Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Vancouver: News From the War on Jihad III

This is the last part of Dag's posting for this week.

The Covenant Completed

There are in the West two kinds of people who attend to the nature of publicity: there are those pre-9/11 and there are those post-9/11. It's been like that from the beginning of the Enlightenment circa 1750. It began clear on Sept. 12, 2001. We are either pre-Enlightnement people or no; either reactionaries or progressives; either collectivists or individualists; either neo-feudalists or Modernists. We are, in short, either counter-revolutionaries or revolutionary Americanists. These are dichotomies made to raise voices and tempers. Nevertheless, they are essential and real. We stand defined in our metaphysic and episteme certainly by the reaction we have to the attacks of 9/11. Who we are is how we feel about or, conversely, how we think of 9/11.

There are numerous diagnostics one can perform quickly to find out what kind of person one is Descartes or von Herder? "I Think, therefore I am," is a person entirely different from one who claims "I feel, therefore I am." One is Classical or Romantic. And on it goes. The one current and most common dichotomy is 'Left and Right.' There can hardly be a less meaningful distinction in our time. Rather, there is the reactionary and the progressive, to be brief. How we react to the Triune Revolution, that defines us essentially.

I began this essay with the intention of promoting the concept of you, dear reader, forming a Covenant Zone of your own. I've tried to lay out some background of that begun in Vancouver, Canada, of it's trials and travails and tribulations. My hope is that one will not rush out into the world expecting, as I did, great mass movements on the spot. Most of our won are not such people,and the few who will move toward greater freedom and who will work for it incrementally over the decades won't be moved by rhetoric or parades. I do hope that even with my low-key presentation of our successes you might be encouraged anyway to attempt to reach out to others like yourselves. If you do, you will reach out to a small and select group of thinkers. To act in forming your Covenant Zone would be to act in a state of faith, in yourself, and particularly in your fellows and in our nation and the greater world. I have been blessed in this.

Until such time as we who are post-9/11 become the dominant proportion of our intelligentsia we will be faced with a hostile public, those who face whichever direction according to popular opinion as defined by the intelligentsia. It is not particularly easy for most to stand against the crowd. To do so for years on end with no end in sight requires faith in the good. Hatred won't do it. Revenge is not enough. One needs faith in our future, one we might never live to see. Faith is neither stupid nor sentimental, irrational nor passionate. One might say our faith and our Covenant can be very boring. Depending on the kind of person one is, that in itself is a draw. Our efforts, though not immediately successful and not dramatic, are paying off slowly in positive ways, and I have, from this adventure, no scars to show for it. We who meet weekly in our public library are not universally loved or admired or even liked or tolerated by the public. We face hostility from jihadis at times, and weekly we face possibilities of violence. We carry on quite nicely in spite of it, and we gain, however slowly, a foot-hold in society. We reach on occasion a post- 9/11 person. And it really has little to do with 9/11 at all. It is in the mind and in the person's understanding of the meaning of life. Those who have faith, who have love and concern and true belief in our great nation, (even if in this case a foreign nation,) fight for the rights of Humanity. We recommit ourselves weekly in our covenant.

There is no dogma here, no grand creed, no oaths of loyalty to sign in blood. We come as individuals to meet individuals, and in that we struggle against the collectivists of the counter-revolution. Yes, we were attacked on 9/11, but the struggle had been raging fiercely for hundreds of years before that. Now it is open. You might find it to your advantage to participate in a meeting of your own at your own public library to meet such people as yourselves. I can't predict your success. Mine has been life-changing. Yours might not be so, but it might, though, match mine. One will know by acting in good faith. The covenant is within yourself, and you can share that with others, should you and they care to make that leap of faith.

I'll close here and next time I'll do as I was invited to do in the initial exchange, which is to give some precis of our meeting. We talked last day of Mark Styne, of Ezra Levant, of Kathy Shaidle, and the struggle against the thought police in Canada who bring charges against journalists and bloggers to a quasi-judicial court with coercive powers. When I return on Thursday I'll leave some sense of what we speak of and why we do so. Meanwhile, I hope I've given some sense of the act of the Covenant. The rest is, dare I write this-- kind of fun. We organize and attend demonstrations against the Death Hippies. I'll have more on that next time.

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Yalla, Dag



I eagerly await your next report Dag. Each time we confront Jihadists and their rhetoric, we win a bit of our freedoms back. To keep the West safe for the next generation we must have "Constant Vigilance"!

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