Three of the most defended flags of modern liberals are the “rights” to abortion, euthanasia and gay marriage. Beyond the morality of such (clearly delicate) issues, one thing that strikes me is that they all, in one way or another, work against the growth of future generations.

Since Europe is in the middle of a demographic crisis, with a growth below minimum replacement, the push for abortion is nothing short of suicidal. More abortions, less native Europeans. Simple as that.

Euthanasia is also a strange “right” to fight for. Several films, such as the Spanish “Mar Adentro”, or Clint Eastwood’s “Million Dollar Baby”, have painted it as a noble ideal. Yet somehow even in those films euthanasia appears in somewhat a gloomy light. If all you want to fight for is the right to “die”, then you don’t really seem to value life that much. The death wish of the individual is the mirror of the death wish of a society. That the most important rights fore some are “the right to be killed” (since euthanasia is not suicide, which is readily available for all), and the “right to kill your offspring” says a lot about modern liberals’ causes.

Gay marriage is a different issue, yet at the same time it also intends to promote a type of “marriage” that does not create future generations, thus only worsens the demographic issue that affects most of the developed West.

I don’t know if Europe wil regain its cultural confidence or not, and if current or future generations will reverse the march towards Islamization, economic decline and demographic decay, but Portugal’s recent aproval of abortionist laws does not bode well. The “future generations” are being killed already in the womb.

–>From The Sunday Times

March 18, 2007

Iraqis: life is getting better

Marie Colvin

MOST Iraqis believe life is better for them now than it was under Saddam Hussein, according to a British opinion poll published today.

The survey of more than 5,000 Iraqis found the majority optimistic despite their suffering in sectarian violence since the American-led invasion four years ago this week.

One in four Iraqis has had a family member murdered, says the poll by Opinion Research Business. In Baghdad, the capital, one in four has had a relative kidnapped and one in three said members of their family had fled abroad. But when asked whether they preferred life under Saddam, the dictator who was executed last December, or under Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, most replied that things were better for them today.

***

Sunday, 18 March 2007

Pessimism ‘growing among Iraqis’

A new survey paints a pessimistic picture of Iraqis’ confidence in their own government and in coalition forces. Only 18% of Iraqis have confidence in US and coalition troops, while opinion is almost evenly split on whether to have confidence in Iraq’s government.

About 86% of those questioned expressed concern about someone in their household being a victim of violence.

More than 2,000 people were polled for the study, which was commissioned by the BBC, ABC News, ARD and USA Today.

Commentary:

“Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.” (Mark Twain)

In his latest column, the mysterious Spengler changes his usual subject of international politics and religion and offers an interesting point about modern art. According to him, abstract art and atonal music grew from the same movement, but while hardly anybody listens to atonal music, lots of people flock to see the latest Damien Hirst bullshit conserved in formaldehyde. Why?

Modern art is ideological, as its proponents are the first to admit. It was the ideologues, namely the critics, who made the reputation of the abstract impressionists, most famously Clement Greenberg’s sponsorship of Jackson Pollock in The Partisan Review. It is not supposed to “please” the senses on first glance, after the manner of a Raphael or an Ingres, but to challenge the viewer to think and consider.

Why is it that the audience for modern art is quite happy to take in the ideological message of modernism while strolling through an art gallery, but loath to hear the same message in the concert hall? It is rather like communism, which once was fashionable among Western intellectuals. They were happy to admire communism from a distance, but reluctant to live under communism.

When you view an abstract expressionist canvas, time is in your control. You may spend as much or as little time as you like, click your tongue, attempt to say something sensible and, if you are sufficiently pretentious, quote something from the Wikipedia write-up on the artist that you consulted before arriving at the gallery. When you listen to atonal music, for example Schoenberg, you are stuck in your seat for a quarter of an hour that feels like many hours in a dentist’s chair. You cannot escape. You do not admire the abstraction from a distance. You are actually living inside it. You are in the position of the fashionably left-wing intellectual of the 1930s who made the mistake of actually moving to Moscow, rather than admiring it at a safe distance.

That is why at least some modern artists come into very serious money, but not a single one of the abstract composers can earn a living from his music.

The same reasoning applies to other forms of art: experimental books and films, for instance, are hardly successful (well, in the case of books, they can always be put on the shelf or on the coffee table to impress guests). But visual arts somehow has created a public that is not only avid to consume such nonsense, but also seems to expect it. I suppose it has to do with the fact that most “admirers” of contemporary art are not interested in the “art” per se, but in the way they will be seen by the others. To aesthetically appreciate dead animals in tanks is to be “in the know”, and most people either want to impress others or simply do not want to appear ignorant or uninformed.

The last exhibition of contemporary art I went to had everything that one would expect in such displays – horrible photographies of dead omutilated corpses; sculptures made with blood, urine and other “unorthodox” materials; religious blasphemy (for some curious reason, only images from Christianity were used); personal objects of the so-called artist exposed as “art”, etc etc etc.

I remembered then my trip to Pompeii, and thought that, if 1500 years from now, some archeologist tried to understand our current world by means of the artworks that he found, he would think that ours was a strange civilization, bent on self-destruction and self-disgust (and he wouldn’t be very far from the truth). Just try to compare anything in recent output with a painting by Velazquez or Boticelli.

I suppose we would have to blame mostly Duchamp and his urinal for what contemporary art has become. Yet, Duchamp’s tricks, at the time, were witty and ingenious. Seventy-plus years later, thought, with the same variation repeated over and over by all kinds of artists, the joke isn’t funny anymore. Yet there is one work of contemporary art that I, like Spengler, would be very happy to see at an exhibition:

By inflicting sufficient ugliness upon us, the modern artists believe, they will wear down our capacity to see beauty. That, I think, is the point of putting dead animals into glass cases, or tanks of formaldehyde. But I am open-minded; there might be some value to this artistic technique after all. If Damien Hirst were to undertake a self-portrait in formaldehyde, I would be the first to subscribe to a commission.

Rio de Janeiro, the city famously celebrated by Tom Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes in prose and song, is now officially dead.

Yesterday armed drug gangs killed 18 people all over the city, including 7 who died when a tourism bus full of passengers was set on fire.

The reasons for such acts of terrorism? Aparently, armed militias are challenging the power of drug gangs in the favelas of Rio.

That’s right, armed militias. Just like in Iraq. When the State cannot provide its only duty – security for the citizens – then private groups are formed. Just look at Colombia’s example to see how nasty things can get.

Others say that the reason for the attacks is simply a message to the new Governor: “behave, or else…”

It doesn’t really matter – it’s been years since the State, local, regional or federal, has no authority whatsoever over the favelas. They are controlled by armed gangs fighting one against the other. What’s happening now is that the population outside the morros is paying each time a heavier price.

The original song called “Cidade Maravilhosa” was composed in 1934 by André Filho, and the singer was Aurora Miranda, sister of the more famous Carmem Miranda. Now its lyrics sound ironic, or just plain sad.

Cidade maravilhosa
Cheia de encantos mil
Cidade maravilhosa
Coração do meu Brasil

Berço do samba e das lindas canções
Que vivem n’alma da gente
És o altar dos nossos corações
Que cantam alegremente

Jardim florido de amor e saudade
Terra que a todos seduz
Que Deus te cubra de felicidade
Ninho de sonho e de luz

Cidade maravilhosa
Cheia de encantos mil
Cidade maravilhosa
Coração do meu Brasil

Since nobody reads this blog anyway, I tought I might stop writing about politics, international news and other boring stuff and just post a few notes about a poem by Yeats hat I like:

THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Now, the poem is apocalyptic in tone and pessimistic in its message, so in a sense it has not lost its power. Written in 1920, inbetween two World Wars, it seems however more apt to the times we live in.

Its theme, of course, is the decay of Western civilization. All the first stanza provides images of discontrol, loss, despair. “The falconer cannot hear the falconer”. “Things fall apart”, and of course, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” Indeed, even now the worst murderers and sonofabitches – islamic terrorists, neocommunists, murdering dictators armed with nuclear bombs – are full of passionate intensity while the best… Waver. Falter. Or are not really sure of what to do to stop the tide of insanity. Perhaps there’s nothing to do. Perhaps Yeats is right and we have reached the end of a 2000 year cicle. A beast slouces towards Bettlehem, and the world will plunge into the New Dark Age…

Sleep well, folks.

Às vezes fico até consternado de ver o esforço que brilhantes intelectuais conservadores, como o nosso José Guilherme Merquior, dispenderam em impugnar idéias esquerdistas. Ser bem sucedido nesse esforço não significa nada, quando as idéias não valem por si e são só a camuflagem de alguma operação mais discreta. Se um vizinho safado vai jogar baralho na sua casa com a intenção de ficar passando a mão na perna da sua esposa por baixo da mesa, não é vantagem nenhuma você vencê-lo no jogo. O que importa é virar a mesa e encher o sujeito de porrada.

(Olavo de Carvalho, “Por baixo da mesa”)

Theodore Darlrymple, in a new article, asks whether the Iraqis have free will or “it’s all Bush’s fault”.

While the Shia-Sunni conflict continues, Bush promises “hard choices“, but doesn’t say what they are. We’ll see soon enough I guess.
Spengler argues that this is all just a part of a proxy conflict between (Sunni) Saudi Arabia and (Shia) Iran for oil, religious dominance and regional power. I tend to agree.
Omar from Iraq the Model favors “a lethal blow to Sadr and his militia in order to render him unable to inflict harm on Maliki and other members of the UIA.” I tend to agree too.
And the ISG Report seems, fortunately, dead.

Argentina keeps growing, says The Economist. More (in Spanish) in La Nación.