Killers Part 1

     The civility cherished by the civilized men had finally been defeated by their ideas, although they did not know that this was the cause. After years of preaching contradictions and of evading principles with an anti-ideological shrug, these men were astonished to see the nation conclude that man cannot live by principles, that reason is no guide to action, and that anything goes. After years of institutionalizing interest-group warfare, which they had justified as sacrifice or collective service, these men were astonished to see hostile gangs take to the streets and demand one another’s sacrifice. After years of undercutting the mind by preaching the primacy of gentle feeling (whether “progressive” or religious or skeptical), these men were astonished to find that irrational feeling is no counter to “wild emotionalism.”
     After years of spreading or condoning or subsidizing the cult and culture of nihilism, the civilized men were astonished to find that they had nothing more to say, and that there was no one left to listen.
     The moderates were helpless. The authorities were helpless. The killers were taking over.

     [Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels]

     Give them their strangling cloths. Give them their burial picks. Swear by our mother Kali to be thrice faithful to her and to me and to our order and to all of us.
     Rise, our new-made brothers. Rise and kill. Kill, lest you be killed yourselves. Kill for the love of killing. Kill for the love of Kali. Kill! Kill! Kill!

     [Gunga Din]

     There are things we’ve known for a long time. Some of them are expressed in the quotes above. They’re indisputable, both logically and from the evidence. Yet in recent years we’ve become afraid to admit them to our consciousnesses, much less to proclaim them in public.

     The promotion of an evil idea must be expected to bring evil in its wake. How could it be otherwise? We know the power of an idea – and evil ideas have a unique power. They appeal to those who will evil: they who seek to do evil deeds, whether for personal gain or for the sheer pleasure of wounding others.

     We’ve had any number of fictional depictions of such evil ideologies in our time, but the one that rings most clearly to my ear is one you’ve seen cited here before:

     “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”

     Orwell illuminates and emphasizes the evil idea we’ve not dared to articulate: Power is not a means; it is an end. They who seek power do so for power’s sake, not for any “noble” or “public service” reason.

     But there’s another link in the ideological chain we must follow. Orwell illuminates that one, as well:

     “Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing…. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.

     The utility of power over others is in inflicting suffering and death on those others. To inflict suffering and death upon helpless others brings happiness to only one sort of person. It cannot be made plainer than that…another evil idea we refuse to confront with our conscious minds.

     Yes, the 800 words above are mostly “previous work.” (Lemmas, for the mathematically inclined.) I’m sure my Gentle Readers are familiar with all the quotes I’ve presented. Yet there’s something bloodless about the evil ideas they express. They appear to the decent, peaceable man as dicta held by someone else: some enemy lurking in the shadows.

     It is not so. Many of your neighbors hold them, or their precursors.

     “But surely, Fran,” I hear you murmur, “something specific must have triggered that flood?” You’re quite correct: something did:

     Explosive leaked documents have emerged that show medical staff were ordered to euthanize patients who had been admitted to hospital and tested positive for COVID-19.
     The official documents were leaked from the UK’s state-funded National Health Service (NHS).
     The docs further confirm the previous reporting from Slay News that revealed patients were euthanized in order to boost the numbers for “Covid deaths.”
     As Slay News reported, smoking gun evidence revealed that tens of thousands of elderly people were murdered to boost the mortality rates.
     The data produced for the report indicated that people were being euthanized using a fatal injection of Midazolam.
     The cause of their deaths was then listed as “Covid,” indicating that the virus was killing far more elderly people than it was.
     The explosive data from the report was made public by Australian politician Craig Kelly, the national director of the United Australia Party.
     The report obtained official UK government data on death rates and causes.
     According to Kelly, the patients were euthanized in order to boost “Covid deaths” and ramp up public fear to garner support for lockdowns and vaccines.

     I’m going to pause here to attend to some necessities. While I’m dealing with them, read the story above carefully, and find the evil idea that made possible the slaughter it reports. I’ll be back.

     Did you find it? It’s not stated explicitly in the cited story. However, it lies beneath the atrocities the story describes.

     We don’t have a “national health service” in the United States. Pressure is rising for the creation of one. Our neighbor to the North has one. Those fleeing its “services” mainly come here.

     What is the idea behind the nationalization – or socialization, if you prefer – of medical care and services? I’m not thinking of the cost-savings its promoters claim will arise from one. Neither am I thinking of the lamentations the bleeding-heart crowd chant about people who “can’t afford health insurance.” I want to go deeper than that.

     For what does it mean to say “Let the federal government operate all medical care in these United States?” What special attribute does a government possess that distinguishes it from other entities? Why would that attribute conduce to “better” or “fairer” medical care for Americans? What other consequences might flow from it?

     You know what I’m talking about.

     In the Peikoff citation at the head of this piece, he describes the conclusion of the ideological-ethical degeneration that allowed Weimar Germany to become the Third Reich, with all that followed. The ideological atmosphere of the Weimar Republic was, for all practical purposes, “anything goes:” nihilist. But an ideological vacuum is as voracious as a physical one: it pulls thought and action into its maw. What comes out the other end is as septic as any other creature’s excreta.

     The U.S. has never yet had a complete ideological collapse. We’ve suffered some partial evacuations, but always there has been a national ideological-ethical redoubt: a core populace that remained faithful to the principles expressed in our ideological birth certificate: the Declaration of Independence. Unfortunately, the Left’s conquest of our organs of communication, education, and entertainment has allowed our resident nihilists to chip at the margins of that core. Some have given up; others have withdrawn into themselves. The core is dwindling in size and giving ground thereby. What’s flowing into the evacuated spaces is not friendly to freedom, justice, or individuals’ rights.

     I could be talking about population flows and demographic trends here. I’m not; those are consequences of our accumulating ideological losses, not primaries. The primaries are the ideas dominant among us, always. We can see some of the consequences of one particular idea in the Slay News story cited above.

     More anon.

     Ideas have consequences. — Richard Weaver