The Greatest Aftermath

Autumn Fundraiser 2012, Day Seven

This is the final installment of this week’s fund-raising posts. Dymphna had planned to do this morning’s essay, and started writing it a couple of days ago. Alas, she was under the weather for the better part of yesterday, so I had to step up and pinch-hit for her today.

Fundraising weeks are always exhausting, and Dymphna succumbs more easily to fatigue than I do, given her chronic condition.

However, the response to this week’s appeal has been heartening, and the emails that many of you have sent have buoyed her spirit. Unfortunately, she keeps making the mistake of reading the news online, and then dysphoria strikes her down again.

And there are so many items in the news that induce anger or despair. The topics that laid Dymphna low recently include:

• Barack Hussein Obama
  
• The Republican Party
  
• The metastasis of federal executive power
  
• The profligacy of federal, state, and local governments
  
• The imprisonment of Tommy Robinson
  
• The European Union
  
• The United Nations
  
• Agenda 21
  
• Norway
  
• The Muslim Brotherhood, at home and abroad

…and much, much more.

She asked me to give our readers this message:

“My heartfelt gratitude goes out to those people who read our blog and then take the trouble to make a financial contribution to help keep us going. Times are hard, both financially and otherwise, and it moves me to see people step forward and give what they can to the cause. You all have become part of the garrison that guards the Gates of Vienna.”

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Each post in this quarter’s bleg has been a variation on the theme “Aftermaths”. Today I’ll round off the series with a look at the longest-running and most far-reaching aftermath of the modern era, the aftermath of World War Two.

Strictly speaking, the Second World War was simply the continuation of the Great War, after a cease-fire that lasted twenty-one years. Therefore it might be more appropriate to describe what followed as the “Aftermath of the Great Wars”. We’ve been in it for almost seventy years, and there’s no telling how much longer it will continue before it peters out under the World Caliphate. Or maybe the Chinese Empire, after it take the wheel of the New, Improved World Order.

The consequences of the Great Wars are so huge that they almost defy analysis. Beginning with technological changes, the Great Wars prompted the development of:

• Tanks
  
• Radar
  
• Jet aircraft
  
• Helicopters
  
• Rockets
  
• Nuclear weapons

That’s just a partial list of major innovations; readers may want to supply additional items.

The wars also accelerated existing technologies, including:

• Radio communications
  
• Aircraft technology
  
• Encryption devices
  
• Automated computation
  
• Chemical weapons
  
• The design of the internal combustion engine
  
• Plastics and composite materials

And on and on and on.

The political aftermath of the Great Wars included the end of European empires and overseas colonies, and the concomitant emergence of national self-determination as the dominant paradigm within the international order. Ninety years later that particular meme is dying, as nations are deconstructed and merged with the new global order that explicitly denies the legitimacy of the nation-state.

Among the more noxious political effects was the Bolshevik Revolution and all the horrors that followed it over the next seventy-four years. The Soviets were far worse than the Nazis in the magnitude of the slaughter and destruction they unleashed, but the less obvious aftermath of the October Revolution may be even worse: the institutionalization of Marxism throughout the democratic West by means of quiet infiltration and the subornation of our traditional civic institutions.

John Barleycorn is dead, but…

…the huntsman he can’t hunt the fox,
Nor so loudly blow his horn,
And the tinker he can’t mend kettles nor pots
Without a little of Barleycorn.

Marxism has become the state religion of modern godless Western institutions. The Bolsheviks lost in Russia and the Near Abroad, but they conquered the West by stealth. Lenin and Stalin are up there somewhere, laughing merrily at how easily we succumbed.

Other social changes brought about by the wars are harder to quantify. Among the more obvious ones was the emancipation of women, which began during the Great War when women flooded the armaments factories. The new status of women was sealed for good by a similar process during the Second World War.

The change in the role of women — especially female suffrage — brought about what may be the largest political change in the Western Democracies, as politics became feminized and non-confrontational. An emphasis on safety, health care, non-violence, and social cooperation replaced national security, ethnic pride, and the martial virtues as the dominant driving force in political life. We are nearing endgame on this phenomenon, as the effete feminized West confronts the primordial masculine violence of Islam, and reacts with the collective equivalent of a helpless high-pitched shriek followed by meekness and passive submission.

The withering away of the nation-state is explainable at least in part by the same process that created the obsession with race and “racism”. The revulsion against all things Nazi reversed the pre-war trend — which had been moving towards eugenics and the recognition of white superiority across the entire West, not just in Germany — and replaced it with its polar opposite, in which racial differences were denied, deprecated, and made unmentionable. As a corollary, the nation-state, based as it was on a national identity defined by ethnicity, had to go.

Combine all these multifarious trends (and many more), and you have the noxious mess in which we find ourselves today, with a degraded and passive popular culture obsessed with hedonism and material goods, a knee-jerk pacifism that denies all political actors on “our” side the ability to defend themselves militarily, and the infiltration of political Islam throughout our societies, which find themselves deprived of any ideological weapons to counter it.

Much more could be written about the aftermath of the Great Wars. An essay isn’t sufficient; it would take a lengthy scholarly treatise, or a book, or even shelves of books.

That will have to come later. Right now, it’s time to start on our thank-you notes.

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Yesterday’s contributions arrived from:

Stateside: California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, N. Carolina, Ohio, and Tennessee.

Near Abroad: Canada

Far Abroad: Australia, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK

Thanks to one and all for their ongoing generosity.

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Afterword

Two of the photos used in this post — the girls painting war posters and the boys working with model aircraft — were requested by Dymphna for the essay she was planning to post this morning, but was too unwell to complete.

She plans to finish her post and publish it sometime later, and will use those two photos to illustrate a different theme. So they won’t really be recycled — they’ll just be doing double duty.