“But other men know not what
they are doing when awake, even as
they forget what they do in sleep.”
—Heraclitus, Fragment

Whenever an act of violence is committed against Muslims by a non-Muslim, as Brenton Tarrant did in March when he viciously gunned down 50 Muslims at prayer in Christchurch, New Zealand, the left-liberal elites of the West and their mainstream-media acolytes see and seize the opportunity to calumniate all who oppose their ideology of egalitarian fundamentalism.  They do this by connecting the kuffar en masse to “hate” and terrorism, and by labeling traditionalist thinkers as “far right,” as if such a label is self-evidently damnable.  The calumny, in turn, serves as the basis for deplatforming traditionalists and demanding legislation that will (ostensibly) protect the rights of Muslims by (coincidentally) advancing the progressives’ already-established agenda.

Such is the bitterest of ironies foreseen well in advance by G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis: By using Islam as a cudgel with which to beat the “far right” into submission, the left destabilizes and ultimately destroys the very foundation of the most “tolerant” civilization in the history of mankind, unleashing hitherto unimaginable malevolence.  Indeed, Western man has been “tolerant,” perhaps to a fault, because he did not value tolerance per se, but rather the virtue of Christian magnanimity.  The transformation of magnanimity into bastardized, secularized tolerance has allowed the left’s own fantastical ideology to grow and metastasize in the former lands of Christendom.

What comes next—a democratic Utopia where all the colors bleed into one?  No.  Puritanical “Chrislam” is what follows.  Watch now as Jacinda Ardern—agnostic lapsed Mormon, first New Zealand prime minister to march in a gay-pride parade—dons the hijab as she meets with Islamic leaders in Christchurch following the shootings.  A feminist, Ardern is wearing the symbol of submission to Allah, who commands through his prophet that a woman should cover herself head to toe, except when alone with her husband, in imitation of Aisha, who consummated her marriage to Muhammad at age nine after a three-year betrothal.

Whenever a killer such as Tarrant or his hero, Anders Breivik, leaves behind a manifesto, the calumnious left has its task made easy.  The media may then cite chapter and verse, especially when the killer quotes writings that are critical of Third World immigration and its destabilizing effects; writings that are disdainful of the very real fact that Muslim populations are moving by droves into Western societies, changing the local culture wherever they choose to live, taking offense at “far-right Islamophobic” calls to assimilation, carelessly nurturing resentments among their young that lead to radicalization when Western individualism runs afoul of their prophet’s words and deeds as explained to them by Internet jihadists; writings that lament the dreadfully low birthrates among the women of Western nations.

Well, Tarrant’s manifesto has it all.

“It’s the birthrates,” he says in the beginning of his screed, thrice, as if he is reciting a liturgy.  Echoing many of the ideologues of the amorphous thing called the Alt-Right, Tarrant deplores the low birthrate among white women and contrasts this phenomenon with “the higher fertility rates among the immigrants.”  Framed in this way, we cannot argue.  Statistically speaking, women who are white are not having children at replacement levels; and women who are brown are more fecund.  Indeed, left-liberals themselves do not argue with the facts that support the rhetoric of “replacement,” for this is the outcome they desire, arising as it does from within their own collectivist, Marxist worldview, which categorizes human beings in terms of large groups of the oppressors and the oppressed.

“This is WHITE GENOCIDE,” declares Tarrant, repeating the conclusion drawn by umpteen other proponents of the “14 Words,” which he also quotes.  (“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”)  One would think that getting a job, marrying, and fathering some legitimate “white children”—instead of playing out a murderous video-game fantasy guaranteed to get you killed or imprisoned for life—would be the best way to change “the birthrates,” if you truly conclude that White Genocide is underway.

But is this conclusion true?

I am not asking whether this conclusion rings true among the young men who are forced to live in the unnatural bizarro Western societies in which intersectional feminism is dominant.  Or whether the demographic data are accurate.  I’m asking whether this conclusion is true according to formal reality.  I’m asking how “white genocide” relates to the eternal ideas that give shape to the world we experience, with all of its chains of causality visible and invisible.

The modern project was from the beginning an attempt by liberals to re-imagine the world in materialist terms, to drive the Christian religion into an intellectual ghetto where the ignorant masses could go once per week to feed their opioid addiction.  Henceforth anything truly worth knowing (scientia) would derive from “science”—biological science, social science, economic science, anthropology.  What could religion or classical philosophy possibly tell us about the nature of man, when they rely not upon scientific data but upon revelation and right reason to arrive at truth?

When the Psalmist rhetorically asked, “What is man that thou art mindful of him?” his answer was metaphysical: “Thou has made him a little lower than the angels.”  When Aristotle said in the Nicomachean Ethics that man possesses a “rational principle” (λ?γον ?χον) he was not talking about a material quality or capacity, but about the immaterial form of man, his soul.  When the Lord said (Matthew 10:28), “fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul,” He was presenting a hierarchy of value: the spiritual over the physical—both of them necessary, one of them properly subject to the other.  The Nicene Creed declares that God the Father Almighty is the “maker of all things visible and invisible.”  Luther, in his Small Catechism, says of the meaning of the First Article of the Creed, “I believe that God . . . has given me my body and soul, eyes, ears, and all my members, my reason and all my senses, and still takes care of them.”

The West, then, if we are to speak sensibly of it, was animated by this acknowledgment of and devotion to a certain metaphysic; it is a civilization that obtains coherence when it places the highest value on the soul and its relationship to the Divine.  Do biological accidents have the power to influence the soul?  Of course they do.  St. Paul speaks repeatedly about the dangers of feeding or prioritizing “the flesh.”  St. James warns metaphorically of the evil power of the “tongue” and its ability to control the body.  But this, too, is a matter of the soul, as Jesus points out (Matthew 15:11): “Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.”

Western Civilization was unified not phenotypically by race but by a shared commitment to the cultivation of the soul and the cultural institutions that accomplish this task.  It comprised many overlapping ethnic cultures and groups, each fiercely proud of its own customs and familial traits, but also mindful of its subservience to the Triune God Who gives all people their good gifts.  And it stood more or less united by the obligation of creating and preserving a space within which the Church may proclaim the Gospel, free of harm from without or within, lest the various peoples forget to “fear rather him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”

Today, we regard the soul not as an essential component of human existence but as a quaint artifact of our backward “dark age,” a time when “science” was stymied by superstition.  In respectable intellectual circles, “soul” is simply the human mind, explained in biochemical terms as the perception of consciousness.  Or at best we conceive of the soul as a bonus feature, a reality whose existence is confined to our “spiritual” or “religious” understanding.  For what matters is material.  Every secret of life will be revealed in the science of genetics, it is claimed—the cause of all behaviors, all predilections, every expression of illusory human “will.”  This soulless materialism (or phenomenology) is the underlying sentiment of the modern ideologies of both the “far left” and the “far right,” from Rousseau and Marx to Darwin and Nietzsche.

It is evident that the children of Rousseau and Marx have grasped the reins of power and seek to fumigate the West of any remaining whiff of the heritage of Christendom by associating every Western institution with the sins of the White Man.  The increasing arrogance and heavy-handedness of the left has cultivated the ground for the Alt-Right, mostly young men who have not the slightest interest in being browbeaten for being white.  Bereft, however, both of a true sense of their heritage and of moral formation, those who are “red-pilled” know of nothing to bind them together and give them purpose besides “white racial consciousness,” which is utterly foreign to the development of the civilization they claim to defend.  Thus, they pervert the entire Western tradition by claiming that its sine qua non is neither logos nor the Logos made Flesh, but instead the genetic endowments of generic Europeans, or whites—who were, in actuality, groping their way in the dark before the transformative Gospel was brought to them from outside, purely by the grace of God.

Buoyed by their anonymous online friends whose imaginations have been deformed by vile “ironic” memes that make light of evil and depict Muslims as subhuman, a few of them will commit heinous crimes “IRL,” purportedly in “defense” of the West.  What do I have to lose? they reason.  Or in the words of Tarrant, “WHY DON’T I DO SOMETHING?”

That the “Caucasoid” peoples are succumbing, one after another, to their own “replacement” is a direct result not of genocide, nor even of suicide, but of apostasy.  The will to endure hardship in the service of duty, to marry and rear children, to build cultural institutions that will outlast you, to resist falsely conceived characterizations of “hate”—Islamophobia included—comes not from racial consciousness but from a simple confidence in the divinely ordained goodness and inviolability of family, kin, the inherited civil order, and the unique cultural institutions by which we pass on this confidence to our children.  To attribute these good gifts, even partly, to our own racial merit is as wicked as it is to deny that they are good gifts to begin with.  God is not mocked.

Tolerance is not a virtue, and its enforcement predictably leads to resentment and inhumane cruelty.  On the other hand, to be magnanimous means literally to have a large soul, one big enough to pursue the highest good in humility and in recognition of one’s estate in the Divine Order.  For those conditions to obtain, one must believe that he has a God and a soul—and that others do, too.