COME, thou Redeemer of the earth,
and manifest thy virgin-birth:
let every age adoring fall;
such birth befits the God of all.

Veni, redemptor gentium;
ostende partum Virginis;
miretur omne saeculum:
talis decet partus Deum.

From Veni, Redemptor Gentium

German Advent calendar

YESTERDAY, as my husband and I were driving home from a twilight walk, Christmas lights went on all around us. Someone had turned on a master switch, or so it seemed. Lighted icicles dangled from gutters and electric nets encased shrubbery. Snowman inflatables rose from the dead on suburban lawns, a stuffed Santa held onto a roof for dear life and bright red boxes of peppermint bark adorned the aisles of Trader Joe’s. Was this Christmas Eve or December 2nd? I don’t remember so much decoration this early in the season when I was a child, except in stores. I felt as if I was in a Christmas theme park. None of it expressed to me the beauty and anticipation of Advent. Imagine if you received a birthday cake a month before your birthday. Would it mean as much?

Advent calls on us to be especially counter-cultural. We are asked to resist the trappings of a Christmas celebrated too soon. We are asked to seek silence, at least inner silence, and cultivate true sorrow for our sins. Take a walk beneath winter’s penitential skies. Thank God for all the innumerable benefits bestowed upon you. Get up perhaps just 15 minutes earlier in the morning. Find time for penance, spiritual reading and meditation on these bottomless mysteries. Even if you have a very busy life, lift your mind in prayer for minutes here and there as often as you can during the day. Don’t let this opportunity pass to prepare yourself for the profound truths of Christmas. Your life is whizzing by. Christmas is an 18-wheel freight truck without brakes careening down the highway. It’s a ferris wheel that won’t stop so you can, please, please get off — and yet you have a soul to save and an infant Savior to love with all your heart and mind.

I do not mean to suggest that we should go to the Puritanical extreme of not enjoying the sparkling lights, decorated greenery, music of the season and gift-buying. I don’t mean to suggest we should cut ourselves off from the brightened mood of pre-Christmas when we find it. We should strive for balance. We are soul and body.

In vain did the angels sing on that December night; in vain did shepherds receive and welcome the invitation to adore the Babe and know Him; in vain did the Magi come from the east, asking where they were to find the crib of the King that was born. At this last example, the city of Jerusalem was somewhat moved; but the astonishment was only for a moment, and the old indifference soon stifled the good tidings.

Thus it is, O Jesus, that Thou comest unto darkness, and darkness does not comprehend Thee. We beseech Thee, let our darkness comprehend the light, and desire it. (First Sunday of Advent, The Liturgical Year)

More from Dom Prosper Guéranger’s Liturgical Year:

If, now that we have described the characteristic features of Advent which distinguish it from the rest of the year, we would penetrate into the profound mystery which occupies the mind of the Church during this season, we find that the mystery of the Coming, or Advent, of Jesus is at once simple and threefold. It is simple for it is the one same Son of God that is coming; it is threefold because He comes at three different times and in three different ways.

‘In the first coming,’ says St. Bernard, ‘He comes in the flesh and in weakness; in the second, He comes in spirit and in power; in the third, He comes in glory and in majesty; and the second coming is the means whereby we pass from the first to the third.’ Read More »

“A BLACK or an Arab with a piece of paper that says they’re Irish is Irish in the same way that a man with a piece of paper that says they’re a woman is a woman.

“Blacks and Arabs will never be Irish and trannies will never be women. This used to be common sense.”

— Apolitical

“THESE words were composed by Spencer the Rover
Who’d travelled Great Britain and most parts of Wales.
He had been so reduced which caused great confusion
And that was the reason he went on the roam.

“In Yorkshire near Rotherham he had been on his rambles,
Being weary of travelling he sat down to rest.
At the foot of yonder mountain there runs a clear fountain;
With bread and cold water he himself did refresh.

“It tasted more sweeter than the gold he had wasted,
More sweeter than honey and gave more content.
But the thoughts of his babies lamenting their father
Brought tears in their eyes which made him lament. Read More »

Video link

Read More »

Henry Kissinger,  1950 

IN memory of the late Henry Kissinger, who died this week at the age of 100, some relevant reflections by Sufyan Jan:

Although South American jungles and the sands of the Middle East might reflect the general public view of the communist image, perhaps this is a ‘desert sands mirage’? Contemporary ‘Commies’ wash and dress well, and attend Georgetown University in between martinis and formulating America’s domestic and foreign policies. They fly business or first class to London or Bern Switzerland and sit in the cool smooth leather of Chesterfield lounge chairs at the local Gentleman’s Club. These pseudo-Roman literati, travel ‘long haul’ to charge the batteries of the sagging ‘culture war tension machine’. The current urgency is palpable and some ‘blunt force’ revisionism will be required to set the record straight on the top end of town ‘commies in suits’. Read More »

WILLIAM Makis, MD features several Japanese videos at his Substack about the rise of sudden deaths in the country, including a very moving video about relatives of these people.

Video link Read More »

IS there any political agenda in this lovely Russian folk song?

Not at all. It’s about simple pleasures and real life.

(Click on captions for translation.)

SINCE we’ve been discussing folk music lately, I’d like to examine this famous ‘Hilltop” Coca-Cola ad of the 1970s. It features a great example of what might be called anti-folk music, created with the specific intent of destroying the distinctive, life-giving traditions that create folk music. (Thank you to a reader for sending this and noting its significance.)

But first, what are “folk?”

Briefly, the folk are living and breathing communities, extended families, peoples, existing over the course of successive generations and over enough time to create their own traditions and their own communal spirit. In Latin, they are gens — clans, tribes, peoples and nations connected by blood and place. Folk are always changing. They are never stable and yet there are threads of consistency made up of ideas, experiences, and historic events, but also of the inherited, collective personalities of different peoples based both in biology and the supernatural as experienced collectively. That’s why we can speak of the folk as possessing a soul.

One of the oddest things about modern advertising is that commercials often have seemingly little to do with the products being sold. What in the world does this sentimental anthem sung improbably on a hilltop have to do with a sugary soft drink?

Let’s think about that.

The video with its repetitive, slow-moving melody features people of different folk in traditional dress — clothes which have been replaced in the real world by the universal, Marxist uniform of denim and T-shirts. They wear dreamy smiles and vacant looks, as if drugged. Unsurprisingly, young and beautiful whites take the lead. They are naturally at the forefront of the song’s utopian dream — a dream of “perfect harmony.”

Apple trees and honey bees and snow-white turtledoves …

How cleverly these words imitate real folk music. They are not used, however, to evoke everyday life, but a one-world paradise.

The song takes things fundamentally good — the natural affinity of different folks and the worthy ideal of peace among them — and twists them, promoting a dream that ironically results in the destruction of different peoples.

Dr. Jop Pollman wrote in the outstanding little songbook, Laughing Meadows (Grailville Publications, 1947): Read More »

ALAN writes:

Lawrence Auster was quite right to oppose the totalitarian ideology of multiculturalism and to oppose it for the right reasons.

In 1847, Engels wrote about Communism:

“What will be the attitude of communism to existing nationalities?

“The nationalities of the peoples associating themselves in accordance with the principle of community [ i.e., the principle of Communism ] will be compelled to mingle with each other as a result of this association and thereby to dissolve themselves, just as the various estate and class distinctions must disappear through the abolition of their basis, private property.”

— Cited by Thorin Reynolds in “Multiculturalism is Communism”, Faith and Heritage

By which he meant: Communists will force people who want nothing to do with each other to associate with each other. Each individual will thus be forced to erase his mind, his identity, and his capacity for thought, which are of course the most fundamental private property—which Communists also do not like.

You read it there—straight from the pen of one of Communism’s proponents.

Americans today are living in such a Communist nightmare, which of course is never called a Communist nightmare. It was achieved by the enactment of Communist tactics like non-discrimination, anti-discrimination, affirmative action, anti-racism, and racial and ethnic preferences; and the criminalization of the right of free association in an open marketplace.

Unfortunately there are no reasons to believe Americans will not continue to make it much worse than it is and has been for quite some years now.

SOME comic relief.

Read More »

Lawrence Auster, 1949-2013

“THE global conception of morality results, I would argue, in a distortion of morality rather than its fulfillment. Ethics could be defined as a sense of responsibility toward other human beings and the consequent willingness to put restraints on one’s own behavior. As a personal development, a sense of ethics normally originates in the family and among those we are close to and then is extended outward in widening circles to other human beings. The distortion of this natural basis of morality is brought about when it is applied in the abstract to collectivities of human beings, or even to the human race as a whole. Even thoughtful liberals are beginning to realize the impossible burden such an obligation places on human nature. As Christopher Lasch has written:

“My study of the family suggested … that the capacity for loyalty is stretched too thin when it tries to attach itself to the hypothetical solidarity of the whole human race. It needs to attach itself to specific people and places, not to an abstract ideal of universal human rights. We love particular men and women, not humanity in general. The dream of universal brotherhood, because it rests on the sentimental fiction that men and women are all the same, cannot survive the discovery that they are not.

“This sentimental fiction arises, I think, when we take our own personal experience of love of ethical responsibility and say: ‘because I feel this for one or a few people, and because this feeling is good, I must feel the same way toward everyone, I must act on the same basis toward the entire human race as a collective whole.’ Once people have taken this stand, and especially if they try to convert it into public policy, all rational limits of common sense or self-interest are thrown out the window. Ultimately, this obligation must be imposed by political force, since no one can actually love the whole human race. What starts, then, as a personal sense of compassion and responsibility for individuals ends as a collectivized ethics which compels men to love the foreigner (not just the individual foreigner, but all foreigners) more than their own.”

 — Lawrence Auster, The Path to National Suicide – An Essay on Immigration and Multiculturalism (American Immigration Control Foundation, 1990), p. 79. Read More »

“MORE immigration in 2022 alone than 1945-2000 combined, and off the back of the largest decrease in living standards in modern history. If you wanted a model for how to destroy a country, this is it.

“I can’t legally say what should happen to the MPs and others who enabled this. It’s historically the biggest demographic transformation since the Anglo-Saxon invasions to a people who wanted and voted for the opposite.”

— Maximus

“WINSTON had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of the atmosphere of hockey−fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean−mindedness which she managed to carry about with her. He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy.”

— George Orwell, 1984