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Friday, June 28, 2019

Reading List: Diabolical

Yiannopoulos, Milo. Diabolical. New York: Bombardier Books, 2018. ISBN 978-1-64293-163-1.
Milo Yiannopoulos has a well-deserved and hard-earned reputation as a controversialist, inciter of outrage, and offender of all the right people. His acid wit and mockery of those amply deserving it causes some to dismiss what he says when he's deadly serious about something, as he is in this impassioned book about the deep corruption in the Roman Catholic church and its seeming abandonment of its historic mission as a bastion of the Christian values which made the West the West. It is an earnest plea for a new religious revival, from the bottom up, to rid the Church of its ageing, social justice indoctrinated hierarchy which, if not entirely homosexual, has tolerated widespread infiltration of the priesthood by sexually active homosexual men who have indulged their attraction to underage (but almost always post-pubescent) boys, and has been complicit in covering up these scandals and allowing egregious offenders to escape discipline and continue their predatory behaviour for many years.

Ever since emerging as a public figure, Yiannopoulos has had a target on his back. A young, handsome (he may prefer “fabulous”), literate, well-spoken, quick-witted, funny, flaming homosexual, Roman Catholic, libertarian-conservative, pro-Brexit, pro-Trump, prolific author and speaker who can fill auditoriums on college campuses and simultaneously entertain and educate his audiences, willing to debate the most vociferous of opponents, and who has the slaver Left's number and is aware of their vulnerability just at what they imagined was the moment of triumph, is the stuff of nightmares to those who count on ignorant legions of dim followers capable of little more than chanting rhyming slogans and littering. He had to be silenced, and to a large extent, he has been. But, like the Terminator, he's back, and he's aiming higher: for the Vatican.

It was a remarkable judo throw the slavers and their media accomplices on the left and “respectable right” used to rid themselves of this turbulent pest. The virtuosos of victimology managed to use the author's having been a victim of clerical sexual abuse, and spoken candidly about it, to effectively de-platform, de-monetise, disemploy, and silence him in the public sphere by proclaiming him a defender of pædophilia (which has nothing to do with the phenomenon he was discussing and of which he was a victim: homosexual exploitation of post-pubescent boys).

The author devotes a chapter to his personal experience and how it paralleled that of others. At the same time, he draws a distinction between what happened to him and the rampant homosexuality in some seminaries and serial abuse by prelates in positions of authority and its being condoned and covered up by the hierarchy. He traces the blame all the way to the current Pope, whose collectivist and social justice credentials were apparent to everybody before his selection. Regrettably, he concludes, Catholics must simply wait for the Pope to die or retire, while laying the ground for a revival and restoration of the faith which will drive the choice of his successor.

Other chapters discuss the corrosive influence of so-called “feminism” on the Church and how it has corrupted what was once a manly warrior creed that rolled back the scourge of Islam when it threatened civilisation in Europe and is needed now more than ever after politicians seemingly bent on societal suicide have opened the gates to the invaders; how utterly useless and clueless the legacy media are in covering anything relating to religion (a New York Times reporter asked First Things editor Fr Richard John Neuhaus what he made of the fact that the newly elected pope was “also” going to be named the bishop of Rome); and how the rejection and collapse of Christianity as a pillar of the West risks its replacement with race as the central identity of the culture.

The final chapter quotes Chesterton (from Heretics, 1905),

Everything else in the modern world is of Christian origin, even everything that seems most anti-Christian. The French Revolution is of Christian origin. The newspaper is of Christian origin. The anarchists are of Christian origin. Physical science is of Christian origin. The attack on Christianity is of Christian origin. There is one thing, and one thing only, in existence at the present day which can in any sense accurately be said to be of pagan origin, and that is Christianity.

Much more is at stake than one sect (albeit the largest) of Christianity. The infiltration, subversion, and overt attacks on the Roman Catholic church are an assault upon an institution which has been central to Western civilisation for two millennia. If it falls, and it is falling, in large part due to self-inflicted wounds, the forces of darkness will be coming for the smaller targets next. Whatever your religion, or whether you have one or not, collapse of one of the three pillars of our cultural identity is something to worry about and work to prevent. In the author's words, “What few on the political Right have grasped is that the most important component in this trifecta isn't capitalism, or even democracy, but Christianity.” With all three under assault from all sides, this book makes an eloquent argument to secular free marketeers and champions of consensual government not to ignore the cultural substrate which allowed both to emerge and flourish.

Posted at June 28, 2019 20:09