Tag: history

He Wasn’t Wrong

Twenty-five years ago, the Atlanta Braves pitcher John Rocker wrote an impassioned observation about the decline of New York.

“Imagine having to take the 7 Train to the ballpark looking like you’re riding through Beirut next to some kid with purple hair, next to some queer with AIDS, right next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time, right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids. It’s depressing. The biggest thing I don’t like about New York are the foreigners. You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English. Asians and Koreans and Vietnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish people and everything up there. How the hell did they get in this country?”

He was roundly condemned for this by the national media, by Major League Baseball, and was even forced to undergo professional counseling for the thought crime of noticing the consequences of the foreign invasion the city was undergoing. And now, with what appears to be the imminent election of a socialist Muslim born in Uganda to the highest elective office in New York City, he’s taking a well-earned victory lap.

25 years ago I criticized New York for its rapid decline into a third world country. I was forced to undergo Psychological Counseling, as if I were the crazy one. 25 years later, the city is voting in a muslim socialist for mayor.

This is an object lesson for all of the puritanical goodthinkers and immigration fetishists who drank the equalitarian Kool-Aid. Those Cassandras you condemned for being “crazy” and “racist” and “bigoted” were right all along. All of history, recent and ancient, clearly testifies to the obvious fact that if you permit a sufficient number of foreigners to enter your country, they will change it to suit their preferences with absolutely no respect for what was there before them.

The equalitarian ideology has failed. The Enlightenment has failed. Multiculturalism and anti-racism have failed. Immigration is a clear, present, and existential danger to most of the nations of the West.

If you are still having trouble understanding the concept, ask an American Indian to explain it to you.

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Immigration and Military Power

As we know, Martin van Creveld has demonstrated that immigration is simply another form of war, and an invasion is an invasion regardless of whether it is a peaceful, unarmed, and disorganized one that is welcomed by a governing elite or an armed and organized one that is resisted by the governing elite.

But one of the lessons demonstrated by Sir Charles Oman in his The Art of War in the Middle Ages is the way in which immigration and the reliance upon foreign troops is intrinsically deleterious to the nation’s military organization and will inevitably weaken even the most dominant military power. And this weakness is distinct from the separate problem of foreign military commanders whose loyalties tend to be outweighed by either their ethnic interests or their self-interests.

As he demonstrates in the first chapter of his excellent essay, now being serialized at Castalia Library, the Roman Empire suffered both of these negative effects.

The morale of the Roman army was no longer what it had once been: the corps were no longer homogeneous, and the insufficient supply of recruits was eked out by enlisting slaves and barbarians in the legions themselves, and not only among the auxiliary cohorts. Though seldom wanting in courage, the troops of the fourth century had lost the self-reliance and cohesion of the old Roman infantry, and required far more careful handling on the part of the general. Few facts show this more forcibly than the proposal of the tactician Urbicius to furnish the legionaries with a large supply of portable beams and stakes, to be carried by pack-mules attached to each cohort. These were to be planted on the flanks and in the front of the legion, when there was a probability of its being attacked by hostile cavalry: behind them the Romans were to await the enemy’s onset, without any attempt to assume the offensive.

This proposition marks a great decay in the efficiency of the imperial foot-soldier: the troops of a previous generation would have scorned such a device, accustomed as they were to drive back with ease the assaults of the Parthian and Sarmatian cataphracti.

It should not be a surprise that the US military is in observable decline, having lost its global superpower status and has been surpassed in several areas by the Russian and Chinese militaries, given the fact that the percentage of foreign-born U.S. veterans rose from 2 percent in 1990 to 4.5 percent in 2022. And, of course, this doesn’t even count the much larger number of foreigners who were second- or third-generation immigrants whose interests do not necessarily align with those of the native population.

History is an absolute necessity if one wishes to understand the probable consequences of current events. Even if you have relatively little interest in leatherbound books, or in the aesthetic aspects of the most beautiful books in the world, it will behoove you to consider signing up for a free subscription to the Castalia Library substack for the benefit of the daily serial alone. On a related note, I’m pleased to be able to announce that yesterday, Castalia Library reached 3,000 daily subscribers.

In other Castalia-related news, we have completed the interior layout for THE JUNIOR CLASSICS Volume Nine, Sport & Adventure. We anticipate shipping both volumes Nine and Ten to the backers in November, although demi-royal backers will probably need to wait until December to receive theirs. And for those who were not original backers, we anticipate making the regular editions available as part of the annual Thanksgiving sale.

And yes, we will be announcing a 2nd Edition of The Castalia Junior Classics in leather and making them available once the complete set of the Original Backer’s Leather Editions is in production at the US bindery. The difference will be that the 2nd Edition will be bound in pigskin at the Castalia Bindery.

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The Mediocrity was Inevitable

The modern sacralization of democracy is one of the intellectual abominations of Clown World. And the reasons why the great writers of the past disdained democracy and had such low expectations for it have been more than demonstrated by the rise and fall of the Western democracies. Such as, for example, Zeno of Elea:

The genius of a nation strikes but once in its history. It is its glory and its immortality in the annals of men. It is aristocratic, discriminating, radiant and selective, and abjures all that is mediocre, plebeian and mundane. It is regnant. It is spiritual. It is the flame emanating from the core of the Universe, which is the generation of life. It is the lightning which sets fire to the small spirits of men, and raises them above the field and the plow, the house and the hayfield, in a sudden revelation of grandeur. It is, above all, masculine, for the aristocracy of the soul is purely masculine and never feminine, which is concerned only with petty matters and insistent trivialities. It transcends the humbleness of daily living and stands even the least important of men upon Olympus for a brief hour. It is never democratic, for democracy is a destructive thing, conspired in the inferior minds of envious men.

If that nation which would survive in glory would cultivate only the masculine principle its name in history will be written in gold and blaze through the centuries.

Even real democracy is destructive, so imagine how much worse is the USA’s pseudo-democratic model of “representative democracy” where a fraction of the people participate in rigged elections that pretend to let them choose between one AIPAC-funded candidate and another AIPAC-funded candidate who will then represent the interests of a foreign people and other foreign invaders at the expense of the nation.

It’s no surprise that the so-called “authoritarian” models of Russia, China, and even Iran are proving objectively superior over time as the pseudo-democratic model has not only become sclerotic, but rapidly approaches complete collapse everywhere from France and Germany to the UK and the USA.

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The Post-WWII Moral Order

Since 1945, World War II has been the basis of Clown World’s civic religion, but with the observable decline of the West, neither the native masses nor the foreign invaders believe in it anymore:

Every civilization rests upon a sacred order, something that transcends the merely mortal and provides the framework through which value is arranged and meaning conferred. It is not a fiction but a sacred order that defines good and evil, memory and destiny, and determines what may be preserved and what must be condemned.

For the modern West, that faith is the Second World War.

It is remembered not as a conflict among nations but as the moment in which a new moral order was born. The war is treated as revelation, the event from which the moral legitimacy of the Western Regime descends. From it emerged a political theology that shaped institutions and public life, binding the Western world to a moral interpretation of its own survival.

Within this framework, Hitler ceased to be a historical figure and became a moral archetype, a new antichrist whose memory must be condemned. He stands as the emblem through which modern virtue is defined and the warning through which conformity is maintained. His image serves as the foundation of the postwar faith, a reference point invoked to justify authority and to police the boundaries of thought.

Through this transformation, a human tragedy was elevated into doctrine. The victors fashioned from their triumph a permanent narrative of righteousness that turned history into morality and memory into commandment. The faith endures because it explains the modern West to itself, granting coherence to its institutions and meaning to its exhaustion. It teaches that virtue lies in suppressing national will, that peace depends upon the renunciation of power, and that remembering the past too fully risks exposing the myths on which the present order rests.

The cult of the war did not remain confined to remembrance. It grew into a civic religion, woven into the structures of power and instruction. Its language pervades public life, where law and policy alike are judged against its moral vision. The past is recalled less to understand than to admonish, and history itself has been moralized into a sermon.

From this grew an orthodoxy that defines the limits of permissible thought. Nations may exist only as administrative zones and marketplaces, peoples as abstractions, and tradition as surface decoration. The religion grants the ruling order its moral immunity, for to question it is to profane what has been declared sacred.

As I pointed out to Louise Mensch, no one cares about World War II, the Nazis, or the Holocaust anymore than people cared about the Boxer Rebellion in 1939. Events that took place more than 80 years ago are simply not relevant to their lives or to their experience in any way, shape, or form.

This wasn’t true 30 years ago. When Spacebunny and I bought our first house, the man from whom we bought it was nearly brought to tears when meeting my grandfather, a Marine who fought in WWII, because he’d lost his brother in Normandy on D-Day. And an elderly British man of our acquaintance could barely hear the word “Israel” without his lip curling in disdain; he’d lost a brother in the Irgun’s bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946.

But nearly everyone with personal experience of WWII is now gone and the false moral order that was imposed in its aftermath is not only fading, but obviously bankrupt. We don’t know exactly what will take its place, but we do know that the post-post WII period is going to be very different than what preceded it. And we can be certain that the nations will rise again.

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The Importance of GamerGate

The Billionaire Psycho reminds us of “the most important event you are not allowed to discuss”:

GamerGate is maybe the most important event of the past 20 years which never receives mainstream media coverage. Lomez will be publishing an in-depth history of GamerGate, to serve as an official record going forward, and that’s crucial as part of building a foundation for a new culture — fighting the narrative war over how history is remembered, how history is interpreted, what events are recognized as significant and influential moments in culture, and how Western identity is defined.

GamerGate was only possible because a generation of incompetent Leftists inherited an empire built on propaganda that came without a legible instruction manual. Leftists forgot how to run their imperial machine. Video games sedated young white men, funneling their energy into a simulation of achievement, an illusory power fantasy of digital significance. Leftists forgot that porn, video games, movies, junk food, and other passive consumption activities primarily existed to prevent young white men from doing anything useful with their lives. And this zone of sedation was viewed as another industry to conquer so that DEI activists could bully the video game industry into providing overproduced elites with fake jobs.

This event was important for several reasons.

GamerGate exposed American Sharia laws. It unveiled the shibboleths, religious taboos, and blasphemy codes which were considered more important than Constitutional protections on “free speech”. A gulf emerged between written laws, and selective enforcement.

GamerGate was maybe the first time in 50 years that Leftists suffered a real, measurable defeat.

It functioned as a generational awakening: a catalyst that activated a decentralized army of shytpoasters, bloggers, podcasters, streamers, journalists, and RW activists.

It mapped out in real-time the architecture and OODA loop of the Leftist hivemind, providing empirical data on how the swarm intelligence perceives, coordinates, reacts, propagates… and suffers damage.

It educated critics of the hegemonic monoculture that rules the Global American Empire.

But I think the most important aspect of GamerGate was that it disproved the narrative illusion that everyone more or less accepted as conventional wisdom, the bedrock of the uniparty worldview. Before GamerGate, it was taken as a self-evident fact that America was a capitalist country, and that all of the evil in the world was caused by Wall Street corporations chasing “shareholder value” and advancing “the profit-motive”. Capitalism and racism were the invisible demons which could be used as scapegoats for anything bad that ever happened at any point and at any place in American society.

Leftism could do anything it wanted, no matter how dumb, destructive, intrusive, or evil — and then blame capitalism and racism for the consequences.

This illusion was shattered by GamerGate.

First of all, as an Original GamerGater, I can testify that Lomez’s history, while welcome, is almost certainly going to be incomplete and missing some very important details. I’m 99 percent confident that he doesn’t even know who GamerGater #1 is, because there are only a small handful of people who do and Lomez isn’t speaking to them and he hasn’t spoken with me either.

This doesn’t mean his chronicle of the public history and his analysis of the public events and the observable consequences won’t be accurate, but he isn’t going to be able to understand the hows and whys of what happened because he isn’t talking to anyone who was actually there in the early days of what was then called the Quinnspiracy.

And the Billionaire Psycho is correct to point out that what is now obvious today, namely, the total disinterest of the international corpocracy in things like customers, revenue, and profit, were first exposed to the public by GamerGate. Now, the corporations even admit it openly, as the former CEO of Ford admitted that his company invested excessively in electric vehicles even though car buyers clearly indicated that they didn’t want them.

Former Ford CEO Mark Fields openly acknowledged that the industry charged ahead with massive EV investments, overlooking what consumers actually wanted. Fields, who led Ford from 2014 to 2017, pointed out the misstep during a discussion on the rapid buildup of EV production. “Over the last couple of years, the automakers really went full bore in putting in capacity for EVs,” he said. This aggressive push came without enough thought to buyer preferences, leaving companies like Ford and GM facing unexpected market realities.

Now the corporate games industry is dying, although the indy game development community hasn’t been this healthy or this profitable since id Software was putting out shareware and Fenris Wolf was developing technology showcases for Artist, Creative, and Intel. And while GamerGate didn’t fix the problem, it did accomplish the very important task of diagnosing it and making it known to a large section of the public.

For those of you who weren’t there, here is the timeline of the start of #GamerGate from my perspective.

  • 11 August 2014: Depression Quest released on Steam.
  • 16 August 2014: The Zoe post. Mundane Matt puts out a video discussing it.
  • 21 August 2014: My first post about Kotaku and the Quinnspiracy
  • 27 August 2014: Adam Baldwin coins the hashtag #GamerGate
  • 28 August 2014: 17 game journalists run very similar articles asserting the irrelevancy of gamers.
  • 17 September 2014: Milo breaks the news of a secret GameJournoPros mailing list.
  • 21 September 2014: Milo exposes the entire GameJournoPros list.
  • 15 July 2015: Mike Cernovich, Milo and I host #GGinParis. Le Monde covers it.

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It Actually is Their Land

Ron Unz realizes that the Zionists really held the original claim to the land all along:

America’s tens of millions of Christian Zionists regard themselves as the champions of the Israelis whom they identify with the Israelites of the Bible, and I suspect that many of them may vaguely consider the Palestinians to be the descendants of the accursed Canaanites. But the actual facts seem to be the other way round, with the Israeli Jews having heavy Canaanite ancestry and today’s suffering Palestinians probably being the closest direct descendants of the ancient Israelites.

It would appear Miles Mathis knew what he was doing when he described the primary moving force behind Clown World as “the Phoenician Navy”. And no doubt the shape of the next temple in Jerusalem, will surprise everyone when it is eventually built.

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When Change is for the Better

When I was in high school and college, it was a regular ritual of fall for the Golden Gophers to get absolutely crushed by the nation’s top college football teams. Particularly memorable was the 84-13 defeat at home in 1983, which was part of a 16-0 run by Nebraska from 1963 to 2012.

Somehow, the Gophers are still in the lead in the series, 38-25-2, a lead to which they added last night by upsetting the #25 Cornhuskers 24-6 thanks to no less than nine (9) sacks by an aggressive, bruising defensive front seven and excellent coverage in the secondary.

In other sports news, I don’t pay much attention to baseball, but the historic performance by Shohei Ohtani merits a mention, considering that it was arguably the greatest baseball game by a single player in the history of the sport. He hit three home runs – including the first leadoff home run as a pitcher in the history of the major leagues – and struck out 10 batters and gave up only two hits while leading the Dodgers to a 5-1 victory over the Brewers to sweep the National League championship series.

We never got the chance to see Babe Ruth or Ted Williams play, but we can watch Shohei Ohtani in action, which may actually, incredibly, be to our advantage.

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The Art of War in the Middle Ages

The Art of War has been very simply defined as ‘the art which enables any commander to worst the forces opposed to him.’ It is therefore conversant with an enormous variety of subjects: Strategy and Tactics are but two of the more important of its branches. Besides dealing with discipline, organization, and armament, it is bound to investigate every means which can be adapted to increase the physical or moral efficiency of an army. The author who opened his work with a dissertation on ‘the age which is preferable in a generalissimo,’ or ‘the average height which the infantry soldier should attain,’ was dealing with the Art of War, no less than he who confined himself to purely tactical speculations.

Today marks the launch of the new serialization at the Castalia Library substack. The work being serialized is the Oxford edition of Sir Charles Oman’s original 1884 Lothian Prize-winning essay: THE ART OF WAR IN THE MIDDLE AGES A.D. 378–1515.

The essay is the precursor to the work being published by Castalia Library as the Sep-Dec 2025 subscription book, which is an expanded version of the essay that was published in 1898 by Methuen & Co. as A HISTORY OF THE ART OF WAR: The Middle Ages From the Fourth to the Fourteenth Century.

In my humble opinion, this book is a must-have for anyone with an interest in either history or war. If you haven’t subscribed to Castalia History yet, this is a book that should make you seriously considering doing so, because it’s going to be an instant classic and will almost certainly sell out before it’s even available.

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A Special Interview

This is a real treat! Big Serge interviews Dr. Sean McMeekin, the author of the excellent book STALIN’S WAR:

Big Serge: “One of the first things that stands out about your work is that you have found success writing about topics which are very familiar to people and have a large extant corpus of writing. World War One, the Russian Revolution, World War Two, and now a broad survey of Communism – these are all subjects with no shortage of literature, and yet you have consistently managed to write books that feel refreshing and new. In a sense, your books help “reset” how people understand these events, so for example Stalin’s War was very popular and was not perceived as just another World War Two book. Would you say that this is your explicit objective when you write, and more generally, how do you approach the challenge of writing about familiar subjects?”

Dr. McMeekin: “Yes, I think that is an important goal when I write. I have often been called a revisionist, and it is not usually meant as a compliment, but I don’t particularly mind the label. I have never understood the idea that a historian’s job is simply to reinforce or regurgitate, in slightly different form, our existing knowledge of major events. If there is nothing new to say, why write a book?

Of course, it is not easy to say something genuinely new about events such as the First World War, the Russian Revolution, or World War Two. The scholar in me would like to think that I have been able to do so owing to my discovery of new materials, especially in Russian and other archives less well-trodden by western historians until recently, and that is certainly part of it. But I think it is more important that I come to this material – and older material, too – with new questions, and often surprisingly obvious ones.

For example, in The Russian Origins of the First World War, I simply took up Fritz Fischer’s challenge, which for some reason had been forgotten after “Fischerites” (most of them less than careful readers of Fischer, apparently) took over the field. In the original 1961 edition of Griff nach der Weltmacht (Germany’s “Bid” or “Grab” for World Power, a title translated more blandly but descriptively into English as Germany’s Aims in the First World War), Fischer pointed out that he was able to subject German war aims to withering scrutiny because basically every German file (not destroyed in the wars) had been declassified and opened to historians owing to Germany’s abject defeat in 1945 – while pointing out that, if the secret French, British, and Russian files on 1914 were ever opened, a historian could do the same thing for one of the Entente Powers. I had already done a Fischer-esque history on German WWI strategy, especially Germany’s use of pan-Islam (The Berlin-Baghdad Express), inspired by a similar epigraph in an old edition of John Buchan’s wartime thriller Greenmantle – Buchan predicted that a historian would come along one day to tell the story “with ample documents,” joking that when this happened he would retire and “fall to reading Miss Austen in a hermitage.” So it was a logical progression to ask, if Fischer can do this for Germany’s war aims, why not Russia?

Both the interview and the book are highly recommended.

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Another Sign of the Inevitable

Turkey’s nationalists are beginning to openly push for a break with NATO and the Clown World West:

For decades, Turkish nationalism marched under the NATO flag. But now, one of Türkiye’s most influential right-wing leaders is calling for a turn East – toward Russia and China. His proposal may mark the country’s clearest ideological break with Atlanticism since joining the Alliance.

In September, Türkiye’s political landscape was shaken by a statement that many experts called sensational and potentially transformative. Devlet Bahceli, leader of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and a long-time ally of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan within the People’s Alliance, proposed the establishment of a strategic trilateral alliance involving Türkiye, Russia, and China to counter the “US-Israel evil coalition.”

Bahceli emphasized that such an alliance is “the most suitable option, considering reason, diplomacy, the spirit of politics, geographical conditions, and the strategic environment of the new century.” The proposal extends far beyond the usual nationalist agenda, positioning Türkiye as a player capable of initiating new formats of international cooperation.

To grasp the importance of this statement, we must note the historical context. Turkish pan-Turkism has traditionally been oriented toward the West, and nationalists were seen as staunch defenders of the pro-Atlantic course. In this light, Bahçeli’s call for an alliance with Moscow and Beijing marks a symbolic break from that tradition, reflecting growing distrust toward NATO and the US within Türkiye’s political landscape.

Bahceli’s comments are not random. Over the past few years, he has steadily ramped up his criticism of the West, advocating for Türkiye’s sovereign development “beyond blocs and alliances.” But this is the first time he has explicitly named Russia and China as preferred partners.

This obviously isn’t even remotely surprising, considering that I predicted it was going to happen over a year ago. But cooperation with an increasingly irrational and aggressive NATO is obviously not in Turkey’s best interests, given its past history of military conflict with Russia, and Turkey also has very serious reason to doubt that its allies will take its side in its coming conflict with Israel.

One thing that has escaped the notice of the mainstream analysts is the way that the fall of the Assad regime in Syria has set up an inevitable conflict between Turkey and Israel. Turkey clearly has a stronger historical claim to Jerusalem than the modern Jewish state, which was only held by the right of conquest by the Davidite dynasty for 270 years, less than the Romans (700 years), the Caliphates (332 years), or the Turks (401 years).

The elimination of Syria as a functional buffer state between Turkey and Israel means that war between the two states is inevitable. And both Erdogan and Turkey know that an AIPAC-dominated USA is going to side with Israel, which explains why the Turkish nationalists are now openly favoring an alliance with Russia and China, neither of whom are particularly enamoured of the Israelis in light of how Israel has been a) destabilizing the entire Middle East and b) attempting to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from the region.

The fact that NATO has been comprehensively defeated by Russia almost certainly factors into the new Turkish perspective as well. What use is an alliance that can’t effectively defend you and is more likely to take the side of one of your primary enemies than yours? Logic dictates that the break will come, but it’s impossible to say when it will come. But the fact that the Turkish nationalists are now openly calling for it suggests that it will come sooner rather than later.

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