Give me Attila the Hun over our present-day homegrown barbarians any day of the week.
There was something honest about the old-fashioned barbarians. Whether they were the Huns or the Vikings, or the Vandals or the Visigoths, there was something honest about them. They made no bones about it: they were going to sweep down, burn your village, rape your wife and daughters, torture you, and enslave your sons. They would take your cattle and your chattels and laugh in your face before they cut off your head.
While you could fight back by rallying the troops, sharpening your sword or battle axe and wade into warfare, there is little one can do against the smug self-righteousness of the barbarians of today because should you hint that you are disinclined to jump on their bandwagon, should you even suggest that reasonable dialogue or debate should take place, or should you decline to “take a knee” or suggest that iconoclasm and anarchy are not an answer, you will be howled down and hounded out if not hauled off to the guillotine.
Friedrich Nietzsche observed that the notions of good and evil had been subverted. Originally what was “good” was all that was strong, noble, true, powerful, wealthy, and magnificent – evil was the opposite. To be poor, sick, enslaved, humbled, and oppressed was clearly an evil. Of course, Nietzsche, instead of blaming whites, blamed the Jews and then the Christians for exalting the lowly.
Nietzsche proposed that the “slave revolt in morality” was fueled by resentment—a simmering bitterness that abides within the heart of the downtrodden eventually evolving so that the victim could regard himself as a martyr, and, if a martyr, then a virtuous person, thus making the “oppressor” ever more evil.
Like the barbarians of old, these virtuous people will pillage, burn, rape, murder, and destroy, but unlike the barbarians of old, they do so with an air of self-righteousness and justification. Whatever their ideology, be it communist, fascist, feminism, homosexualism, nationalism, globalism, environmentalism or fundamentalism, they will conquer all, and they will take no prisoners because they are right, and right makes might.
These crybaby bullies are everywhere – in the Church, in the educational system, the government, the police, and even the military. Their self-pity is only exceeded by their self-righteousness, and their willingness to bully, hector, and manipulate their way into power knows no bounds. If they can portray themselves as oppressed, the sentimentalists will rally around with another layer of indignation and self-righteous activism.
The crybaby bullies always use emotional blackmail. The emotions will first be those of faux tenderness and a manufactured guilt trip which they put on the enemy. When that doesn’t work they will use intimidation and threats of violence.
One needs to understand those tactics and then counter with a genuine attempt to listen to grievances but be fully aware that if the protestors are ideologically driven they will not be appeased. This is because their cause has become linked with their identity. Take away their cause and they crumble. Unfortunately, logical or practical tactics against the barbarians of our age are unlikely to succeed
Source: Give Me Attila the Hun by Dwight Longenecker, Crisis Magazine
