Vancouver: News From the War on Jihad II

This is Part 2 of the Vancouver Covenant Zone report.

The Covenant Continued

On Sept 11, 2001 our social relations with our nation and the world at large altered at the foundation. I suggest that at that time our contract and covenant with the world came up for renew. Few have addressed this. Most have, rather, ignored it completely, carrying on as if before. Above I gave a synopsis of a possible middle-class life outside the norm. I offered it as one model of our collective future as citizens of an altered world. The meaning of citizenship and duty are not the same that day and will not be so again. We continue to pretend only at our collective peril. What was normal and decent on Sept. 10th is not since Sept. 11 any good at all. To live within a pre-9/11 world-view is delusional. Worse, it is fatal to our nation and to the larger world.

I have few ties to home and family and therefore am free to pursue the nature of things according to my immediate vision. That's not the standard by which most Westerners live. Fair enough and rightly so. However, this is not a time any longer in which normal is normal. Ours is a time of serious conflict at the foundations of our social world. My presentation offers some highly radical propositions, and I'm taking a long time to set the scene so the reader might have some context in which to place these propositions in a clear light. This world of ours is not the same one it was a few short years ago, and we do ourselves a disservice if we don't subject our assumptions to scrutiny in this new order. Radical is sense. I have few ties to hold me to the status quo, and I realize most others cannot simply abandon it without a fair explanation of why anything other is better.

Our Modernity is divided today into two parts, one unconsciously accepting a world-view of pre-1789, 1776, 1750: half of our own fellows live in a world of the pre-Enlightenment and pre-Industrial Revolution. We are, dear reader, in a civil war. The attacks of 9/11 made that clear. We are divided into those who live in a reactionary world-view, i.e. a Gnostic neo-feudalism, on one side; and those who live on the other in a state of progressive Modernity. Our future depends on which side of this struggle is triumphant; and that very much depends on who knows what the stake is and why we do as we do. Why we bother, if we do at all. There is a clear division between those who feel the world of reaction is at war with the world of progress. The former feel that the war we are currently engaged in a civilizational conflict in the making, is nothing more than a bumper-sticker slogan. On the other side there are those who understand that the world of Man s bifurcating daily into two worlds of irreconcilable hatred and eventual total-war. I've written extensively on this subject elsewhere, so here I'll briefly state that of the total of our populations there will only be 15 percent who engage in active duty for or against our civilization. The remaining 85 percent of people will act at best in various supportive ways without active engagement. Our divided world is not then, one of man against man and everywhere Nature red in tooth and claw. the state of things is far simpler. Perhaps seven percent of our populations are for, and eight percent against. Our civil war, fought amongst the intelligentsia, is about that two percent who must shift for the weak side to dominate. In our Modernity, the shift might well need be far more that two. It can be done. We who prize freedom and our democratic Modernity, those of us who intend to univeralize it, can succeed. We must though understand the nature of our condition. And we must act within our laws.

The draw that brings me here is the question of Israel attacked by our own nation. the question to ask ourselves is at what point is our nation no longer ours but that of others, of usurpers? At what point do we see our nation ruled by our enemies? At what point are our laws and our government illegitimate and we rightly at war against our own nation? What is the foundation of our notion, and is it changed now so fundamentally that we are no longer citizens but subjects? I argue that the time is not now. We still have the basic America of our Constitution intact. But for how much longer will we see a government by Fifth Column as legitimate? And then, dear reader, what is to be done? Today that question is simple. The answer is simple. We as free people with a right to vote for our representatives do vote, and in our congress of advocates we decide our mutual benefits and compromises. Today it works. Today we are lawful citizens abiding our legitimate laws.

Since 9/11 things are totally changed in the very soul of our nation and our world. The world today is divided between those who struggle for freedom and Modernity and those who act for the restoration of the Middle Ages. The divide is widening daily. Most people stand in the middle of this struggle, falling into an abyss of which they know nothing, taking as their world-view what they gather from their community of fellows, those around them who say what others say. Predominant today is the narrative of the so-called Left. At worst, they represent a small proportion of the American public, some percentage of the 15 percent of those who are the intelligentsia. You, dear reader, are in that 15 percent, at a good guess. You are, by all odds, a normal person living a normal life in our collective Modernity. Unfortunately, Modernity itself is not what it was, and cannot be again. It will be -- or can be-- something else; and what that something is will be up to you. I offer the suggestion that you are at war. Your life is not the same thing it was, and you cannot legitimately expect it to be what it was after the war came home on 9/11. I am clearly not suggesting that we break our laws and wage a private war against enemies our nation won't war against. We have a military and a paramilitary, and it is our role in government and in our nation to govern ourselves in civil matters. That is where I suggest we wage a full war against our enemies. There will be no filibuster of Modernists campaigning across the world as in days of old. Instead we might find a new model army, as it were, of citizens armed with ideas doing battle against the primitives of our own nation and the world.

Two and a half years ago I met a few people who came to a meeting I called for over the Internet. Frankly, I had expected hundreds. Two showed up. No, not two hundred. Two people. I was one. The following week another came. I would like to write that in that time we have grown into the thousands and are soon expecting hundreds of thousands to join us in our struggle to redeem our nations. I'm not a novelist. Most weekly Thursday evening meetings we hold in public at the city library in the open spaces of the atrium are just us three. There are sometimes more, sometimes guests come from around the world to speak to us, IDF agents, soldiers, scientists, lawyers, philosophers, travelers, and thinkers of all sorts. They come to our Covenant Zone.

It's the nature of things that most people will never become involved in public affairs other than football games and parades on the Fourth of July-- as spectators. The fundamental shift in the ground of the existence of our nation didn't move many. some of us, more interested in the public than in the party system of politics, reach out to those who would care to affect the restoration of our nation to a solid ground of democracy. This is not a partisan affair of parties, it is a desire to recommit to a covenant of nationhood and public duty as citizens regardless of party and creed. Not religious, ours is an act of faith in democracy and the people who live in our Modernity. We talk a lot. I had no idea when I began this struggle that I would talk so much. Mine was a desire for action and arms against the jihadis. My call to arms brought out two men who think. I found myself listening.

I'm making this long presentation so you will have an idea of what can be done and what one might expect if one cares to attempt to meet ones fellows for the sake of saving our nation from destruction. Whereas I thought my ideas radical in the beginning, I see now just how radical instead are the ideas of my fellows here in Canada. My world shifted out of orbit on 9/11, and I thought my call to arms was a radical response. I find it was not so at all. Militant, yes, but not radical. That came from my colleagues later.

Next day I'll try to conclude with the idea of our Covenant Zone, of why we sit week after week talking and thinking aloud. I hope to show that from such comes a path to renewal of our great nation and our Modernity. I hope to show why we have faith in the future of our America, or,in this case, Canada.

I'm looking forward to the last part of this report and will post reports from Dag, our intrepid reporter in Vancouver hopefully each week.