This is an ongoing series of reports from Covenant Zone in Vancouver.
Primo Levi was an Italian intellectual, a man who had a Ph. D. in chemistry, held down a good job, and lived a quiet life as a Jewish guy in a small European city, everything pretty ordinary and sort of nice. Then one day he landed at Auschwitz. Eventually he committed suicide.
I'm happy to write that there's more to this story. It's not a happy story, but it's a story worth knowing, I think. In the abstract, it's our story today. I'll keep it very brief.
Levi survived the death camp. He did so by surviving. I mean, and he explains, he survived because he wanted to survive, and he thought about it, and he discovered there were ways of surviving, ways others didn't think through, those others dying in their millions. We know it's millions. We know Levi survived because he wrote
Survival at Auschwitz. We know from his book that he survived, ultimately, by chance. And if we try to think he survived because God spared him to write this book, then I suggest that God could have found any number of better writers, probably far better people, to do a better job. Levi isn't a great thinker, not a great writer, not a great person. Any of a million other people could have written the kind of book he wrote. That's why it's important: because he's ordinary. He's only exceptional in that he survived Auschwitz. In his book he summarizes the experience in a essay entitled "The Drowned and the Saved." I put it to you, dear reader, that we face the same situation Levi faced, though not so brutally and immediately, but the same dilemma of life: Do we live or do we die? I don't mean to liken the world to a death camp; I hope to bring to our attention the problem we face, that Levi faced, in whether we will live rather than die. Levi faced an immediate problem by the moment. We face something different but we face a problem of being in the same sense Levi did. What kind of people are we? Are we the Drowned or are we the Saved?
Levi relates that he witessed people disembarking from trains, that they were lined up, sorted out, some sent to die immediately, the rest sorted out for death by, among other means quicker, exhaustion and starvation. We, of course, don't face that kind of immediate physical threat, but I suggest we face threat as dire in the long term, the existential threat of dying like those disembarking from trains at a death camp. Levi claims he didn't want to know those around him, didn't give them names, didn't think of them as alive at all. it wasn't cruelty or apathy or hatred. Those who disembarked from the trains, those not singled out for immediate murder en masse, we given labor specifically engineered to cause their deaths within three weeks if they followed the rules assigned them. Most, the vast majority, and almost to a man, followed the rules. They followed rules designed to murder them. He saw those around him as not alive to begin with, their deaths not being anything more than a formality. They were, he writes, the drowned.
Levi committed suicide, as did many survivors of the death camps, and as do many survivors of other horrors. He died, though, after he survived Auschwitz. Was it worth it? Having an answer to that will tell what kind of person one is.
It is the natural fate of most of Humanity to follow even unto death that which they follow regardless. Who knows? people are social and they do as others do, even if that is to die by murder. In circumstances less dramatic than Levi's one has the luxury of sympathy. I find that I have written for a number of years now the same phrase: "We are blessed." We are blessed with the chance to care about those who have no idea of their peril. We re blessed in that we can take our lives and do some great thing in the defense of the defenseless, those disembarking from the trains of societies unraveling before our very eyes daily. All are lost in this life, and none survive. Till then, that time, is it worth the living? Those who never ask such a question are those who deserve never to have to ask such a question; but they might be faced with such a forceful thing. It is our blessing that we will be ahead of all in our defense of the unquestioning. I'm sorry to say it's nothing dramatic we can do. no costumes like a comic book hero, no fancy space weapons to blast down enemies by the score. We can do this great task set for us by simply sitting quietly, talking. If we're saved.
Again I've made a long preamble to a short point. Here in Vancouver, Canada we, my mates and I, sit in the main hall of the city library once a week, talking and drinking coffee and swapping books and so on, like any of hundreds of others around us. We are very unexceptional. Some might say, some indeed have said, we are boring. We seek such people. We have, actually, found many. To a degree, they are in trouble that affects their lives deeply. You might know of some of them by name. Mark Steyn is one. Ezra Levant is another. Kathy Shaidle, too. No one is pointing a gun at their heads, not directing them to death chambers. This is, after all, Canada. Here, the situation is different, less violent than many other places, but as creepy and worsening as one might find anywhere that fascism has seeped into the fabric of society. It will only get worse if people drown in the rule-following of conformity and sociable behaviour. It's the nature of things.
Last evening, Thursday, we met as we do every Thursday evening, to discuss events in the nation and beyond regarding jihad and Left dhimmi fascism. We focussed our discussion on Steyn, Levant, et al. No costume changes, no ray-guns, we simply sit and talk and plan as we can to assist our colleagues in the struggle to stop the Leftist fascism now so deeply rooted in the West. What can we, as bloggers and private citizens, do?
There is no shortage of issues, here or elsewhere, to do with jihad and Left dhimmi fascism. So, along with our discussion of Styne and company, we discussed as well the local situation that includes people in the immediate area, those under attack in various devious ways, by the socialist political party that runs a good half of the city. We have contacted and befriended a number of those who are struggling to wrest control of a community center from professional "social activists." As it happens, the latter group have strong liking in their public announcements for the use of Stalinist cliches and Maoist phraseology. It's not surprising, given that one of their numbers showed up on television at his election to the city council wearing a Che Guevara tee-shirt. Not surprising that one of the clique referred to the area as a "Maoist Liberation Zone." We sit at the library and talk. We aren't particularly dramatic. We talk about free speech, how to protect people who exercise it, those who are penalized for doing so. And sometimes they just go too far and we go picket the bastards and make ourselves real visible and heard over their shouting! There come times when enough is enough and one must stand up and start making it known it's too much at all.
We might even lose this struggle not just for the right to speak freely in public but to live at all. We might find ourselves attacked by ever-more emboldened jihadis. We've had our minor encounters. There might well come a time when we can't face them down without a fight. We're talkers and writers and thinkers. We aren't brawlers. But we're not going to drown, either. If there's any way to prevent it, we won't let our societies drown in the muck of collectivist fascism. We might go down with the rest, but we'll go down trying to swim. Yes, it's hopeless, and we'll all go down someday, never to return and lost for eternity. But not till then. Till that time we go on and we sit like the best of men who talk. We drink coffee and we even eat cookies. That's what I ask of you, dear reader. What kind of person are you?
If anyone were more heroic than we, I'd get nervous. What would we have in that case? We don't need hot-headed people looking for instant and eternal answers to all of life's problems. We seek instead comrades in an endless struggle to preserve what good we have and to extend it beyond it's current boundaries and to others who might or might not develop it further. But we live scattered across the wide globe and we might never meet face to face, hand in hand. We might have to rely on knowing that you and yours sit quietly in libraries talking to those who feel like you, that freedom is worth preserving and extending in your neighbourhood against those who would extinguish it from our nation and these lands. it doesn't take much to further the freedoms our forefathers died for. We do our parts just by sitting in public letting the world know we are there. And they do know. For all the lack of drama, we frighten the Death hippies in this city. Because people whisper about us now, whereas before they stayed silent and did what they were told, obeying the rules that allowed the creation of this nasty little police state in Canada. All it take is sitting down to talk. I hope that you will, in your town or your city, do the same for the sake of all.
I'll return next week if I may to bring some news of Mark Styne who will face the government in a hearing against him for having written a book,
America Alone. As well, i hope to have news of a local nature on the Maoist liberation Zone's community centre election of a board of directors, some of whom were last term evicted from the building for daring to question the ruling cliques right to do as they pleased, which is to run a campaign headquarters on union wages to re-elect a Communist M.P. from this city. this story will never end, and shouldn't end. it's the nature of life that we will always have to work to preserve and extend the good. And because we can, friend, I say,
"We are blessed."
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Yalla,
Dag
Covenant Zone meets every Every Thursday evening, 7-900 p.m, at the main public library in the atrium outside Blenz coffee bar they meet to discuss current events regarding jihad and Left dhimmi fascism.If you are in the Vancouver area, you are welcome to join them.
