude.

# # #

Strange Death is full of reports like these. I include these several up front in the hope of convincing any delusional leftist apologists that, first, the problem is real. Not “fake news.”  Assuming this now a thing accomplished, I turn to the far more compelling question of “Why?”  As in, why is Europe, as typified by the hopelessly delusional rape victim above, welcoming this viper into its bosom?

Murray goes to great lengths to dissect the zeitgeist that currently afflicts Western Europe. What compels the European to see rapist as victim; to see black as white, up as down, wrong as right? To wrap our minds around this question it needs to be said that this is a HUGE question. It is deep and it is complex. It won’t yield to a single solution. Furthermore, everyone who looks at it will see it through their own viewport. There is no right or wrong answer. But it would be incredibly stupid to throw up the hands in resignation—or worse yet pretend it doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter—as so many do. Here in the U.S., how often do I read in a news report comment rejoinder, “Europe’s finished.”? It matters... greatly. We are talking about the survival of the home of western civilization, which is on track to disappear within a generation or two. I submit that there is no more important question for the West to consider.

Murray delves most extensively into the Question in the chapter titled “Tiredness.” He relies on several historical references to point to an “exhaustion” that has settled upon the continent. A spiritual and psychological exhaustion. Its capacity for constructive self-reflection at a breaking point, Europe has embraced nihilism. The popular culture is in the sewer. There is no line between the performances of the latest “pop princess” and soft-core pornography. While its birth rate continues to dive further below replacement level, it embraces, celebrates and promotes homosexuality—aka “alternative lifestyles” that by their very nature preclude procreation.

To what do we attribute this moral and spiritual vacuum—not to mention the rejection of simple common sense? There is one obvious culprit: the abandonment of Christianity, the founding faith.  Europe has chosen to discard its religious foundation that evolved over two millennia; the religion that, grudgingly perhaps, adapted itself to rationalism and scientific inquiry, and eventually found a marginal position alongside secular humanism. It has sought enhancements for the Judeo-Christian definitions of good and evil and replacements for its rules governing moral conduct and its prescriptions for the purposeful life. Murray believes all its efforts to do so have failed.

The rejection of Christianity is not, however, Murray’s big answer for Europe’s spiritual starvation—it is just the launching point for his analysis of Europe’s failed quest for meaning in life. He explores the revolutionary and brilliant ideas of Europe’s great philosophies. Communism, notably, attempted to provide an all-encompassing solution that failed miserably. To Murray’s thinking, Europe limped out of the twentieth century in the wake of the two great world wars, emerging thoroughly exhausted. The continual strife and warfare, resulting in large part from its failures to find the ultimate rational answer to man’s purpose in lieu of religious dogma, finally caught up with her.

Germany’s self-inflicted psychological and spiritual neutering after World War II is by now a cliché. Yet it is real, and perhaps nowhere more exemplified than in the chief culprit of the entire immigration debacle: Angela Merkel. As head of Europe’s leading state, Germany’s enduring leader did more than anyone else to embrace the tide of Muslim immigration.  Time and time again, Merkel “stood up for mercy and compassion,” despite the consequences to her own people. Germany has a mortal fear of anything that could even remotely resemble racism. And this is why political entities like Pegida, that call for a halt to Muslim immigration and a reversal of Merkel’s ‘Europe open borders’ policy, are demonized by the German establishment.

There is another aspect of the Question that is extremely important to note, and Murray informs with copious examples. The people of Europe do recognize the harm visited upon them by the immigrants, and they most assuredly oppose the open-borders policies and the massive influx of Muslims from the Near-and Middle East and Africa. Poll after poll confirms this. The people of Europe know of the harm because what they witness on their own streets cannot be hidden, despite the best efforts of a craven media establishment. But it is the political and intellectual leaders that are united in pushing these policies, with the collusion of media elites and the law enforcement agencies.

In response to the machete attack on Lee Rigby, the British soldier on leave from Afghanistan, Prime Minister David Cameron, the UK’s Conservative Prime Minister addressed the atrocity outside 10 Downing Street with these words,

“This was not just an attack on Britain—and on our British way of life. It was also a betrayal of Islam—and of the Muslim communities who give so much to our country. There is nothing in Islam that justifies this truly dreadful attack.”

Recall, the machete attacker left a note on the victim that listed almost two dozen quotations from the Koran justifying the slaughter.

The following year, after the beheading of a British aid worker in Syria by a British-born jihadist, Cameron said,

“They claim to do this in the name of Islam. That is nonsense. (Repeat after me: ) Islam is a religion of peace. They are not Muslims; they are monsters.”

The fourth estate colludes in this sham. The media have, quite frankly, lied about the crimes committed by Muslims, when simply not reporting them became untenable.

Muslim criminals are deliberately misidentified. In England, so-called “grooming gangs” enticed girls as young as eleven into becoming drug-addicted sex slaves, prostituted out for money. Authorities had been warned of this in the early 2000s, but it wasn’t until 2014 that police revealed that organized gangs of African and Pakistani Muslims had “groomed” over 1,400 non-Muslim white girls between 1997 and 2014. All had been brutally raped, some had been doused in petrol and threatened to be lit afire. Some were threatened with guns and forced to watch other girls get raped as a warning to keep quiet. One was even branded with her slave master’s initial, “M.” Take a wild guess...

The non-response of politicians, law enforcement and the media is symptomatic of why the problem resists solution. Sex-slavery of “infidels” is enshrined in the Koran. These child-rapists and groomers are different than typical perverts and pimps that afflict every society.  A man with an uncontrollable sexual predilection for children may be filled with guilt and shame over his unnatural desires, and wish for nothing more than to be rid of them. An Islamic warrior uses rape to sow fear in his enemy. Rape has always been an instrument of war. The rape epidemic in Sweden and Germany begs the question—where are the men? Too many of them have been emasculated by feminism, rendering them (figuratively if not literally) impotent. But as the record will show, any attempts by the men—and/or women for that matter—to defend their communities from these barbarians are slapped down by their own governmental authorities. Shocking and shameful... but true.

In 2004 a documentary about problems in Bradford, now a fully Islamicized city in England, contained a segment on the groomings. After a pre-broadcast screening, so-called “anti-fascists” and local police chiefs appealed to the network to drop the documentary. The segments on grooming were said to be “inflammatory.” The main fear was that the broadcast was scheduled just before an election, and it might help the fortunes of the new political party created to combat Muslim immigration and affirm British identity, the British National Party.

When a Labor MP, Ann Cryer, approached the issue of the rape of underage girls in her district she was denounced as a racist and an Islamophobe and had to receive police protection when she made public appearances.

When the investigation into the grooming gangs in Rotherham was finally addressed, staff of the local council described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins for fear of being thought racist. Others remembered clear direction from managers to not do so. The investigation found that local police failed to act for fear of accusations of racism. In reports to this day, Muslims caught engaging in terrorism, violent crimes and sexual assaults are classified as “Asian” by media outlets like SkyNews.

The Rotherham grooming cases point to one of the explanations for the acquiescence of political and community leaders to sociopathic and criminal activity: fear. And it’s a well-founded explanation. The whole series of atrocities that began with Dutch filmmaker Van Gogh’s film of violence against women in the Muslim world, Submission, is a template for the effectiveness of terrorism. Europeans are afraid for their lives to speak out against Islam, the religion, or of especially vicious crimes committed by Muslims.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Theo Van Gogh

In 1993 Ayaan Hirsi Ali came to Holland requesting asylum from her native Somali to escape a forced marriage. She was a model immigrant, and took advantage of the university education system after working factory jobs and learning the language. She received an MA in political science and eventually rose to enter politics and was elected to parliament as a member of the Liberal Party.

Hirsi Ali began to question the faith of her birth after 9/11 and eventually chose to renounce Islam. This brought her few friends, even among Dutch liberals. What they wanted was a Muslim immigrant success story—proof that Muslims can assimilate. Others in that camp wanted her to speak out against Islam to reveal the criticisms that they themselves were afraid to voice. And as expected the most extreme vitriol came from the Muslim community itself. After all, under Sharia law, apostasy is a capital offense. The penalty is death.

One would think that being a black woman, and one who had been subjected to genital mutilation (common in Somalia), as well as a non-Christian, would give the Left in Holland cause to rally around her. After all, a three-fer should be immune from criticism in any western nation dominated by political correctness.

Hirsi Ali shared the story of her strange odyssey from Somali refugee to Dutch Member of Parliament in her autobiography, Infidel. A friend asked her, “Don’t you realize how small this country is, and how explosive it is, what you’re saying?” To Ali, given the extreme liberality of Dutch culture, this question was absurd.

It was during this time that Hirsi Ali began a fateful collaboration with Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh. Van Gogh’s first notorious act of blasphemy was to put an image of Mohammed on the cover of his book Allah Knows Best (title translated). He took on Muslim critics on television programs and public debates, including radical Islamist extremists. After one such instance his opponent was heard to say, “We’ll get that fat pig and cut him open.”

Soon after, in 2003, he made the short film Submission (“Islam” translated into its English meaning) about the mistreatment of women in Islam, written and inspired by the young Somali immigrant, Hirsi Ali. Death threats ensued, but Van Gogh foolishly rejected offers of police security. On November 2, 2004, Van Gogh was brutally attacked while riding his bicycle. After shooting him, his assailant slit his throat and repeatedly stabbed him in the chest. Hirsi Ali was named in a letter left by the murderer, and authorities quickly spirited her out of the country.

Forced to seek government protection, she had to live in army barracks and safe-houses, and was eventually allowed to live in a specially protected building. Afraid for their own safety, her neighbors sued to force her to leave. Eventually, her citizenship was revoked, and she fled to America. In Murray’s words:

"The country that allowed in hundreds of thousands of Muslims without expecting them to integrate, and which harbored some of the most radical preachers and cells in Europe, withdrew citizenship from one of the only immigrants who actually showed what a fully integrated immigrant to Holland would look like. Hirsi Ali moved to America, becoming, as Salman Rushdie subsequently put it, ‘maybe the first refugee from Western Europe since the Holocaust.’”

# # #

Fear may provide one reason for the spineless behavior of law enforcement and the media, but it can’t explain the actions of politicians who willfully initiate policies that encourage and promote further Islamization of their nations. For this, a more pathological explanation is required.

Is it possible that some ethnic European leaders actually want to see their own kind replaced by a population of non-white Muslims? Why would this be? One simple answer would be that some white Europeans have “seen the light” and converted to Islam. The numbers may be negligible, and Murray does a good job of explaining the phenomena, largely by a personal anecdote. The epiphany comes to the usually twenty-something lost soul at a moment of disgust while engaging in some useless decadent, soul-nullifying pleasure-seeking. These may be genuinely transformative experiences, but they are few in number and don’t account for the behavior of older political leaders promoting these policies who are set in their ways.

Consider the words of Swedish Prime Minister Fredrick Reinfeldt from the conservative Moderate Party:

“Only barbarism is genuinely Swedish.”

Or consider the response of Sweden’s parliamentary Secretary Lise Berg to the question, ‘Is Swedish culture worth preserving?’

“Well, what is Swedish culture? And with that I guess I’ve answered the question.”

To further illustrate the point of Europeans simultaneously applauding foreign cultures while denigrating their own, there’s this from another Swede, Mona Sahlin, the Minister of Immigration. She told an audience in a Kurdish mosque that many Swedes were jealous of them, because the Kurds had a rich and unifying culture and history, whereas the Swedes only had silly things like the festival of Midsummer Night.

Yet another example, this one from Germany. On Nov. 11, 2015 in Hamburg, Green Party councilwoman Stefanie von Berg addressed the city council on an issue regarding immigration and said:

“Our society will change. Our city will change radically. I hold that in 20, 30 years there will no longer be (German) majorities in our city ...We will live in a city that thrives on having many different ethnicities; that we have plenty of people and live in a supercultural society. This is what we will have in the future. And I want to make it very clear, especially towards those right-wingers: This is a good thing!”

What accounts for this? In my own book, Notes From the 3rd Rail: Civilization in the Crosshairs, I coin the term self-othering to describe the process of self-loathing that afflicts a poisoned culture that views itself as the ultimate source of evil. It seeks to replace everywhere the normal with its opposite, elevating the deviant and the depraved over the ordinary and conventional.  Self-othering is manifested through and explains the source of political correctness.

# # #

A slight digression here. Is it a coincidence that so many of the self-loathing European leaders that figure in these sordid reports of political capitulation to Islam are women? I think not. Let me preface this by saying that Murray himself expresses no opinions regarding any role feminism plays in Europe’s suicide.  In my analysis of the disease afflicting the West I duly recognize the antecedents from mid-century: deconstructionism, critical theory, and so-called "cultural Marxism" that infected the Academy; and from there transmogrified into the chaos we see rampant on today’s college campuses and watch its fruits grow in every dimension of the body politic. But I also acknowledge another turning point in our more recent past, that I believe set us on a path of no return.

The late twentieth century ushered in the “era of victimization” and saw the rise of identity politics and political correctness, the twin toxins. Power came from one’s association in a victim group. These privileged (i.e., “protected”) groups appear to be endless, the latest being those who reject the binary categorization of sex. They assert that gender isn’t even biological at all, but rather just another “social construct.”

But one of these identity movements overshadows all the rest. The societal and cultural changes that it introduced are far more transformative than any others. I am speaking of course of the women’s movement. This “identity group” comprises fully 50 percent of the population. How could it not have the greatest impact? Its political expression is commonly referred to as “feminism,” but its impact on what ails us is more than just the result of feminist gender justice. There is also the notion of feminine—wholly distinct from the politics of feminism. Of the latter, most of us sensible people are now beginning to see what has been unleashed by its deadly nature. But this is not the place for a discourse on the evils of feminism.

Murray speaks about the contention between mercy and justice... towards the immigrants. He concludes that the conflict between them, eventually won by mercy (by dint of the Christian compassion lingering in our morality even though we’ve discarded its source), suffers from misunderstanding the other. He refers to Aristotle’s claim that when virtues appear to be in contention it is because one of them is misunderstood. Murray feels that justice is misunderstood in the refugee immigration debate. What is overlooked is the justice for the German (and by extension, European) people who have to bear the tremendous cost of the immigration. It’s a cost that is measured in almost every way imaginable. Certainly financial, but also the cost to their very way of life—admitting people that cannot assimilate, have no desire to do so, and in fact hate their hosts and everything about its culture (except the resources they provide).

Radical as it may sound, I believe in innate differences in male and female natures and temperament, expressions of and extending from the biological differences. I believe the age-old definition of marriage and family should not be changed: the state-sanctioned pairing of a man and a woman for the purpose of procreating and providing the economic atomic unit from which a healthy society can be formed.

The female is biologically wired to love and protect the offspring no matter what. Unqualified love and acceptance is necessary for the psychological needs of an infant, to know that the world is a safe place. The strains of that pretty sixties pop ballad sung by Jackie Deshannon, “Put a little love in your heart,” plays in my ears. Agreed. There is nothing more beautiful in the human experience than a mother’s unconditional love for her child. But the father enforces society’s rules... not to run red lights... boys don’t hit girls. Dad reveals that the world can be a very harsh place, and that the individual must learn cooperative behavior if he is to avoid the community’s punishment for anti-social behavior. He must learn to play by the rules.

Of course this is simplistic and of course there is huge overlap in most of the functions of the parents, and of course there is variance that occurs in outliers, but generally speaking the mother and the father have different roles in raising their children.

If the milk of human kindness isn’t tempered by innate masculine rationalism—tough love on the human scale—anarchy ensues. This is why there is no evidence of a matriarchal civilization in the historical or archaeological records. If there were, they didn't survive long enough to leave any artifacts. And this is why the turn toward matriarchal power structures in the West has led to social chaos—and now to the even greater threat to Europe, one to its very survival. Thus Sweden.

In a patriarchal society those male traits will dominate the complexion of the culture. It is impossible to speculate on what becomes of a matriarchal society because none have ever existed—or if one had, it left no mark from which to study. Where are the monuments? But Sweden may provide a test case.  Though not fully formed, it is the closest thing we have yet seen.  However it appears likely that the experiment will end prematurely. Sweden is on track to become the first European nation to fall to Islam... btw, Islam is not matriarchal—rather, it is the most patriarchal society on order.  

I contend that the West is in the process of transitioning into a matriarchal society. In a patriarchal society the self-identification of the nation is unquestioned. First and foremost, it has a boundary. Second, a common language. In dealing with immigration, a patriarchal society would not put the feelings of a refugee ahead of the economic realities of the breakdown of the border. To the question of the “dreamers,” a woman is driven by compassion. Her inclination is to put herself in the shoes of the child, and thus be guided by sympathy. A woman is more likely to go along with ignoring the law, deeming it subordinate to the immediate needs of someone’s suffering.

Besides the negative byproducts of feminism in the West, I believe it is largely the feminine nature of Europe’s female leadership that is responsible for choosing mercy over justice—overlooking completely the other side of the justice coin—justice for themselves.

# # #

Murray explores in depth the cultural underpinnings that have brought Europeans, and Germans in particular, to this nihilist state. It is a society so weak and bereft of meaning that it will embrace anything from without that reinforces its lack of self-worth. A foreign rigid belief system, sure in its certainty with strict rules of conduct and swift and sure punishments for transgressors, will ultimately prove appealing to a people that worship at the altar of moral relativism and have abandoned all restraint, and with it any pretense of purpose for their lives. Is Islam to be the karmic solution to Europe’s spiritual crisis?

This is how many of the Islamicists see it. They don’t hide it. They blatantly proclaim it from Speaker’s Corner:

We will out-breed you into oblivion. Your daughters will wear the hijab and breed Muslims—or be our sex slaves. We will abuse your liberal civil rights institutions to bombard and harass you with Islamic preaching. When you try to fight back we will wrap ourselves in your flag and demand protection under your laws... and then we will seek and obtain your prosecution. And when our numbers are sufficient, we will use your silly democracy to vote ourselves into power. And then we will usher in Sharia Law, and you will have a choice: submit, or ....

Meanwhile the police stand by to protect them should any native ethnic Englishman or European dare to gainsay them. And if enough naysayers actually organize and try to do something about the enemy in their midst—usually living off the public purse—law enforcement will then diligently apply themselves to finding an ordinance violation or some such other petty reason to “bring them to justice.”

While we in the U.S. litigate over Nativity scenes in the town square at Christmas, and the ACLU champ at the bit for any excuse to file a lawsuit against a Christian bakery refusing to bake a cake for a gay wedding, Canada and some European countries are voting in blasphemy laws, criminalizing criticism of Islam. While Piss-Christ and Chris Ofili’s elephant dung-decorated The Holy Virgin of Mary are granted public funding and celebrated by art houses, Islam is being inoculated against criticism.

Britain First, one such resistance group in England, videotape Muslim marches and sidewalk proselytizing, as well as film their own rallies. Donald Trump was roundly criticized by the mainstream media for re-tweeting a Britain First meme. Britain First leaders Paul Golding and Jayda Fransen were finally “brought to justice” in March this year (2018), sentenced to 18 and 36 weeks respectively for “aiming religiously aggravated abuse at innocent members of the public.”

I am reminded of the 1974 movie Zardoz. The sci-fi fantasy set in a simultaneously utopian and dystopian future is typically ridiculed for its psychedelic sequences and dated visuals—particularly protagonist Zed’s (Sean Connery) cheesy outfit. It is one of my favorite movies. When I first saw it I was impressed with its originality but also viscerally moved by its unconscious message. 

Ages before the movie’s present, mankind’s elite achieved immortality through advanced genetics, and cordoned themselves off from the rest of humanity as the world fell apart. In the nightmarish hell outside, gangs of “Brutals,” worshipers of the God Zardoz, ruled the enslaved dregs of humanity with utter ruthlessness. In the final scene when the Brutals finally breech their sanctuary, the immortals rush to the barbarians pleading for their execution. They had achieved immortality but ultimately found it boring, and wanted nothing more than liberation. They longed for death, which their technology had denied them.

Is this a metaphor for Europe? Begging to be put out of its misery, welcoming the seventh century Brutals, followers of the Prophet, as their liberators? Has western civilization finally played itself out? Say it isn’t so.

- Marcus Clintonius

# # #

Rock Music's Finest Hour

Rock Music’s Finest Hour

It was 49 years ago today that the Grateful Dead took the stage at the Fillmore West and delivered a musical performance that is arguably rock’s finest hour.

The iconic version of Dark Star was performed in what was then its typical sequence: followed by Saint Stephen, into The Eleven and ending with Turn On Your Love Light (though just as often terminating with Death Don’t Have No Mercy).

The set was immortalized on the band’s fourth album: “Live Dead.” Unbeknownst for many years, the quartet of tunes was actually a graft of two concerts. The Eleven and Love Light were from the Avalon Ballroom a month earlier, but the collating was seamlessly engineered and thousands of listeners remained none the wiser.

Dark Star from "Live Dead"

"Live Dead" by the Grateful Dead

The improvisational tour-de-force that is Dark Star evolved over the years. Various themes came and went, but it was this period, early 1969, that will forever represent the canonical form—because of the impeccable version performed on this night.

Those unfamiliar with the early years of the band might think it laughable to laud Jerry Garcia’s guitar playing, as it decayed so rapidly, first into a “delicate doodling” and then, after discovering heroin, into a putrid pantomime of hard rock.

But here’s what Phil Lesh had to say of the band’s improvisations at the time:

“We orbit around a common center that is impossible to define but it has something to do with making good music of any kind.”

And more often than not, in those early years, it was the winding fluid runs of Garcia that surged from that center, tugging the other musicians along a spiraling accretion disc of musical exuberance.

The 2-27-69 performance of Dark Star ranges from the exquisitely sublime to the ecstatically euphoric. The band is fully 100 percent in the moment. This is the essence of ensemble improvisation. No rock band before or since comes close. Though the various sections/themes that they run through are standard for the period, there are moments of inspiration where Garcia finds notes he never played before and never did since.

It was said that the Dead could make time stand still. Many are the Dead Freaks who “blew their minds” listening to this performance on acid. 

On the album, the tune appears to slowly emerge out of an ambiguous musical ether. But the actual 2-27-69 performance is a set of six consecutive tunes that begins with the jug-band rag Dupree’s Diamond Blues, which then flows into the ballad Mountains of the Moon. Both of these are played acoustically (though Phil is playing his electric bass), and Mountains ends with a little jam, during which the boys discard their acoustics and uncork their electrics. It is this moment that the Dark Star track on “Live Dead” picks up the performance. A minute or two of teasing then lands with stately confidence into the belly of Dark Star proper.

And thus it begins. Twenty-one minutes of musical majesty. Forty-nine years ago today.

# # #

"Live Dead," the album

Fillmore West 2-27-69 full concert, both sets

Racial Politics and "Black Panther"

Stan Lee should've done the "white" thing and skipped the obligatory cameo in Black Panther. Whites not intruding into black spaces, such as remaining silent until all people-of-color have had their say in a race-related discussion, is a theme that is reinforced several times in the movie. Whites are referred to as “colonizers,” and the only main white actor other than the (first) villain is played by beta male hobbit Bilbo Baggins: Martin Freeman. And it's probably no coincidence that Lee's cameo has him appropriating casino winnings that weren't his. A sly jab at his penchant for appropriating credit for creating the Marvel Universe from Jack Kirby perhaps—or just a play on the movie's underlying subtext of white colonization?

As a white man, of course I’m supposed to ignore slights like this and just take it like a (privileged) man, despite the fact that as a boy I was a Marvel comics fanatic and was there at the time with my 12 cents when Fantastic Four #52 came out in 1966.

But the truth of it is, unless I want to live as a hermit and forego the opportunity to see the comics that I loved as a kid brought to life on the silver screen, I have no choice but to take it. Sad.

Despite my objections to the identity politics rampant in Black Panther, Marvel Studios have made a terrific movie.

In my opinion the best of the Marvel movies have been the “origin” movies. And that’s not a coincidence. For those that may not know, most of the major players in the “Marvel Universe” were created largely from the fertile imagination of Jack Kirby when he collaborated with Stan Lee in the early-and-mid sixties. To get a handle on the scope of Kirby’s contribution, it’s easier to name the few superheroes who weren’t a product of his imagination. It’s a short list: Spider-Man, Daredevil, and Doctor Strange. (And there’s actually a connection to Kirby for those characters, too—but to fully explain that would take a digression that would only be appreciated by true comic nerds...).  It’s no coincidence that the first Thor, Captain America and Iron Man movies are three of the best in the portfolio. Add Black Panther to that list.

Specifically, the Black Panther was introduced in the pages of Fantastic Four in the year-plus span of issues that ran as a continuing arc of stories from 1965 to 1966. This celebrated run, which many comic book aficionados (me included) claim to be the pinnacle of the medium over its entire history, culminated with the introduction of the Black Panther and began with the introduction of a nemesis team, the Frightful Four. A two-issue battle with their enduring arch-enemy Doctor Doom followed, after the heroes had lost their powers and were aided by Daredevil. 

Next the Frightful Four returned for another round, which took three issues to complete (41-43)—but this time with the Thing converted to their side by way of a machine that exposed and magnified the dark part of his nature.  

Medusa, the Frightful Four’s female counterpart to Sue Storm, evolved into a member of the Inhumans, a brilliant collection of characters. The ending of the colorful Inhumans saga culminated in Fantastic Four #48, which is spoken of in reverential terms by comic fans because it was in this same issue that the Silver Surfer and Galactus made their first appearances. "King" Kirby now in full sci-fi mode, the so-called Galactus trilogy ended in issue 50, after which Kirby took a breather and put out a relatively down-to-earth story, “This Man... This Monster,” that is celebrated for its human dimension—specifically, the redemption of the story’s one-fer villain.

It was following this issue that Black Panther made his debut. If you’re counting, that’s #52. It was concluded in the next issue, 53.

The whole run started in #38.  That’s sixteen  consecutive issues of continuing story arcs, with one break between 43 and 44 for the publication in the summer of 1965 of the Annual that featured the wedding of Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic) to Sue Storm (the Invisible Girl).

* * *

There’s been a fair amount of discussion regarding the claim that Black Panther is ground-breaking because it features the first black superhero in film.

That’s not true, as many have pointed out. There’s Wesley Snipes’ Blade series as well as a bunch of movies starring Will Smith.  However, the accolade is not misplaced. Black Panther was the first black superhero to appear in comics—and even more importantly, he was created by Jack Kirby during his creative peak.

But Black Panther is a groundbreaking movie. It’s not just a movie with a black star and cast; this is a movie set in a wholly black environment—Africa. It celebrates a fictional African nation and its people and culture. The credit doesn’t go to an inclusive, politically correct contemporary comic book company, willingly pandering to the identity politics grievance community. It goes to Jack Kirby, who created this world from whole cloth in a 1966 comic book. It was 52 years ago that (coincidentally) Fantastic Four 52 hit the newsstands. It pre-dated (by just a few months) the creation of the militant “black power” Black Panthers organization in Oakland, California.

In 1966, a black superhero bursting into the lily-white world of comic books—from Africa no less!—that was truly revolutionary.

So, to make a long story short, what we have is a superhero with a great origin story who happens to be black. Everything Kirby touched at that time turned to gold, and the Black Panther was no exception. But it was novel, because it was not euro-centric. Kirby created an ideal world in Africa where the people of Wakanda, ruled by their hereditary Black Panther kings, created a technologically advanced civilization while still maintaining their African cultural identity. African-American comic book fans have testified how significant the appearance of Black Panther in Marvel comics was for them. And I don’t think it takes someone to be black to appreciate the honesty and integrity of that sentiment.

But this idealization of a highly advanced African nation is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it instills racial pride in the descendants of the African diaspora—but on the other hand it is an absurdity, and the pride it instills has no basis in reality. Africa is the poorest and most backward of the great continents. It is the only place where slavery still exists! Under the growing influence of Islam, female genital mutilation, flogging of women for Sharia Law infractions and other barbaric practices are rampant. Forgotten is what Mohammed Ali said upon returning from a trip to the “homeland”: “Thank God my granddaddy got on that boat!”

Besides Black Lives Matter ideologues, the people most likely to embrace the Wakanda fantasy are liberal whites. I can envision scores of lesbian New England college professors with heretofore zero interest in comic book superheroes going to see Black Panther to commune in this historic cultural phenomenon. Again, the anti-white subtext figures into the political fallout. The movie reinforces the notion of black victimization—specifically, that the dire conditions in which so many urban blacks live is not their fault, but due to institutional racism and the legacies of colonialism and slavery. Liberal whites can wallow in their self-loathing; blacks can reassure themselves of the futility of working hard to claw oneself up the ladder of middle class success.

* * *

There’s an ongoing controversy in the comic book community over so-called “white-washing” of characters. This refers to changing the race of established characters. The most notorious example is Nick Fury, whose character is now owned by Samuel L.Jackson after appearances in multiple Marvel films. Nick Fury was first incarnated as a grizzled WW2 army sergeant in Marvel’s entry into the “war comic” category. His character was very well-defined, and many fans resented the change of race in the movies. It’s one thing to change the race of a minor character, such as the Thing’s girlfriend Alicia Masters, but a whole different kettle of fish to change the race, and thus the fundamental identity, of a major character such as Nick Fury.

Black Panther was, obviously, black from the start. He was embraced by all Marvel’s readers, because he was yet another great product of the “House of Ideas;” and because of his race and African origin: exotic to boot.

Marvel has been roundly criticized for promulgating an orgy of political correctness and identity politics in their comics, typified by the white-washing of their established heroes, and even “man-washing” many of them—including the God of Thunder himself, Thor, who is now female!

It’s believed that the social justice warriors who now run Marvel realize that the future of the company is in the movie franchises and the merchandise that spins off of it, and that the printed comics business is not long for this world anyway. And so they don’t care if their radical re-imagining of their heroes in the comics is bad for business. The movie revenues bail them out.

Unfortunately the political correctness in Black Panther isn’t confined to fantasies of African technological superiority: Wakanda’s premier soldiers are all women. By now this sort of thing is to be expected. Nonetheless, I raise my objections, no matter how futile. And there is a saving grace to it in Black Panther’s manifestation: the bald, Grace Jones-like praetorian guard women do look really cool.

Marvel Studios have done a terrific job of translating those rather simple yet groundbreaking notions that Kirby and Lee put down in 1966.  I’m sure Kirby, if he were alive today, would be immeasurably proud of how his creation has been brought to mass audiences worldwide.

The movie incorporates the main story line of the Black Panther’s first comic book appearance, excluding, naturally, the Fantastic Four themselves. The villain in the first storyline of the movie (there are really two) is faithful to the comic book. Ulysses Claue (in the comic, he is named “Klaw”), wants to steal Wakanda’s prized natural resource, the mineral “vibranium.”

Once that conflict is resolved, a deeper storyline, and a more dangerous villain, emerges.  The plot lines are seamlessly weaved, and there is a clever recurrence of plot points, which altogether produces a well-constructed story.

The movie is visually stunning, with African vistas counterpoised with elaborate hi-tech motifs. It is sure to garner critical acclaim if for no other reason than it is Afro-centric and reinforces white self-othering. The movie’s main conflict emerges as whether or not Wakanda should drop its pretense as an African “nation of farmers” and share its advanced technology with the rest of the (inferior, white) world for the betterment of all mankind. Such a story line is irresistible... catnip for Hollywood liberals. But regardless, it is a very well made movie, a real escapist blockbuster. Another winner from Marvel Studios.

- Marcus Clintonius