Culture Wars | Standpoint

January/February 2013

For the Nazis, the opposite of culture was not anarchy, but civilisation. Kultur was authentic, pure and German, whereas Zivilisation was cosmopolitan, urban and Jewish. Nazi pseudo-intellectuals churned out bestsellers devoted to the supposed evils of civilisation. Viewing the world through the prism of this viciously anti-Semitic Kultur, Himmler and other senior Nazis indulged a bizarre taste for the occult: not only astrology and spiritualism, but "cosmic ice theory", ancestor worship and much else besides. But these foul fantasies, brilliantly investigated by the late Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, served a purpose: to defile and ultimately obliterate the achievements of millennia of Judaeo-Christian civilisation. Even before they launched the most terrible war in history, the Nazis mounted a culture war. Had they not been defeated, Europe would have entered a darker age by far than that which followed the Roman Empire.

It was a previous incumbent of Hitler's office, the "Iron Chancellor" Otto von Bismarck, who launched the first Kulturkampf (literally "culture struggle") against the Catholic Church in Prussia. It failed, but today many Western governments follow his example by discriminating against those who uphold Judaeo-Christian values. As Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali writes in this month's Standpoint, in England the churches must all prepare for exile. In Germany and elsewhere, Jews are threatened by attempts to ban circumcision and kosher slaughter. In the US, Allan Bloom's warning against "spiritual entropy" as a consequence of the "decay of culture" has been amply borne out over the quarter-century since The Closing of the American Mind achieved notoriety. Bloom lamented that his "select students [at Chicago] know so much less, are so much more cut off from the tradition". How much more aghast he would be at today's prospect of a world in which any notion of "the tradition" or "Western canon" is shot to pieces by the very profession that ought to be its guardian: the academy.

The place where state, religion and culture converge is the Bible. Thanks to a privately-funded initiative of the Education Secretary Michael Gove, all 24,000 state schools in England have received a copy of the King James Bible. But its majestic prose is almost as much of a mystery to most of today's students as the Hebrew, Greek or Latin originals. Yet the King James Bible is a product of the first modern era of biblical scholarship. We have a fine new example by Geza Vermes this month. In New York's Jewish Museum, an exhibition of manuscripts from the Bodleian Library, Oxford includes one of the earliest Hebrew codices extant, the splendidly illuminated Kennicott Bible, and one of only two Gospels from the period of St Augustine's conversion of England. We are fortunate that such treasures have survived. Each generation should truly make the Bible its own. Let us start by teaching our children and grandchildren to read it.

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Frederick

December 26th, 2012
9:12 AM

Although you may like to pretend otherwise the kind of religion that you promote is entirely within genre of whats-in-it-for-me pop religion. The kind of religion that promotes the consoled feeling that everything that is OK as it seems, while waiting for "Jesus" to return. Religion based on the conventions of "street wisdom" combined with the equally absurd pop righteousness of the purveyors of righteous absolutist State religions (such as the Pope), and their cultic Idols made of arbitrary uninspected beliefs and conventional mythologies about long ago very dead "Jesus", and all the other half-imaginary Biblically based prophetic figures of the past. We thus have all of the usual street wars of religion against religion, dull idea against dull idea, which are nothing but the muscle of collective stupidity, sheeplike ego clashes (socking macho horn-heads competing for a rut), the separate junk piles of the past all hurled at one another for the sake of angry power, whizzing between minds that are mucked in self, hardened by fear, defined by the resident passions childish and adolescent birth, and utterly oblivious to the Truth and the Wide Wise significance of our bleeding worried lives. All of which solidifies the fiction of separateness and the denial of the universal characteristic of prior unity. A fiction which is a mind based illusion, a lie, a terribly deluding force, and a profoundly negative act. The individual and collective denial, and active refusal, of the Universal Condition and Intrinsic Law of prior unity is the root and substance of a perpetual and self perpetuating universal crime against humanity, performed by every one and all of humankind itself. In the present day, the culture and politics of illusion controls the human world. There are now 7 billion human beings, and otherwise, large numbers of competitive and mutually dissociative groups, cultures, traditions, races, religions, corporations, and nation states that are, characteristically, and even strategically, out of touch with each other - like dust, and bombs, and petty traffic, all blowing in the wind. That wind steadily blows all prior unity into the bits and particles of human chaos. To pretend that reading and becoming knowledgable the contents of The Bible is going to make any difference that dust and bomb creating steady wind is sheer delusion.

Frederick

December 26th, 2012
8:12 AM

You really have to laugh when some any one, pretends that encouraging children and young people to read the Bible is going to change anything about the now universal psychosis. At last, and inevitably, the ancient exoteric rulerships have failed, and "official" exoteric power-and-controlling seeking Christianity (along with all the other now archaic "great" world religions) is now reduced to all the impenetrable illusions and decadent exercises that everywhere characterize previously privileged aristocracies in their decline from worldly power. Now, except a Spiritual revolution renews the Spirit of Truth, exoteric Christianity is reduced to a chaos of market-share seeking corporate cults and Barnumesque propagandists (such as the Pope) that rule nothing more than chaotic herds of self-deluded religion-consumers in the market place of whats-in-it-for-me consumerist religion. Such a Spiritual Revolution will not, and indeed cannot come from within the now world dominant corporate cults. And with very rare exception everyone is now involved in whats-in-it-for-me consumerist religion. Therefore, the myth of the cultural superiority of "official" Christianity, and of even all merely exoteric religions, has now come full circle. The religious mythologies of the "great" world religions are not only now waging global wars with one another (like so many psychotic inmates of asylums for the mad, each confronting the other with exclusive claims of personal absoluteness), but the public masses of religion-bound people - who, all over the Earth, for even thousands of years, have been controlled in body and mind by ancient institutions of "religiously" propagandized worldly power - are now in a globalized state of "religious" delusion and social psychosis.

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