Tag: history

The Collapsing Tripod

The Atlantic is not exactly a publication in which I have any trust whatsoever. But it is informative to note that even some of the most-hallowed mainstream media institutions are beginning to attempt to come to grips with the ineluctable fact that the economic order is on the verge of collapsing because the foundational principles upon which it rests have proven to be false.

The Anglo-American system of politics and economics, like any system, rests on certain principles and beliefs. But rather than acting as if these are the best principles, or the ones their societies prefer, Britons and Americans often act as if these were the only possible principles and no one, except in error, could choose any others. Political economics becomes an essentially religious question, subject to the standard drawback of any religion—the failure to understand why people outside the faith might act as they do.

To make this more specific: Today’s Anglo-American world view rests on the shoulders of three men. One is Isaac Newton, the father of modern science. One is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the father of liberal political theory. (If we want to keep this purely Anglo-American, John Locke can serve in his place.) And one is Adam Smith, the father of laissez-faire economics. From these founding titans come the principles by which advanced society, in the Anglo-American view, is supposed to work. A society is supposed to understand the laws of nature as Newton outlined them. It is supposed to recognize the paramount dignity of the individual, thanks to Rousseau, Locke, and their followers. And it is supposed to recognize that the most prosperous future for the greatest number of people comes from the free workings of the market. So Adam Smith taught, with axioms that were enriched by David Ricardo, Alfred Marshall, and the other giants of neoclassical economics.

The most important thing about this summary is the moral equivalence of the various principles. Isaac Newton worked in the realm of fundamental science. Without saying so explicitly, today’s British and American economists act as if the economic principles they follow had a similar hard, provable, undebatable basis. If you don’t believe in the laws of physics—actions create reactions, the universe tends toward greater entropy—you are by definition irrational. And so with economics. If you don’t accept the views derived from Adam Smith—that free competition is ultimately best for all participants, that protection and interference are inherently wrong—then you are a flat-earther.

Outside the United States and Britain the matter looks quite different. About science there is no dispute. “Western” physics is the physics of the world. About politics there is more debate: with the rise of Asian economies some Asian political leaders, notably Lee Kuan Yew, of Singapore, and several cautious figures in Japan, have in effect been saying that Rousseau’s political philosophy is not necessarily the world’s philosophy. Societies may work best, Lee and others have said, if they pay less attention to the individual and more to the welfare of the group.

But the difference is largest when it comes to economics. In the non-Anglophone world Adam Smith is merely one of several theorists who had important ideas about organizing economies. In most of East Asia and continental Europe the study of economics is less theoretical than in England and America (which is why English-speakers monopolize Nobel Prizes) and more geared toward solving business problems.

First, Rousseau was always an absurd and nonsensical joke. Second, Steve Keen has mathematically proven the fundamental incorrectness of Adam Smith due to the unreliable nature of the collective demand curve. Third, List is not the solution to Smith, and for the same reason.

The hardest thing for even many of the people on the so-called ideological Right to accept – so-called because Left-Right ideology is incoherent, irrelevant, and entirely outmoded – is that the Enlightenment has proven to be an intellectual and philosophical dead end. Reason, at least in its human embodiment, has turned out to be irrational; all of the models and creeds and policies that rely upon the basic concept of human rationality have not only failed, but have been conclusively proven to be false.

It was simply inertia from Christendom that allowed the Enlightenment to pass itself off as progress. But the systematic eradication of Christianity from intellectual, professional, and public life combined with the adulteration of the European nations is finally overcoming that centuries-old inertia, to disastrous effect.

DISCUSS ON SG

Some Thoughts on Hitler

In the aftermath of having been publicly accused of harboring “sympathies for Hitler” by certain individuals in the Swiss media on the basis of a single accurate reference to National Socialism, I’ve been cataloguing the public record of my statements in my books, columns and blog posts concerning the late leader of Germany over the last 21 years on the advice of the lawyers. As it happens, I went into some detail on the subject in the first part of Chapter XII of THE IRRATIONAL ATHEIST, published by BenBella Books in 2008.

HITLER, THE INQUISITION, THE CRUSADES AND HUMAN SACRIFICE

“Now, you will stay in the Comfy Chair until lunch time, with only a cup of coffee at eleven.”

– Cardinal Ximinez

It would be impossible to write a book of this sort without addressing the three subjects that inevitably come up when atheists are contending with Christians. Just as atheists anticipate the need to answer for Stalin and Mao, Christians are expected to answer for the Inquisition and the Crusades. And both sides recognize the need to deal with the Hitler Question. Like Einstein,(1) the Führer made enough ambiguous statements to leave the matter up for discussion, unlike Einstein,(2) no one is eager to claim Hitler and his National Socialists as members of their intellectual camp.

The Unholy Trinity have no choice but to concern themselves with the matter, of course, and they do so largely in the manner that one has come to expect from them.(3) Harris wastes eight pages attempting to tar the Catholic Church and Pope Pius XII with guilt by insufficient opposition,(4) then on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, declares that Auschwitz was a logical and inevitable consequence of the Christian faith.(5) Hitchens also complains about the Catholic Church and relates a few irrelevant anecdotes about Italian Fascists and Irish Blue Shirts, but then shows genuine insight when he notes that the Hitler regime shows us “with terrible clarity what can happen when men usurp the role of gods.”

Dawkins, on the other hand, demonstrates that he is perfectly capable of presenting a reasonable case when he chooses to do so and lays out some reasonable evidence for the reader to reach his own conclusion on the matter. He avoids making the common case for Hitler’s religious faith on the basis of his abused childhood,(6) wisely, considering that one could apply precisely the same argument to Christopher Hitchens and Dawkins himself. Instead, after quoting Hitler’s public statements which state outright that he is a Christian, and a very devout one at that, Dawkins quotes private statements which reveal a deep hatred for Christianity surpassing that possessed by even the most militant New Atheist.

“It is possible that Hitler had by 1941 experienced some kind of deconversion or disillusionment with Christianity. Or is the resolution of the contradictions simply that he was an opportunistic liar whose words cannot be trusted, in either direction?”(7)

It is worth noting that most of the statements which indicate Hitler’s Christian faith were made in public, prior to 1934, when he was still a politician running for elected office. Given his subsequent actions once he had secured political power, there is no reason to believe that Hitler meant them any more sincerely than George W. Bush intended to keep his promise to pursue a “more humble foreign policy” three years before he launched an invasion to bring democracy and freedom to the Middle East. But Hitler was no atheist, neither was he agnostic, the evidence tends to suggest that he was a pagan(8) who was skeptical, but open to the possibility of acquiring temporal power through supernatural means.

The Thule Society which founded the German Workers Party that was the predecessor of the Nazi Party was an esoteric society connected with the occultist Madam Blavatsky and the Theosophists. Hitler was the 55th member of the DAP, which was renamed the National Socialist German Workers Party, or NASDAP, only four months after he joined on October 19, 1919. While the Nazis suppressed their early connection with the Thule Society and even arrested its founder, Rudolf von Sebottendorff, when he published a book about the relationship between Hitler and the society, the Nazi interest in esoteric matters, primarily on the part of Heinrich Himmler and the SS, is well known and has played a role in everything from Charles Stross’s excellent novel, The Atrocity Archives, to Wolfenstein 3D and the Indiana Jones movies.

It is not known to what extent Hitler shared Himmler’s enthusiasm for the supernatural, but it is reasonable to assume that if he was as skeptical about its existence as the New Atheists are today, he would not have allowed the Reichsführer-SS and founder of the Studiengesellschaft für Geistesurgeschichte, Deutsches Ahnenerbe(9) an annual budget of the modern equivalent of $5.6 million to spend on occult research, medical experiments and expeditions to Sweden, Syria, Iraq, Finland and Tibet.

And yet, if Dawkins is not quite able to definitively conclude that Adolf Hitler was not a Christian, Robert Wistrich, the professor of modern Jewish history at Hebrew University, has no such qualms.
In “Hitler and the Holocaust”, Wistrich writes:

“Indeed, the leading Nazis – Hitler, Himmler, Rosenberg, Goebbels, and Bormann – were all fanatically anti-Christian, though this was partly hidden from the German public…. The conviction that Judaism, Christianity and Bolshevism represented one single pathological phenomenon of decadence became a veritable leitmotif for Hitler around the time that the “Final Solution” had been conceived of as an operational plan.”(10)

But the most convincing proof that Hitler was neither an atheist nor a Christian can be seen in two documents that the various New Atheists and Wistrich were probably not aware of at the time they wrote their books. The first of these was prepared by the Office of Strategic Services in preparation for the Nuremburg trials in 1945. Released to the public in 2001, the report from the archives of of Gen. William J. Donovan, special assistant to the U.S. chief of counsel at the Tribunal, is a fascinating description of the Third Reich’s methodical plan to coopt, pervert and ultimately usurp the Catholic and Protestant churches of Germany. As an editor of the the Nuremberg Project for the Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion described it: “They wanted to eliminate the Jews altogether, but they were also looking to eliminate Christianity.”(11)

The first installment, entitled “The Nazi Master Plan; The Persecution of Christian Churches”, shows how the Nazis planned to supplant Christianity with a religion based on racial superiority. The report, prepared by the Office of Strategic Services – a forerunner of the CIA – says: “Important leaders of the National Socialist party would have liked… complete extirpation of Christianity and the substitution of a purely racial religion.”(12)

The second document is equally significant. It is the 30-point plan for a National Reich Church, drawn up by Alfred Rosenburg, the Nazi ideologist who was Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories and head of the Centre of National Socialist Ideological and Educational Research. Three of its more significant points are as follows:

  1. The National Reich Church is determined to exterminate irrevocably and by every means the strange and foreign Christian faiths imported into Germany in the ill-omened year 800.
  2. The National Reich Church demands immediate cessation of the publishing and dissemination of the Bible in Germany as well as the publication of Sunday papers, pamphlets, publications and books of a religious nature.
  3. The National Reich Church does not acknowledge forgiveness of sins. It represents the standpoint which it will always proclaim that a sin once committed will be ruthlessly punished by the honorable and indestructible laws of nature and punishment will follow during the sinner’s lifetime.

One need not be a theologian to recognize that whatever religion happens to lurk behind a church that does not recognize the forgiveness of sins and is determined to suppress the Bible, it is not Christianity.

Although the only logical conclusion is that Hitler was neither a Christian nor an atheist, there are still lessons that Christians and atheists can learn from his pagan totalitarianism. Christians must recognize that it is possible for their institutions to be infiltrated and utilized for evil purposes even as they religiously attend church and participate in the mainstream of society. Had more German Christians demonstrated the courage of the evangelical Confessing Church and openly opposed Hitler, as did the pastors who signed the 1934 Barman Declaration,(13) much tragedy might well have been averted. Despite the deception that was undeniably involved, Christians have no excuse for being blind to such things, not when they have been warned in the Bible to be on their guard against deceitful wolves in sheep’s clothing.

As for atheists, they must recognize that science is a deadly foundation on which to build future utopias, and it should make them more than a little uncomfortable to consider the striking similarities in the following three quotes, one from a Humanist, one from a New Atheist and the other from a leading Nazi.

  • “Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence; it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.“ – Bertrand Russell
  • “The dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advance of science. Religion will have to make more and more concessions. Gradually the myths crumble.” – Adolf Hitler
  • “Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important.” – Christopher Hitchens

CHAPTER 12 FOOTNOTES

  1. I concur with Richard Dawkins on this point, despite a few metaphorical statements about God. It is not reasonable to conclude that Albert Einstein was anything but an agnostic or atheist.
  2. What is unexpected, however, is how much the Nazi Martin Bormann’s description of a metaphorical God sounds almost exactly like Albert Einstein’s as described by Richard Dawkins.
  3. Given the non-polemical nature of his book, Daniel Dennett commendably sees no reason to mention the matter.
  4. Harris, The End of Faith, 104. Harris finds it extraordinary that no German Catholics were excommunicated, but then, other than Hitler, there were no former Catholics in the Nazi hierarchy. The most notable Catholic, former Reichkanzler Franz von Papen, was jailed after speaking out against Hitler after Kristallnacht and was acquitted at Nuremberg.
  5. How strange that it should happen only once in more than 2,000 years, and at the behest of a few fanatical anti-Christians, no less. I further note that the Buddhist Harris neglects to mention the fact that Professor Walter Wüst, who commanded the SS-Ahnenerbe under Himmler after February 1937, publicly declared that Hitler’s ideologies corresponded with those of the Gautama Buddha.
  6. I seem to recall someone informing us that a Catholic upbringing is even worse than sexual abuse for a child.
  7. Dawkins, The God Delusion, 276. Given that Hitler was not only a politician, but a stunningly effective one, the answer has to be yes.
  8. Hitler once made an interesting statement to Bormann about the foolishness of restoring Odin worship, which he refers to as “our old mythology”. As he goes on to talk about getting rid of Christianity, it’s apparent that his goal is to create a new and better Teutonic mythology compatible with science and philosophy.
  9. The Study Society for Primordial Intellectual Science, German Ancestral Heritage, usually known as the Ahnenerbe, was an SS department set up by Himmler to investigate the ancestral German heritage. It is this group which attempted to find the Holy Grail and other mystic treasures, as portrayed in the movies. The Atrocity Archives, by Charles Stross, are probably the most interesting fictional portrayal of this occultic bureaucracy; my own novella which briefly touches on the subject, “The Lesser Evil”, can be found in the short story collection entitled The Altar of Hate.
  10. Robert S. Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust (New York, 2001), 131-132
  11. Edward Colimore, “Papers Reveal Nazi Aim: End Christianity” The Philadelphia Inquirer, January 9, 2002.
  12. “Nazi Trial Documents Made Public”. BBC News, January 11, 2002. The entire OSS report can be downloaded in four PDF files from http://www.lawandreligion.com/nurinst1.shtml.
  13. “We reject the false doctrine that the Church could have permission to hand over the form of its message and of its order to whatever it itself might wish or to the vicissitudes of the prevailing ideological and political convictions of the day.” The Barmen Declaration, The Confessing Synod of the German Evangelical Church, 1934.

PS: If anyone can send me the transcripts of my debates with Andrew Anglin and Greg Johnson on the subject of National Socialism, that would be appreciated.

DISCUSS ON SG

Who Deceives Wins

Even relatively recent history is fake and gay. The great hero of the SAS was a complete fictional construct:

In 1942, a downtrodden Britain desperately needed a hero. The widespread respect – even grudgingly – enjoyed in Britain by charismatic General Erwin Rommel, the commander of Hitler’s Afrika Korps, was a source of particular frustration to Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

Rommel’s capture of the Libyan port of Tobruk that June, leading to the surrender of 34,000 men to his German-Italian troops, was one of the worst moments not just of the western desert campaign but of Britain’s entire war.

What was required, in Churchill’s mind, was a counter to the adulation of Rommel. A soldier who was not just Rommel’s match but who was his superior in guile and courage. A warrior of whom the British could be proud.

That September, newspapers carried a scoop: the tale of the ‘Phantom Major’, a military mastermind whose covert team of guerrilla soldiers was striking terror into the hearts of Rommel and his men.

The major in question was David Stirling, and his new elite fighting squad the Special Air Service, or SAS, would become one of the most celebrated units of the British Army with its fearless motto Who Dares Wins.

Stirling was described as ‘the newest terror of the desert’ who, ‘towering 6ft 4in, is as lithe as a panther, a former boxing champion, one of the finest horsemen in the Army’. He was fluent in German, capable of fooling his way through enemy checkpoints and was, they claimed, a veritable ‘Robin Hood in battledress’.

In the space of a year, Stirling had risen from a humble lieutenant to a major with a Distinguished Service Order – a truly startling ascent. For, in reality, David Stirling was a man of limited capacity with a troubling, error-strewn history.

He might have been the Phantom Major to the British tabloids but to his soldiers, Stirling was a liability who had repeatedly gambled with their lives in his pursuit of glory. His languor and fondness for drinking and gambling in the clubs of Cairo, meanwhile, had earned him the nickname ‘the Giant Sloth’.

Born to a wealthy aristocratic family whose ancestral home was Keir House in Perthshire, Stirling, the fourth of six siblings, had underwhelmed since childhood, overshadowed academically and in charm by his older brothers Bill and Peter. His mother Margaret Fraser was also a force of nature whose father, the 13th Lord Lovat, had been aide- de-camp to Queen Victoria.

When war broke out, Stirling joined the Scots Guards but struggled from the start. He lacked the discipline to knuckle down and submit to the drudgery of drilling. Meanwhile Bill, who had also trained with the Scots Guards, submitted proposals to the War Office to develop a guerrilla warfare training programme to prepare troops for special missions.

This was set up at the Commando Special Training Centre at Inverailort House in the remote north of Scotland, and among the first recruits – thanks to Bill’s intervention, and to the relief of the Scots Guards – was Stirling.

Bill quickly discovered what the Guards had known for several months: David Stirling was indolent and temperamental, a disruptive influence. Now it was Bill’s turn to look for a way to offload his wastrel sibling. The man who would, indirectly, prove his salvation was Winston Churchill.

Keep this little historical detail in mind if you’re ever tempted to fall for the grand heroics of the Navy SEALs or any other brave and daring special forces that are publicized for the benefit of the public. Remember, the Official Story is always false in at least some important detail.

DISCUSS ON SG

Feminism, Transgenderism, and the Devil

The present battle between feminazis and trannies is a red-on-red conflict, as both evil ideologies spring from precisely the same source:

Conceptually, people think of the Devil as masculine. He is the ultimate “bad guy”, double emphasis on the “bad” and the “guy”. Traditionally theologians have largely conceptualized the Devil as a man, or manlike figure, and denoted him with the masculine pronoun, ‘he’.[6] However, as Faxneld notes, not all have agreed with this summation. As the Devil is an angel, this means he does not conform to the gender norms that men and women are formed in. Christian theological tradition does not require that the Devil conforms to a particular sex, indeed it was recognized that demons could take the forms of any gender as they chose.

Anyone who has read the ancient Greek tales will be familiar with the way that the Greek deities could change gender at will, often using this to trick their victims and even at times the heroes of the tale. Minerva in Homer’s Odyssey is one example, but Odin was known to do the same thing, and many others. In fact, it was a consistent theme throughout the pagan pantheons to have gods transgressing all boundaries, including gender boundaries.

From a Christian perspective these beings were neither fake, nor gods. They were a combination of legends and people’s encounters with demonic beings. It is easy to understand why the early Church, and many in the Medieval Church, viewed Satan neither as male nor female, but as a boundary transgressing being, who took on the form that was useful in the moment.

In many medieval and early modern representations of the Devil he is shown to be an “hermaphrodite monster”. Demons were viewed as ontologically unstable creatures that crossed gender and species boundaries. “Gender-bending would then be another sign of the liminal and blasphemously category-defying nature of Lucifer and his demons (figures 2.2 and 2.3).” Faxneld shares with us some abominable examples of how the early modern artists visualized the Devil in figures 1 and 2.

As you can see, it was common for the Devil, and demons, to be visualized as inherently unstable beings that conformed not only to no gender boundaries, but no natural boundaries either. The devil is the ultimate boundary breaking entity, which is really a good description of evil itself. Evil intent consists in the desire and intention to transgress the boundaries laid out by God himself. Indeed, one of the words for sin in the Bible is transgression, which literally means to transgress the boundaries of what the Lord says is good. Evil inherently transgresses all of God’s good boundaries.

But not only was the Devil represented by such boundary transgressing beings, he was also conceptualized or represented as a woman, or a serpent-woman. For instance, in one Christian work “Livre pour l’enseignement de ses filles (‘Book for the Education of his Daughters’, 1371–1372), the author,

“…Geoffrey attempts to instil in his daughters the lesson that women should defer to fathers and husbands in anything but domestic matters and makes his point by retelling how Eve broke this rule when she conversed with the serpent, ‘whiche as the Hystorye sayth hadde a face ryght fayre lyke the face of a woman’.”

It may be strange for us to conceptualize a feminine Satan, because it is more common to view him as masculine, but this was a consistent image throughout Church history.

“…A more straightforwardly female Satan can be seen in the actually very common depictions of the snake in the Garden of Eden with a woman’s head on its serpentine body and sometimes also the breasts of a woman…Exactly when the notion of a female snake was established is difficult to say, but the earliest translation of the Bible into Latin rendered the word as serpens—feminine gender.”

Indeed, according to J. B. Trapp “it was the most frequent way of representing the Edenic serpent from the late twelfth century until the late sixteenth century, when the human features of the creature disappear and it becomes, once more, only reptilian.” This is interesting that the devil would be represented by feminine imagery, but again, note, the Devil is not a man nor a woman, Satan is a fallen spiritual being. The Devil is inherently in a different category. Even if you want to argue the Scriptures lean towards presenting him as male figure, note, the view that he transgressed all boundaries is inherent in his rebellion against God’s good boundaries and in his role as ‘The Evil One’.

The most famous image representing the Devil’s transgender nature is the Baphomet. Baphomet is a hermaphrodite figure, and one of the most recognized symbols of Satan in the last century or so. Baphomet was first visually conceptualized by French occultist Éliphas Lévi “in his book Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (‘Dogma and Ritual of the High Magic’, 1855) and elsewhere.”

Note, we are not seeking here to establish precisely how Scripture describes the gender of the Devil. The point is to establish that a lot of historical Christian theology viewed the Devil as a being that transgresses all boundaries, and early feminists were inspired by this and took this idea and ran with it. They turned this transgender being into a liberator of women.

Notice how evil always inverts. “The Light of the World” became “the Dark Ages”. The revival of satanic darkness became “the Enlightenment”. And the enslavement of women to sin and self-destruction became “Women’s Liberation”.

If you want to discern if something has satanic roots, look for the inversion. Once you spot it, you’ll scent the sulfur soon enough.

DISCUSS ON SG

The End of Globalization

The economic insanity of the post-Cold War era is rapidly coming to an end, as the global economy is dividing again into three parts, Clown World (USA-UK-EU-Israel), Sovereign World (China-Russia-Iran), and the unaligned countries.

Moscow expects increased economic cooperation with China as the West takes a more dictatorial stance, in global affairs, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warned on Monday. Russia intends to build relations with independent countries and will decide how to deal with the West if and when it comes to its senses, he added.

“Now that the West is taking the position of a dictator, our economic ties with China will grow even faster,” Lavrov told students at the Primakov School… If and when the West comes to its senses and wants to offer something in terms of resuming relations, Russia will “seriously consider whether we will need it or not,” the foreign minister told the high-schoolers.

Moscow isn’t just implementing a strategy of import substitution in response to anti-Russian sanctions, but “must stop in any way being dependent on the supply of anything from the West” and rely on its own capabilities and those countries that have “proven their reliability” and act independently, Lavrov explained.

The difference is that whereas the First World previously had the advantage because the Second World was subject to a dysfunctional economic ideology, it’s now Clown World that is subject to an insane ideology that permeates and weakens every single aspect of its societies. This means that the odds of success are heavily in favor of Sovereign World, a situation that is compounded by the pressure that Clown World is presently putting on the unaligned countries to support its insanity.

Those who think that the lessons of history support the probability of Clown World success are looking superficially at the nominal labels of the parties involved rather than the substance of the various parties and their relative capabilities. Consider this: whereas the populations and the industrial capacities was heavily stacked in favor of the Triple Alliance in WWI and the Allies in WWII, they are even more heavily stacked in favor of Sovereign World now.

And whereas Britain was once powerful enough to force Chinese submission in the First Opium War of 1839-1842 by itself, it no longer has the ability to meaningfully oppose Iran, let alone Russia or China. Not only are the states of Clown World no longer what they were, unlike the nations of Sovereign World, they are no longer even proper nations anymore.

DISCUSS ON SG

A Failure of Deterrence

Dominick Cummings explains

When Pearl Harbor happened, Washington was in shock. Unprovoked attack!

What had really happened?

America had tightened economic warfare against Japan including shutting down oil. Then it suddenly confiscated Japanese assets held in America. Japan won’t do anything, said the high status Washington insiders, because rationally they know attacking America will be fatal.

But in Japan they reasoned differently: America has clearly decided to destroy our regime so we should attack and try to change the balance of forces.

Washington’s ‘insanity’/‘irrationality’ was Tokyo’s rational calculation.

Why is this relevant?

America has many virtues but its ruling class does not have a long culture of imperial success and it has not developed a ruling class that generates leaders good at judgements about other regimes. Britain had people like Lord Cromer ruling the Egyptians — a very smart, cold, calculating cynical aristocrat with empire in his blood, a sort much better suited to imperial politics than the output of American graduate schools who dominate Washington and repeatedly, naively misjudge other countries. We’ll bring democracy to Afghanistan… We’ll stop corruption in Afghanistan… We’ll bring LGBTQ+++ to Afghanistan… Argh we gotta flee Afghanistan…

Even very smart and able Americans such as Dean Acheson were not good at assessing other regimes. Imperial politics is not the same as democratic politics. Also notice that when Tyler Cowen interviewed Brennan, a former CIA director, and asked about the Tetlock project, by now known in outline to many in politics, Brennan didn’t even know what it was — a very telling detail. If the CIA director doesn’t know about the most interesting project to counter intelligence failures, what else doesn’t he know?!

In the Cold War we saw Washington make repeated errors. The Vietcong are about to fold, they said, year after year. Turned out the Vietcong defined their priorities and rationality differently. America had to retreat.

Just last year we could see how bad the trillion dollar network of DoD and intelligence agencies were on Afghanistan and the Taliban. America had to retreat.

And now Washington’s high status insiders are confidently declaring what it would be ‘rational’ and ‘crazy’ for Putin to do.

Given their complete inability to correctly anticipate what Putin – or pretty much any of their other enemies – was going to do previously, what are the odds that they have gotten it right this time? More importantly, most of the people making decisions about the use of US military force have no loyalty to nor concern for the American people or their national interests, so they’re much more willing to take risks than actual Americans would.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Idiocy of Expansion

Even neutral parties grasp that joining NATO is a foolish action by Finland and Sweden:

NATO membership won’t make Finland and Sweden more secure, but would likely see them fighting somebody else’s wars and hosting American bases, Dr. Jan Oberg, director of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, has told RT.

“It’s a disastrous decision,” Oberg said on Sunday, following an official declaration by the Finnish government that it is planning to join the US-led military bloc. Hours later, a similar announcement was made by the ruling party in Sweden. The two Nordic nations stayed out of NATO during the Cold War, but their governments said Russia’s military operation in Ukraine has become a game-changer.

Finland and Sweden have failed to carry out “long-term consequence analysis,” he added. “Nobody seems to ask whether NATO is the right thing to join. After all these years since 1945, NATO has proven that it’s not able to deliver what taxpayers are paying for, namely stability, peace and security… and then Finland and Sweden say: ‘We’ll join this failed organization,’” he remarked.

One has to be almost completely ignorant of military history to conclude that joining a military alliance makes war LESS likely. The history of war is literally the history of military alliances, from the Delian League and the Latin League to the League of Cambrai and the Triple Entente. Only neutral nations such as Spain, Switzerland, and Ireland managed to stay out of WWII, which is why it is absolutely counterproductive for formerly neutral nations such as Switzerland to impose sanctions on Russia and totally insane for formerly neutral nations such as Finland and Sweden to voluntarily sign up as co-belligerents to engage in a war against both Russia and China.

Because that’s what they’re signing up for, even if they don’t realize it yet.

UPDATE: Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Russia appears to have started moving nuclear-capable missiles to Finland’s border just a day after the country announced it will bid to join NATO. Video posted on Russian social media today shows trucks carrying Iskander ballistic missiles – which can be tipped with nuclear warheads – moving through the country, reportedly on a highway to Vyborg, on the Finnish border. ‘As soon as the president of Finland said they were joining NATO, a whole division of Iskanders, seven of them… is moving towards Vyborg,’ the video’s narrator says.

UPDATE: Sweden boards the geopolitical short bus.

Sweden has said it will join Finland in bidding for membership of NATO, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine prompted an ‘historic’ shift away from decades of neutrality. Magdalena Andersson, the Swedish prime minister, announced the move on Monday – just a day after Finnish counterpart Sanna Marin tabled her own bid. Andersson said the move was being made in conjunction with Helsinki and marks ‘a historic change in our country’s security policy’ which has relied on a pledge of neutrality to deter attacks since the Napoleonic era.

DISCUSS ON SG

Quelle Surprise

It’s not exactly shocking to have The New York Times confirm, only 44 years late, that three-time New York City Mayor Ed Koch was a homosexual.

Edward I. Koch looked like the busiest septuagenarian in New York.

Glad-handing well-wishers at his favorite restaurants, gesticulating through television interviews long after his three terms as mayor, Mr. Koch could seem as though he was scrambling to fill every hour with bustle. He dragged friends to the movies, pursuing a side career in film criticism. He urged new acquaintances to call him “judge,” a joking reference to his time presiding over “The People’s Court.”

But as his 70s ticked by, Mr. Koch described to a few friends a feeling he could not shake: a deep loneliness. He wanted to meet someone, he said. Did they know anyone who might be “partner material?” Someone “a little younger than me?” Someone to make up for lost time?

“I want a boyfriend,” he said to one friend, Charles Kaiser.

It was an aching admission, shared with only a few, from a politician whose brash ubiquity and relentless New York evangelism helped define the modern mayoralty, even as he strained to conceal an essential fact of his biography: Mr. Koch was gay.

The Secrets Ed Koch Carried, The New York Times, 7 May 2022

So a Jewish politician pretending to be an American was also pretending to be straight? Lawsy, will the totally shocking surprises never cease? Just think, sometime around the year 2052, The New York Times – or rather, the single media amalgamation that has swallowed The New York Times – will report that Barack Obama was a homosexual and “Michelle” Obama’s real name was “Michael”. And we will all pretend to be surprised.

The so-called conspiracy theorists aren’t always right, but they are far more often correct than the media that claims to “debunk” them.

I’m old enough to remember when people would say things like, “Ed Koch can’t possibly be gay, for crying out loud, he dated Miss America!”

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You Don’t Say

The former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO says the quiet part out loud.

“I think we are in a proxy war with Russia. We are using the Ukrainians as our proxy forces.”

Philip Breedlove, former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO

Meanwhile, the Russian Foreign Minister let a little something slip out too.

“So what if Zelenskyy is Jewish? The fact does not negate the Nazi elements in Ukraine. I believe that Hitler also had Jewish blood. It means absolutely nothing. The wise Jewish people said that the most ardent antisemites are usually Jews.”

Wait, what?

Oh, that’s right. Of course Hitler is Jewish. After all, we’re all one race, the human race.

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This Could Not Be Verified

Not only is it impossible to verify Ukraine’s claims of Russian losses in the Special Military Operation, it is impossible to take them seriously on a statistical basis.

The scale of Russian troop losses in Ukraine has tipped 21,000 as Putin’s war rumbles into its third month today.

The latest statistics, published by the Ukrainian Land Forces this morning, suggest 21,800 Russian fighters have been killed amid bitter resistance from Ukraine’s armed forces and territorial defence units – though this figure could not be verified.

Meanwhile, the land forces claim to have dealt massive damage to Russia’s military equipment and machinery.

A total of 873 tanks are said to have been destroyed, along with 2238 armoured vehicles, 179 planes, 154 helicopters and 408 artillery systems.

According to the same article, “On February 24, Russia’s land army consisted of 280,000 full-time active soldiers compared with Ukraine’s 125,600.”

Now, the number of casualties in war is always a multiple of the number of fatalities. For example, the USA lost 407,316 KIA during WWII and 671,846 WIA out of 16.4 million troops, for a Cas/Fat ratio of 1.65. As medical science improved, this ratio increased over time, to 2.6 for Vietnam, 7.2 for Iraq, and 8.6 for Afghanistan.

So, if the most recent US war is a reasonable comparative, the Ukrainian claims would indicate an additional 180,600 wounded Russians for a total of 201,600 Russian casualties, which would mean that the Russian casualty rate of 72 percent exceeds that of the German, Japanese, and Soviet militaries during the entirety of World War II. And at 7.5 percent, the fatality rate is three times the US WWII fatality rate of 2.5 percent in just two months.

In other words, we can state with certainty that these reports are highly improbable, and logically conclude that they are false.