Tag: decline and fall

The Crisis of Clown World

It simply cannot be swept under the rug or sugar-coated any longer: the Western order is in literal crisis. The people have had enough, and the avalanche is picking up inertia because the process is a self-reinforcing feedback loop: the more wanton elites fall, the more that citizens are energized to rise up against them. And when that happens, the elites are forced to clamp and double down on their lies, hypocrisy, and repressions in a futile attempt to stem the flow; this leads to even more ill-will, resentment, and revolt against their destructive policies.

Simplicius observes this. Peter Turchin predicted this. I predicted this. It’s becoming really freaking obvious to everyone now, everyone except the lunatics still trying to cling to power.

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We are the Elendilans

Contemplations on the Tree of Woe contemplates the possibility that JRR Tolkien is the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe of our Aenean Age.

The defining conflict of Elendil’s era, the Second Age of Middle Earth, is fought by the Last Alliance of Elves and Men. The Last Alliance is a coalition of the remnants of great powers, united in the aftermath of Númenor’s fall to resist the rising darkness of Sauron. After decades of brutal struggle, The Last Alliance of Elves and Men achieves its purpose: Sauron is defeated and the One Ring is taken from him. Yet the victory is bittersweet. Elendil falls in battle and his sword Narsil shattered. His son Isildur chooses to keep rather destroy the One Ring, ensuring that the seeds of future conflict are sown. The Elves, diminished by their sacrifice, begin their long retreat into the West, and the kingdoms of Men, though triumphant, are fractured and weakened. Thus begins the Third Age.

Tolkien’s Third Age is marked by many moments of heroism and beauty, but even at its height it is a shadow of the glorious Second Age. By the time of The Lord of the Rings, the Elves have faded, Númenor has become a memory, Arnor has been conquered, and Gondor has been reduced to a pale reflection of its former strength.

If what was true of Middle-Earth is true of our own era, then what lies ahead is neither the dawn of a golden age or the night of a dark age, but rather a long twilight—an era where the remnants of greatness, having averted or avoided total annihilation, nevertheless must struggle to resist an ever-encroaching darkness at great cost. The civilization, while noble, will bear terrible scars from this struggle. Its grandeur will be tempered by humility and its ambitions will be limited by necessity.

I thus finish this essay with an unsettled heart. Tolkien, I am convinced, is truly a cultural mythmaker as influential as Goethe; and Elendil, I am certain, is a hero cut from the same cloth as Aeneas.

But Aeneas’s cloth is the purple cloak worn to an emperor’s coronation; and Elendil’s cloth is the shroud worn to a king’s funeral. Rome was greater than Troy, but neither Arnor nor Gondor was as great as Númenor. Thus an Elendilian Age would not be as bright as an Aenean Age. Its destiny would be somewhere between the inspiring future of my original essay and the hellish future anticipated by my essay’s critics.

Yet this ought be no cause for despair. If the Aenean spirit or Tolkien’s northern courage means anything, it means that the fight must be fought regardless of the likelihood of success. And Tolkien’s myths remind us that even in decline, there is beauty, heroism, and meaning. The Elendilian Age, if it were to come, might not shine as brightly as the Faustian, or even the Aenean; but it would still carry forward the light of what came before. And in the end, that light—however faint—will be enough to illuminate the path for those who follow.

When one reads a book like Brideshead Revisited, one can’t help but be struck by the way its elegaic melancholy almost perfectly expresses the mood of the end of the American empire. Evelyn Waugh was writing at, and about, the end of the British Empire, which is why the emotional tone of his literary work is so familiar to the modern American reader. The Tree of Woe is, in my opinion, to observe that we are at the end of one age and entering into a new one; whether it is as dark and challenging as he anticipates is yet to be determined, but on the basis of the panopoly of known facts, certainly appears to be correct.

Read the whole thing there. It’s well worth it. And remember that the light of Christian civilization will survive so long as at least one of us possesses the courage to stand against the rising Dark.

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Racism, Disproved

An X-commenter proves the case for untrammeled immigration presented by Elon Musk, Ramaswampy, and Fake Short Trump:

All the vile, racist drivel on this hell site can be disproved so easily with one real life example. Look at man in his most debased and primal state, man in prison, where his survival instincts emerge. Notice how prison gangs do not segregate on racial lines, but instead, scout the top talent from the prison system, as the Black Disciples and Aryan Brotherhood furiously compete for the Indian inmates and other elite human capital.

In actuality, history underlines, illustrates, and proves the truth of Andrew Torba’s recent statement: Be racist or be replaced. Consider the selection from today’s eerily timely serialization of The Cambridge Medieval History, published in 1911:

This is the role of nomadism in the history of the world: countries too distant from its basis it could only ravage transitorily, with robbery, murder, fire, and slavery, but the stamp which it left upon the peoples which it directly dominated or adjoined remains uneffaceable. The Orient, the cradle and chief nursery of civilisation, it delivered over to barbarism; it completely paralysed the greater part of Europe, and it transformed and radically corrupted the race, spirit, and character of countless millions for incalculable ages to come. That which is called the inferiority of the East European is its work, and had Germany or France possessed steppes like Hungary, where the nomads could also have maintained themselves and thence completed their work of destruction, in all probability the light of West European civilisation would long ago have been extinguished, the entire Old World would have been barbarised, and at the head of civilisation today would be stagnant China.

In light of these historical observations, isn’t it intriguing to observe that the economic nomadism encouraged by the Enlightenment-era elite for the last 200 years appears to be in the process of extinguishing West European civilization, barbarising the New World and the Old World alike, and thereby leaving staunchly racist China at the head of global civilization today?

Perhaps greater intellectual courage, which is to say greater knowledge and acceptance of the fact that racism is neither a sin nor an evil, but a civilizational prerequisite, could have averted what is shaping up to be a global cataclysm surpassed only by Noah’s flood.

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They Didn’t Have to Take the Bait

ESR tries, and fails, to defend his fellow Boomers for their role in destroying America and wrecking the culture, economy, and demographics of the United States.

“Boomers and their crusade to tear down the entire past, resent to year zero, and reinvent culture. That’s what happened.”

Oh, no, Devon. It wasn’t that simple. You’re excused for not understanding this, because you weren’t there. I was. I’m a late Boomer, born in ’57. I can dimly remember the day JFK was shot. I watched the moon landing. My teens and early twenties coincided with the 1970s. I was there for it all. And even then, even in the 1970s, feeling a sense of subtle disintegration all around me, I already dimly grasped that we weren’t just falling. We were being pushed. But I was very young then; I wouldn’t come to fully understand why, and by whom, for almost another 30 years We Boomers didn’t burn down our heritage in a fit of thoughtless hedonism. I mean, we did some thoughtless hedonism, yeah, but that’s not where the real damage came from.

If you want to know where the damage came from, look up Yuri Bezmenov. Listen to him explain “demoralization” and the long game of Soviet culture-jamming against the West in general and the U.S. in particular. Reset to year zero was a Marxist idea. It was part of a suite of memetic weapons, infectious propaganda bombs deployed against the social and cultural cohesion of the “main enemy”. Often, they were successful in damaging us by leveraging not our vices but our virtues. Valorizing tolerance and liberality until they became helplessness in the face of more and more extreme forms of deviance was one of their attacks. We didn’t fall on our own. We were pushed. The Boomer fault wasn’t that we were hedonists or nihilists, it’s that we didn’t have sufficient cultural immune defenses against what was being done to us.

Why that is exactly is a long sad story that I’m still not sure I completely understand. But I can hit some highlights. One is that religion failed us. This is nobody’s fault and I don’t think it could have gone differently; it’s a failure that had been on the cards ever since the mechanistic worldview reached effective completion by Darwin. One of the things the Marxists did was work to accelerate the inevitable decay of religious authority. Secular conservatives failed us, too. They had one job – just one job – which was to explain why all those Chesterton’s fences shouldn’t be torn down. They utterly flubbed that on all three levels of awareness, analysis, and persuasion. That could have gone differently. It didn’t help that after the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954 conservatives developed a severe case of cowardice about calling out Communist subversion. That may have been their single greatest dereliction of duty. The result was that over the next 50 years Communist institutional capture of academia and other institutions went almost unopposed.

Which is why today we struggle with “woke”. Most of us Boomers weren’t wreckers, even by accident. Most of us were duped. It’s easy to say in hindsight we should have done better, but the enemy was very clever and determined. Try not to judge us too harshly, kids. It’s nice to think that a later generation might have done better, but…I haven’t seen it happen yet.

That excuse didn’t work for Eve and it won’t work for the Boomers. It’s true, there were iniquitous forces at work, but even at this late stage, ESR refuses to call out either the spiritual forces or the material forces responsible. Communism was certainly ONE of the ideologies that served those forces well, but it was far from the only one and it is about the only one that most Boomers reject now. Which, of course, is why they call it out while still rejecting Christianity, denouncing racism, and slavering over “our greatest ally”.

The Boomers were not pushed. They were lured into selling their souls for what they believed was a shiny, sexy, secular society that would be an improvement on the boring, restrictive, traditional Christian American society into which they were born. So they sold their souls and they wrecked their society. Is it their fault? Absolutely.

Is it only their fault? Absolutely not.

But the most damning thing about the Boomers isn’t what they did when they were young, it’s what they’re still doing now, by refusing to help the younger generations get out of debt, repair their demographics, and help make America what it was before the Boomers fell en masse, not some perverted foreigner’s delusional vision of greatness.

And yes, Generation X is already doing better, despite our flaws, weaknesses, and abortion-decimated numbers. Just ask our children.

Have you asked yours?

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The Regime Change Cycle

Dominic Cummings takes a page from Peter Turchin and observes that the West is entering the next phase in what has been observed to be a regime change cycle averaging about 50 years.

If you look back at European history since the French Revolution, there is a cycle of slow rot, elite blindness, sudden crisis, fast collapse, regime change that flares up roughly every 50 years… The vast majority of Insiders cannot see this process while they are playing their part in it and even those who see some only ever see a little. The process only acquires any coherence in retrospect when it becomes history, people define a period including the run-up then the crisis and the regime change and try to abstract critical features of it and argue for centuries about the ‘causes’. Though even after it becomes ‘history’ it remains unsolved: we still can’t describe a good model for the cause of war in summer 1914, we still argue about whether the French Revolution was net good/bad, most find it impossible to learn much from the Cuban crisis even though we can listen to secret recordings of key meetings.

Looking back since the French Revolution and end of the Holy Roman Empire we see this cycle repeat.

  • A cycle of major war and revolution ended in 1815 with the Peace of Vienna.
  • In Germany the 1815 settlement nearly crumbled 1848-50, barely held, then was transformed in 1866-71 (~50 years) then again, after another ~50 years, in 1918 (Weimar), again in 1933 (Nazis) and 1945 (West/East Germany), then ~50 years of relative stability then again in 1989/91 (a re-united Germany).
  • France has had more regime changes depending how exactly you count them.
  • Russia had four: the Tsars, Communists, Yeltsin, now Putin (although nominally the Yeltsin constitution largely remains I think it’s more accurate to see the current regime as fundamentally different in a similar way as Prussia/Germany was fundamentally different after 1866-67 even though the old Prussian constitution remained).
  • The Habsburgs were chased out of Vienna in 1848 and had to fight their way back in, had to rejig the Empire after Italian and German unification, collapsed in 1918, that regime was replaced by the Nazis then replaced again in 1945.
  • And so on…

Sometimes regime change goes faster and wider as crises multiply (e.g 1848-71, 1917-19), sometimes it is more stable (e.g 1815-48, 1871-1914, 1945-89). But 50 years seems to be about the maximum then at least a few big regimes change. And even Britain and America, avoiding revolution and defeat, have seen a similar process of the regime being reinvented every 50 years or so (Washington/Hamilton, Lincoln, FDR, ??).

I think what’s happening now across the western world rhymes with this cycle.

There are certainly a number of disaffected elites, which Turchin believes to be a necessary requirement of successful change. Donald Trump and Elon Musk are just two examples of elite figures who have been rejected by the system and thereby been inspired to transform it more to their liking. This does not, to be sure, make them “the good guys”; they are still elites, and, being products of the system, are naturally inclined to try to preserve and transform it rather than burn it down entirely and build anew.

However, it is encouraging that history is clearly not on the side of some of its most wicked players. The global imperialists are failing, as we know they inevitably will, because both God and human nature are against them.

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The Liberal World Order is Over

Viktor Orban is correct, although ironically, it’s the fall of Syria, not Ukraine, that marks the end of the so-called Neo-Liberal Rules-Based World Order:

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has claimed that his country’s refusal to conform to liberal ideology will yield considerable benefits in the future.

“The liberal world order is over,” he declared during a speech in Budapest on Tuesday. The conservative nationalist politician has been in power since 2010, winning successive elections on a platform of defying what he considers to be authoritarian rule by Brussels.

EU leaders have accused Orban of undermining democracy in Hungary and harming the economic bloc’s solidarity on the Ukraine conflict. He has argued that Brussels’ policies have been disastrous for EU member states.

“As the changes come, only those nations can be winners that can bring the most out of themselves,” Orban told a gathering of university students, as quoted by his office. “Those who assimilate, fall into line, are unable to show their own values or discover the strength inherent in their national character will soon become irrelevant.” 

The rapacity with which Israel and Turkey are seizing Syrian territory, and the shamelessness with which the USA refuses to condemn their actions demonstrates that even those countries which are favored by Clown World can’t be bothered to maintain the pretense of what previously passed for “international law” any longer.

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Burning the Village to Save the Village

Clown World is systematically destroying its own justifications for its right to govern the nations, as Simplicius observes in the aftermath of the fall of Syria and the failed presidential coup in South Korea:

The short-term obsessed West considers the various CIA-sponsored subversions of the democratic processes as “winning”: but have these people given any thought to what precedent they’re setting? They are burning their foundations, lighting their entire house on fire. In the hopes of smoking out a few ostensible ‘wasps’ they now stand to destroy their entire order within a generation.

The perception of the West’s miserable ‘Rules Based Order’ will never be repaired after this—the rest of the free world is watching and learning precisely how ‘Rule of Law’ hews to principle; the West will never regain their trust, and its institutions will forever carry the stench and stain of political interference and hidden hatred for true democracy—which has always been a token byword meant to excuse the Western order’s imperialistic overreach.

The Western order has turned into an odor, and the global south can’t pinch its nostrils hard enough.

Long concealed beneath the hypnotic glitz and glam of the hegemon’s ‘magic show’ was that the ‘indivisible’ idol of democracy has always been apportioned into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ forms, as necessity dictates. It was hidden well at one time, with Western leaders who at least made attempts at pretenses to maintain the fable. Now things have spiralled down the drain so quickly that desperate measures are required—with all precautions tossed out with the bath water, to reveal the ugly face of the Western political system kept buried in the ash of its conquests for so long.

In short: they don’t have the time to construct elaborate myths and schemes any longer, instead forced to merely act on instinct to save their foundering empire. But in doing so, they have hastened its decline by revealing just how illiberal and despotic it has been all this time.

It’s hardly news that the neo-liberal rules-based world order is neither liberal nor rules-based, but it is remarkable to see how “democracy” has been redefined to mean “whatever the ruling foreign elite demands” everywhere from Moldova to Ireland.

While this dropping of the democratic veil is a good sign that Clown World’s power and influence are on the wane, as the unexpected fall of the Assad regime in Syria shows, just because a beast is wounded does not mean that it is no longer dangerous.

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The EU’s Fake Democracy

If the people vote wrong, just make them vote again until they vote correctly:

Romania’s Constitutional Court has annulled the results of the first round of the national presidential election after independent candidate Calin Georgescu clinched a surprise win last month. The decision comes amid accusations that Russia had allegedly assisted Georgescu’s campaign, claims Moscow has dismissed as “absolutely groundless.”

Georgescu, a religious nationalist, is critical of both NATO and the EU, and has criticized Romania’s role in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. He has also promised to end all military and political assistance to Kiev if elected into office.

During the first round of voting in November, Georgescu secured 22.94% of the ballots, beating out the liberal leftist candidate Elena Lasconi, who received 19.18%. The two were scheduled for a runoff on Sunday. However, on Friday, the country’s constitutional court issued a ruling annulling “the entire electoral process regarding the election of the President of Romania” and announced that the whole process will be resumed in its entirety at a later date.

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the only thing worse than mob rule is rule by constitutional courts. The separation of powers doctrine is just the latest Enlightenment concept to prove a complete failure, in this case due to the combination of legislative cowardice, executive corruption, and judicial tyranny.

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Winning is Not on the Table

All of the more informed military strategists concur: the US military is in no shape to win any sort of war with Russia:

Most Americans continue to believe that the United States will prevail in a conventional war with Russia. But that is simply not the case. For starters, Russia’s state-of-the-art missile technology and missile defense systems are vastly superior to those produced by western weapons manufacturers. Secondly, Russia can field an army of more than 1 million battle-hardened combat troops who have experienced high-intensity warfare and are prepared to engage whatever enemy they may face in the future. Third, the United States no longer has the industrial capacity to match Russia’s impressive output of lethal weaponry, artillery shells, ammunition, and cutting-edge ballistic missiles. In short, Russian military capability far exceeds that of the US in the areas that really count: High-tech weaponry, military industrial capacity, and experienced manpower. In order to drive this overall point home, I’ve taken excerpts from the work of three military analysts who explain these matters in greater detail underscoring the dramatic shortcomings of the modern US military and the problems it is likely to encounter when faced with a more technologically advanced and formidable adversary…

We see the same criticisms reiterated over and over again : Insufficient industrial capacity, dwindling stockpiles, “insuperable production limitations”, and diminished technological superiority. When we add these to the myriad logistical problems of conducting a war in eastern Europe with an ad hoc army of inexperienced volunteers who have never seen combat, we can only conclude that the United States cannot and will not prevail in a prolonged conflict with Russia. Even so, Washington continues to fire ATACMS missiles into Russia (13 more were launched over the past two days) apparently believing that there will be no response to the provocation. Even so, NATO Command continues to entertain illusions of victory by pressing for preemptive “precision strikes” on Russian territory welcoming the prospect of a direct conflagration between NATO and Russia. And even though, both France and the UK threaten to deploy combat troops to Ukraine thinking the inexorable trajectory of the war can somehow be reversed. It’s madness.

Five centuries of primacy have produced a cadre of western elites so drunk with hubris that they are incapable of seeing what is painfully obvious to everyone else, that the imperial model of western exploitation (the ‘rules-based order’) is collapsing and that new centers of power are rapidly emerging. It appears now that these same elites are prepared to drag the world into a catastrophic Third World War to preserve their grip on power and to prevent other nations from achieving the independence and prosperity they’ve earned. Fortunately, Washington will fail in this effort just as it has failed in all its other interventions dating back to 1945. Because the United States no longer has the technology, manpower or industrial capacity needed to win a war with Russia.

I’m no professional military analyst. But I reached the same conclusion before the Special Military Operation began in 2022, and nothing that has happened since suggests otherwise. All of the US and NATO sabre-rattling is counterproductive, because it’s like bluffing in poker with nothing in your hand but Uno cards.

One hopes President Trump is getting better advice from his experts than Clown World is getting from its various professionals, analysts, and strategists, all of whom have invested too heavily in their word spells to be capable of admitting even the most obvious truths. This is how imperial overstretch happens.

And forget China, let alone the Sino-Russo-Persian alliance.

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The End of the Enlightenment

The Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, declares the end of the form of Western civilization that has persisted since the Enlightenment:

After the collapse of communism, after the collapse of the USSR, the idea of the Western elite was that the world should be Westernized, should be created in their image and likeness. This is the idea of American exceptionalism, European arrogance and conceit, real or imaginary civilizational superiority, which has existed since the European Enlightenment.

All this contributed to the fact that after 1990 the task became not the restoration of Eurasia, not a global agenda, not a world agenda, but the Westernization of the world along the lines on which the previously successful Western world had been built.

We are here today because that era is over. The idea that the whole world should be organized along Western lines and that the people who would be chosen to do that would be willing to do it in exchange for economic, financial advantages has collapsed.

Asian states have become stronger and have proven their ability to rise, exist, and survive as independent economic and political powers. As a result, the center of the world economy has shifted to the East.

Moreover, the Eastern economies are growing four times faster than the Western ones. Western industry creates 40% of the world’s added value, and Eastern industry – 50%. This is the new reality.

The Western world has not only failed in its idea and strategy of reorganizing the world, but is also suffocating in its own environment within the Western world. The issues that liberal, progressive, dominant thinking could not answer have been put on the agenda. This is migration, this is gender ideology, ethical contradictions regarding traditional values, or even the ongoing war. Thus, the West is becoming increasingly incapable of governing itself.

The five-hundred-year era of dominance of Western civilization is over.

At this point, it’s entirely obvious that the Enlightenment was a satanic turn that led Christendom upon a false path that has not only destroyed Western civilization, but the organizations and nations who created it in the first place.

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