The victory of the Taliban over the military forces of Uncle Sam in Afghanistan raises some unpleasant questions for Dixie. Writing of the motivations of the Taliban, Mr Pat Buchanan says,
‘ . . . to brand the Taliban terrorists and pariahs is not new to them. What they seek is something for which they have proven they are willing to die.
‘What is critical for them is to restore the Taliban to their previous dominance; to create an Islamic Emirate; to make themselves the moral, social, and political arbiters of a more purely Islamic Afghanistan. And to be rid of the outsiders and their alien values. They want to be able to stand up and say to the Muslim world: "We have shown you how to do it. We fought America, the world superpower, for 20 years until we forced the Americans, tails between their legs, to get out of our land, and then put their puppets up against a wall."’
In this instance – loyalty to one’s fatherland and its culture, even to the death – the Taliban are shaming the South rather badly. It is often said that in the South, memory and tradition live; that Christianity is vibrant; that the extended family is a beloved institution; and so on. To be sure, there are still glimmers of those things in the South, but overall they are faint and growing dimmer.
We must admit the disquieting truth: Most Southerners, for the moment, would rather be a part of the un-Christian Yankee American Empire rather than experience any deprivation or discomfort to free ourselves of Washington City’s perverse and destructive influence. Not so the Taliban:
‘Geopolitically, what matters now is how the Taliban have written a whole new script, showing the lands of Islam, as well as the Global South, how to defeat the self-referential, seemingly invincible US/NATO empire.
‘The Taliban did it with Islamic faith, infinite patience and force of will fueling roughly 78,000 fighters – 60,000 of them active – many with minimal military training, no backing of any state – unlike Vietnam, which had China and the USSR – no hundreds of billions of dollars from NATO, no trained army, no air force and no state-of-the-art technology.’
Thus, it is unsurprising that in the South what was unthinkable not long ago is now the agonizing ‘new normal’: The Governor of Arkansas vetoed legislation this year to protect female athletes from confused, ‘transgender’ males; North Carolina repealed a law in 2016 (HB 2) that mandated separate bathrooms and locker rooms for men and women and vetoed local laws granting special rights to LGBT people; the Republican Party, the party of choice of most conservative-minded Southerners, now officially celebrates Pride Month; the Southern Baptist Convention embraces Critical Race Theory; etc.
What is happening in the South is simply an extension of what is at play in the whole West. The author Paul Kingsnorth explains:
‘Ultimately, without that higher purpose to bind it, society would fall — as it has — into “emotivism”, relativism and ultimately disintegration. If every culture is cored around a sacred order — whether Christian, Islamic or Hindu, the veneration of ancestors or the worship of Odin — then the collapse of that order will lead inevitably to the collapse of the culture it supported. There is a throne at the heart of every culture, and whoever sits on it will be the force we take our instruction from. The modern experiment has been the act of dethroning both literal human sovereigns and the representative of the sacred order, and replacing them with purely human, and purely abstract, notions — “the people” or “liberty” or “democracy” or “progress.”
‘I’m all for democracy (the real thing, please, not the corporate simulacra that currently squats in its place), but the dethroning of the sovereign — Christ — who sat at the heart of the Western sacred order did not lead to universal equality and justice. It led — via a bloody shortcut through Robespierre, Stalin and Hitler — to the complete triumph of the power of money, which has splintered our culture and our souls into a million angry shards.
‘The vacuum created by the collapse of our old taboos was filled by the poison gas of consumer capitalism. It has now infiltrated every aspect of our lives in the way that the Christian story once did, so much so that we barely even notice as it colonises everything — from the way we eat to the values we teach our children. Cut loose in a post-modern present — with no centre, no truth and no direction — we have not become independent-minded, responsible, democratic citizens in a human republic. We have become slaves to the self and to the power of money; broken worshippers before the monstrous idol of Progress. “In the ethics of the West,” wrote Spengler, “everything is direction, claim to power, will to affect the distant.”’
Mr Buchanan’s statement, similar in spirit to Mr Kingsnorth’s, pierces the Southern soul like a sword:
‘Is what we have on offer—one man-one vote democracy—truly appealing in a part of the world where democracy seems to have trouble, from the Maghreb to the Middle East to Central Asia, putting down any deep roots?
‘The Taliban's God is Allah. The golden calf we had on offer was democracy. In the Hindu Kush, their god has proven stronger.’
If the South had not abandoned Christ, we would be willing to deny ourselves like the Taliban, dig in our heels, irritate the Yanks (using peaceful, non-violent methods), and wait until they get so frustrated with us that they turn us loose. But the South has accepted the ‘golden calf’ of Yankee democracy and materialism, and just as in Afghanistan, it is leading to chaos. Mr Declan Leary is exactly right when he says, ‘We must consider the possibility that the gospel of American Progress—democracy, liberalism, equality—failed in Afghanistan not because it is not Afghan but because it is not true. Because, if we are really being honest, it’s not doing too hot on the homefront either.’
The South, along with the rest of the States, has ‘suppress[ed] the natural human passions toward order and loyalty, faith, place, and blood, with shallow promises of voting rights and forward motion’.
This has consequences, . . .
The rest is at https://www.geopolitica.ru/en/article/what-taliban-victory-means-dixie .
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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
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