18+ 
The Collapse of America
09.01.2020
The nations of the world have nothing to fear in the long run: The Holy Republican Empire of America will eventually collapse, for it has cultivated no faculty capable of discerning, appreciating, participating in, or creating spiritual beauty.
China has her foundation in the refinement of the soul through the teachings and example of such sages as Confucius. The guqin, for instance, was ‘the favored instrument of Confucius’:
“Many people are saying we should restore traditional Chinese culture,” said Zhao Jiazhen, a guqin master whose audience has included President Barack Obama. “Qin is the vector of this culture. It was played by many emperors and ancient poets. If you think about Chinese culture, you have to consider the qin.” (“Gu” means ancient, and the instrument is sometimes simply called “qin.”)
Indeed, the guqin was the quintessential musical instrument of traditional China’s educated elite. For millennia, any gentlemen worth his salt was expected to be proficient at it, along with chess, calligraphy and painting. The guqin was believed to be the instrument best able to link man and cosmos, to harmonize heaven and earth; some even claimed it could summon ghosts, cure disease, make birds dance and fish fly.
The paulownia tree, from whose wood the instrument is crafted, was believed to be special, thriving in remote areas, standing still as a spirit, and absorbing the luminescence of sun and moon.
So deeply embedded is the guqin in Chinese culture that to study it is to embrace an all-encompassing moral philosophy known as “the way of the qin,” essentially a lifestyle of moderation, self-cultivation and decorum. A sincere follower of the way of the qin does not seek fame but, like Boya, prefers a select audience of fragrant pines, craggy peaks, swirling mists and the occasional discerning human. Indeed, a true guqin devotee does not have to play the instrument at all. He can simply possess it and appreciate its “soundless music.”
Proper playing of the guqin is a metaphor for good governance — “if the large strings are too tight, the small strings will break” — and emperors were often portrayed holding a guqin.
--Sheila Melvin, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/12/arts/12iht-guqin12.html (Our thanks to Mr Cristian for this link)
For an idea of how the guqin sounds when played:
Russia has her foundation in the radiant beauty of the One True Faith of the Holy Orthodox Church, which brings forth from her storehouse of holiness abundant blessings of kindness, gentleness, light, and healing such as this:
In the 16th Century, this Icon was found in a lovely setting on Mt. Kuremyae, known to the Estonian populace as “Pyukhtitsa,” i.e. “Holy Mountain.” At the foot of the mountain there is a spring flowing with healing water.
According to tradition, the Holy Icon appeared at a time when the German nobility was striving to forcibly convert the locals to their faith. It was then that the Mother of God showed her kind mercy to the local populace in order to strengthen them in the Orthodox Faith.
One morning, an Estonian shepherd witnessed the Virgin standing in a radiant light upon the mountain; each time he attempted to come closer, she would become invisible. The astonished shepherd described this miraculous apparition to his fellow villagers, who in their turn were able to confirm that his account was true. The next day, an Icon of the Dormition of the Mother of God was found there, resting in a fissure in an ancient oak tree.
The Estonian shepherds who found the Icon of the Mother of God gave it to the Orthodox residents of their village. Then the villagers constructed a chapel to house the Holy Icon near the healing spring at the foot of the mountain.
In 1876 a church was erected on the site of the finding of the Holy Icon, and in 1891, the women’s Monastery of the Dormition was established there. Righteous St. John of Kronstadt, a great pastor and prayerful intercessor for all Russia, was a true native and spiritual father to the nuns of the monastery, providing them with spiritual nourishment and instruction. He foresaw that on the site of the blessed apparition of the Mother of God, a there would arise a great cathedral church monastery, which would become a beacon of Orthodoxy in the Estonian land. Fr. John loved the Pyukhtitsa Monastery very much, and often, sending his spiritual children there, would tell them, “There you will be three steps from the Kingdom of Heaven.”
Each year on the Feast of the Dormition of the Most-holy Theotokos, such great numbers of the faithful would gather at Pyukhtitsa that during the All-night Vigil, the entire mountain would be illuminated by the candles being held by the faithful
The Pyukhtitskaya Icon of the Dormition of the Mother of God is relatively small in size. Applied to the Icon below the depiction of the Mother of God in the tomb is an open-mesh silver net serving as her shroud.
Pilgrims for everywhere continue to come to Pyukhtitsa to bow down before the Icon granted [to the faithful] by the Queen of Heaven herself, and to wash in the healing waters of the spring.
Western European nations had the same foundation in the Orthodox Faith as Russia before the Great Schism gave them a new half-heathen underpinning (something Dr Joseph Farrell amply notes in God, History, and Dialectic). But they nevertheless retained some sensitivity to beauty in the centuries that followed, as is evident in, for instance, musical works by Corelli, Haydn, and others.
And likewise for many other places in the world.
The American Empire, however, is founded not on truth, beauty, and goodness, but on lies, ugliness, and violence. Its foundations were laid on the bones of hundreds of thousands of slaughtered Southerners and Native Americans, an invitation to the demons which has never been revoked.
Rather, this Empire has only strengthened its demonic domination over the States by killing millions of unborn children through abortion at home and hundreds of thousands of adults and children in wars overseas.
It knows little of spiritual beauty and refinement of the soul but is instead much inclined toward the stimulation of the brute passions in the quest for money, pleasure, and the like.
The physical fabric of its communities (if one can call them that) which it has built is a true reflection this spiritual ugliness - deformed, bizarre, disorienting:
--Google campus in California, via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googleplex
It is the same with its buffoonish pro sports teams:
And its awful pop-rock music which it has vomited out on nearly all of mankind:
These are easy targets, though. But even its ‘Christian rock’ and megachurch architecture and other art forms show a disorder in the souls of those who are supposedly ‘religious’:
--Circus tent, convention center, or church building? Via Lisa Anne Auerbach, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/may/01/megachurches-christianity-lisa-anne-auerbach-photography-america
Comic book or Holy Scripture?
Since it has little inherently good within it, the American Empire resorts to lies that it is a ‘chosen people’ in order to justify its existence.
No nation built from such material will last very long. So again we say to the countries of the world: Be patient, and you will be troubled by the American Empire no more.
It is all too true that the South has fallen prey to this spiritual and physical ugliness. However, the dominant outlook was once very different there (before the cataclysm of Lincoln’s War of Northern Aggression). Her leaders, men like James Johnston Pettigrew, William Gilmore Simms, Robert Allston, and others, were deeply committed to beauty, order, harmony, and such things, both within the soul and without. This concern and commitment live on in writers like Richard Weaver, Flannery O’Connor, Marion Montgomery, and others. In order to recover it fully, Southerners need to read from their tradition and begin living it again. To that end, we will try to take a deeper look into that tradition as it relates to beauty and her kindred some day soon, God willing.
