The Weekly Forum - 14 November
18 november 2024 | Forum for Democracy Intl
FVD is international to its very core. If you liked Thierry Baudet’s recent interview in French, you are going to love Pepijn van Houwelingen’s interview in Japanese. Pepijn was discussing politics with Sohei Kamiya, the leader of the Sanseito (‘Do it yourself!’) party and a member of the upper house of the Japanese parliament. They agreed that the common point of their respective parties, Sanseito and FVD, is that they can appeal to voters on the left as well as on the right because anti-globalism attracts lefties, just as globalism attracts many righties, at least neo-liberal ones. And globalism often also seduces provincially-minded people who have little real knowledge of the wider world – unlike FVD.
Liberalism is the key. The liberal ideal is predicated on a fiction, namely that individuals somehow exist in a state of nature and then conclude a social contract for their own protection. But humans are never in a state of nature: we are all born into societies and families we have not chosen and we are dependent on them for much of our lives. Moreover, society is not a choice or an option, but instead an integral part of what it means to be human. Man is a social animal. Dissolving societies is inhuman. Globalism is an advanced form of liberalism for it seeks to uproot existing societies and mix everyone up into a global miasma, in which they theoretically have maximum choice but where, in reality, their choices are limited precisely because the individual is weaker than the collective. Historian Robert Lemm explains in an article for FVD why liberalism is a sin.
Read Robert Lemm’s article here
The other big fiction of liberalism is that society can be created on a whim and, by extension, that reality can be structured by our will. The West has been very severely infected by this delusion – it is what gives us all the crazy narratives about transsexualism and other fads. Worse, it encourages us to think that reality can be structured (and should be read) through the lens of morality, moral condemnation being an expression of personal will. It is this virtue-signalling which has led the West into a very dangerous situation in Ukraine. What is the point of condemning your adversary if the danger is that he will kill you? Your condemnations are not much use if you end up dead. As Sid Lukkassen explains in a piece for FVD, the obsession with ideological purity, which dominates Western policy-making, is causing Europe to shoot itself in the foot.
Read Sid Lukkassen’s article here
Our guest on The Forum this week was Michael Bryant who argues that the post-World War I ‘Spanish flu’ is a myth. He claims that the huge numbers of deaths of young men which followed the end of the war is better explained by the diseases which were rife in the trenches and by the effects of gas and other chemical weapons. ‘Flu’ was a lazy label stuck onto these deaths which has been retrospectively used to justify big Pharma’s over-medicalised approach to health.