Tag: decline and fall

A state of war

Dmitry Orlov considers the current state of US-Russia relations on Zerohedge:

So far, this all seems like typical economic warfare: the Americans want to get everything they want by printing money while bombing into submission or sanctioning anyone who disobeys them, while the rest of the world attempts to resist them. But early in 2014 the situation changed. There was a US-instigated coup in Kiev, and instead of rolling over and playing dead like they were supposed to, the Russians mounted a fast and brilliantly successful campaign to regain Crimea, then successfully checkmated the junta in Kiev, preventing it from consolidating control over the remaining former Ukrainian territory by letting volunteers, weapons, equipment and humanitarian aid enter—and hundreds of thousands of refugees exit—through the strictly notional Russian-Ukrainian border, all the while avoiding direct military confrontation with NATO. Seeing all of this happening on the nightly news has awakened the Russian population from its political slumber, making it sit up and pay attention, and sending Putin’s approval rating through the roof.

The “optics” of all this, as they like to say at the White House, are rather ominous. We are coming up on the 70th anniversary of victory in World War II—a momentous occasion for Russians, who pride themselves on defeating Hitler almost single-handedly. At the same time, the US (Russia’s self-appointed arch-enemy) has taken this opportunity to reawaken and feed the monster of Nazism right on Russia’s border (inside Russia’s borders, some Russians/Ukrainians would say). This, in turn, makes the Russians remember Russia’s unique historical mission is among the nations of the world: it is to thwart all other nations’ attempts at world domination, be it Napoleonic France or Hitleresque Germany or Obamaniac America. Every century or so some nation forgets its history lessons and attacks Russia. The result is always the same: lots of corpse-studded snowdrifts, and then Russian cavalry galloping into Paris, or Russian tanks rolling into Berlin….

[W]hy has war been declared now, and why was it declared by this social worker turned national misleader? Some keen observers mentioned his slogan “the audacity of hope,” and ventured to guess that this sort of “audaciousness” (which in Russian sounds a lot like “folly”) might be a key part of his character which makes him want to be the leader of the universe, like Napoleon or Hitler. Others looked up the campaign gibberish from his first presidential election (which got silly young Americans so fired up) and discovered that he had nice things to say about various cold warriors. Do you think Obama might perhaps be a scholar of history and a shrewd geopolitician in his own right? (That question usually gets a laugh, because most people know that he is just a chucklehead and repeats whatever his advisers tell him to say.) Hugo Chavez once called him “a hostage in the White House,” and he wasn’t too far off. So, why are his advisers so eager to go to war with Russia, right now, this year?

Is it because the US is collapsing more rapidly than most people can imagine? This line of reasoning goes like this: the American scheme of world domination through military aggression and unlimited money-printing is failing before our eyes. The public has no interest in any more “boots on the ground,” bombing campaigns do nothing to reign in militants that Americans themselves helped organize and equip, dollar hegemony is slipping away with each passing day, and the Federal Reserve is fresh out of magic bullets and faces a choice between crashing the stock market and crashing the bond market. In order to stop, or at least forestall this downward slide into financial/economic/political oblivion, the US must move quickly to undermine every competing economy in the world through whatever means it has left at its disposal, be it a bombing campaign, a revolution or a pandemic (although this last one can be a bit hard to keep under control). Russia is an obvious target, because it is the only country in the world that has had the gumption to actually show international leadership in confronting the US and wrestling it down; therefore, Russia must be punished first, to keep the others in line.

Empires always fall. The most powerful military is always eventually surpassed by its rivals. These are lessons of history that the average individual, especially the average American, never takes into account. And very, very few individuals in a society in decline ever recognize that it is in decline at the time. However, the USA is presently showing many signs of decline that have previously been observed in imperial societies of the past, including both democratic Athens and republican Rome.

Obama’s plan to open the immigration floodgates and give out 34 million green cards on top of the 60 million immigrants already in the country may mark the final nail in the coffin, but such things are merely consequences of the country abandoning its original identity as a white Christian Anglo-Saxon nation. There is no mechanical fix for that, and it should surprise absolutely no one that an empire that is no longer predominantly a white, Christian, Anglo-Saxon nation does not abide by either the traditions or the values of white, Christian, Anglo-Saxons.

An unmoored state

John C. Wright drops a daisycutter of law and logic on the celebrants of the ur-legalization of sodogamy:

The proponents of what is called (with unintentional hilarity) gay marriage express the gaiety for which they are named by crowing and gamboling with delight that the Supreme Court has declined to do its core Constitutional mission of interpreting the law, and chastise and check the abuses of activist judges overruling the sovereign votes of the decent and sober majority.

They should perhaps rein in their gay celebrations: gay marriage cannot be justified either in law or logic. This means the law has just departed from the environs of law and logic.

The gay partisans should instead recoil with dread, for the thing, by being given into their hands, is effectively destroyed. Whatever meaning or sanction the pairs of homosexuals are seeking out of the pretense of marriage is destroyed by the very fact that it is a pretense, not a marriage.

I am not speaking about an abstraction, but as a matter of law. The way law works, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the basic principle, is that once a precedent is established, until and unless it is definitively overruled, it has controlling authority over every case standing on similar facts, and the degree of similarity is the core of what all legal arguments are about.

This ruling, now left to stand, will and must create more havoc with family law, with testaments and estates, divorce laws, property laws, far more than if the government simply decreed marriage to be a private contract. No matter what the desires and tastes of the reformers, and no matter their promises, once set in motion, the law operates by a logic and by an inertia of its own.

I have been pointing out the increasing U.S. abandonment of law (and, for that matter Law) for nearly a decade now. I first noticed it back in the 1990s, when a petty legal case to which I was the only witness was settled, in the courtroom, by the judge literally flipping a coin. At the time, this was shocking to me. These days, I think the average man would consider himself lucky if he managed to get fifty-fifty odds of genuine justice being done.

What we are witnessing here in the Supreme Court’s cowardly decision to permit the widespread implementation of sodogamy through inaction is precisely what Wright describes, the abandonment of law and logic. I’m not even remotely surprised by the Court’s decision to punt; the reason they did so was expressly because they did NOT wish to set a precedent, any precedent, in either direction. On the one hand, they did not wish to “turn the clock back” in favor of traditional, actual marriage because they wish to curry favor with the global elite that are actively seeking to destroy marriage. On the other, they did not wish to set an actual legal precedent because there are no solid legal or logical grounds that would permit them to demolish the concept of marriage consisting of the union of one man with one woman that would be limited to only changing the “man/woman” element; every argument that can be made for sodogamy can also be made every bit as effectively for polygamy and for unions with non-human entities. Regardless of whether you are anti-sodogamy or pro-marriage equality, this abandonment of jurisprudence should not be celebrated.

The continued abandonment of law and morality is inevitable at this point, to the extent it hasn’t already happened. It is part and parcel of a civilization in the latter stages of decline, and our responsibility is not to try to prevent its fall, but rather, to continue to uphold each petty traditional schwerkpunkt represented by the families and institutions that have not succumbed to the cultural rot. Human societies are cyclical entities, and one can no more fight the cycle than gravity. This is not, however, a counsel of despair, but rather, one of hope. “Progress” is neither linear nor inevitable. What we are seeing has happened before, and will happen again. Our fathers and grandfathers may have failed to sustain the civilization they inherited, but we cannot be held responsible for that. What we can, and will be responsible, is if we fail to keep the seeds of that civilization alive to pass on to future generations.

We are the bases of tomorrow’s civilization. We are the foundation of tomorrow’s societies that will rise from the swirling barbarism. Don’t forget that.

As wicked as Sodom and Gomorrah

Thus spake the Rev. Billy Graham:

Reverend Billy Graham, arguably the most well-known and respected evangelical preacher of the last 50 years, said in a recently published commentary that America was “founded by men who believed in prayer” and that prayer can turn “the tide of history,” adding that while “America is just as wicked as Sodom and Gomorrah” and deserves “the judgment of God,” this judgment can be lessened through prayer.

“Even though America is just as wicked as Sodom and Gomorrah ever were, and as deserving of the judgment of God, God would spare us if we were earnestly praying, with hearts that had been cleansed and washed by the blood of Christ,” said Rev. Graham.

It’s hard to argue otherwise without throwing out the entire metric. Post-Christianity is a bitch, and a pretty nasty one at that, as the West is gradually beginning to discover.

Islamophobia at the UN

I take personal offense at this reprehensibly Islamophobic comment by a UN official, who implies that devoted members of the religion of peace would allow anyone to come to harm after taking control of a Syrian city:

Thousands of people “will most likely be massacred” if Kobani falls to Islamic State fighters, a U.N. envoy said on Friday, as militants fought deeper into the besieged Syrian Kurdish town in full view of Turkish tanks that have done nothing to intervene.

I’m sure the Turks are amused by the passive-aggressive criticism of their failure to defend the very Kurds who have been violently rebelling against their rule for decades, if not centuries. It’s one thing to wipe out your enemies. But one can hardly criticize a people who, upon seeing someone else doing it for them, shrug, look on, and say, “you know, defending those people is really neither our problem nor our interest.”

Anti-gun liberals would do well to keep this in mind come the day of the zombies. When they’re screaming “somebody, please do something!” I suspect there will be more than a few well-armed conservatives and libertarians who will look on with a faint smile and say, “now, weren’t you the very sort of idiot who a) brought the zombies to town, and b) tried to take my guns away?”

After all, did not the Bible say that the hearts of men would grow cold?

Dutch slaughter

So much for the concept of “never again”. Between abortion and the end of life and euthanasia at the end of it, modern secularists are beginning to make the National Socialist approach to mass killing look downright moderate:

The number of mentally-ill patients killed by euthanasia in Holland has trebled in the space of a year, new figures have revealed. In 2013, a total of 42 people with ‘severe psychiatric problems’ were killed by lethal injection compared to 14 in 2012 and 13 in 2011. The latest official figures also revealed a 15 per cent surge in the number of euthanasia deaths from 4,188 cases in 2012 to 4,829 cases last year. The incremental rise is consistent with a 13 per cent increase in 2012, an 18 per cent rise in 2011, 19 per cent in 2010 and 13 per cent in 2009.

The rise is also likely to confirm the fears of Dutch regulator Theo Boer who told the Daily Mail that he expected to see euthanasia cases smash the 6,000 barrier in 2014. Overall, deaths by euthanasia, which officially account for three per cent of all deaths in the Netherlands, have increased by 151 per cent in just seven years.

Most cases – some 3,600 people – involved cancer sufferers but there were also 97 people who died at the hands of their doctors because they were suffering from dementia, the figures show. The figures, however, do not include cases of so-called terminal sedation, where patients are given a cocktail of sedatives and narcotics before food and fluids are withdrawn. Studies suggest that if such deaths were added to the figure then euthanasia would account for one in eight – about 12.3 per cent – of all deaths in the Netherlands.

So, Dutch doctors are murdering people with “severe psychiatric problems” as well as dementia. At this point, it won’t be long into it is decided that everyone with an IQ under 99 is removed from the gene pool.

The idea that modern post-Christian society is any less barbaric than the Middle Ages is becoming increasingly risible. 

“Those who hate you will rule over you”

I fail to see how encouraging African aliens to rule over white Americans is going to reduce racial strife. Or work any better than it has in Zimbabwe.

Kulane, a 32-year-old graduate of St. John’s University, is one of two Somali council candidates this year, marking the first time that Somali-American citizens have filed for city election here. A third is running for school board. By all accounts, it’s a significant step in this central Minnesota town of about 65,000, which has had a history of cultural tension with the immigrant group.

“It’s a sign of the times,” said Stephen Philion, professor of sociology at St. Cloud State University and chair of the nonprofit Greater Minnesota Worker Center. “They’ve organized the way that other [immigrant] groups previously have organized. Now they’re looking for a seat at the table … They’re a group that should no longer be taken as outsiders. They are St. Cloud.”

Philion said the racial hostility they faced may have had unintended consequences of giving the Somali community “a greater sense of commitment to fighting for political power.”

Kulane, who has lived in the city’s Ward 1 since 2006, is careful not to campaign on issues of diversity…. The racial strife dates to as early as 2002, a few years after Somalis began moving to the area in greater numbers.

A significant step to be sure. But not for the better. I wonder how it is that people from a notoriously failed state are suddenly deemed worthy of political leadership in the United States due to nothing more than the miracle of geographic translocation. And keep in mind that for the most part, alien refugees are the losers of the wars in their homelands; the USA is actually the recipient of the least capable parties. They were outsmarted by barbarian warlords running a Third World failed state, they’ve done nothing but live off welfare ever since, and now they’re going to run things in the West?

Then again, if the people of Saint Cloud are dumb enough to a) permit themselves to be invaded by Somalis and b) actually elect them to positions of leadership, they will deserve to dwell in the New Mogadishu that will result.

It’s increasingly looking like we may not make it until 2033 before the violence starts. If one can’t escape the alien invasion in St. Cloud, Minnesota, then it can no longer be escaped and five decades of retreat from the inner cities has ceased to be an option. Considering that Americans were willing to kill hundreds of thousands of people to keep French children from growing up in German-occupied France, I cannot imagine what they will be willing to do in order to prevent their children and grandchildren from growing up in African-occupied America.

The Baby Boomers won’t do anything, of course, because they collectively don’t give a damn about succeeding generations. But GenX does and will.

The sixth-most evil author

John C. Wright was not only voted the sixth-greatest living SF author, he was also named #6 on a list of evil authors, led by the evilly evil Orson Scott Card:

Though not as well known as Orson Scott Card, sci-fi author John C. Wright has been even more vocal about his distaste for homosexuality. After the SyFy Channel promised to be diverse in its portrayal of gay people, Wright took to LiveJournal with a shockingly homophobic post: “Why are you willing to tolerate sexual perversion but not racism? In a world with no standards, what makes a malfunction of love higher on your standard than a malfunction of hate? Is an irrational lust and longing to mimic the mating act with a sex with which one cannot mate, at its root, any more or less disconnected to reality than an irrational fear and hatred of a Negro?” He also compared being gay to bestiality, necrophilia, and the sexual abuse of children.

As the Supreme Dark Lord of the Evil League of Evil, I can only approve, of course. I am also amused by all the great writers of the past that were omitted; if “distaste for homosexuality” is sufficient to land one on the list of evil bigots, then the greater part of the contributors to the Western literary canon will necessarily need to be included as well.

Of course, the Bible speaks on this in the Book of Isaiah: Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.

To put it bluntly, if you are not being labeled evil by the world these days, you should probably reflect upon what it is you are doing wrong. And with regards to homosexuality, it’s hardly new. To assert that its increasing public acceptance is an indication of human progress is to demonstrate one’s historical ignorance. As with an overabundance of credit, open and culturally permissible homosexuality is an indicator of late stage societal decadance. It’s not a cause of rapid civilizational decline, but it is a warning sign that such a decline is in the works.

Repatriation is off the table

With 41.3 million immigrants now having successfully invaded the USA, it now appears to be too late for repatriation:

The number of legal and illegal immigrants living in the United States reached an all-time high, at 41.3 million people, in 2013, according to a new report from the Center for Immigration Studies.

The U.S. immigrant population has doubled since 1990, while the general population has risen just over 20 percent, and quadrupled since 1970, while the general population has risen just over 50 percent since then. The greatest increases over the last three years in the immigrant population over the last three years, between July 2010 and July 2013, came not from Latin America but from the Middle East, Asia, and the Caribbean…. Nearly one out of every six adults living in the U.S. in 2013 was an immigrant.   

Well, if repatriation is out, that leaves four possibilities:

  1. Peaceful coexistence forever
  2. A gradual amalgamation into a single new people
  3. Civil war and partition
  4. A return to a homogeneous nation through ethnic cleansing and mass slaughter

I leave it to the historically literate to present their cases for which of these four alternatives are most likely. As longtime readers are aware, my expectation is #3 in the year 2033.

As for those who try to pretend that mass immigration on this scale is not an invasion, note that this is 1.3 million more people than lived in all of England in 1931. The USA is materially more invaded and occupied than every single country that was occupied by the British Empire. The total population of France going into World War II was 41.7 million. The USA has been invaded by the equivalent of a major European power and the magic of geographical translocation has failed to transform them into white Christian Americans who regard the Constitution as law.

This is not going to end well. Not for anyone, not even the globalists who think everything is working to their long-term advantage.

The beginning of the end

This 1978 speech given by Alexander Solzhenitsyn at Harvard is not only prophetic, but appears to have fallen entirely on deaf ears:

How short a time ago, relatively, the small, new European world was easily seizing colonies everywhere, not only without anticipating any real resistance, but also usually despising any possible values in the conquered people’s approach to life. On the face of it, it was an overwhelming success. There were no geographic frontiers [limits] to it. Western society expanded in a triumph of human independence and power. And all of a sudden in the 20th century came the discovery of its fragility and friability.

We now see that the conquests proved to be short lived and precarious — and this, in turn, points to defects in the Western view of the world which led to these conquests. Relations with the former colonial world now have turned into their opposite and the Western world often goes to extremes of subservience, but it is difficult yet to estimate the total size of the bill which former colonial countries will present to the West and it is difficult to predict whether the surrender not only of its last colonies, but of everything it owns, will be sufficient for the West to foot the bill.

But the blindness of superiority continues in spite of all and upholds the belief that the vast regions everywhere on our planet should develop and mature to the level of present day Western systems, which in theory are the best and in practice the most attractive. There is this belief that all those other worlds are only being temporarily prevented (by wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own barbarity and incomprehension) from taking the way of Western pluralistic democracy and from adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in this direction.

However, it is a conception which develops out of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, out of the mistake of measuring them all with a Western yardstick. The real picture of our planet’s development is quite different and which about our divided world gave birth to the theory of convergence between leading Western countries and the Soviet Union. It is a soothing theory which overlooks the fact that these worlds are not at all developing into similarity. Neither one can be transformed into the other without the use of violence. Besides, convergence inevitably means acceptance of the other side’s defects, too, and this is hardly desirable.

If I were today addressing an audience in my country, examining the overall pattern of the world’s rifts, I would have concentrated on the East’s calamities. But since my forced exile in the West has now lasted four years and since my audience is a Western one, I think it may be of greater interest to concentrate on certain aspects of the West, in our days, such as I see them.

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course, there are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.

Political and intellectual bureaucrats show depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in theoretical reflections to explain how realistic, reasonable, as well as intellectually and even morally worn it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And decline in courage is ironically emphasized by occasional explosions of anger and inflexibility on the part of the same bureaucrats when dealing with weak governments and with countries not supported by anyone, or with currents which cannot offer any resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.

Should one point out that from ancient times declining courage has been considered the beginning of the end?

Solzhenitsyn even foresaw the vicious and unending assault of the Social Justice Warriors: “Social dogmatism leaves us completely helpless in front of the trials of our times.” Social Justice Enforcers would be a more apt term. The SJWs are nothing less than the mutaween of the godless West, the self-appointed enforcers of the would-be globalist elite’s hellish parody of morality.

This is the time to make your choice. This is the time to stand up for what you believe. This is the time to show courage rather than to keep silent in the hope that you will be overlooked and the rabid mob will pass you by. This is the time to support those who stand with you and abandon those who don’t. This is the time to stop trying to appease the voracious, insatiable rabbits, who have tasted blood and discovered that they rather like it.

This is not the time for cowardice.

Sooner or later, the end will come. Every society ever known to Man has come to an end and ours will not be an exception. But if it ends in our time, let us be found with wounds in the front of our bodies and broken, bloody swords in hand. And if it ends in our children’s or grandchildren’s times, let them be able to look to us, as we look to Solzhenitsyn, and know that we prepared them for the battles they must fight.

The internal invasion

The parasites are fleeing their self-made hellholes and are busily engaged in recreating them in their new residences:

Californians have moved to Colorado and Nevada. Massachusetts natives have moved to New Hampshire. New Yorkers have moved to North Carolina and Virginia — and, of course, have continued moving to Florida.

Over the last few decades, residents of many traditionally liberal states have moved to states that were once more conservative. And this pattern has played an important role in helping the Democratic Party win the last two presidential elections and four of the last six. The growth of the Latino population and the social liberalism of the millennial generation may receive more attention, but the growing diaspora of blue-state America matters as well.

The blue diaspora has helped offset the fact that many of the nation’s fastest-growing states are traditionally Republican. You can think of it as a kind of race: Population growth in these Republican states is reducing the share of the Electoral College held by traditionally Democratic states. But Democratic migration has been fast enough, so far, to allow the party to overcome the fact that the Northeast and industrial Midwest contain a smaller portion of the country’s population than they once did….

Since 2000, the blue-born population in red states has grown by almost a quarter, to 11.5 million, or 12 percent of the states’ total population. These changes aren’t happening simply because the national population has grown over the same period, either. In fact, the red-born population in blue states shrank, to 7.3 million from 8.4 million, between 2000 and 2012.

And thus ends the grand experiment of the laboratories of democracy. This is why the right to free association, also known to its critics as segregation, is an absolute must for any democratic society that wishes to retain its character. In an age of mobility, any system that functions will be rapidly swamped by the invading denizens of those systems that don’t work.

It should never be forgotten that most of the 18th century political principles were developed prior to the age of mass global transportation. It should not be a surprise that not all of them are capable of surviving it.