Part I Nefasto: Evil Aimed at Destruction of Our American Nation-State.
Nefasto. It’s a great word in Italian for wicked or evil. Why not use an English word? Because of its origins in ancient Rome, Nefasto describes the evil used to attack the fundamental integrity of a nation-state better than any English word I know.
Nefasto describes the subversive processes aimed at our destruction. Today, those attacks come from both the merchant class on the right and from the Social Justice Warriors of the left who seek a subversive overthrow of our nation-state in the name of said “social justice”.
Nefasto describes the subversive processes aimed at our destruction. Today, those attacks come from both the merchant class on the right and from the Social Justice Warriors of the left who seek a subversive overthrow of our nation-state in the name of said “social justice”.
Nefasto describes what takes apart the fas, the bindings you see on the bundle of rods that were carried about as a sign of a Roman’s authority. We see these bindings in a lot of American political art, such as Lincoln's throne.
Those bundles were carried by an aide to a lector who could give you a beating with those rods if you failed to show respect to some official. That is where “giving a licking” came from, a corruption of the word “lectoring”.
The bound rods symbolized the unity that underlay the Roman city-state and its great invention, the abstraction called “the Republic”. The binding, the law, was the fas.
Etruscan kings ruled Rome for several centuries, and the Romans did not like it. Once overthrown, concerned that a new tyranny might arise from within, the Romans set up this abstraction called “Res Publica”, “the people's entity”, to hold and administer the assets of Rome: roads, buildings, temples, public baths, aqueducts, its army, its very existence, in place of a king.
That way the people of Rome could rule themselves without a king, without a tyrant. They also had the advantage of the fact that Rome's assets never got divided on the death of a king among his heirs. The “Res Publica” established in formal terms the People of Rome as the essential owner and sovereign of Rome.
The binding, the fas of the fasces, represented the agreement of the thirteen tribes of Rome to constitute themselves as that republic. Hence, anything that undermined that unity was “Nefasto” : “Ne-“, as in “negative’, the “fas”, the law, the unity and integral structure of the Republic of Rome. Nefarious is the closest English equivalent.
The binding, the fas of the fasces, represented the agreement of the thirteen tribes of Rome to constitute themselves as that republic. Hence, anything that undermined that unity was “Nefasto” : “Ne-“, as in “negative’, the “fas”, the law, the unity and integral structure of the Republic of Rome. Nefarious is the closest English equivalent.
No, it wasn’t a constitutional democratic republic of the kind we have, but, given the times, it was light-years ahead of anyplace else in the world. The Res Publica was a major milestone on the road to our constitutional republic.
City-states were found in the Mediterranean in the ancient world, but none were formally “republics”. Some existed for a while in places such as India. Empires existed, but they were not nation-states in the truest sense of the term.
In the modern world, nation-states sprang up all over Europe as the railroads permitted trade to go long distances among people speaking similar dialects, such as the Italians. Modern communication, such as the telegraph, helped bring those regions together into a nation-state. Nationality as an identity got born as people began to think of themselves as a member of a nation, not simply a region. The Germans talked about “Deutschland Uber Alles”, a cry to put regional differences aside to create a German nation-state. Not so easy to do…Our own American republic floundered twice from within as regional/state differences threatened to break our republic apart: before the adoption of the US Constitution, and during the Civil War.
On the practical side, to create and maintain the nation-state, there are three technical requirements and one political-philosophical one.
First of all, a nation-state must be able to assert control over its borders, keeping invaders out.
Second of all, a nation-state must be able to control its territory within, applying some kind of consistent law-and-order.
And, third of all, a nation-state needs tax money to finance the whole thing from an economy that produces enough wealth to do the trick.
Second of all, a nation-state must be able to control its territory within, applying some kind of consistent law-and-order.
And, third of all, a nation-state needs tax money to finance the whole thing from an economy that produces enough wealth to do the trick.
The fourth requirement, the political-philosophical requirement, however, is the most important.
The people of a nation-state need a shared vision of what the nation-state is about, a thing that rouses the people in terms of its whole culture- political, religious and otherwise. Without this shared vision, a nation never can get past its wanna’be phase and will soon fall apart when local interests trump national ones to the point of unbinding the fas, killing the nation-state’s existence.
The people of a nation-state need a shared vision of what the nation-state is about, a thing that rouses the people in terms of its whole culture- political, religious and otherwise. Without this shared vision, a nation never can get past its wanna’be phase and will soon fall apart when local interests trump national ones to the point of unbinding the fas, killing the nation-state’s existence.
Just ask yourself why a country such as Yugoslavia fell into such chaos and suffering, and you can understand in its absence what it means to have that animating principle, that shared vision of a nation-state. Paranoia reigned and people whose family lines had lived together for several centuries in relative peace took to killing one another.
Politics, policies, attitudes, demagoguery that attack our essential unity are nefasto: they unbind the unity and I think you, the reader, now get what is so good about this word.
Let's make sure that legitimate dissent is not nefasto. Necessary dissent is good; in fact is anti-nefasto...
As I continue on in this blog, we will get to a discussion of subversive rebellions, the illegitimate attacks which seek to overthrow our nation-state today from both sides of the political aisle…
Next, though, something better and to the point has come up: the film, "2016", about President Obama and his anti-colonialism.
Next, though, something better and to the point has come up: the film, "2016", about President Obama and his anti-colonialism.
This question of the indifference of the police to death threats coming from Islamists is really the most important question one could ask. I mean, yes, yes, we who have access to reason can get what Islam is about, but this wholesale betrayal of our fellow citizens when they most need us, a moment in which the handwriting on the wall is there for all to see, what is this about?
I compare it to the passive abuser in child abuse, the other parent whose passivity enables the active abuse of the child.
Same question: why?
I don't know that I nor anyone else will be satisfied with my answer because passive enabling is very much an evil and the willingness to be part of that is inherently confusing. Nevertheless, I will try.
The way I see it guilt-mongering and fear of being alienated from important, cherished, even necessary social groups are at the heart of it. Even abject cowardice to confront the evil-doer happens far more often than we imagine. Yes, we all are especially surprised that moral cowardice might be the reason that law enforcement, for example, fails to act. After all, courage of all kinds is a prerequisite for the role.
As a result, real aggression, rational aggression, that could be used to protect the victim is off the table as a response. The commitment is to a kind of smother-mother "Big Nurse" ("One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest") approach that we see almost everyday around us at work and in our family life where loyalty to certain individuals and attitudes trumps coherent choices.
I recently broke off a friendship with someone I respected a lot over this. He really could not countenance admitting that there was something inherently wrong at the basis of Islam and tried to control my posts at an article he had written to avoid the controversy. He is an officer with real combat experience, but he sentimentally chooses to ignore a real analysis of Islam because that meant having to go farther against his mindset of "openness" than he would have been comfortable with.
In the words, as I saw in my friend, this choice, the passive enabling, the ignoring of the threats against Spencer and others is due to the weight of the enormous about-face that many today would have to undergo.
Understanding Jihadism is the real "inconvenient truth" that the West has to confront, and too many simply prefer to make it "your problem" because you "caused a disturbance" and now you have to deal with it.
All that passive enabling of abuse goes on instead of realizing that "all religions are not created equal" in their relationship to democratic political culture.
I know I resisted this understanding to some extent based on knowing and working for quite a few Muslims whose Americanization seemed to be complete and who were absolutely humane with me.
I could say the same for the Italian communists I knew in Italy. They were very warm, humane people incompatible with anything Stalinist, but their own Jihadists, the Italian Red Brigade who kidnapped and executed Aldo Moro, the Italian prime minister, were a shock that combined with the other shocks (Stalinism itself!) and forced Italian communists to come to realize that they had to renounce the fundamental principles of Marxist-Leninism to become acceptable to Italian voters and, actually, to be acceptable to themselves and their own ideals.
Once they had done that, the ex-communists combined with the left-wing of the old Christian Democratic party, and Massimo D'Alema got to be the first Italian ex-communist prime minister of Italy.
If there is not a general and widespread renouncing of violent Jihad, the essence of the incompatibility of Islam and Western political culture, then some kind of social civil war will come to be with tremendous unforeseen consequences. The renunciation is possible and has been done by some sects of Islam already, some "heretical" sects, such as the follower of Ahmad.
Last point: this is the second time that Islam has been taken over by its most radical fundamentalist wing. The first time, centuries ago, led to the persecution of Islam's then fine scientific community and all the relative free thinkers whose evolving thought would have allowed a movement toward the modern world.
Instead, Islam collapsed, falling behind Europe in terms of cultural advancement of all kinds: political, economic, scientific and the rest.
This happens because religion is there to help us deal with human consciousness and religions evolve as the people evolve within the context of their religion, eventually forsaking child sacrifice or the stoning of adulterers. Sometimes great forward leaps are necessary, usually accompanied by social unrest and even war.
The ones who can make the leap do so, but the "reverters", in this case, the Ft. Hood shooters, many of the suicide bombers, those who carried out the WTC attack, are educated, even steeped in Western values, but unable to turn against their own core religious identity, choose death for themselves and as a way to take us along with them, as a kind of inclusive suicide.
And, all this, as is the case in the Ft. Hood shooter, enabled by those who choose not to see the danger because the "inconvenient truth" requires too much work, is too embarrassing, and/or will distance them from too many friends, co-workers or institutions that they value being part of.
This will continue until a critical mass of people who get what violent Jihad derives from and who come to actively oppose it, providing support for others as well.