Not all Comments of the Day have to be epics. Sometimes a spare, eloquent, short comment makes a crucial point as well as it can be made.
Here is Isaac’s Comment of the Day on the Comment of the Day bonanza that is “KABOOM! Anti-White Stereotyping At The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture”:
It wasn’t meant to make sense. These are not unique European or White values. Europeans didn’t invent nuclear families or hard work. These values are not absent in Africa or any other continent. They are just found in varying proportions.
Most of them are just plain “good” values. That they are more uniquely tied to Europe is solely because Europe happened to fully embrace Christianity (specifically Protestantism and the written Bible) before the rest of the world.
What we’re seeing is just the devil’s mask slipping. It’s a thinly veiled attempt by Marxists to hollow out the African American subculture and wear it like a skin. And Marxism is itself a thinly veiled attempt to erase Christianity and kill its adherents.
Ethics Alarms 
https://larryalextaunton.com/2020/07/understanding-what-is-happening-in-america-a-christian-response/?fbclid=IwAR1UmYg479R8QUzdYH5hMZrYJyzHCufWu9p2Upx23Yheqw39NK3cuEWugNI
Well said, Isaac.
The critical article that James Hodgson posted, which is perhaps an extended commentary on Isaac’s paragraphs, is interesting and I think *accurate* in many different senses. Strict Marxism of the Alinsky sort, and Marxism’s that are not necessarily rigorously defined at a philosophical level, must be when one examines their predicates and core assertions anti-Christian. This is not an exaggerated statement.
But I suggest that it is a mistake, and a severe mistake, to erroneously imagine and suppose that the essential doctrine of Marxist anti-metaphysical materialism has not penetrated extremely far into the general American psyche. The quest, if I can put it in this way, or the trick, is one of recognizing where and how the Nation taken as a corporate body has gone off the tracks. This involves an intense examination and also self-introspection.
Media-culture, advertising, the way the war-power of the nation is used (and what *interests* are involved in that), the pornography industry, and certainly ‘Hollywood’, as well as youth-culture, reveal them self as profoundly corrupt and as purveyors of corruption. But I would especially focus on the evil and the sin of murder, and therefore mention America’s recent wars and especially that waged against Iraq. How many people does a nation get to murder, and what level of destruction are you allowed to carry out against the social body and the cultural body of a given nation before you must be taken to task? Before you must make an accounting? If you say you *believe in God* and if you believe that there is a God that notices and measures all the acts of destruction against what are said to be ‘Christian values’, how is it that you believe that you have no complicity in the harms that have been done to people in these far-off places?
If one is going to *profess Christianity* and if one is going to begin to take a militant stand against the activists and revolutionaries of that Alinsky-type, then the meaning of ‘Christian value’ will have to be profoundly considered and thought-through.
There is a false-sense of things that I have noticed. It is this idea that one can locate the enemy *over there* in concrete form and that one can name the enemy. I think about this when there is this notable *crowing* about America’s greatness and it exceptionality. Given certain turns that have been taken, and given the penetration of sin and error of extreme forms right into the very heart of America, one must modify one’s notions about this. Patriotism is an important sentiment, but Machiavelli pointed out the The Prince must learn to manipulate patriotic sentiments as part of his machinations to hold on to power.
One of the more important things I have learned as a result of my participation here — though I know this does not sit well and indeed angers people — is how deeply implicated in hypocrisy and mendaciousness it is possible to be while at the same time crowing about patriotic values and the *greatness* of one’s nation. If you are really so ‘great’ and if you are really so committed to ‘Christian values’, then it seems to me that the entire notion of what that means must be reexamined. (And when I use the pronoun ‘you’ I do it because to say ‘one’ is not direct enough and sounds wishy-washy).
Marxist ‘praxis’ as it is called is an intense application of disruptive and undermining actions and also the introduction of the same in the idea-realm. And how has it come about that *they* (those who do this) have so much power to do so? It is because ground has been ceded to them. But I suggest it is because those who would oppose their *activism* have no corresponding intensity. In this sense one could refer to becoming ‘lukewarm’.
I make this assertion: you are not going to simply nor suddenly ‘turn back’ the insane manifestation of rebellion and destructive action that has burst into flames out in the cities and within the social body of America. It does not stand to reason that this simply ‘abates’ all of a sudden. It is not going to be turned back by the (possible or even probable) election of Donald Trump. No. You are going to have to go with it, along with it, to those final points where the ‘intensity’ needed and required to combat *what is going on in our present* becomes truly manifest, not just manifest in the *lukewarm* sense. It will have to manifest with equal intensity and with profound conviction. And it is not going to come about because a given person throws away the naughty porn-cds and starts to think in more *conservative* terms.
Because that is not going to get to the heart of the sickness that has profoundly invaded the country and which has gone right to the sources of power and influence. The metaphor of Iago is an interesting one. Othello then becomes *each one of us*, Desdemona the ideal of what we can and should be, and Iago all the insidious influence that comes to bear on us and works to destroy us.
Well said, worthy of COTD status.
Isaac your words have inspired me a great deal. I’m in the middle of moving but hope to post a response soon.