What a weekend: mere anarchy
Too many murders, both of the public political and jihadi type, and of the private. They signify different things and threaten different things, but there’s this quality to it:
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.
I’ve posted that poem or parts of it many times on this blog. But unfortunately, it seems more appropriate than ever. I’ve never quite understood why Yeats uses the term “mere” to modify “anarchy” – is it ironic? But I won’t quibble with a masterpiece, written in 1919, over a hundred years ago.
I left out the first two lines, but they matter too:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
To me, this suggests not only that things are spinning out of control, but that the guiding principle has been lost. From the poem’s Wiki page:
[Yets] saw the age of classical antiquity as beginning with the Trojan War and then that thousand year cycle was overtaken by the Christian era, which is coming to a close. And that is the basis of the final line of the poem: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
I’ve long thought the answer is: Islamic bloodlust and revenge. Although then again, that’s certainly nothing new. How about “Islamic jihadist bloodlust and revenge, and the abdication of so many Western governments to a takeover by lies and a failure to protect the west’s previous values and present-day populations”?
The Jews are just the proverbial canaries in the coal mine, but so many people don’t see that. As writer Guy Goldstein (a man who grew up in Australia) writes, in a Substack essay entitled, “Can I Still Call Australia Home?”:
As I see the footage of the memorials [in Australia], I see Jews standing alone, a spectacle that the rest of Australia is watching. I see people talking about the impact on the Jewish Community, and what this means for Jews. I don’t hear anyone talking about Australians. I see politicians coming to politic, I see a few locals coming to spectate, what I don’t see is Australians embracing Australians. No “We are one, but we are many”.
This past few years has felt like something more than just a local conflict in the Middle East for Jews around the world. Watching my people being gunned down in Australia, I finally understood what it was. They have undone the emancipation of the Jews. The Jews have been restored to their rightful place as “other” in the eyes of the West.
It doesn’t matter if you’ve been a citizen your entire life. It doesn’t matter that you’ve been Australian your entire life. You’re a Jew now. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been American your entire life. It doesn’t matter that you bleed red, white, and blue. You’re a Jew now.
We see it in France. We see this in the UK. As an Australian, I never imagined that it would happen to us. I never imagined that the land that my grandmother worshipped as the font of all that is good in humanity, as her saviour and her true love, would turn into exactly the place that my family had to flee.
I don’t agree that this is true in the United States. Not yet, and I hope never. But it’s getting closer – too close for comfort. And if the bell tolls for the Jews, it tolls for thee.
The poet may have been using “mere” in an older sense.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mere
(Etymology 1, senses 2 and 3.)
The FBI over the weekend arrested a group of pro-Palestinian would-be terrorists who were planning to carry out a series of bombings in Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve.
https://pjmedia.com/catherinesalgado/2025/12/15/fbi-arrests-pro-palestine-bomb-plotters-n4947091
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I’m getting a black cat feeling here. As the Goldfinger saying goes, once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, third time is enemy action.
The Islamists Strike Back.
I am not at all sure that the Jews are just “canaries in the coal mine” in this story.
G-d is simultaneously throwing everyone in the Judeo-Christian West back on their assumptions, while gathering in even the most reluctant and assimilated Jews…. both the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust began in countries where Jews surrendered hope of return to Zion and assimilated completely.
Please don’t blame the Jihadis. Islam is as it has always been. The real story here is loss of faith, morality, and nerve in what used to be called “Christendom”.
Generations of educated Westerners thought “Now that the Enlightenment has brought Emancipation and political liberty, we no longer need the monotheistic faith on which those secular freedoms are based”… Including many Jews eager to shake off the burden of their identity…
Wrong. It turns out the political freedoms of the West depend on the personal moral conviction of individual citizens. Democratic governments can’t mandate belief – but they depend upon it like a cathedral borne up invisibly by flying buttresses.
Perhaps this is what the founding fathers meant when they said their Constitution was suited only to a moral people. When a majority of the populace no longer believes in the “Creator” who “endowed them with rights”, the Constitution and other Enlightenment-era declarations of “the Rights of Man” become inanimate, useless pieces of paper.
We found this out these last few decades – as the last vestiges of Judeo Christian personhood (free will + personal responsibility + brotherhood) dissolved into a shapeless general “niceness” and “tolerance”.
Now Westerners must choose whether they are Judeo-Christian brothers or neo-pagans… and the test case, front and center, on every screen and newscast, is the ingathering of the Jewish exile, and how you interpret it.
Isaiah 27:12
On that day G-d will thresh/beat from the meeting place of the rivers to the brooks of Egypt (= the fertile crescent) – and you shall be gathered one by one, the children of Israel.
Jeremiah 31
(read the whole chapter: https://mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt1131.htm)
Thus saith the LORD: the people that were left of the sword have found grace in the wilderness….
Again shalt thou plant vineyards upon the mountains of Samaria; the planters shall plant, and harvest from mature vines….
Behold, I will bring them from the north country, and gather them from the uttermost parts of the earth, and with them the blind and the lame, the woman with child and her that travaileth with child together; a great company shall they return hither.
They shall come with weeping, and with supplications will I lead them; I will cause them to walk by rivers of waters, in a straight way wherein they shall not stumble; for I am become a father to Israel, and Ephraim is My first-born.
Hear the word of the LORD, O ye nations, and declare it in the isles afar off, and say: ‘He that scattered Israel doth gather him, and keep him, as a shepherd doth his flock.
It has long been apparent to me that America is slowly but surely committing seppuku.
It pleases me not to say this, but a feeble response to Islam is so obvously inadequate.
I certainly don’t look at it that way, as an American. I have been surprised to find who’s Jewish based on comments and interviews since Oct. 7, 2023, and over this weekend. I don’t think about this, any more than I want to know the religious affiliations of sensible commentators in general, unless the discussion is specifically about religious doctrine.
Religious teachings do affect how people behave. What we can call Judeo-Christian morality is not followed by tribalist fanatic Muslims.
Please don’t blame the Jihadis. Islam is as it has always been. The real story here is loss of faith, morality, and nerve in what used to be called “Christendom”.
Ben David:
Well, I will blame Islam in large part. It started out as a supremacist totalitarian religion enforcing its vision with violence. It still is and does.
Early on Islam conquered the Holy Land, the Byzantine Empire and Spain. I don’t think the problem then was a “loss of faith, morality, and nerve.”
I agree with Ben David, above. It’s not just Islamist Jihadis, although they are a serious problem. It’s the loss of our moral center. Without beliefs, we’re just twisting in whatever wind is blowing. Many in western nations are now neo-pagans, as Ben David says.
OK, let’s do “mere larceny”:
“Tim Waltz got caught. Gavin Newsom got a presidential campaign”—
https://instapundit.com/762621/
Related:
Colorado’s turn?
https://instapundit.com/762619/
It has long been apparent to me that America is slowly but surely committing seppuku. It pleases me not to say this, but a feeble response to Islam is so obvously inadequate.
CICERO:
I don’t see it that way either. America isn’t committing suicide, it’s battling a globalist elite infection that it is only now figuring out how to fight.
The globalists elites are, by plan and certainly by actions, backing Islam to destroy Western nationalism and the Western middle/working classes to further globalist power.
It’s the loss of our moral center.
Kate:
So one might say of a loose woman wearing a short skirt. She still doesn’t deserve to be raped.
I am discouraged by the current lacks of moral direction in the West. We still don’t deserve the attacks of Islam.
Unless Muslims truly are bloodthirsty power-mad savages without agency who can’t help themselves, I will blame them.
True, we can do better and I hope we will.
I hope what I said, huxley, didn’t lead you to think we “deserve” Islamist attacks. Nope. Not at all. But our loss of a moral center leads to our failure to respond appropriately to the attacks.
If we had any common sense we’d be investigating every Islamist school and internet site and removing extremists from our country, while making it clear to those who remain that they either accept American public morality standards or they also will leave.
When I talk about public morality, I mean a whole lot more than “loose women wearing short skirts.” Our laws don’t tolerate rape or murder of women, loose or otherwise. Our laws don’t tolerate honor killings or revenge killings. Our laws don’t tolerate execution of people who have left a religious group by their former co-religionists. Our public morality used to say, along with the service academies, “We don’t lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do.” We put ourselves at very serious risk when we decline to recognize that some groups don’t follow these rules.
The real story here is loss of faith, morality, and nerve in what used to be called “Christendom”.
Amen.
Exhibit A
https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2025/12/15/ignoring-islamic-threat-aussie-pm-vows-tougher-gun-laws-after-bondi-beach-n4947095
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
– – –
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
There is the contrast. My guess is that innocence and social structure and comity are special and arrived at, and maintained, with effort. Anarchy is easy, normal, and common when no one puts in the effort.
Ghouls are on the internet claiming the Bondi Beach attack was a Mossad false flag operation — for reasons which are unclear to me or any other sensible person.
https://hotair.com/david-strom/2025/12/15/antisemites-claiming-bondi-beach-attack-was-false-flag-n3809890
As a counterpoise to Yeats’ gloomy vision, I offer the following stirring passage from Richmond Lattimore’s translation of the Iliad, Book 15, lines 15.733-741. The scene: The counterattacking Trojans have pushed the Danaans (Greeks) back to the water’s edge and forced them aboard their ships. All seems to be lost for the Danaans, all hope seems gone. Nor are their greatest heroes on hand to turn back the Trojan onslaught: Odysseus, wounded, has taken himself out of the fight; Achilleus is sulking in his tent; Diomedes, Menelaus, and Agamemnon are for one reason or another absent. Of all the best Achaean warriors only the stolid Aias remains in the fight. As the Trojans, wielding flaming brands, charge forward to set fire to the ships, he climbs up on the prow of one of the ships and, armed with a long pike, singlehandedly fights the Trojans off. And as he fights he calls out to the Danaans, exhorting them to cast aside their demoralization and despair and join him in the defense of the ships and, not least, in redeeming their honor. This is what he says:
“Friends and fighting men of the Danaans, henchmen of Ares,
be men now, dear friends, remember your furious valour.
Do we think there are others who stand behind us to help us?
Have we some stronger wall that can rescue men from perdition?
We have no city built strong with towers lying near us, within which
we could defend ourselves and hold off this host that matches us.
We hold position in this plain of the close-armoured Trojans,
bent back against the sea, and far from the land of our fathers.
Salvation’s light is in our hands’ work, not the mercy of battle.”
Of Aias, Richmond Lattimore, in his introduction to his translation of the Iliad, observes: “Diomedes in his aristeia fights under the protection of Athene, and Achilleus is constantly attended and favoured by divinities; but Aias carries on, from beginning to end, without benefit of supernatural aid. . . . A huge man, he is compared to a wall, and carries a great shield of seven-fold ox-hide. He is not the man to sweep the enemy back in a single burst, as Diomedes, Agamemnon, Achilleus, or Hektor can do. . . . He fights as a big man, with no aura of the supernatural about him; best on defence and when the going is worst. With the other great Achaians out of action, he keeps the Achaian retreat from becoming a rout, defends the wall, and then the ships. At the last moment before Patroklos and the Myrmidons come to the rescue, we find him leading the defence of the ships, baffled by Hektor, beaten, sweating, and arm-weary, without hope, but still fighting. Lacking the glamour of others, never the greatest leader, Aias remains throughout the best soldier of them all.”
As Idomenus observed in Book 13: “Nor would huge Telamonian Aias give way to any man who was mortal and ate bread, the yield of Demeter. He would not [even] give way to Achilleus, who breaks men in battle, in close combat.”
So, in this dark time, I say to you all: “be men now, dear friends, remember your furious valour. . . . Salvation’s light is in our hands’ work, not the mercy of battle.”
Kate:
The reasons are actually very simple: because they are vicious liars who hate Jews.
It seems to be sadly true that some people will believe anything they see online, preposterous or not.
The next battle royale?
“FBI’s Clinton Foundation/Uranium One inquiry died after slow-walking and statute of limitations”—
https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/clinton-foundation-and-uranium-one-inquiry-died-after-statute
One of the problems with misidentifying islam as a “religion” is that it allows our enemies on the left to lump it in with every other “religion,” most especially Christianity and condemn all “religions” as being nothing more than cabals of murderous thugs. Like lumping together all breeds of dogs and condemning them all because some bull terriers are vicious and dangerous. Islam is no more a religion in the ordinary sense than is communism, which shares with it a murderous and totalitarian core as well as complete intolerance for any competing philosophy. (Please spare us the “not all moslems” argument; it is the exception that proves the rule.) Moslems, as the self-proclaimed descendants of Ishmael quite emphatically inherit the angelic pronouncement to his mother Hagar in Genesis 6:12, “He will be a wild donkey of a man; his hand will be against everyone and everyone’s hand against him, and he will live in hostility toward all his brothers”. The koran is antithetical to The Bible and its followers are unsuited for life among non-moslems. Australia is merely the lastest country to have found this out.
It looks like we are headed to shooting. Shooting conflicts tend to take a life of their own. Results are generally surprising. The winners and losers will be charged beyond recognition, but they won’t know it.
“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
Could it be the Red-Green Alliance*, with Globalists as fellow travelers?
* DuckDuckGo says “Mixing red and green colors typically produces brown…it can also yield various shades of brown, such as khaki or burgundy.”
Our excellent host @neo wrote: “I don’t agree that this is true in the United States.”
I don’t disagree. However I am concerned parts of the nation are moving in that direction. The protests and harrassment we’ve seen primarily in the northeast especially in New York City. The cold-blooded murder of two Jewish individuals in our nation’s capital. This morning saw video of two Orthodox Jewish individuals singled out and physically attacked on a train in New York City.
And no one said or did anything to intervene.
For the last four years I have worked in our city’s public library system. There are several families who come every day and are obviously Muslim (head coverings) and more specifically Arab or at least Arabic-speaking. Some of them wear clothes and jewelry wihch clearly announce their support for the Palestinian cause. “Liberate Palestine” and Falistin in Arabic (which I can read) and the outline of modern Israel with the Gazan flag and an old-fashioned key. To me that is the moral equivalent of wearing swastikas or White Power messages. I know they don’t see it that way. I find it deeply offensive and openly antagonistic. Of course I say nothing and smile when helping them. “What can I do for you?”
On rarer occasion I see Jewish patrons (the men wearing kippot and you can see their tzitzit) come in. I have not yet seen them here at the same time as our pro-Palestinian friends. Would they feel safe doing so? I honestly don’t know what would happen.