From: punditster@gmail.com   
      
   On 3/6/2026 10:21 AM, Noah Sombrero wrote:   
   > On Fri, 6 Mar 2026 16:03:01 +0000, Julian    
   > wrote:   
   >   
   >> ‘Progressive’ or ‘woke’ politics is undoubtedly religious. But not   
   in a   
   >> good way. In championing transgender, ethnic minority or postcolonial   
   >> ‘victims’, it fully embraces the zeal of the Hebrew prophets and Jesus   
   >> to raise up the downtrodden. And it shares their righteous ire against   
   >> those who do the treading down. But there’s a problem. Prophetic zeal   
   >> unrestrained by other elements produces a distorted Christianity. Wokery   
   >> is a Christian heresy.   
   >   
   > I understand that it would be very comforting for you to believe that.   
   >   
   You can never, ever make Islam or Muslims the villains!   
    >   
   >> In my experience, instead of behaving as if they were subject to God and   
   >> his moral requirements, ‘woke’ prophets conduct themselves like little   
   >> gods, subject to none but themselves, tyrannical and merciless   
   >>   
   >> Since I was dragged into the culture wars in 2017, because I didn’t   
   >> think that colonialism was simply wicked, I’ve spent over eight years   
   >> dealing with ‘woke’ critics, many of them with the title    
   €˜Professor’ or   
   >> ‘Reverend’ in front of their name, or ‘Church Commissioner’ behind   
   it.   
   >> My consistent experience has been that they don’t behave like creatures   
   >> and sinners. They betray no sign of feeling the need to learn or be   
   >> corrected. They conduct themselves as if they have absolute possession   
   >> of the truth and the only reason some might disagree is that they’re   
   >> morally wicked (that is, racist). So, they don’t listen or reflect   
   >> thoughtfully on what dissenters have to say. Instead, they respond with   
   >> unscrupulous aggression – smearing critics’ reputations, misreporting   
   >> their words, twisting them into strawmen the easier to blow down and   
   >> seeking to intimidate them into silence. As Priyamvada Gopal, the   
   >> Cambridge professor who first brought the culture wars to my doorstep,   
   >> tweeted to her comrades after reading about my ‘Ethics and Empire’   
   >> project, ‘OMG. This is serious shit. We need to SHUT THIS DOWN’. In my   
   >> experience, instead of behaving as if they were subject to God and his   
   >> moral requirements, ‘woke’ prophets conduct themselves like little gods,   
   >> subject to none but themselves, tyrannical and merciless. (Readers   
   >> looking for further substantiation of my claims here can find chapter   
   >> and verse in The New Dark Age: Why Liberals must Win the Culture Wars.)   
   >>   
   >> A leading feature of decolonising ‘wokery’ is its exaggeration of the   
   >> sins of western civilisation – the civilisation that Christianity has   
   >> done most to shape. One common expression of this is the wholesale   
   >> damnation of the British Empire. Now, we can argue about whether the   
   >> Empire was, all things considered, more a force for evil than good. But   
   >> no one holding themselves accountable to the facts of history can deny   
   >> that it chalked up some major humanitarian and liberal achievements.   
   >> Exhibit A: the Empire was among the first states in the history of the   
   >> world to abolish the hitherto universal practice of slavery and then led   
   >> the world in suppressing it, from Brazil to New Zealand, for over a century.   
   >>   
   >> Exhibit B:  from June 1940 when France fell, to June 1941 when Germany   
   >> invaded the Soviet Union, the Empire was the only military opposition to   
   >> the genocidally racist regime in Nazi Berlin, with the sole exception of   
   >> Greece. But these achievements the ‘woke’ prophets adamantly refuse to   
   >> acknowledge, lest it muddy the simple waters of their absolute   
   >> condemnation.   
   >>   
   >> Why? Why the stubborn, truth-defying exaggeration? One plausible   
   >> explanation is this. For Christians, the paradoxical mark of the   
   >> genuinely righteous person is a profound awareness of their own   
   >> unrighteousness. The saint stands out as one who knows more deeply than   
   >> others just what a sinner she really is. Like all virtue, however, this   
   >> can be corrupted into vice. As Jesus pointed out, humility can be   
   >> infected by pride. So, don’t make a public display of your piety. Don’t   
   >> virtue-signal. For genuine humility can degenerate into a perverse bid   
   >> for supreme self-righteousness, which exaggerates one’s sins and   
   >> broadcasts the display of repentance: holier-than-thou because   
   >> more-sinful-than-thou. In The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western   
   >> Masochism, the Jesuit-educated Pascal Bruckner captures this when he   
   >> writes of contemporary, post-imperial Europe (and by extension, the   
   >> non-US West): ‘This is the paternalism of the guilty conscience: seeing   
   >> ourselves as the kings of infamy is still a way of staying on the crest   
   >> of history… Europe is still messianic in a minor key.’   
   >>   
   >> In this self-regarding display of virtue, the penitent hogs the stage:   
   >> ‘by erecting lack of love for oneself into a leading principle, we lie   
   >> to ourselves about ourselves and close ourselves to others… In western   
   >> self-hatred, the Other has no place. It is a narcissistic relationship   
   >> in which the African, the Indian and Arab are brought in as extras.’   
   >>   
   >> This psychological speculation by a right-of-centre French philosopher   
   >> is given empirical substantiation by the left-of-centre Australian   
   >> anthropologist, Peter Sutton, in his book, The Politics of Suffering:   
   >> Indigenous Australia and the end of the liberal consensus.   
   >>   
   >> After spending several decades among the aboriginal Wik peoples of   
   >> northern Queensland, Sutton became convinced that their social   
   >> dysfunction was caused less by historic colonialism than by contemporary   
   >> factors. Yet he found that ‘woke’ opinion was in thrall to an   
   >> ideological ‘politics of compassion’ that resisted the implications of   
   >> expert or statistical evidence and obstructed the crafting of realistic   
   >> remedies: ‘Simplistic causal accounts continue to grow like healthy   
   >> weeds’. For example: ‘The kids don’t go to school because the teachers   
   >> are racists.’ ‘What enables the purveyors of such pap, and those who   
   >> swallow it,’ he asks, ‘to so suspend their normal critical faculties?’   
   >> The answer he gives to his own question about the springs of such   
   >> ‘uncaring kindness’ is career-interests: ‘Victimhood becomes, for   
   many,   
   >> the family business, a business of status as well as of economics.’   
   >>   
   >> If ‘woke’ prophets really cared to liberate the oppressed, they’d be   
   >> eager to understand the causes of their plight correctly, the better to   
      
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    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)