Auspundits

America's Culture War

* By Lounge Lizard

Who can forget Sarah Palin's speech to the Republican Convention in which she accepted the nomination as John McCain's running mate?

Joe McCain, John McCain's brother, gave an insider's account of the speech in an article in The Australian of September 16 entitled The real barracuda.

In this article, Joe McCain revealed that the joke Palin told about hockey moms who, unlike pit bulls, wear lipstick, wasn't in the script. Indeed, she went so off-base during her speech that eventually the teleprompter operator decided to turn the thing off.

For the speech of her life, that demonstrated enormous self-confidence.

Lounge Lizard watched her as she spoke. He noted that she was a very fit and healthy looking person and that she was totally at ease with herself, her family and with being an American. She betrayed not the slightest hint of nerves.

She's tough.

She not only preaches conservative values but the choices she and her family have taken in life's journey demonstrate to ordinary Americans that she lives by those values.

And that drives the left totally nuts.

On Civilisations' Existentialist Challenges

Brilliant essayist, Bill Whittle, in National Review:

When all is said and done, Civilizations do not fall because of the barbarians at the gates. Nor does a great city fall from the death wish of bored and morally bankrupt stewards presumably sworn to its defense. Civilizations fall only because each citizen of the city comes to accept that nothing can be done to rally and rebuild broken walls; that ground lost may never be recovered; and that greatness lived in our grandparents but not our grandchildren. Yes, our betters tell us these things daily. But that doesn’t mean we have to believe it.

These words should sound familiar to readers of Auspundits. That is because it resembles very much the words of Christian writer Malcolm Muggeridge. Words that I am oft disposed to quoting:

It is difficult to resist the conclusion that 20th century man has decided to abolish himself, tired of the struggle to be himself, he has created boredom out of his own affluence, impotence out of his own erotomania and vulnerability out of his own strength. He himself blows the trumpet that brings the walls of his own cities crashing down, until at last having educated himself into imbecility, having drugged and polluted himself into stupefaction he keels over a weary old Brontosaurus and becomes extinct.

Similar words were spoken by Alexander Solzhenitsyn's in infamous 1978 Harvard address:

…no weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of will power…weapons become a burden for the capitulating side. To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being. Nothing is left, then, but concessions…the next war…may well bury Western civilisation forever.

Solzhenitsyn on War

Following on from my post yesterday into Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s criticism of Western media, I follow up with a post on his pronouncements on the West’s ability to survive:

The next war (which does not have to be an atomic one and I do not believe it will) may well bury Western civilisation forever.

Solzhenitsyn on the Media

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a famous Russian author and Nobel Laureate. He along with several others (Malcolm Muggeridge for example) exposed the sufferings that Russian peasants were facing due to the collectivisation of Russian industry. He along with his companions struggled to beat down the lies of traitors such as Walter Duranty (New York Times journalist) and the misguided George Bernard Shaw (another writer).