Tag: history

For all its global reach, the neo-liberal world order will likely prove to have been exceptionally short-lived in the historical sense:

Though the press is obsessed with President Trump defining a change we are seeing, that is a classic case of mal-educated Amerocentrism. The shift started before him. He is just a symptom, not a cause. It isn’t even an American phenomenon. If anything we are lagging the global trend.

What period started to come to an end at the start of this century? The end of the post-Cold War as a period by itself? I don’t quite buy it. There is a lot of talk of an end to the post-WWII, “Liberal World Order” (LWO). I think that might be right.

The LWO began at the end of WWII. The period after the fall of the Soviet Union that people call as the Post-Cold War Era wasn’t really an era. It was either the final or the penultimate chapter of the long running LWO that the Cold War was just a longer chapter of. Even while the Soviet Union was on its death bed we saw the next chapter, AKA Bush41’s “New World Order” (NWO).

One could argue the NWO was the penultimate chapter, and 2001-2008 the final chapter of the LWO.

Hard to say right now, but if forced, I’d put my chips on that argument.

The NWO lasted less than a decade, if that. It was a period of unchallenged American dominance, but that rode on the back of the “The Liberal World Order” built in the post-WWII period.

What I would call the final chapter, somewhere from the attacks of September 2001 and the newly elected President Obama’s apology tour and welcoming of a rising China, I’m not sure – but it marked a shift to something new. The pivot is not yet complete – it is a slow turn that took awhile to get here.

The last two chapters of the LWO saw the falling apart of those structures – the EU, ascendency of Western culture, extra-national international legal bodies, American dominance of the high seas – that defined the success of the old age. The vacuum left behind by them, and the fragility of remaining ones like NATO, is feeding change.

This new era is a movement of returns, reckoning, and realization. Strangely, end of the LWO can probably can be traced back to the Muslim world. They were an the early adopter or canary in the coal mine of the structural culmination of the LWO. There you find the first place where the assumptions of the ruling Western elite began to fail.

Just look at the pictures of Cairo and Kabul in the 1960s and 1970s. Western dress, cultural norms, secularism, and political systems (socialist, capitalist, or a mixture of both) dominated. At the end of the 1970s the wave crested first there when you saw decades of progress for women in the public space begin to retreat from Islamabad to Alexandria.

Those were indications that the West had lost its confidence and its appeal. Once that support goes soft, everything it underpins weakens. Much of the weakening started with the anti-Western efforts in our own universities and popular culture. Jesse Jackson’s “Hey, hey, ho, ho; Western Civ has got to go” was just one of a long series of notes to the outside world that things were well along the way to being not quite right.

If you value Western values of tolerance and progress, how do you expect them to grow and expand abroad when you cannot support them at home? In their absence, something will fill the void.

I don’t believe there is any difference between the LWO and the NWO. Both were aspects of the neo-liberal world order championed by the same people. Globalism was always the objective of certain elements behind the neo-liberal world order, and the ongoing rise of nationalism represents the inevitable reaction to globalism that is described in the old Chinese aphorism.

 The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.

But remember, what fuels the drive for global institutions is the result of widespread failures at the national levels. As we have seen in the USA, when centralization fails, the response is not to abandon it, but to try to salvage it through expanding its reach. As fast as the neo-liberal world order has failed, any globalist order would fail even faster due to the greater stresses upon even more fragile bonds.

The combination of pyramids and eyes never seems to bode anyone very well:

An enormous ancient Chinese pyramid has been discovered in an 4,300-year-old lost city, which regularly hosted human sacrifices and was once one of the largest settlements in the world. The astonishing find was documented in the latest issue of the journal ‘Antiquity,’ in which researchers revealed that the newly excavated step pyramid is at least 230ft high and covers a staggering 24 acres at its base.

The article, written by a team of professors at universities in China and California, says the city, now named “Shimao,” flourished for five centuries across a 988-acre region surrounding the pyramid, making it one of the largest cities in the world.

The pyramid is decorated with eye symbols and part-human, part-animal figures which, the researchers say, could have given the pyramid religious power in the eyes of the Shimao citizens of the day.Both the city and pyramid were surrounded by a series of sophisticated defensive stone walls, ramparts and gates, which the team says indicates highly restricted access to the complex. Decapitated human heads were also discovered, suggesting human sacrifice was a popular tradition at the time.

Do you ever get the unsettling impression that this isn’t the first time the human race has been through this whole technological cycle?

Patrick J. Buchanan observes that what now calls itself “America” is not, in fact, American at all:

America has been remade. Not only has Christianity, and all its symbols and expressions of faith and belief, been removed, but also a purge is underway of monuments and statues of the explorers, colonists and statesmen who, believing in the superiority of their religion, culture and civilization, set out to create the county we inherited.

And William Frey, resident demographer at the Brookings Institution, writes about how America is being changed — without the consent of the people.

“Since 2000, the white population under the age of 18 has shrunk by seven million, and declines are projected among white 20-somethings and 30-somethings over the next two decades and beyond. This is … a trend that is not likely to change despite Mr. Trump’s wish for more immigrants from Norway.

“The likely source of future gains among the nation’s population of children, teenagers and young working adults is minorities — Hispanics, Asians, blacks and others.”

When we are all minorities, and all behave as minorities, making our separate demands upon the country, what then holds America together?

In Federalist 2, John Jay famously wrote:

“Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people — a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion … very similar in their manners and customs…

“This country and this people seem to have been made for each other, and it appears as if it was the design of Providence, that an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest ties, should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous, and alien sovereignties.”

Yet, each decade, less and less are we descended from the same ancestors. Less and less do we speak the same language, profess the same religion, share the same manners, customs, traditions, history, heroes and holidays.

Does America look today like the “band of brethren united to each other” of which Jay wrote, and we seemed to be as late as 1960?

Or does not the acrimony attendant to the nomination of Judge Kavanaugh suggest that we have already become a land “split into a number of unsocial, jealous and alien sovereignties.”

The historical revisionists who falsely talk about “our Judeo-Christian heritage” are inadvertently telling an important truth. America has an Anglo-Saxon Christian heritage. It is post-1965 Fake America that has a Judeo-Christian foundation and is less and less European, and less and less Christian, with every year that passes.

It is not just “liberals” who are to blame for this. It is not just the Jewish and Irish immigrants who struck the fatal legislative blow who are to blame for this. It is the civic nationalists who believed, and continue to believe, the lies of Magic Dirt and Equality, who pride themselves on their refusal to defend their own people and boast of their treason to their own nation.

Because civic nationalism is not just globalism lite, it is the elevation of loyalty to the political state above loyalty to the actual nation.

Apropos of nothing, really. Just writing down a momentary observation. Don’t ask me what it means. I don’t know yet.

1. Wealth: (economic) all things that have a monetary or exchange value.
2. Gross Domestic Product: a monetary measure of the market value of all final goods and services produced in a period.
3. Ergo, GDP is at most a subset of a state’s wealth.

PM points out that the popular free trade argument that trade prevents war is based on an early 20th century Nobel prize-winner’s idea that proved itself to be an epic falsehood within seven years of its first articulation:

Norman Angell is most widely remembered for his 1909 pamphlet, Europe’s Optical Illusion, which was published the following year (and many years thereafter) as the book, The Great Illusion. (The anti-war film La Grande Illusion took its title from his pamphlet.) The thesis of the book was that the integration of the economies of European countries had grown to such a degree that war between them would be entirely futile, making militarism obsolete. This quotation from the “Synopsis” to the popular 1913 edition summarizes his basic argument.

He establishes this apparent paradox, in so far as the economic problem is concerned, by showing that wealth in the economically civilized world is founded upon credit and commercial contract (these being the outgrowth of an economic interdependence due to the increasing division of labour and greatly developed communication). If credit and commercial contract are tampered with in an attempt at confiscation, the credit-dependent wealth is undermined, and its collapse involves that of the conqueror; so that if conquest is not to be self-injurious it must respect the enemy’s property, in which case it becomes economically futile. Thus the wealth of conquered territory remains in the hands of the population of such territory. When Germany annexed Alsace, no individual German secured a single mark’s worth of Alsatian property as the spoils of war. Conquest in the modern world is a process of multiplying by x, and then obtaining the original figure by dividing by x. For a modern nation to add to its territory no more adds to the wealth of the people of such nation than it would add to the wealth of Londoners if the City of London were to annex the county of Hertford.

Whenever you dig into the logic of free trade or the arguments presented on its behalf, you inevitably discover that they are based on foundations that were conclusively proven to be rotten decades, or even centuries, ago. One of the most remarkable things about free traders I have observed is their relentlessly stubborn ignorance of the roots of their own economic philosophy.

Of course they don’t know anything about Norman Angell’s case for trade. One can hardly criticize them for that, as it was justly obscured by the course of historical events. But free trade advocates don’t even understand the specifics, let alone the intrinsic flaws, of David Ricardo’s comparative advantage argument.

The author of The End of History is losing the debate to his dead mentor, but still refuses to concede:

Since Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations has been contrasted with my own End of History in countless introductory International Relations classes over the past two decades, I might as well begin by tackling at the outset the issue of how we’re doing vis-à-vis one another. At the moment, it looks like Huntington is winning.

The world today is not converging around liberal democratic government, as it seemed to be for more than a generation. The Third Wave of democratization that Huntington himself observed progressed in the period from the mid-1970s to the mid-2000s from about 35 electoral states to perhaps 115 by 2008. But since then the wave has gone into reverse, what Larry Diamond has labeled a democratic recession. Not only has the number of democracies declined somewhat, but important qualitative changes have taken place. Big authoritarian powers like Russia and China have grown self-confident and aggressive. Meanwhile, existing liberal democracies have lost much of their appeal after the financial crises in America and the Eurozone during the 2000s, and are suffering from populist uprisings that threaten the liberal pillar of their political systems.

In place of the Left-Right ideological split defined largely by issues revolving around the relative economic power of capital and labor in an industrialized setting that characterized 20th-century politics, we now have a political spectrum organized increasingly around identity issues, many of which are defined more by culture than by economics narrowly construed. This shift is not good for the health of liberal democracy, and the number one exemplar of this dysfunction is the United States, where the rise of Donald Trump has posed a serious threat to America’s check-and-balance institutions. The phenomenon of rising populist nationalism is one that I have explored previously in this journal, and at much greater length in my most recent book Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment.

Huntington was very prescient in his depiction of “Davos Man,” the cosmopolitan creature unmoored from strong attachments to any particular place, loyal primarily to his own self-interest. Davos Man has now become the target of populist rage, as the elites who constructed our globalized world are pilloried for being out of touch with the concerns of the working class. Huntington also foresaw the rise of immigration as one of the chief issues driving populism and the fears that mass migration has stoked about cultural change. Indeed, Carlos Lozada of the Washington Post has labeled Huntington as a prophet of the Trump era.

What no one in the current debate can say is whether the current democratic recession will turn into a full-blown depression, marking a more fundamental shift in global politics toward some alternative regime type, or whether it is more like a stock market correction. The causes of the current recession in Western countries are reasonably clear: Populism has been driven by the unequal effects of globalization, as well as a cultural revolt against the large numbers of migrants moving across international borders and challenging traditional notions of national identity.

There are a number of reasons, however, to wonder if these forces will be strong enough to eventually overcome the factors driving the world toward greater convergence in economic and political institutions, or lead to serious geopolitical conflict on a scale matching that of the early 20th century. Neither the China model nor the emerging populist-nationalist one represented by Russia, Turkey, or Hungary will likely be sustainable economically or politically over an extended period. On the other hand, democracies have mechanisms in place for correcting mistakes, and a big test of American democracy will occur in November when Americans get to vote on whether they approve of the presidency of Donald Trump. Moreover, the rural, less-educated parts of the population that are the core of populist support are, in countries experiencing economic growth, in long-term decline. At this point, however, such assertions amount to no more than speculation.

It’s an interesting article, but the point that Fukuyama simply refuses to address is the intrinsic falsity of what he calls “socioeconomic modernization” and James Burnham, more straightforwardly, calls liberalism. The observable reality, and one of the core causes of the loss of popular faith in liberalism and the post-WWII neo-liberal world order, is that its claims to be founded on democracy and the will of the people have proven to be every bit as false as the claims of Communism to be founded on the interests of the working class.

Ideologies lose their adherents when their promises are contradicted by the observable reality. How can liberalism credibly claim moral superiority on the basis of the will of the people when from California to Brussels its primary institutions are openly elitist and anti-democratic? Rather like the failed Soviet Union, the rulers of the West pretend to respect the vote and the people of the West pretend to believe their vote matters. But the pretenses are failing, on both sides.

Liberalism also promises increasing societal wealth and rising living standards through openness, but there too it is failing on both counts. The wealth of the West is a debt-based facade; average wealth per capita has been rapidly declining for decades, to the point that only a small percentage of the population actually owns their own home anymore. Not only birth rates and marriage rates, but average life expectancies are actually falling in many Western countries, and the quality of life drops with every low-IQ criminal immigrant who invades the country with the full support of the ruling elites.

And the irony of calling Russia and China “authoritarian powers” when the government of the United States is spying on the entire global population, engaged in the military occupation of over 70 different countries and territories, and claiming the authority to decide who can be legally criticized or not under pain of imprisonment is deep indeed.

Fukuyama has retreated, but his new book demonstrates that his retreat is a fighting withdrawal rather than a concession. But it will avail him little, because Huntington has only begun to win the debate. Identity is indeed significant, but Fukuyama’s implication that new identities can be created to compete with the existing cultural and religious ones is as doomed to failure as the European Union, given that he is counting on higher education and a growing middle class to provide them.

Identity, as opposed to Huntington’s concept of culture, is a better descriptor of today’s politics because it is both socially constructed and contestable, as today’s debates over American national identity illustrate. Huntington’s cultures are, by contrast, fixed and nearly impossible to change. Contrary to the views of many nationalists and religious partisans, identities are neither biologically rooted nor of ancient provenance. Nationalism in the modern sense did not exist in Europe prior to the French Revolution; the Islam of Osama bin Laden or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi does not conform to any of the major traditional schools of Islamic jurisprudence. Contemporary identities based on concepts of nation or religion were created by political actors for specific purposes, and can be displaced by other identities as the outcome of a political struggle.

So while culture does matter, Huntington’s theory really does not fit the current reality in many ways. Western democracies are at war with themselves internally over national identity; there is a slipping consensus that they fit into a broad category like “the West.” When Donald Trump spoke of “the West” in a speech in Poland in 2017, his West was a different one from the West of President Obama. Similarly, in other parts of the world, civilizational fractures are just one among many that are dividing people politically. The only countervailing forces are strong states like the ones governing China and Russia, not transnational entities based on shared cultural values.

Ron Unz boldly casts considerable doubt on the central article of the globalist catechism:

Another obvious matter casts further doubt upon the historical quality of those five immensely thick volumes of standard Holocaust narrative, which together occupy nearly a linear foot on my bookshelves. For prosecutors of any crime, establishing a plausible motive is certainly an important goal, and in the case of the Jewish Holocaust, these authors would seem to have an easy task at hand. Hitler and his German colleagues had always claimed that the Jews overwhelmingly dominated Bolshevik Communism, and much of their struggle against the former was in order to prevent further bloody deeds of the latter. So surely devoting an early chapter or so to describing this central Nazi doctrine would provide an airtight explanation of what drove the Nazis to their fiendish slaughters, rendering fully explicable the horrifying events that would occupy the remainder of their text.

Yet oddly enough, an examination of their indexes for “Bolsheviks,” “Communism,” and all variants reveals almost no discussion of this important issue. Goldhagen’s 1996 book provides just a couple of short sentences spread across his 600 pages, and the other works seem to contain virtually nothing at all. Since all of these Holocaust books almost totally avoid Hitler’s self-declared motive for his anti-Jewish actions, they are forced to desperately search for alternative explanations, seeking clues buried deep within the German past or turning to psychanalytical speculations or perhaps deciding that what they describe as the greatest massacre in all human history was undertaken out of sheer Nazi wickedness.

The obvious reason for this glaring omission is that the authors are constructing a morality-play in which the Jews must be portrayed as absolutely blameless victims, and even hinting at their role in the numerous Communist atrocities that long preceded the rise of the Third Reich might cause readers to consider both sides of the issue. When purported historians go to absurd lengths to hide such glaring facts, they unmask themselves as propagandists, and we must be very cautious about trusting their reliability and candor in all other matters, whether great or small.

Indeed, the issue of Communism raises a far larger matter, one having rather touchy implications. Sometimes two simple compounds are separately inert, but when combined together may possess tremendous explosive force. From my introductory history classes and readings in high school, certain things had always seemed glaringly obvious to me even if the conclusions remained unmentionable, and I once assumed they were just as apparent to most others as well. But over the years I have begun to wonder whether perhaps this might not be correct.

Back in those late Cold War days, the death toll of innocent civilians from the Bolshevik Revolution and the first two decades of the Soviet Regime was generally reckoned at running well into the tens of millions when we include the casualties of the Russian Civil War, the government-induced famines, the Gulag, and the executions. I’ve heard that these numbers have been substantially revised downwards to perhaps as little as twenty million or so, but no matter. Although determined Soviet apologists may dispute such very large figures, they have always been part of the standard narrative history taught within the West.

Meanwhile, all historians know perfectly well that the Bolshevik leaders were overwhelmingly Jewish, with three of the five revolutionaries Lenin named as his plausible successors coming from that background. Although only around 4{e1b6c4ee08d0f44a6a5b11eb06b9139d63cfe72acbaefd7257f78696d447c626} of Russia’s population was Jewish, a few years ago Vladimir Putin stated that Jews constituted perhaps 80-85{e1b6c4ee08d0f44a6a5b11eb06b9139d63cfe72acbaefd7257f78696d447c626} of the early Soviet government, an estimate fully consistent with the contemporaneous claims of Winston Churchill, Times of London correspondent Robert Wilton, and the officers of American Military Intelligence. Recent books by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Yuri Slezkine, and others have all painted a very similar picture. And prior to World War II, Jews remained enormously over-represented in the Communist leadership, especially dominating the Gulag administration and the top ranks of the dreaded NKVD.

Both of these simple facts have been widely accepted in America throughout my entire lifetime. But combine them together with the relatively tiny size of worldwide Jewry, around 16 million prior to World War II, and the inescapable conclusion is that in per capita terms Jews were the greatest mass-murderers of the twentieth century, holding that unfortunate distinction by an enormous margin and with no other nationality coming even remotely close. And yet, by the astonishing alchemy of Hollywood, the greatest killers of the last one hundred years have somehow been transmuted into being seen as the greatest victims, a transformation so seemingly implausible that future generations will surely be left gasping in awe.

Today’s American Neocons are just as heavily Jewish as were the Bolsheviks of a hundred years ago, and they have greatly benefited from the political immunity provided by this totally bizarre inversion of historical reality. Partly as a consequence of their media-fabricated victimhood status, they have managed to seize control over much of our political system, especially our foreign policy, and have spent the last few years doing their utmost to foment an absolutely insane war with nuclear-armed Russia. If they do manage to achieve that unfortunate goal, they will surely outdo the very impressive human body-count racked up by their ethnic ancestors, perhaps even by an order-of-magnitude or more.

More importantly, the American Neocons ARE the Bolsheviks, specifically, the Trotsky faction. But everyone here already knew that.

However, Ron Unz’s iconoclastic piece got me thinking about the logic of the historical situation as we know it and some of the anomalies that have proven so difficult to resolve in a satisfying manner, massive anomalies that have led to criminal accusations of Holocaust denial on the one hand and charges of shameless historical mythmaking on the other. But what if both parties are basically correct concerning their primary points of emphasis? What happens if, in the spirit of theoretical skepticism, we simply apply straightforward logic to the facts as we observe them to be.

• Major Premise: A very large quantity of Jews were killed in the 1936 to 1945 time frame.
• Minor Premise: The meticulously bureaucratic Germans, for whom historians possess a tremendous quantity of historical documents related to the WWII era, do not appear to have kept any records of any of the many aspects of the logistical and operative decisions and actions required for the major premise, nor did they have the motive or the opportunity to thoroughly eliminate those records. 
• Conclusion: Someone other than the Germans killed most of those Jews.

The German – or rather, Immigrant – President declares there are “no biological Germans”.

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has declared Germany “is a nation of immigrants and will remain so”, asserting: “There are no half or whole Germans, no biological or ‘new’ Germans”.

Speaking at Berlin’s Bellevue Palace, where a small group of people with Turkish heritage had been invited to share their views on immigration, integration, and xenophobia in Europe, the German president strongly denounced “exclusion of and discrimination against people with foreign roots”.

Telling guests of his regret at hearing people with migration backgrounds report incidents which they claimed made them feel they don’t belong in the country, Steinmeier claimed prejudice undermines “all the things we have done together as a country”.

“There are no Germans who are ‘on probation’ and having to earn their rights in society again and again because their [citizenship] could be revoked on the basis of alleged misconduct,” the president said, insisting that there are “no half or whole, no biological or ‘new’ Germans; there are no first- or second-class citizens, no right or wrong neighbours”.

This tends to raise an obvious question. If the USA, Great Britain, Sweden, and now Germany are all “nations of immigrants”, to what nation do all of these immigrants originally belong?

I mean, obviously there cannot be any “German-Americans” or “Swedish-Americans” now that we know there have never been any biological German or Swedish nation.