Calling Oswald Spengler about the twilight

The transcript of the President’s address to the nation on September the 30th, 2020 as broadcast on all the major networks: 

My fellow God fearing Americans,

In recent months, there has been a radical armed and extremely violent movement to defund, dismantle and dissolve our police departments. Most Democratic politicians have joined this anti-police crusade and relentlessly vilified our law enforcement heroes. Blood is being shed, property is being destroyed, good Christian citizens are cowering in fear. Our major cities are now a battlefield. A battlefield between Dark and Light, a battlefield between God and Satan. Whose side are you on? 

This bloodshed of the police and and of the innocent god fearing citizens must end. This bloodshed will end. Today, I’m calling for a National Patriotic Uprising to support our police and the return to law and order on our Streets. I am calling for all the Patriots and Christians around this blessed country to take up their arms and join the government forces all over the USA to protect property, worship and liberty. Take up your weapons and fight and prevail!

So we will work, we will fight every single day to restore public safety, protect our nation’s children and bring violent perpetrators to justice by any means necessary. Soldiers, officers of the law, citizens — we will fight, we will take back our country from these lawless, godless, violent thugs. We will prevail!

The final Battle has started. God and Justice will win. Listen to your radio, watch your news, watch my briefings. Now is the time for resolute action. We will prevail, God will prevail, Justice will prevail.

God bless you and God bless America.

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And no, this is certainly not a very likely scenario, I think. The major thing being that surely he wouldn't do it. Though if he would, there would be thousands, maybe tens of thousands, maybe more, following the call. This is where we now are.

Never forget: Jallianwala Bagh

I am currently reading a fresh study of the massacre, an excellent work by Kim A. Wagner. The Empire will always be a certain litmus test for us anglophiles. Being not conservative, nor radical, but a liberal I view that day as a crossroads, a defining moment. The moment when all illusions left were shattered and the skull beneath the skin was revealed, the racist grin. And not only that day and the awful days and weeks after, but the way this vast, vile crime was treated in London. Yes, a half hearted, typically British, gesture was made towards justice, mocked by its own nature and the deep respectable torydom in the Home Counties and beyond.

Yes, killing innocents is the way of the world, the routine way of history. No excuse though, the opposite of an excuse.

The Death of Jaan Tõnisson

Surely not nearly as important as the life, and therefore important too. Date and manner not known, though well imaginable. And not that it would have necessarily been particularly heroic and filmatic, most deaths are not. His integrity was already established elsewhere, untouchable. A pedantic, fussy man, not good imagination, rather like our K.J.Ståhlberg, both respective fathers of liberalism of their countries. Known for stubborn insistance on rights, liberties and the rule of law. K.J.Ståhlberg writing "Tulevaisuuden lähtökohtia" in April 1918 when the slaughter was still going on. Tõnisson not moving an inch for Päts and Laidoner, nor even, when the game became deathly, to Stalin.

4am - from Temple Bar to Phibsboro in 1999

The day after the St Stephen's Day I think. We were too generous, surely, or maybe I only too good pretending to be, and just maybe even the others too. And, yes, to a degree that is true (in the way it is inevitable in this fallen world) - but still no, no, not at all: we really were generous, shining, even if just a little a bit. Even me. And he really was a good person, a good young man, effortlessly better than the brooding, crooked me: handsome, generous, confident. And to my credit if so not ease, I did see that. He was. And so then, walking bitterly crying back to Phibsboro and eventually thinking of knifes and wrists, but also as I now see, shining. We did have large generous untimid hearts. Erring, yeah, oh how much erring in those years, but generous, yes, daring, yes, even me, the least of us.

And I am a citizen of two countries

Weird to think about it with the benefit of actually understanding things, in hindsight. You never tend to do it in real time. But actually I have been a good Finnish Pietist all along, strange - here in this waking world and even before these days when I am not at all as hopeless as I used to be. And so there it is: art and knowledge and feeling, the long views - and so I am here, and not totally here, a citizen of two countries:

Poetry and friendship and love and the pursuit of understanding do accompany me just as well as the Hymns of Zion do (but not all hymns at all). So then, I don't only walk in this waking world but also in the other one of art and love and understanding, a citizen of two countries.

Not much pride left

I still vividly remember that one debate in Helsinki in the fall of 1987, in the small Pietist student hostel, my first home after home. I argued, passionately and full of true conviction, that I would not pray nor beg for loved people being entitled for justice, not mercy. Now I obviously would, no question, and do. Not much pride left in that respect. Have been lucky. Weird how some scenes, vignettes stay in memory, or better put, are transformed into vignettes by the act of remembering.

Love in the time of plague

It is strange to witness history after a lifetime of being so securely out of it. Fukuyama was both very naive and very perceptive: at least he approached history as a serious, coherent thing. But to think it would have possibly somehow ended in the early 90's - that was surely the height of neoliberal folly, before all the following follies. And obviously there is no certainty of whether history even would really be a serious, coherent thing, instead of being a random ape evolution to whatever carnival of craziness and greediness and violence. But just as obviously one does keep on hoping.

No time for decency

In these times Orwell does rather regularly come to mind. A weird, largely unlikable person, a shining light. Artists are strange people: often brutally limited in their private lives, often creating an antithesis of those limitations, a near complete rebuttal of their own persons. Strange things. His beliefs were much better than him, but to have had them, tells also a story - an overcoming of situation and person. His attitude, his writing, and yes, his person, are so much missing from this shameless cold era of prostitution and exploitation.

Musing on Howard's End or Why won't England ever grow up?

E.M. Forster was radically civilized in his private life, a living indictment of his savage, primitive era. The pre-war fiction is strange, I believe it is clearly better than its reputation, which is not exactly bad but still somewhat lukewarm. This is not to deny it's obvious limitations and shyings away - somewhat tame tales of Liberal and Conservative England. But with a ring of truth around them: an extended family with always the worst members in charge. If possible even more true now than then - certainly the material conditions were much worse a century ago, but there was also a spirit of optimism about, of progress mitigating them. Now we have only endless vistas of corrupt finance capitalism and gradually ever less of meaningful democratic politics, meaningful discussion. Little sense of hope.

The river keeps keeping its name

I recently visited a place once very significant and warm, a fountain of great friendship and of so much laughter. And yes, the steps and the voices did echo, memories did flood, the bird did urge speed etc. But there was something else in that experience too, in a place so intimately recalled: something less sweet and more real. It is not that nostalgia should be automatically bad, just that it is automatically inaccurate. The sharpness, the vividness of experience, of the moment, is forgotten, that feeling of living poised on top of a great roaring wave of time with always the fear of crashing down, of drowning. Yes, those good things were true, they did happen, but that is just a part of that experience, at the time it was no fountain, it was life.

A lower and even more dishonest decade

The previous decade seemed bad enough: a decadent, cynical war of choice - the late empire gathering good ratings for homeland. And then that lame interlude did not seem so lame at first. But now these garish colours: reckless, compromised late empire, the stench of decay. Corruption, spite and ignorance. Conservatives forgetting all conservatism, forgetting history, getting easily bought. Liberals only semi-convinced of anything, only half-heartedly offering some feeble defence for half-forgotten positions.

Admittedly, only local, fleeting issues - these questions will be resolved, become utterly irrelevant soon enough in the longer perspective, and that longer perspective in itself only a moment. But we are here and now, and can only so be. So this is the moment and the place to engage: our absurdly short moment. The only time we have.

Cultural fugue

We don't live by bread only. A critical addition to this retro-30's (so far lite) era is the other central theme of this blog: the increasing decline of christian-humanist values - and the concequent emptying of liberalism into a shallow official creed not understood, not believed in, not defended, only practiced as a handy way to increase the various further concentrations of capital. We are consumers, not citizens, servants, not masters. 

Yes, this has been said before and by some very doubtful people, like Heidegger, like Nietzsche. They had very little understanding of liberalism, little understanding of history, of freedom. But here we now are in the West: opulent but with no convictions whatsover. Faith is not by far the only thing necessary to keep a civilization going, to keep a society coing, but it is the minimum requirement, the base. We are losing our memory, we are forgetting our beliefs, our convictions.

Slaves of defunct economists

This article says it all brilliantly and succintly: Against Economics

We live in an age of corruption and unreason - and nothing excemplifies it better than the mainstream economic orthodoxy shared by both financial and political elites, ever shortsighted and irrational. And that madness in turn is slowly killing civil societies and the post-war liberal Western order. What more disasters are needed to weed the idiocy out? Or will nothing be enough in this age of defeat and retreat?

Liberalism is not nice

I don't get this niceness aspect that is so often associated with liberalism. Well, to be exact, with the real existing liberalism - unlike pretty much all the other ideologies, liberalism is seen as  actual, specific practice, not as an abstract ideology, and as an actual existing practice in this hopelessly fallen world it is then compared with the pure ideologies, with those countless ideal laboratory cases of our rich human imagination, with unreality, in other words.

But in any case liberalism is not nice: it's hard, it's nonsentimental, it's detached, empirical, unemotional, even inhumane. Liberty is an empty thing, an emptiness, just a preliminary tiny first step away from outright barbarism. And even that tiny step has been paid for with blood - it has been taken from unimaginable hardships and brutalities and injustices. Not for capital, not for the highest return for investment, but for liberty and justice, for the primitive ignorance and brutality of human history to be one day totally ended.

Kus on Konstantin Pätsi haud? Kus on Jaan Tõnissoni haud? Kus on kindral Laidoneri haud?

Meditating on that wave of liberation and emancipation, the late 80's, the falling of the wall. The liberal Europe, its seiren song, the mostly pragmatic, rational US (at least in the West). And then, what happened? - further relaxation of the capital controls, robber capitalism, the explosion of private debt and public corruption. Not what was supposed to happen at all. And now in 2019, the former bastions of the liberal order, the US and Britain are mad and chaotic, capital ever gaining on work, the finance sector casually buying politicians, the centre not holding at all. History is merciless, it doesn't give respite, triumphs fade and are forgotten, ideals crumble.