Whistling Past the Graveyard

“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

It isn’t that people can’t recognize evil, it is that they don’t want to believe it exists.

So, they just choose to ignore it.

A common idiom in the Western world is the phrase, “Whistling past the graveyard.”

The etymology seems to trace this practice back to the Middle Ages where villages were commonly a day’s travel apart. With cemeteries at edge of each village, the spirits of the dead would come out at dusk and haunt travelers as they passed by. People came to believe that loud noises/sounds kept the spirits at bay, so tinkers and other tradesmen would bang their pots & pans to “scare” the ghosts away while other people would loudly whistle or shout, hoping to keep the spirits away until the travelers put enough distance between themselves and the graveyard to be safe.

Today, since we are less inclined to worry about haints (a uniquely Southern term for ghosts) hanging around the graveyards, to “whistle past the graveyard” has become a phrase to describe any attempt to distract oneself from impending doom by busying yourself with distraction…to ignore the risk in hopes that it just won’t happen and any negative outcome will be avoided, that you will make it past the graveyard without being accosted by any of the assortment of ghouls, ghosts and undead who might lay in wait.

Roger “Verbal” Kint, portrayed by Kevin Spacey in the move, “The Usual Suspects, said:

“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

Verbal was speaking of the infamous Keyser Soze – the mythical crime boss in the movie who was everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

The left and their enablers in the media are going Keyser Soze on America, demanding that you believe BLM is peaceful,  people protecting themselves from violent thugs like ANTIFA constitute “right-wing violence”, violent crime isn’t rising, that cultural Marxism doesn’t exist, and that people who clamor for socialism aren’t really socialists.

Carl Von Clausewitz proposed that “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” The corollary of which would be that politics is the continuation of war by other means. And that is true – politics has become the mechanism by which people do bad things to other people under the guise of majority agreement as if simply being in the majority is the same as being ethical and moral.

Being in a majority doesn’t equal to being morally right, it only guarantees the anonymity of being part of the mob. What a mob (a temporary majority) does do is provide the safety of numbers and enough false bravado to allow accusations to be made and positions to be taken that never would or could be if hurled by an individual.

It’s happening now.

If you are paying attention, identity politics defines the collectivist as the protagonist (the good guys) and the classical liberal as the antagonist (the bad guys). When you strip it down to the bare minimum, the charges of racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, et al are almost exclusively leveled at non-progressives…and typically hurled from the safety of the middle of some mob – i.e. the Democrat Party, the media, Hollywood – some collection of relativists engaged in a war by other means.

When you synthesize the two concepts of Keyser Soze and the presumed morality of the mob, you get Karl Marx. Marx contemplates the creation of the ultimate mob – a global communist state – and that any morality within that state would be “democratically” determined by the vote of the masses.

Recently, I was involved in a discussion about the nexus between Antonio Gramsci, the Frankfurt School and Cultural Marxism and I found these words from Pedro Blas Gonzalez very interesting:

“Marxism is not philosophy. Instead, Marxism is a negation of life, for Marxism is an intellectualized violent response to human reality. For this reason, Marxism can only exist as a reaction to capitalism and all forms of transcendence. Philosophy is a constructive effort to make sense of human reality, regardless of the often-unsavory truths that man discovers. Philosophy is toil that comes about as the result of observation of the world around us, perspicuity, intuition and common-sense intelligence. Philosophy is not the result of theory-building bravado.

According to Marxism, when capitalism is eventually dissolved, only then can there exist universal suffrage. It is not difficult to realize that Marxism’s virulent attack on God and organized religion does not spring from sound metaphysical and epistemological reasoning concerning transcendence, the sublime and the complexity of physical laws, but rather from a pathological aversion to the nature of work. One example of this is that Marxism has nothing to contribute culturally or intellectually to man’s understanding of pre-capitalist societies. In other words, what amounts to the vast totality of human history. The only way that Marxism can relate to man’s nature throughout history is to enact retroactive Marxist theories, especially recent examples of cultural Marxism’s pathological fetish about sex, race and culture as forms of exploitation of the Other.”

Yes, evil exists, and Cultural Marxism is alive and well today.

Cultural Marxism - BLM, ANTIFA, CRT, DIE - are the Keyser Soze of contemporary left-wing politics and the minions of evil and Marxism (I guess that was redundant) in the media (MSNBC, CNN, NYT, WaPo, HuffPost, etc.) are spending a lot of time trying to convince you they do not exist.

Don’t be fooled.

To defeat evil, you must look it in the face.

No amount of whistling or pot banging will make it go away.