Jonathan Pageau: A Prophet Rises From Quebec and YouTube
By Rod Dreher, European Conservative.
The ‘Symbolic World’ on how to survive the end of this world.
On a trip to Germany last month, I met a young man who wanted me to understand something important about his country. He said he, like me, is a believing Christian—and this, he did not need to tell me, makes him rare in his generation. He also said he is a conservative, but a conservative under siege in a way that an American like me might not understand.
“You have to realize that in Germany, anything to the right of the liberal conservative party”—he meant the Christian Democrats—“is seen as fascist,” the young man said. Given Germany’s history, this designation demonizes any and all challenges to the current system.
Does this put normie Christian conservatives who dissent from the mainstream in the same category as, for example, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the right-wing party that, to put it charitably, is not oriented around the Christian faith? Yes, the young man conceded. But, he added, what choice do people like him have?
“The current Zeitgeist in Germany is so overwhelmingly materialist, anti-transcendent, and liquidly modern that I have not found people who agree with us in any other sphere of influence,” he said. By “liquidly modern,” the man invoked sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s concept that in our time, virtually all social relations are fluid and up to negotiation.
What my German interlocutor was trying to tell me was that people like him are being forced to take stands alongside others with whom they don’t agree, necessarily, because the alternative—the only alternative they are given by the powers that govern German society—is to capitulate to the destruction not only of Germany, but of Western civilization. It really is that stark.
That conversation has remained in my mind as I try to understand the civilizational drama playing itself out on the world stage. Living in Europe for most of the past two years has taught me, as an American, how badly people in the U.S. are being gaslighted by American media about the so-called ‘far right’ in Europe. It is a smear term designed not to illuminate Americans about the actual state of non-establishment right-wing political groupings, but rather to discredit them by framing them as fascist.
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