Tag: history

Russia’s Volkskriege

Big Serge explains the transformation of the Russian approach to its war with NATO/Ukraine:

Russia began a Kabinettskriege in 2022 when it invaded Ukraine, and found itself mired in something closer to a Volkskriege. Russia’s mode of operation and war aims would have been instantly recognizable to a 17th Century statesman – the Russian professional army attempted to defeat the Ukrainian professional army and achieve limited territorial gains (the Donbas and recognition of Crimea’s legal status). They called this a “special military operation.”

Instead, the Ukrainian state has decided – like the French National Government – to fight to the death. To Bismarck’s demands for Alace-Lorraine, the French simply said “there can be no reply but Guerre a Outrance” – war to the utmost. Putin’s cabinet war – limited war for limited aims – exploded into a national war.

Unlike Bismarck, however, Putin has opted to see Ukraine’s raise. My suggestion – and it is only that – is that Putin’s dual decisions in the autumn of last year to announce a mobilization and to annex the disputed Ukrainian territories amounted to a tacit agreement to Ukraine’s Volkskrieg.

In the debate between Moltke and Bismarck, Putin has chosen to follow Moltke’s lead, and wage the war of extermination. Not – and again we stress this – a war of genocide, but a war which will destroy Ukraine as a strategically potent entity. Already the seeds are sown and the fruit begins to bud – a Ukrainian democide, achieved through battlefield attrition and the mass exodus of prime age civilians, an economy in shambles and a state that is cannibalizing itself as it reaches the limits of its resources.

There is a model for this – ironically, Germany itself. After the Second World War, it was decided that Germany – now held to account for two terrible conflagrations – could simply not be allowed to persist as a geopolitical entity. In 1945, after Hitler shot himself, the allies did not demand the spoils of a Cabinet War. There was no minor annexation here, no redrawn border there. Instead, Germany was annihilated. Her lands were divided, her self-governance was abolished. Her people lingered on in a stygian exhaustion, their political form and life now a plaything of the victor – precisely what Moltke wanted to do to France.

Putin is not going to leave a geostrategically intact Ukraine which will seek to retake the Donbas and exact revenge, or become a potent forward base for NATO. Instead, he will transform Ukraine into a Trashcanistan that can never wage a war of revanchism.

Clausewitz warned us.

This is why studying history, even as an amateur hobbyist, is invaluable. The ability to recognize the patterns that play repeatedly play out over time will often provide the intelligent, but informed amateur a better basis for understanding and anticipating events than the professionals and political decision makers.

It’s educational to note that while the professionals and politicians never understood the significance of the Special Military Operation designation, many of the armchair military historians did.

DISCUSS ON SG

Copyright is Corporate Welfare

You won’t often hear a publisher or an author speak out against the manufactured government-monopoly granted legal right that is “copyright”. And I’m not doing so because there are some books by deceased authors that we would definitely publish if their copyright was expired, or because I believe that the extended copyright of life+70 years is both immoral and absurd even though I do. In most cases, we have absolutely no problem obtaining the necessary rights from the copyright holders.

What I’m addressing here instead is the reality of the situation that surrounds the issue, because nearly everyone who opines about it is doing so in complete ignorance and on the basis of some wildly false assumptions.

First and foremost, the idea that no one will write books if they are not “protected” by copyright that “gives them the opportunity” to sell and profit from them is absolutely and utterly false. It is such a ridiculously stupid statement that anyone who argues this should never, ever, express their opinion on anything ever again, because they are not only literally retarded, they are also historical null sets. I will never regard anyone who presents this argument as a cognitive adult, because it requires a complete absence of both thought and relevant information.

Copyright was invented in The British Statute of Anne 1710, full title “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned”. Previous “copyrights” were simple royal monopolies granted on an individual basis, which should make plain the true foundation of the so-called “moral right”. Regardless, the fact is that all of the pre-1710 classics were written sans copyright, thereby exploding the ahistorical notion of copyright causality.

But one doesn’t need to know anything about history to realize that economic factors do not drive the impulse for human creativity. Consider the current numbers reported by the book publishing industry.

  • 787,700,000: Total US print editions sold in 2022
  • 526,000,000: Total US ebook editions sold in 2022
  • $22,600,000,000: Total US print revenue in 2022
  • $2,040,000,000: Total US ebook revenue in 2022
  • $8,900,000,000: Big 4 publisher revenue in 2022 (Penguin Random House, Hachette, Harper Collins, Macmillan)
  • 4,000,000: The number of new books published in 2022.
  • 2,300,000: The number of self-published books published in 2022
  • 600,000: The number of self-published books published in 2014
  • 80: The percent of total book distribution controlled by Amazon.
  • The average book sells 200 copies in its first year and 1,000 over its lifetime on Amazon

In other words, each print edition produced an average $28.69 in revenue while each ebook produced an average $3.88 in revenue. So the average book produces $27,182.80 lifetime revenue, with at most $17,668.82 going to the average self-published author and $997.30 to the average mainstream published author. Obviously, since Colleen Hoover sold more than 4,730,000 books in 2022, the median book lifetime revenue is considerably lower, but the averages are sufficiently informative to make it clear that absolutely no one is writing books in order to make less than $20,000 over the entire sales lifetime of the book.

Still less is copyright required to defend the interests of any heirs to that massive average windfall.

The fact is that copyright is nothing more than corporate welfare that primarily benefits five companies in the publishing industry and is defended by a very small number of corporate-favored authors who are the chosen beneficiaries of those five companies. Copyright is neither a moral right nor a property right, it is actually a violation of the economic rights of hundreds of millions of people for the benefit of a very, very small number of individuals connected to an insignificant number of corporations.

As for me, I would write even if absolutely no one ever read my books. I have written and published 27,435 blog posts and more than 500 opinion columns without ever getting paid for a single one of them. And not only am I very, very far from alone in that regard, I can count on one hand the number of writers I know who will not write if they don’t get paid for it.

DISCUSS ON SG

An Army of Gammas

The US Army’s strange recruiting tactics make a lot more sense once you realize it probably isn’t mobilizing for a war with a near-peer military like China or Russia, but rather, in preparation for the large-scale violent suppression of civilians:

Do you remember when the testosterone-driven “Top Gun” was the ultimate recruitment tool for the US Navy? It’s easy to see why—the movie was packed with adrenaline, rugged men, beautiful women, and plenty of what’s now termed “toxic masculinity.” Contrast that with today’s military, which has totally shifted focus. Instead of seeking out traditionally masculine men, their recruitment now heavily includes the LGBTQ community and men who wear pantyhose. This change might be why their recruitment numbers are in the toilet.

The United States military’s newest recruitment tactic is taking a really bizarre turn. Gone are the days of scouting for robust young men at gyms or high school football practices. Now, they’re adopting a different strategy: dressing up as anime characters and visiting “conventions” across the nation.

The Bolsheviks didn’t unleash an elite and well-disciplined military against the kulaks of the Ukraine. To the contrary, they unleashed a horde of coked-up gammas to steal, slaughter, and suppress the population, if the accounts of the Holodomor are even remotely accurate.

So, either the US Army has no idea what sort of young men it is going to attract by shifting its focus toward recruiting sexual deviants and “socially-awkward weirdos” or it is preparing for a very different sort of war than most people anticipate it fighting.

DISCUSS ON SG

Happy Thanksgiving

Proclamation 533—Thanksgiving Day, 1904

A Proclamation

It has pleased Almighty God to bring the American people in safety and honor through another year, and, in accordance with the long unbroken custom handed down to us by our forefathers, the time has come when a special day shall be set apart in which to thank Him who holds all nations in the hollow of His hand for the mercies thus vouchsafed to us. During the century and a quarter of our national life we as a people have been blessed beyond all others, and for this we owe humble and heartfelt thanks to the Author of all blessings. The year that has closed has been one of peace within our own borders as well as between us and all other nations. The harvests have been abundant, and those who work, whether with hand or brain, are prospering greatly. Reward has waited upon honest effort. We have been enabled to do our duty to ourselves and to others. Never has there been a time when religious and charitable effort has been more evident. Much has been given to us and much will be expected from us. We speak of what has been done by this nation in no spirit of boastfulness or vainglory, but with full and reverent realization that our strength is as nothing unless we are helped from above. Hitherto we have been given the heart and the strength to do the tasks allotted to us as they severally arose. We are thankful for all that has been done for us in the past, and we pray that in the future we may be strengthened in the unending struggle to do our duty fearlessly and honestly, with charity and goodwill, with respect for ourselves and with love toward our fellow-men. In this great republic the effort to combine national strength with personal freedom is being tried on a scale more gigantic than ever before in the world’s history. Our success will mean much not only for ourselves, but for the future of all mankind; and every man or woman in our land should feel the grave responsibility resting upon him or her, for in the last analysis this success must depend upon the high average of our individual citizenship, upon the way in which each of us does his duty by himself and his neighbor.

Now, Therefore, I, Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States, do hereby appoint and set apart Thursday, the twenty-fourth of this November, to be observed as a day of festival and thanksgiving by all the people of the United States at home or abroad, and do recommend that on that day they cease from their ordinary occupations and gather in their several places of worship or in their homes, devoutly to give thanks unto Almighty God for the benefits he has conferred upon us as individuals and as a nation, and to beseech Him that in the future His Divine favor may be continued to us.

November 01, 1904

President Theodore Roosevelt

DISCUSS ON SG

The Invasion of Britain

The Conservative Party has completely failed to conserve Great Britain.

Net migration could hit 700,000 in new figures this week, the Mail understands, opening a new front for attacks on Rishi Sunak by the Tory Right. Internal Home Office forecasts suggest the official net migration estimate – to be published on Thursday – will rise to a record level. The figure for the year to June is expected to top 700,000, beating the high of 606,000 for 2022, sources said.

To put these numbers into perspective, consider that the successful German invasion of Poland in 1939 was accomplished with 1,250,000 soldiers, five percent less than the number of those who have invaded Great Britain in the last two years alone.

But hey, at least they’re not speaking German, right?

What those with no grasp of history fail to understand is that mass immigration is worse for a nation than a military invasion. Considerably worse. Because, as we have already witnessed from Afghanistan to Iraq, soldiers go home when the military occupation is over.

Immigrants don’t. Just ask the Palestinians how mass immigration has affected them. Or the Native Americans. This is why, as historian Martin van Creveld has concluded, immigration is war.

UPDATE: Further to Peter Turchin’s observations that the voting electorate has absolutely no voice in a modern democracy, an SG reader points out the following:

It must be noted that these record levels of immigration have occurred under a Conservative government elected on a manifesto commitment to massively reduce immigration.

DISCUSS ON SG

Ideology is Rhetoric

I wouldn’t get too excited about the election of Javier Milei in Argentina. If there is one thing that we have learned from more than 100 years of democracy in America and elsewhere, it is that ideology is usually an irrelevant mask for the true objectives of those the elected politician serves.

In END TIMES, Peter Turchin cites compelling and reasonably comprehensive data analysis that proves the democratic will of the people in the United States has absolutely no influence on the policies put into place by their elected leaders, by means of a large-scale comparison of their policy preferences with the resulting policies put into place by their government.

The political scientist Martin Gilens, aided by a small army of research assistants, gathered a large data set—nearly two thousand policy issues between 1981 and 2002. Each case matched a proposed policy change to a national opinion survey asking a favor/oppose question about the initiative. The raw survey data provided information that enabled Gilens to separate the preferences of the poor (in the lowest decile of the income distribution) and the typical (the median of the distribution) from the affluent (the top 10 percent).

Statistical analysis of this remarkable data set showed that the preferences of the poor had no effect on policy changes. This is not entirely unexpected. What is surprising is that there was no—zilch, nada—effect of the average voter. The main effect on the direction of change was due to the policy preferences of the affluent. There was also an additional effect of interest groups, the most influential ones being business-oriented lobbies. Once you include in the statistical model the preferences of the top 10 percent and the interest groups, the effect of the commoners is statistically indistinguishable from zero.

Peter Turchin, END TIMES: Elites, Counterelites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, 2023

In a highly relevant essay, the Bronze Age Pervert explains why “economic populists” always end up betraying the nation they are nominally supposed to represent, regardless of whether they are considered “right-wing” or “left-wing”. This is why ideology is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter very much if you elect Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Tony Blair, Boris Johnson, or the Irish Republican Army, as their collective answer to everything is always: open the doors wider, bring in more immigrants, flood the nation!

It is also why China, and to a lesser extent, Russia, are very good bets to defeat the denationalized remnants of the adulterated nations of the West. In both great powers, the nation always comes before ideology. Stalin transmuted the international socialist revolution into national communism, while in China nationalism is built right into the ideology, as even socialism is required to have “Chinese characteristics”.

Consider for example that the doors of Argentina have been busted wide open to mass migration. This has been done despite the economic populist and nationalist language that Bannonites invoke in America and that Peronists have used even more aggressively in Argentina. I find it fascinating that all left-populist and economic populist platform nations or regions have this same result by the way. Ireland did, so does Basque Country in Spain — ETA being the spirit of that region and along with the Kurdish PKK one of the old and dependable factions of the international “nationalist left.” But all are flooded with migrants. To look into the reasons why I will again leave for another time but I suspect that, although when out of power such parties insinuate that migrants are being let in for “cheap labor” as a conspiracy by Capital or devious capitalists who plan to build an orbital station like in Elysium movie; and so they promise — maybe genuinely — the lower middle and middle classes that they will stop this migration and improve the labor market, wages, and their economic condition. But then once in power, left-populist parties discover that the migrants were never being brought in by capitalists for Machiavellian reasons; that at most, the capitalists were being bought off, and not all the capitalists but only some industries, who were allowed to profit and who therefore complied… although it’s unclear their willingness to comply or not would have been at all relevant. That the migrants were in fact being brought in primarily as political clients and political tools for the left and by those who opposed “the rich” — a shifting definition that often comes to include much of the middle class as well. And so the logic of this is irresistible to “economic populist” parties once in power for some time, regardless of their initial rhetoric about the “pauperization of the proletariat finally coming true through the vehicle of mass migration.” If your position is “the poor and conservative many against the decadent and predatory Elite and rich,” why wouldn’t you come to see millions of foreign poor “decent family people” as your allies? Economic populists, even when they have open nationalist and ethnic rhetoric in their beginnings, will always abandon this in favor of importing new clients, and it is rational for them to do so. In many cases they don’t in fact have specifically racial, or national or ethnic-cultural language even by the way: many rightists are dumbly misled when a leftist starts to inveigh against “globalism,” the “IMF,” “international Anglo-Liberalism,” “the transnational elites,” and many such things, into thinking that such a person must surely want to preserve the demographic and cultural characteristics of a particular country or region. But that’s almost never the case: importing millions of Paraguayans, Peruvians, Bolivians in Argentina, or migrants in Basque Country or Ireland may actually come to be seen as “yes we are importing good family people who will stand with us in native solidarity against globalism, Capital, and Neoliberal atomization.” And that is in fact what happened.

The Populist Moment Never Happened

The point is that if Ben Shapiro is publicly celebrating the election of a political leader who is an immigrant Catholic apostate, the chances that the new president-elect has any intention of governing the Argentine nation to its actual benefit are not very favorable, no matter what ideology he purports to espouse.

DISCUSS ON SG

Go Ahead, Make Your List

Michael Rapaport clearly doesn’t understand that the rest of the world increasingly doesn’t want money or investment or anything else from him and his friends when he threatens everyone who will not publicly support the idea that “self-defense” gives Israel a right to commit ethnic cleansing in Palestine.

A lot of conversations about my Jewish friends about the silence, the disappointment, the disappearing acts, the Doug Henning, the David Blaine shit, just disappear – poof! – in the air. A lot of people have disappeared. I’m telling you right now, we are making a list, we are checking it twice. And we already know who’s been naughty or nice. See that pun? Do you see that pun? I’m talking about the Jewish people. But I’m also talking Christmas carols.

We will not forget. We’re not suckers. So when you come around asking for this, that, and the third, come around asking for money, investments, and all that stuff, I promise you, I promise you, it’s being discussed. We’re paying attention to who’s being anti-Jewish, anti-semitic, anti-Israel… or not saying anything at all. I promise you.

I’m an enigma. A lot of Jewish people seem nice, we seem like suckers, we seem like you could kind of convince us… Trust me. Don’t come around in six months, eight months, two years. We’re remembering. We’re paying attention.

It’s always educational to observe when the mask slips. And I expect that a lot of other people are remembering, paying attention, and making lists too. A lot.

It might be helpful to recall that historically, those who have prospered most during an age of low polarization are very seldom those who do well during the subsequent age of discord. In fact, as per Peter Turchin, the ages of discord are usually dominated by disaffected and disenfranchised elites with the mass weight of the unjustly immiserated common people behind them, to the detriment of the previous elite that held a disproportionate amount of a society’s wealth and influence prior to its self-delegitimization.

We are presently in what Turchin calls a precrisis period. The historical patterns are observably playing out again. Which is something that the more perspicacious members of Mr. Rapaport’s list-making elite are finally beginning to recognize to their observable dismay:

Israel appears to have heavily banked on being able to use its various social control technologies—which mostly consists of its various NGOs and global ‘anti-hate groups’ like the ADL—to dictate the narrative around this genocide.

But they failed miserably.

Israel did not appear to have a good bead on the pulse of the global awakening. They were sclerotically stuck just a few years behind the times, still thinking this was the late 2010s with the peak of Big Tech’s sprawling domination of our minds, and the omnipotent Leftist Narrative seizure.

Times have changed, things are unwinding, Israel is losing control.

Now, I think it’s too soon to express any opinion at all on Israel’s military actions in Gaza, much less to describe it as a genocide. On the basis of the limited information available, the IDF’s tactics actually appear to be somewhat on the cautious and ineffective side, especially when compared with the successful Russian tactics used at Mariupol, Bahkmut and now Avdiivka. But there are no shortage of elements within both Israel and the diaspora that are openly calling for either ethnic cleansing or genocide – do recall these are not synonyms, but two different, albeit tangentially-related concepts – and therefore rhetorical fair game for the pro-Palestinian side.

DISCUSS ON SG

A Gatekeeper in Action

Tim Pool does NOT want to let his guest talk about the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty or its potential implications for the current US Navy presence in the Eastern Mediterranean.

GUEST: I’m concerned with having American aircraft carriers over there, like what I keep being told about the USS Liberty, that’s something with the Israeli government-

TIM POOL: You should, you should be careful about that one!

SIDEKICK: Allegedly, the Israeli Air Force, jet fighter aircraft, I mean, they did end up paying out the American government.

GUEST: So I’m concerned, like false flag operation, like a missile comes out of Gaza and hits one of our aircraft carriers, but it was actually an Israeli missile. I don’t want, we should get out of there, it doesn’t-

TIM POOL: Let me stop you there. It doesn’t matter where the missile comes from. If a missile comes out of the Middle East in any capacity and hits a US target, everyone will claim it was exactly what they want it
to be, exactly. The US military will say Iran did it, the pro-Palestinians will say Israel did it, the pro-Israel will say Hamas did it.

GUEST: Yeah, if it comes out of a foreign country other than Israel, then it’ll be hard to deny.

TIM POOL: It doesn’t matter where it comes from! The US will say Iran did it.

GUEST: Right, well, if it comes out of Tel Aviv it’s going to be hard to sell that.

TIM POOL: But prove it came out of Tel Aviv! How do you know? You read the news! You are going to get American intelligence agencies going to news organizations, saying “tell them it came out of Iran”!

GUEST: I don’t think the Americans want their carrier to be hit as a false flag. Maybe the USS Liberty thing was an accident.

SIDEKICK: That’s the controversy over it. The Israeli government claims it was an accident, but some survivors say that they don’t think it was an accident, so was it a false flag? That’s why people talk about it.

GUEST: Did America get involved in the 1967 war after that?

SIDEKICK: No, because it ended up it ended up being really short but-

TIM POOL: We are, we’re going to go to super chats so if you haven’t already would you kindly smash that Like button, and subscribe to this channel.

I’m not saying Tim Pool is wrong, although I think there is zero chance that any Israeli missiles will be launched at any American ships; the fact that the US media still avoids the subject of the USS Liberty like vampires avoiding holy water tends to indicate that the Israelis don’t have any desire to risk repeating that sort of debacle, not when the US Navy is perfectly capable of sinking its own ships without any help from friend, foe, or greatest ally. And, depending upon the captain, possibly without even intentionally trying to do so.

Also, there are no shortage of influential neocons in the US government and media who want war with Iran far worse than the Israelis do. They are both less attached to reality and more distanced from the potential consequences. Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld once said, in an ironic turn of phrase, that US neocons are willing to fight to the very last Israeli.

What is most interesting about the interview, however, is the way in which Pool tells the guest to “be careful” after he brings up the incident, and then immediately attempts to change the subject, twice. It would be very interesting to ask Mr. Pool why he believes one has to “be careful” about a minor military engagement that took place 56 years ago and is such a matter of public record that it has its own Wikipedia page.

This is what media gatekeeping looks like in action. It’s the avoidance of certain topics and the steering of the public discourse away from those topics when they are, for some reason, accidentally brought up.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Vanishing Letter

Osama bin Laden wanted to speak directly to the American people. An undated letter promising endless war is one of hundreds of documents collected in the May 2, 2011 raid on his compound in Pakistan that was released Wednesday. The full text is below.

However, the full text of the letter was not actually provided by Foreign Policy. Two lines, highlighted below in bold italics, were omitted with the following note.

(TN: Two lines of poetry that say the Mujahidin will not stop fighting until the United States leaves their land.)

Even more intriguing, The Guardian just disappeared the page on which the letter had been published for the last 21 years.

Removed: document
Wed 15 Nov 2023 21.19 CET
This page previously displayed a document containing, in translation, the full text of Osama bin Laden’s “letter to the American people”, as reported in the Observer on Sunday 24 November 2002. The document, which was published here on the same day, was removed on 15 November 2023.

In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful.

From Usama Bin Muhammad Bin Ladin to the American people,

I speak to you about the subject of the ongoing war between you and us. Even though the consensus of your wise thinkers and others is that your time (TN: of defeat) will come, compassion for the women and children who are being unjustly killed, wounded, and displaced in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan motivates me to speak to you.

First of all, I would like to say that your war with us is the longest war in your history and the most expensive for you financially. As for us, we see it as being only halfway finished. If you were to ask your wise thinkers, they would tell you that there is no way to win it because the indications are
against it. How will you win a war whose leaders are pessimistic and whose soldiers are committing suicide? If fear enters the hearts of men, winning the war becomes impossible. How will you
win a war whose cost is like a hurricane blowing violently at your economy and weakening your dollar?

The Bush administration got you into these wars on the premise that they were vital to your security. He promised that it would be a quick war, won within six days or six weeks; however, six years have passed, and they are still promising you victory and not achieving it. Then Obama came and delayed the withdrawal that he had promised you by 16 more months. He promised you victory in Afghanistan and set a date for withdrawal from there. Six months later, Petraeus came to you once again with the number six, requesting that the withdrawal be delayed six months beyond the date that had been set. All the while you continue to bleed in Iraq and Afghanistan. You are wading into a war with no end in sight on the horizon and which has no connection to your security, which was confirmed by the operation of ‘Umar al-Faruq, which was not launched from the battlefield and could have been launched from any place in the world.

As for us, jihad against the tyrants and the aggressors is a form of great worship in our religion. It is more precious to us than our fathers and sons. Thus, our jihad against you is worship, and your killing us is a testimony. Thanks to God, Almighty, we have been waging jihad for 30 years, against the Russians and
then against you. Not a single one of our men has committed suicide, whereas every 30 days 30 of your men commit suicide.

Continue the war if you will.

Palestine shall not be seen captive for we will try to break its shackles.
The United States shall pay for its arrogance with the blood of Christians and their funds.

Peace be upon those who follow right guidance.

Justice is the strongest army, and security is the best way of life, but it slipped out of your grasp the day you made the Jews victorious in occupying our land and killing our brothers in Palestine. The path to security is for you to lift your oppression from us.

There can’t be much doubt as to why Bin Ladin’s “Letter to the American People” is being disappeared, in light of the recent Hamas attacks, the Israeli invasion of Gaza, and the rush of US men and material to the Middle East. The neocons in the US and UK media are obviously attempting to prevent the pro-Palestinian side from presenting its perspective to the public, and more importantly, they are trying to hide the material link between the past US military defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan with the present US military presence in Syria, Israel, and the Eastern Mediterranean Sea.

I doubt it matters in the slightest. As even the ADL has reported, the youngest generation in the West is solidly against the Israeli position in the Gaza conflict, while only the Boomers generally support it. While the Millennials and Generation X are more balanced – or in the case of GenX, characteristically apathetic – neither of them are even remotely interested in fighting anyone in the Middle East for any reason.

But there can be little question that this is an all-hands-on-deck situation for the neocons, so it will be very informative to observe which public figures fall in line with the demands of the Narrative, and which ones are not being controlled.

UPDATE: The media is officially upset that its attempt to disappear the Bin Ladin letter has failed:

A vile letter written by the warlord behind the 9/11 atrocities has gone viral on TikTok with users saying that reading it has led to them ‘understanding’ as to why the horrific attacks were carried out in 2001. The letter began to gain traction online after UK newspaper The Guardian linked to a 2002 article which translated it in full in an article about the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. It was subsequently deleted with the outlet telling DailyMail.com in a statement that it was removed because was being shared ‘without its original context.’

They’re not even attempting to pretend to be journalists anymore. The letter is “vile”? The attacks were “horrific”? Furthermore, The Guardian linked to the article in 2002, so the letter began to gain traction 21 years later, which is indeed “after” the link, but is a very misleading way to describe what happened and why people are paying attention to the vanished letter.

Remember, facts provided without approved context consistent with the Narrative is misinformation.

DISCUSS ON SG

Interview with John Julius Norwich

This is an automated transcription of an interview with the late English popular historian, John Julius Cooper, 2nd Viscount Norwich, CVO, recorded in 2011.

VOX DAY: I’m delighted to be able to tell you today that my guest is one of my favourite historians, John Julius Norwich. He’s the author of more than 20 books including A History of Venice, Byzantium: The Decline and Fall, Shakespeare’s Kings, as well as his recently published memoirs entitled Trying to Please. Lord Norwich, welcome to the podcast. Western culture has always been obsessed with the Western Roman Empire, and paid relatively little attention to the Eastern Roman Empire, so to what do you attribute this general lack of attention or interest in the Byzantines versus the ancient Greeks and Romans?

JOHN JULIUS NORWICH: I think largely that… I mean, I didn’t. I had the sort of ordinary interest in the Greeks and Romans, because that’s what you have. If you go to school in England, you know, you go to public school education, you learn a lot about the Greeks and the Romans. But the interesting thing in England is that you never, never get any education at all about the Eastern Roman Empire, about Byzantium. It’s a conspiracy of silence, and it has been for the last 200 years. And I fell in love with the Byzantine Empire really, largely because of my friend, Patrick Leigh Fermor, who died last week, who was the greatest archeologist and a scholar of it, and who I went on a cruise around Eastern Mediterranean with. And also when, in 1955, when I joined the Foreign Service, My first post was Belgrade, in Serbia, or Yugoslavia as it was in those days, and I was just sort of swept up in the whole. That seemed to me the sort of the whole mystery and the magic of the Orthodox Church and the Eastern Roman Empire and Byzantium and all that. I suppose I’ve been swept up in it ever since.

VD: To what do you attribute the fact that it was a mystery to you? I mean, it’s certainly a mystery to Americans, we don’t spend any time learning about it either. Why is there such ignorance of it?

JJN: Why is there a conspiracy of silence? Precisely. I wish I knew. I went through what I’m sure would have been considered a very good English public school education at Eton. And I hardly knew what Byzantium was. I’m not sure that I knew whether it was Christian or Muslim. I’m not sure whether I don’t think I knew anything about it at all. And because nobody ever mentioned it all throughout my schooling. And I think I was not alone in this. I mean, people just didn’t. It was never taken seriously by English educationists.

VD: Constantine’s decision to move his capital from Rome to Byzantium was one of the more monumental decisions in history.

JJN: Yes, it tends to distract the reader, as if Obama had suddenly decided to move the US Capitol from Washington, DC to Mexico City.

VD: What was behind Constantine’s decision to establish a new capital? And why did the eastern half of the Empire survive so much longer than the Western one did?

JJN: Well, the capital had really, to all intents and purposes already left Rome. I mean, what happened already in this, in the second century? The second century AD, the whole focus of political and cultural activity, is moving to the east, is moving east from Rome, to the eastern Mediterranean. I mean, if you read the Acts of the Apostles, or if, if you read any of that stuff, I mean, it is it is in Asia Minor on the eastern Mediterranean, that everything is happening. Rome has become a backwater, it’s too far away. By this time. The Empire’s principal enemy is Persia, Rome to Persia. I mean, it’s, I don’t know, three or four months probably travel. And it was no it was absolutely necessary to move the capitol to where all the action was. Diocletian did it first. I mean, he, he decided to divide the imprint of the empire into four. And each one had a what he called a Tetrarch. But all four of them were in the east. None of them are in Rome, even then. So when Constantine decided in 332, to move to move the Capitol, it wasn’t a terribly new or revolutionary idea at all. I mean, he was really doing what had already happened. He was just choosing a new a new place. You know, I mean, Nicomedia. Antioquia was three or four other places, which had been tried out and they were very successful. So he just found this new place. which was superbly in a superb defensive position, and said, right, this is it, this is going to be in future capital. Apart from that we’re exactly the same Empire we’ve always been, where we’re Romans whether our empire is the empire of Adios, Nero and Hadrian and Trajan and all that lot. There’s no change, except that we’ve moved to a new capital.

VD: Why did the eastern half of the Empire survive so much longer than the Western one did?

JJN: Well, I mean, it’s survived. Very, very surprisingly, it remained. Except for 50 years in the 13th century, it remained undefeated, I mean, the Roman Empire continued under the new capital in Constantinople, and got incredibly powerful and is by far the richest, by far the most powerful state in the in the civilised world. Until two terrible things happen. One was the the surge of checks, the first wave of tax arrived, and defeated the Byzantine army. This was intense. And more or less flooded all over the whole of Asia Minor, which was where Byzantium got most of its food, and nearly all its manpower. And, and then, and then, that was the that was the first great disaster from which from which you’ve never recovered. And the second great disaster, of course, was the Fourth Crusade when the the Christian armies, who should have done everything they could to protect and defend and strengthen this last great outpost of Christianity in the east, turned against it and destroyed it, and left it a poor, pale shred of what it had been before, to the point where, although it lasted another 250 years, God knows how it did it. It really had completely lost its importance.

Continue reading “Interview with John Julius Norwich”