The West

This 911 call was allegedly made to a Baltimore County call center in 2018

Operator: 911, what are you reporting?

Caller: Uh, there's someone or some kind of creature prancing around out here.

Operator: Ok, is this a person or an animal or-

Caller: I can't tell. It looks to be a woman but she's about six foot tall, big man hands.

Operator: I'm sorry, you're calling to report a tall woman with man hands?

Caller: Well, she's covered in butterflies. And she has giant wings.

Operator: I'm sorry, what?

Caller: Oh, and she talks like a ****** [faggot]

Operator: ...Ma'am.

[Cut to Natalie pushing aside curtains, covered in butterflies and bathed in bi-lighting]

Natalie: Out of this wood do not desire to go: Thou shalt remain here, whether thou wilt or no. And I will purge thy mortal grossness, so that thou shalt like an airy spirit go.

[Mendelssohn, "A Midsummer Night's Dream Overture, Allegro di molto"]

[more shimmering noises]

Natalie: Hail mortals! I come to thee from my fairy grove to bring thee tidings of great woe. Western culture is being destroyed [pause] by cucks and gender-bending, intoxication and sodomy, you know, [sounding sarcastic] things that have never happened in Europe.

[Images of European landmarks,"The Golden One," and paintings wiz by, with the caption "The West"]

Natalie: There's a lot of people lately talking about "the West" and "Western culture" and "Western civilization." But what do those words even mean? I guess the mature and responsible thing to do would be a simple educational video to edify the public. [Loudly] Fuck that! The people demand blood. And I'm thirsty for blood. And by blood, I mean dick. And by dick, I mean corn-dogs.

Natalie (VO): And by corn-dogs, I mean 16 of them over the course of an evening. And by evening, I mean morning. And by morning, I mean between 8 o'clock and 8:15.

Natalie: And by corn-dogs [whispers] I mean dick. [Excitedly] Who's up first? Well, angry white guy YouTube is usually talking about Western Culture, and it's been awhile since I've done a response video, so let's see what's going on in that part of the internet.

[Video by Magog of Morskar begins]

Magog: Magog is here, baby doll!

[Screaming]

Magog: [Crying] I wanna die!

[More screaming from Magog]

Magog: That, is a man!

Natalie: Wow, I've never done a video response to such a powerful wizard [laughs].

[Video by Queer Kid Stuff plays]

"The second and third clues are Elsa's magical powers, and the song 'Let it Go'. Both of these clues have to do with coming out."

Magog: [Loudly] Wrong. A magic power is the conflict of the plot and her letting it go, is just her realizing her true potential, and her ability to conquer and rule her kingdom! [Louder] She will destroy her enemies and raze their castles to thee ground! The song "Let it Go" is basically, Fuck this shit. I'm conquering everyone!'

Natalie: So, just to be clear, this-this is a grown man who has dressed himself in the garb of a sorcerer, to shout about a YouTube channel for preschoolers. It almost feels like punching down at this point. At least The Golden One was masc4masc [video of The Golden One doing pull-ups in the snow]. [Thoughtfully] Who can I punch up at? Blegh. I don't like talking about punching. It makes me feel like one of those people who talks about punching TERFs. I would never punch a TERF! [Shimmering noises] My hands are too feminine and my fingers are tired. Someone massage them.

Natalie: [Excitedly] Who can I claw up at?

[Clip of Jordan Peterson plays]

Jordan Peterson: The fundamental assumptions of Western civilization are valid. How about that?

Natalie: Dad! Stop? Ugh. Get out of my life!

Natalie (VO): In my video about Jordan Peterson, I talked about how he posits a struggle between "the West" and "postmodern neo-Marxism". I argues that pomo nomo is a label that includes a bunch of incompatible ideas,

[slide of "Petersonism" with "postmodern neo-Marxism includes:" corporate HR, postmodernists, liberal politicians, academic admin, chaos itself, feminists, SJWs, Marxists.]

Natalie (VO): ... None of which are in any sense non-Western.

Natalie: Unless of course you equate the West with white people and Marxism with the Jews, which surely no one involved in this conversation is doing, riiiiight?

[Image of Jordan Peterson tweet]

[Failure sound effect]

Natalie (VO): [Whispering] I'm guessing he wasn't a fan of the bath scene.

Natalie: In this video, I want to look a bit closer at the whole concept of the West and the people who claim to defend it.

[sword sch-wing sound effect over an image of Jordan Peterson with a katana]

Natalie: Wow daddy. Nice...sword. Goddamn it, we're going to need to aim even higher. Ladies, gentlemen, and beyond, I give you: [deep exasperated sigh] The President of the United States of America, big dick special big boy Donald Trump.

[Trump at a rally]

Trump: Just as Poland could not be broken, I declare today for the world to hear that the West will never ever be broken. Our values will prevail, our people will thrive, and our civilization will triumph.

[Zooms in on confederate flag while the audience cheers]

[Scary violin plays]

Natalie: So we've got the most powerful fuck boy on the planet prattling on about the battle for the survival of Western civilization. So I suppose we should probably figure out what that's supposed to mean. Which is too bad, because that's going to require a lot of thinking, and I don't feel like thinking because I'm tired. Someone massage it.

[Squishy brain sounds]

Natalie (VO): And soon, [while stirring tea] mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised my lips to a spoonful of the tea in which I soaked a morsel of the corn-dog. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the dog touched my palette, than a shudder ran through me [camera shakes slightly] and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, [Natalie dips a corn-dog into the teacup] something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of it's origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life have become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory. [Natalie squirts mustard into teacup with the corn-dog inside] This new sensation having had on me the effect of which love has, of [sudden] post-preambulatory banter.

Natalie: Whether you're in fashy Youtube, or pomo nomo acadomono. It's common to take for granted that there is a historically continuous, clearly defined thing called "Western civilization" that starts in ancient Athens and flourishes in our own era of enlightened philosopher kings.

[Sudden cut to Donald Trump wrestling a man on the ground]

Announcer: [Screaming] Donald Trump! Donald Trump!

Natalie: But this is really just a story constructed retrospectively by modern people for particular purposes. It's like an origin myth.

[Article from the Guardian is on screen]

Natalie (VO): In an article titled,"There is no such thing as Western civilization," the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah points out that for the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, there was no such thing as "the West." [Ancient map image appears onscreen] The world was divided into three continents he called Europe, Asia, and Libya. Herodotus had no notion that these three continents corresponded to different types of people, and he never called any group of these people "Europeans."

Natalie: ...he was much more familiar with Egypt and Persia, in which he traveled, than with the faraway and foreign people of Northern Europe. So the idea of the west has to be more recent than that.

[Image of a world map onscreen captioned The West, maybe]

Natalie (VO): Really, there is no one idea of "the West," which is an umbrella term that includes a lot of discontinuous cultures and contradictory ideas.

Natalie: According to me, there are six different concepts often invoked under the heading of "the West". Let's talk about them now.

[Concept 1: Christendom and "Judeo-Christian values"]

Natalie (VO): In the year 732, a soldier named Charles Martel led Frankish forces to victory at the Battle of Tours against the Islamic forces that had advanced from Spain into what is now France, effectively halting the spread of the Umayyad Caliphate into Western Europe.

Natalie (VO): According to Appiah, the first recorded use of the Latin term 'Europenses'' or Europeans, dates from 754, and describes the victors of the Battle of Tours, distinguishing Christians from Muslims. In the late middle ages, the concept of Christendom appeared, and was used to distinguish the Christian world from the Islamic world and paganism.

Natalie: This idea of Christendom is arguably the earliest precursor to the modern concept of the West. Notice that the term itself posits an us-versus-them dichotomy where Christians are the "us" and Muslims are the "them".

Natalie (VO): The Christian inheritance is still invoked today by defenders of the West like Lil' Benny and Professor studied-the-blade, often under the heading of "Judeo-Christian values." A term usually used to falsely imply that contemporary moral norms derived from such a generic, parochial, and incomplete document as the 10 Commandments, as if every major civilization didn't have laws against murder. as if the prohibition of graven images has any contemporary influence whatsoever, as if it isn't an embarrassment that there are four laws against protecting Yale snowflake Yahweh's easily triggered ego, and none condemning slavery and rape.

Natalie: And what if I like it when my neighbor covets my ass? Bible jokes! The other main use of Judeo-Christian values is as a bludgeon against single parents and the queers. Speaking of which, what are exactly the family values we inherit from Christendom? Two kids and a dog, just like the Bible says? Well, no.

Natalie (VO): Polygyny is specifically acknowledged in the Old Testament and not forbidden in either Testament.

Natalie: Even in the beginning, Eve couldn't keep her hands away from strange serpents (and who can blame her)

[Image of Joseph playing with his child]

Natalie (VO): ...and Joseph was a massive cuck who raised another man's child.

Natalie: But it's cool, he was into that.

[Medieval painting of a wedding]

Natalie (VO): In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church gradually enforced the one-man-and-one-woman view of marriage, although in formerly pagan lands, this idea was slow to take hold. Charles Martel's grandson Charlemagne had 18 kids by at least 10 wives and concubines.

Natalie: Because he was a proud son of the North, 100% natty and alpha as fuck. I'm sorry! I-I just can't stop, The Golden One... his soul and mine are intermingled, probably because we both played twelve hundred hours of Age of Empires in 1999, and then something went terribly wrong:

Natalie (VO): [Angrily] Fuckin' 911. It used to be such an innocent decision, [Gameplay footage of Age of Empires] choosing to play as the Franks or the Saracens, then it became this huge civilizational struggle, and that's why this guy is a fascist and I grew up to be a woman.

Natalie: Thanks a lot, Osama. Ugh, being transgender is so weird. Like, you have these childhood memories that are just totally discordant with your adult gender identity. Like how do you even deal with that? Well, here's how: you bond with guys over your shared Age of Empires nostalgia, and [pause] then you fuck them.

Natalie: [Distorted echoing voice] I'M NOT LIKE OTHER GIRLS.

[Distorted version of "Floral Shoppe" plays]

[Concept 2: Enlightenment Values]

Natalie (VO): So in 1517, an annoying social justice warrior named Martin Luther nails his list of whiny complaints to the door of the church in Wittenburg. That kicks off a century or so of brutal violence between Catholics and Protestants.

Natalie: That eventually chills out, but then the 18th century rolls around and shits just fucking crazy.

Natalie (VO): There are various fops and dandies and macaronis, getting wired out of their heads at coffee houses and babbling about enlightenment like the beatnik trash they are. Then 300 years later, a bunch of drink-sodden fedora tippers appointed themselves intellectual decedents of Voltaire, before sinking into sweeping sexual harassment allegations under the rug and making 55 YouTube consecutive videos on how Anita Sarkeesian is destroying video games.

Natalie: That's not what they were discussing at the Parisian salon. This is all very embarrassing, but still, some of these enlightenment values -science, liberty, skepticism about dogma- these are basically good ideas, and they're part of the amalgamation we call "the West," but it's important to keep in mind that these ideas are not "Judeo-Christian". In fact, they are specifically opposed to to that way of thinking. So the sum of what we now think of as "the West" actually contains major contradictions, because the history of the West is a history of change and revolution.

[Silent video from Anita Sarkeesian plays]

Natalie (VO): So when a new movement comes along, like, for instance, a bunch of buzzkill sad sacks pointing out that actually, our society is still pretty terrible to women, people of color, and gender and sexual minorities it might not be the smartest thing to just dismiss it as some kind of sinister postmodern neo-Marxist cuckoldry.

Natalie: It could be the next reformation in a history marked by a series of reformations. If there are any historians watching this, please call it the SJW reformation.

Natalie (VO): Think about the Protestant Reformation. At the time, that probably seemed like a civilizational threat to the Holy Roman Empire, and it kind of was. But in retrospect, we see the reformation as just as important a moment in Western culture as the medieval period that preceded it. [Clip of Donald Trump at a rally] But today's counter-reformation, made up of people like Orangie Smalls and [image of Jordan Peterson] Dr. Clean-Your-Room (ummmm) insist on pretending the current reformation is some kind of alien threat.

Natalie: And as for the counter-counter-reformation, well, that's what you pay a trashy tran to do.

[Concept 3: Western Culture]

Natalie (VO): The idea of "the West" has its roots in the medieval schism between the Western Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church. But in its contemporary sense, the idea of "Western culture" didn't really exist until the imperialist era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries when it was popularized in part by Oswald Spengler's 1918 book, "The Decline of the West," an important influence on Nazi ideology. As long as people have been talking about "Western culture", they've been worried about it's alleged decline and degeneration as I've discussed in in several earlier videos which I encourage you not to watch. But the idea of Western culture was influential well beyond the Third Reich. At the height of European imperialism, the idea of a superior high culture of the West was a convenient excuse to plunder and exploit the mysterious Orient. And even though we've swept the more overtly supremacist rhetoric under the rug, the idea of Western culture is still a foundational concept in our schools and universities where you have to take courses like History of Western Civilization or Western Literature that you didn't actually do any of the readings for because you were too busy crouching in the bushes outside the Dean's office vomiting up a couple pints of Malibu.

Natalie: The consequence of this Western Culture education is that we now all have this sense that we belong to a continuous civilization whose crowning achievements are (VO) the Ten Commandments [image of the Ten Commandments in Hebrew], Jesus-fuckin'-Christ [image of Jesus winking], Athenian pederasts [image of Athenians talking], cathedrals [image of cathedral], Mozat [Image of Leck Mich Im Arse sheet music], human rights [image of "Declaration of the Rights of the Man and of the Citizen of 1789"], science [Clip of past video], and IPhones [image of Kim Kardashian].

Natalie: But the reality is, this is an existentialist conglomeration of a history that's much more non-linear than we often think. We in the West claim to be inheritors of the ancient traditions of Aristotle and Abraham, but the Islamic world is entitled to just the same claim.

Natalie (VO): St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the most powerful Catholic sorcerers, is largely responsible for introducing Aristotle to Christian universities, but he never would have encountered Aristotle in the first place had not ancient Greek philosophy been translated and commentated by Islamic scholars like Ibn Rushd.

Natalie: So the origins of Western culture aren't really unique to us at all.And the stuff that is unique is just a mess of contradictions.One the one hand you have Judeo-Christian values, and on the other hand you have degenerates like William Shakespeare who wrote plays for men to dress up as fairy queens and make out with each other. [Shimmering noises] Which, for the record, is disgusting, and I condemn it, and I'll have no part in it. Cause if you didn't know, in Shakespeare times, boys in drag played female parts. [sadly] I wish I had female parts. Working on it.

[Concept 4: The Free World]

Natalie (VO): From 1941 to 1945, Franklin Roosevelt's Vice President was Henry Wallace, an agricultural scientist from Iowa whom Democratic Party officials despised for what we'd now call a Democratic Socialist. Wallace later ran for president in 1948 as a third party candidate on a platform of universal healthcare, anti-segregation, and opposition to the Cold War. During the campaign, Wallace was widely mocked in the press for his spiritualism, his refusal to disavow the Communist Party's endorsement, and what TIME magazine called "his assault on the south" that is, his quote "ostentatious ride through cities and towns with his Negro secretary beside him," for which he was pelted with tomatoes and eggs. The poor naive Wallace commented, "There is something so unlovely about hate when you see it distorting the human face."

Natalie: Well, get used to it buddy. This is America. Am I lecturing someone from 1948 about how bigoted this country is? [While pouring a glass of vodka] This is fine.

Natalie (VO): Wallace received only 2.4 percent of the popular vote in the 1948 election and he's now best remembered for his 1942 speech titled, "The Century of the Common Man", in which he contrasted what he called the "slave world" of fascists with the free world, which he described as an incomplete and ongoing international People's Revolution.

Narrator: No Nazi counter revolution will stop it; the common man will smoke the Hitler stooges out into the open in the United States, in Latin America, and in India. He will destroy their influence. No Lavals, no Mussolini's, will be tolerated in a free world.

Natalie: Wallace has an especially left-wing take on it, but it was common during World War II, when the phrase "the free world" first entered common parlance, to include all the countries opposing the Axis powers, including the dirty reds. After the war, the phrase "The Free World" remained common in american politics. But the meaning shifted. Instead of referring to the international alliance against fascism, it referred to the capitalist west, as opposed to the communist East. The idea of the free Capitalist West is still an important ingredient in this jumbled concept we call Western Civilization.

Natalie (VO): So when lobster dad ]image of Jordan Peterson] says there's a struggle between Marxism and the West, it seems at first like he's just stuck in the 1980's or something. Doesn't he know there's no more Eastern Bloc?

Natalie: Dad? What year do you think it is? Are you at war in your head with the goddamn Ruskies? [Whispering] They're on your side now, remember? The truth is, he's just using the term Neo-Marxism to invoke Red Scare sentiment in opposition to the SJW reformation.

Natalie (VO): But the point I'm trying to make is that the West is a concept, or rather several contradictory concepts, that are always posited in particular political circumstances as one side of an us-versus-them opposition. Whether it's the Christian West versus the infidels, the Enlightenment West versus Islam, the Cultured West versus the colonized savages, the Capitalist West versus the Communist East, or the White European West versus the Jewish Cultural Marxist plot to cuck the the sons of the North by besmirching the purity of their fair maidens and inundating their countries with a barbarous horde of Third World Migrants.

Natalie: I guess I have to say something about that, huh.

[Concept 5: Blood and Soil]

Natalie (VO): If you ask leading Nazi social media influencer Richard Spencer what he thinks the West is, he'll tell you that it's a cultural, geographic, and genetic inheritance bequeathed to European people by their fair skinned ancestors. To Spencer, the idea that a person of Asian or African decent could be part of the West is ridiculous. because for Spencer, to be Western is to be white.

Natalie: Now the thing about that is, as an analysis of the common usage of the term "The West," it's not even wrong.

Natalie (VO): Consider Latin America, where the main languages spoken are Spanish, Portuguese, and French, where the majority religion is Roman Catholicism. Why is this region generally not regarded as part of The West? Why are immigrants from this region demonized as alien intruders?

Natalie: Well, because it's people have too much melanin to join the club. Or, to be more accurate, the flexible and historically variant concepts of whiteness and the West have been constructed to exclude them. And I've already spent half my YouTube career on delirious gay screeching about Nazis so I don't want to do more of that now.

["Western" "European" "Judeo-Christian"]

Natalie (VO): But suffice to say, the association between whiteness and the West is always lurking beneath the surface and when whiteness rears it's head proudly, the result is the ugliest crimes our civilization is capable of. As I'm making this video, the machinery of the middle stages of those crimes is up and running yet again, thanks to a refugee crisis in Europe and a racist demagogue in the United States. And once more both continents are dotted with barbed wire, refugee ghettos, and internment camps full of children torn from parents.

[Concept 6: The Evil West]

Natalie: "The West" in many ways is an inherently supremacist concept. It's thought to be more civilized, more holy, and more cultured than the non-West. But there are some ridiculous college professors who adopt this story wholesale, but flip it on it's head. According to them, the West is not uniquely civilized, but uniquely uncivilized, cruel, imperialistic, racist, and genocidal. But this just perpetuates the same essentializing error. Europeans aren't inherently more evil than they're inherently more civilized. If capitalist imperialism had burst out of Africa 400 years ago, the result would have been just as brutal. So instead of vilifying the West, I think we should get rid of the concept altogether, adopt a more cosmopolitan understanding of ourselves, and acknowledge that the world is too complicated to reduce to simple us-and-them binaries. Which is not to say we have to get rid of Aristotle and classical music and the Cheesecake Factory. We can still keep all that shit while eliminating the propaganda and injustice that surrounds it.

[Coda]

Natalie: My mind is a predator that preys upon itself. [Distorted music and colors] WHAT IF TRAPS ARE GAY? WHAT IF NO ONE CAN EVER LOVE YOU? WHAT IF HAPPINESS IS IMPOSSIBLE? WHAT IF EVERYONE WHO COMPLIMENTS ME IS LYING SO THEY CAN LAUGH AT ME LATER WHEN I DELUSIONALLY FEEL GOOD ABOUT MYSELF--WHAT IF WHEN YOU DIE YOU STAY CONSCIOUS AND THEN YOU JUST ARE---WHAT IF I'M STANDING IN AN AWKWARD WAY AND IT LOOKS WEIRD? WHAT IF BLANCHARD IS RIGHT? WHAT ARE THESE HORRIBLE GODDAMN NOISES COMING OUT OF MY MOUTH?

[Distortion stops]

Natalie: Sometimes, you just need a break from your own brain and music is really good for that. I've always like classical music. When I listen to Mozart or Mendelssohn or even an amateur like Satie, my mind is lifted to a higher plateau and I don't care what civilization the composer came from or whether he was a bigot or a sexist, and I don't want to know because I NEED this. I need this feeling that just makes me want to take a big [bleep] inside my of balls [longer bleep] And I can fit two at once! [Corn dog porn continues to be bleeped out] So, ok, fine, he has the head of an ass, but there's certain advantages to that. That's all I'm saying.

[The End]

[Natalie eats two corn-dogs and a cucumber as the credits roll]