Tag: decline and fall

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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Of Script and Scriptwriters

Uncle John has his doubts about what appears to be the inorganic second coming of the God-Emperor:

One thing I’ve been observing for a while is what I call The Script. The overwhelming sense that current mainstream culture and politics are not organic. That they’re being directed in some way to deliver a predetermined outcome. This was something I laid a marker on in a private social media venue some time back. I wrote a post on it here a bit ago, wanting to state it publicly. The tl,dr is that some closing Q narrative beats are playing out, only in a forced, not organic way. And all the high weirdness that has gone on since the “inauguration” makes the unreal show aspect inescapable. The premise then was that the people have to see how bad it will get. They’re too NPC and the enemy too entrenched for an informed change.

Note it’s all narrative level. “The patriots” don’t want a real, off the chain nationalist uprising. Both “sides” are still invested in the illusion that the system is real. Following up the first post, the multiple faction within the House of Lies model seems more likely. Things did circle the bowl, but there was no grassroots cry for Trump. What happened is the infosphere changed enough to snuff the TDS tsunami and pulse the NPCs into MAGA. It’s actually been really interesting in a “so that’s how it happens” way. It’s one thing to see where a pattern goes logically and another to experience it unfold. The sudden repackaging of consummate machine man Musk as free-speech-but-not-really fat Tony Stark master futurist is a great example1 There’s clearly opposition. But one faction appears to have wrested the wheel from the clown wing.

Allegedly.

The plan is presumably to sweep in, House of Lies intact, and try a civnat reboot. This is preferable in the short term for quality of life and future-proofing. There are X-factors. The clowns are brazenly criminal. Are they sufficiently threatened for kinetic disruption? There are a lot of destabilization assets around the country. Then there are the structural tissues of the House of Lies – financialization, information control, the surveillance state, etc. How deep does factional conflict run? What is really at stake? It should go without saying that I have no idea who or what is driving The Script, let alone how or why. The opening of this post shows how much interest I have in that. It’s just that the inorganic pattern of events – with their loosely Biblical beats – leading to Trump’s inevitable return has looked obvious for a while.

It’s quite obvious that Trump is the primary tool of the sane faction of Clown World that wants to fix the system. He’s not a nationalist, he’s a civic nationalist who still thinks in terms of 1950s America being the greatest and most free nation in history; making America great again means restoring what used to be the balance between Americans and immigrants.

But just as the imperial restorationists of the Meiji era wound up being deeply disappointed by the new Japanese government’s decision to open to the world rather than return to the primordial perfection of the Emperor Jimmu’s reign – they were infuriated to see how their campaign for National Learning intended to cleanse Shinto of its various Buddhist intertwinements wound up with Shinto being fused with Enlightenment ideals – the would-be US restorationists will find that it’s not possible to go back in time.

To save America, both the neo-liberal rules-based world order and the USA must be allowed to collapse and fail. And I doubt there is a script for that, at least, not outside of Moscow and Beijing.

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Unimpressed

Andrei Martyanov is not at all impressed by the credentials of the incoming National Security Advisor:

“Mike is the first Green Beret to have been elected to Congress, and previously served in the White House and Pentagon,” Trump said in a statement announcing his latest cabinet pick. “Mike served in the Army Special Forces for 27 years where he was deployed multiple times in combat for which he was awarded four Bronze Stars, including two with Valor.” “Mike retired as a Colonel, and is a nationally recognized leader in National Security, a bestselling author, and an expert on the threats posed by China, Russia, Iran, and global terrorism,” the statement added. “He serves as a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Mike is a distinguished graduate with honors of the Virginia Military Institute. Mike has been a strong champion of my America First Foreign Policy agenda, and will be a tremendous champion of our pursuit of Peace through Strength!”

Is not an expert “on the threats posed by China, Russia, Iran and global terrorism” and especially on Russia, because there are about zero people for the least 20+ years in both House Armed Services and House Foreign Affairs Committees who have any clue about the world outside and the modern warfare. He cannot be an expert, considering his alleged support for a delusional and utterly obsolete concept of “Peace Through Strength” for the United States. Waltz worked for Donald Rumsfeld–the guy who failed miserably in his understanding of the warfare and applied geopolitics. TOE of the US Armed Forces is a testament to the views of these people, not that anyone else would have fared better by screwing US doctrinal development so profoundly. Somebody has to tell the guy that “Strength” based on TOE from 1990s is not strength.

I had a very tenuous hope for Trump calling on Colonel Douglas Macgregor for the position of National Security Adviser, well … we all knew what was coming, didn’t we. Waltz is a “specialist” in high intensity police operations in Afghanistan, wow … Degree in “International Relations” from VMI kinda gets you some ideas. So, the “special forces” guy with zero understanding of technological and economic drivers of the modern war will be a classic US gung ho “advising” Trump. Well, looks like we exchanged one set of neocons for another.

I’m not impressed either, but then, I didn’t expect to be. There is absolutely no one in the US military establishment who is genuinely qualified to prepare for either the industrial element of a hypothetical air-sea war with China or the scale of the air-land war with Russia. Even the concept of an air-sea-land war with Iran in the Middle East might or might not be within the limits of the US military’s strategic capabilities.

Technology, demographics, industrial capabilities, and international economics have all changed dramatically since 1990 and that is not a coincidence. But as with the aphoristic generals always fighting the last war, US strategists have not even begun to correctly understand, much less anticipate, the current challenges; we know they have not because they would not be assuming that “strength” is their advantage anymore. Just as the British military still vastly overrates its own significance and abilities, the US military is not cognizant that it is now a regional power, not a global superpower.

And no one who has served in the military can claim to know anything useful about “national security”, not in a nation that has been invaded by tens of millions of foreigners without the military or the so-called security establishment doing anything about it.

This announcement is a bit more promising, although the two appointees are both clowns, they are from the sober faction that is trying to preserve the current system rather than destroy the world.

President-elect Donald Trump has officially named Elon Musk to head the newly created ‘Department of Government Efficiency.’

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America is a Christian Nation

But the current Imperial USA is a Satanic construct supported most strongly by Atheists and Jews.

The situation is not sustainable by pseudo-democracy, a constitutional republic, or even imperialist authoritarianism. The more that American Christians awaken to the subversive evil of their illegitimate foreign rulers, the less the political structure of the USA can remain unitary in the face of all of the various centrifugal pressures that are continuing to build up.

It is said that Man cannot serve both God and Mammon. Even less can he serve both God and Moloch.

2033 is coming fast, and it is not to be feared. It’s an opportunity for Americans to free themselves of their gaslighting narrators and a considerable amount of societal deadweight. Because things are not going to get better, as evidenced by the usual suspects up to their usual PR stunts.

What’s certain is that Mossad agents did accompany the Maccabi fans to the Netherlands. We know that because it was posted as a headline at the Jerusalem Post. So, the Mossad was present. The question is whether they were actively engaged in what amounts to a massive psyops using the footballers to advance their dark agenda?

We can’t answer that, but we can say that it is highly unusual for a government to deploy its intelligence agents to a football match in a foreign capital. Who else does that? No one, which begs the question of whether they were enlisted to participate in a covert “dirty tricks” operation that required their professional supervision.

Of course we can. Anyone who has been paying any attention to recent history can. The fake “Amsterdam anti-semitism riots” were just another gaslighting psychological operation of the sort that we’ve seen going back to Ellis Island and the so-called “Melting Pot” at the very least. It’s all fake, it’s all narrative, it’s all lies. Anyone who is genuinely devoted to the truth and the Truth will eventually see through it and reject it.

We leave for the masters of rhetoric to contemplate the significance of the claim that “this was a pogrom in Europe comparable to the Holocaust.”

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