Tag: history

Not even pretending

The God-Emperor has unmasked the lawlessness of the Left’s pretense at the Rule of Law, and in doing so, is building a strong case for acting outside of the Left-dominated deceptively titled “justice system”:

His basis for doing so was an extraordinary interpretation of the right to travel and the freedom of association, which before, has only been associated with U.S. citizens,” Barnes continued. “Every court decision in the 200 years prior to this has said that people who are not citizens of the United States, who are not present within the United States, have no First Amendment constitutional rights. The Constitution doesn’t extend internationally to anybody, anywhere, anyplace, at any time. Instead, this judge said it did, as long as you had a university here who wanted to assert, quote-unquote, the foreigner’s rights, or you had some physical person here. In this case, it was one of the leading Muslim imams in Hawaii; he wants to bring over various family and friends from the Middle East.”

“The Hawaii judge’s decision says he has a First Amendment constitutional right to do so because he’s Muslim. It was one of the most extraordinary interpretations of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment ever given, which is that because these are Muslim countries that were banned where the issue of terror arises from that that meant they had a special right to access the country and visit the country,” he said.

“As long as there is somebody here that wants them here, no president can ever preclude them from coming here. He basically gave First Amendment rights to everybody around the world and gave special preferences to people who are Muslim under his interpretation of the First Amendment,” Barnes summarized.

“So it’s an extraordinarily broad order. Its legal doctrine has no limits. If you keep extending this, it means people from around the world have a special right to access the United States, visit the United States, emigrate to the United States, get visas to the United States. There wouldn’t be any limit, and the president would never be able to control our own borders. It would be up solely to the whim of a federal judge who effectively delegated it, in this case, to a Muslim imam in Hawaii,” he contended.

Barnes noted that the judge did not “cite any prior decision” that has ever established this astonishing new quirk of the Constitution.

“Just last year, the Supreme Court implicitly said the opposite, when they said your right to association does not include a right to bring foreigners into the United States, in the Din decision,” he pointed out. “Now, there were several concurrences, so the binding precedent of that has been left open, but he does not even reference or mention or discuss the decision. He doesn’t even mention the statute, the main statute that gives the president the right to ban any alien from the country, for any reason the president deems appropriate, for any temporary time period, that the president yesterday cited in his national speech. Like the prior Ninth Circuit decision, the Hawaii judge never mentions the decision at all.”

“So there’s no real legal precedent. He’s taking three or four different concepts that have been applied in completely different areas of law, that only ever have historically applied to U.S. citizens, and he’s magically adding it to foreigners and acting like that’s always been the case when it’s never been the case,” he said.

There is no way to pretend that what these courts are doing is in any way compatible with democracy, law, tradition, history, or even Western Civilization. What we are witnessing is a literal breakdown of civil society and a descent into structural lawlessness. This has been a long time in the making, but it is becoming increasingly impossible to even pretend that there is a coherent or meaningful legal structure of any kind in the United States.

Secularism’s pyrrhic victory

The Atlantic laments that shiny, sexy, science fiction future predicted by the It’s a Small World secularists has not come to pass:

Over the past decade, pollsters charted something remarkable: Americans—long known for their piety—were fleeing organized religion in increasing numbers. The vast majority still believed in God. But the share that rejected any religious affiliation was growing fast, rising from 6 percent in 1992 to 22 percent in 2014. Among Millennials, the figure was 35 percent.

Some observers predicted that this new secularism would ease cultural conflict, as the country settled into a near-consensus on issues such as gay marriage. After Barack Obama took office, a Center for American Progress report declared that “demographic change,” led by secular, tolerant young people, was “undermining the culture wars.” In 2015, the conservative writer David Brooks, noting Americans’ growing detachment from religious institutions, urged social conservatives to “put aside a culture war that has alienated large parts of three generations.”

That was naive. Secularism is indeed correlated with greater tolerance of gay marriage and pot legalization. But it’s also making America’s partisan clashes more brutal. And it has contributed to the rise of both Donald Trump and the so-called alt-right movement, whose members see themselves as proponents of white nationalism. As Americans have left organized religion, they haven’t stopped viewing politics as a struggle between “us” and “them.” Many have come to define us and them in even more primal and irreconcilable ways.

Maybe it’s the values of hierarchy, authority, and tradition that churches instill. Maybe religion builds habits and networks that help people better weather national traumas, and thus retain their faith that the system works. For whatever reason, secularization isn’t easing political conflict. It’s making American politics even more convulsive and zero-sum.

For years, political commentators dreamed that the culture war over religious morality that began in the 1960s and ’70s would fade. It has. And the more secular, more ferociously national and racial culture war that has followed is worse.

What were they expecting? Did they know NOTHING of the history of pre-Christian cultures? Christianity has transformed EVERY culture with which it has come into contact, from Aztec to Viking, and reliably transformed it in the direction of what we consider to be civilization.

Not only that, but for all the dancing and No True Atheism on the part of the atheist apologists, it is a historical fact that non-Christian modernists have slaughtered people on a scale that no Christians ever have. From Genghis Khan and Zhang Xianzhong to Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, and Mao, the great murderers of history have never been Christian.

Like Voltaire or diaspora Jews who prefer living in someone else’s homeland to their own, many secularists are beginning to discover that they would rather live a godless life in a Christian society than do so in a godless one.

Feminism is cultural Marxism

A detailed article on the Redstockings and their influence on feminism at Return of Kings:

In many ways, 1969 was a pretty cool year, but it was also during a wave of crazy radicalism that made today’s upsurge of rent-a-mobs seen like a croquet match. During that year, a group of New York feminists dropped a bomb on civilization. They called themselves the Redstockings; the color red was a reference to Communism.

They’re a bit obscure these days, but back then, they were big enough to have a few chapters around the USA. Ellen Willis and Shulamith Firestone co-founded it; the latter having been a co-founder of New York Radical Women a year and a half previously. Soon after, some lesser lights (or dimmer bulbs) of the Sisterhood joined them. Firestone was one of the co-authors of their Redstockings Manifesto, before abandoning ship later that year to co-found yet another outfit.

This document became quite influential. For example, it’s in a list of essential feminist manifestos, along with other items by Valerie Solanas (number one, bless her heart), Andrea Dworkin, and another by Firestone herself. Since the Terrible Trio wrote four items on that top ten list, consider them a fair sampling of what feminism is all about. Remember that if anyone tries to tell you that those types don’t represent at least a significant part of feminism.

Despite their influence, this is not to say the Redstockings started it all singlehandedly. Still, their manifesto gives a capsule summary of what radical feminism was at the time and would morph into later. Although it’s a Second Wave document, it contains kernels of the ideology by other varieties in recent times. This foundational text begins with a preamble about the “final liberation from male supremacy”. (Okie dokie…) Then:

Item 2 – Class consciousness

“Women are an oppressed class. Our oppression is total, affecting every facet of our lives.”

This whopper shows Firestone’s inclination—one shared with many others—for taking Communist rhetoric and adapting it to feminism. This makes it—big surprise—an instance of cultural Marxism. The considerations of economics and actual social class that orthodox Communists were concerned with get left behind. This was, in fact, one of the reasons for the schisms in New York’s feminist scene.

One of the fascinating things about the last few years is the transition of many apolitical Game writers and sites to politically conscious Alt-Right and Alt-Lite perspectives. This is significant, because all of the writers involved are entirely accustomed to being mobbed and assailed by the mainstream media, so they’re not inclined to cuck and run like most conservatives are when faced with criticism.

Self-serving revisionism

Steve Sailer’s most recent column on Rep. Steve King’s outrageously truthful observation about demographic realities reads almost as if it was surgically excised from Cuckservative:

Seriously, American history has been so severely retconned over the past half century that it’s apparent that most of the people gasping at King’s heresy are only vaguely aware of how humorously deluded they have become.

Countless pundits sputtered in response to King that America has always been “a nation of immigrants,” without realizing that this phrase barely existed in American discourse until it was promoted by the Anti-Defamation League’s propaganda arm in the 1960s….

The reality is that human beings are naturally concerned with their ancestors and descendants. The “nation of immigrants” hype was the work of descendants of Ellis Island immigrants understandably fictionalizing the past to make their forefathers seem more crucial in the national story than they actually were.

Every. Single. Time. Anyhow, as I have repeatedly pointed out, civic nationalism is an intrinsically self-contradictory concept constructed upon a false, self-serving historical narrative. There is nothing true about it, absolutely nothing. Everyone who subscribes to it is either deceived, historically ignorant, or lying, which is why all of its rhetoric, high-minded and soaring as it so often is, is ultimately rooted in falsehoods.

Which, of course, is why it is so easily undermined by superior nationalist rhetoric that is rooted in truth and historical facts.

  • “We all bleed red” is trumped by “So do kangaroos and iguanas.”
  • “We’re a nation of immigrants” is trumped by “You have to go back.”
  • “Our Judeo-Christian values” is trumped by “Thus spake Judeo-Christ.”
  • “Equality” is trumped by “7.6 billion Americans.”
  • “My grandparents completely assimilated” is trumped by “Assimilation and integration are adulteration.” 

We know the nationalists will win in the end because the nationalists ALWAYS win in the end. If they didn’t, the nations wouldn’t exist. So stop clinging to your false narratives, your self-serving revisionist histories, your deceptive adjective-modified nouns, your Not-American Americans, and accept the truth.

Civic nationalism is no more nationalism than social justice is justice. It is just another stealth globalist attack on national identity and sovereignty.

Revisionist history fail

SteelPalm was attempting to pass off revisionist history on one of the very worst sites on the Internet to try to do that.

You know how Hitler could have definitely won the war? If he had spared his German Jewish scientists and also used the Jewish scientists in the territories he conquered.

That is completely false. There were more US-born Jewish scientists than foreign-born Jewish scientists working on the Manhattan Project. The idea that the Germans didn’t succeed in making an atomic bomb due to “persecution of Jewish scientists” was not only a self-serving idea put forth by a Dutch-born Jew whose parents died during the Holocaust, but it wasn’t even the primary reason he provided. Samual Goudsmit “concluded that the failure of the German atomic bomb project was attributable to factors such as bureaucracy, Allied bombing campaigns, the persecution of Jewish scientists, and Werner Karl Heisenberg’s failed leadership.”


Many of the foreign-born Jewish scientists were not from Germany. Hitler had already made his fatal mistake of invading Czechoslovakia and triggering the war with Britain and France by invading Poland before scientists such as Tellar, Segrè, and Szilard would have even been theoretically accessible to him, but the reality is that most of them were already working in the Allied West before 1933. Rudolf Peierls and Hans Bethe were both already at Cambridge on Rockefeller Foundation scholarships in 1930; Otto Frisch left for London when Hitler was elected in 1933.

How could Hitler have possibly spared scientists, much less used them, when they were already out of his reach before he came to power? And more importantly, Germany never had the industrial wherewithal to develop atomic technology and weaponize it; they simply didn’t have the manpower or the materials to spare while they were already engaged in fighting a war on both fronts. The USA possessed every single advantage in the various relevant aspects, yet it still barely managed to produce three testable weapons before the end of the war.

Your cloying, whining rhetoric of the “I can’t even!” variety aside, the Manhattan Project consisted of almost exclusively Jewish scientists and was headed by a Jewish scientist.

I really don’t understand what SteelPalm is attempting to do here. His repeated and counterproductive attempts to defend his people by resorting to a false historical narrative is not going to make anyone think better of them. Quite the contrary, I would think.

The Manhattan Project was not “headed by a Jewish scientist”. J. Robert Oppenheimer was the Scientific Director of the Los Alamos laboratory, he was not even one of the two head scientists of the project. Major General Leslie Groves headed the Manhattan Project, and his scientific advisors were Richard Tolman and James Conant. Los Alamos was only one of four major MP sites and it was considerably smaller than Oak Ridge.

There were 26 Jewish scientists of note involved in some way with the Manhattan Project. 13 were US-born, 13 were foreign born. Hans Bethe was also half-Jewish, but he is usually omitted because he was raised Protestant. These 26 men did not make up the near-entirety of the scientific personnel of the project; one of the “scientists” listed was not even a scientist, but an engineer still in college. Not only did these 26 “Jewish scientists” not make up the majority of the 6,000 scientists involved in the project, they didn’t even make up the majority of physicists involved.

It is true that Jewish scientists, both US- and foreign-born, made vital contributions to the Manhattan Project. It is unlikely that the atomic bomb would have been completed in 1945 without them; it probably would have taken another year or three and therefore would never have been dropped in war. But to claim that Jewish scientists were “almost exclusively” responsible for it is utterly false and a tremendous insult to literally thousands of American scientists and engineers, to say nothing of the six British and Australian members of the vital MAUD Committee, without which the Manhattan Project would probably not have been created in time to factor into the history of WWII.

Ironically, the biggest single contribution to the Manhattan Project was probably made by a man who was not an American, was not Jewish, and although a scientist who later worked on the project in a scientific capacity, his unique and utterly vital contribution was entirely bureaucratic in nature.

When there was no reaction from America to the reports of the MAUD Committee, Mark Oliphant crossed the Atlantic in an unheated bomber in August 1941. He found that Lyman Briggs had not circulated the reports to the Uranium Committee, but had kept them in a safe. Oliphant then contacted Ernest Lawrence, James Conant, Enrico Fermi and Arthur Compton and managed to increase the urgency of the American research programmes. The MAUD Reports finally made a big impression. Overnight the Americans changed their minds about the feasibility of an atomic bomb and suggested a cooperative effort with Britain. Harold C. Urey and George Braxton Pegram were sent to the UK in November 1941, to confer but Britain did not take up the offer of collaboration. 

Remember, this took place almost exactly two years after the famous Einstein–Szilárd letter was delivered to FDR. The Manhattan Project was not inspired by that letter, as many incorrectly assume, but rather, by Oliphant’s stubbornness in bringing the MAUD reports to the attention of the Uranium Committee. This should be obvious, because the budget for the project was approved by FDR in June 1942 and the Manhattan Engineer District was created two months later.

It also demonstrates there is considerable truth to the “for want of a nail” aphorism.

Hitler did nothing wrong

In tonight’s Darkstream, I addressed one of the more historically retarded statements we hear from time to time from trolls as well as the sincerely ignorant.

It’s hard to overestimate the stupidity of the Alt-White, which frequently confuses German supremacism for trans-white nationalism and lionizes a successful rhetorician who failed to learn from either his early successes or his subsequent failures, and in doing so managed to transform Germany from a likely global superpower into a conquered US satrapy for 70 years and counting.

The list of things that Hitler did wrong is considerably longer than the list of things he did right. I mean, successfully bluffing the French and British governments, and stabbing the Soviets in the back first, hardly makes up for a) launching a two-front war by b) invading Russia, then c) unnecessarily declaring war on the most powerful industrial nation on Earth. Hitler wasn’t merely a complete failure, he was a guaranteed failure before the end of 1941.

I always find it amusing when people call me a Nazi. I have considerably more contempt for Nazis than the most sincere Nazi-hater. Those who hate the Nazis fear them and consider them to be evil and scary villains. I don’t fear them and I consider them to be inept, ignorant losers. I’m not counter-signaling here; I don’t counter-signal Communists or people with Down’s Syndrome either.

And for those who try to claim that it’s just rhetoric, yes, I am aware of its use in that capacity. The point is that the best and most effective rhetoric is rooted in truth, not ignorance and buffoonery.

Advice to the Alt-Right

The Zman remembers how the promise of Morning in America went badly awry:

That’s the first bit of advice I offer to the alt-right. Trust no one. In the Reagan Revolution, it was impossible to tell the grifters from the committed. Lots of people attached themselves to conservatism, as writers, thinkers and commentators, simply because there was money in it. The term “Conservative Inc.” did not exist in the 80’s, but the idea of it sure did. Just ask Charles Krauthammer. He was a liberal speech writer for Walter Mondale and then he changed teams, because there was more money in being a right-winger.

Related to this is the recent Milo flap, where he was cut down by previous statements he made in one of his “look at me I’m outrageous” performances. He was ever so close to finally getting onto the big stage, making it to the show, but now he has been sent down to the minors and his career is in doubt. The people in charge of the stage have strict rules about who gets on and what they say while on the stage. You either submit to these rules or they toss you from the stage.

Conservatives in the 80’s made this blunder. They truly thought they would be accepted into the club if the public embraced them. The people in charge don’t give a damn about the public’s opinion. They care about controlling the message and the media stage is the platform from which the message is broadcast. If you want onto the stage, it means signing a blood oath to promote the message and there is no room for compromise. There are two sides in this, pick one and live with the choice.

That’s why it is important to no-platform the people in charge. It would glorious if all Trump voters dropped their cable sub this month, but that’s not happening. People like their entertainments. What you can do is build your own media platforms by relentlessly supporting the new ones coming on-line now…. Supporting the media that supports you means looking for a friendly source before going to the mainstream source. It also means the leaders and big shots of the movement need to stay the hell off the mainstream platforms. Milo doing Maher did everything for Maher and nothing for Milo. Anyone who tries to get onto the big stage and mix it up with the mainstream media should be suspect. It is the Golden Rule, the man with the gold makes the rules and in media, it is the man who owns the stage who makes the rules.

The big lesson from the Reagan Revolution is that optimism is easily used as a weapon against the optimistic. All the “Morning in America” bullshit in the 80’s fooled a lot of people into thinking the fight was over and the results were a foregone conclusion. Young people were convinced they had been born into the springtime of a cultural revolution, when in fact they had been born into the early winter of a declining civilization.

We saw this with the Tea Party too. It had no sooner begun to build momentum when all of the Richard Armitrages and Dana Loesches began leaping to the front of the parade and leading it into oblivion. Fortunately, the “Alt-Right is Hitler” tends to prevent most of the grifters from jumping on board the train, although CPAC’s embrace of Bannon, Trump, and near-embrace of Milo may signify that they are going to begin trying to coopt the Alt-Right since demonizing it failed.

Why listen to TED Talks?

When you can be exposed to the ideas they’ll be discussing years in advance by reading my columns and this blog.

“How do we make sense of today’s political divisions? In a wide-ranging conversation full of insight, historian Yuval Harari places our current turmoil in a broader context, against the ongoing disruption of our technology, climate, media — even our notion of what humanity is for. This is the first of a series of TED Dialogues, seeking a thoughtful response to escalating political divisiveness. Make time (just over an hour) for this fascinating discussion between Harari and TED curator Chris Anderson.”

“I think the basic thing that happened is we have lost our story. Humans think in stories and we try to make sense of the world by telling stories,” the historian said. “And for the last few decades we had a very simple and very attractive story about what was happening in the world. And the story said that the economy is being globalized, politics is being liberalized, and the combination of the two will create paradise on earth. And we just need to keep globalizing the economy and liberalizing the political system, and everything will be wonderful.”

“2016 is when a very large segment of the Western world stopped believing in this story,” he said. “For good or bad reason it doesn’t matter, people stopped believing the story, and when you don’t have a story it is hard to understand what is happening.”

“The old 20th century political model of left vs. right is now basically irrelevant and the real divide today is between global and national, global or local. All over the world this is not the main struggle.”

Such amazing insight, such as the idea that global government might be more akin to China than Denmark! How very fascinating! I’ve never paid any attention to TED for just this reason; it’s third-rate pop intellectualism marketed to pseudo-intellectuals to make them feel smart. The amazing thing is that it has taken them this long to begin suspecting that Fukuyama might have been wrong. And they still haven’t figured out that Huntington, and Powell, and Wallace et al were right.

Out of curiosity, I did a search on “globalism” in my latest book, the first volume in the trilogy of my collected columns, and this was the first one that came up.

From The Collected Columns Vol. I, Innocence & Intellect, 2001-2005


One world… one big, bloody problem
February 4, 2002

It’s not hard to understand why globalism is so persistently seductive to people of genuinely good intent. Long a staple of hack science fiction writers and the producers of Saturday-morning cartoons, the notion of one central and benevolent government for all humanity appears like a light shining in the darkness of a world that is still wracked by warfare, terrorism, famine and disease despite the past century’s incredible advances in technology.

Of course, it was pointed out several thousand years ago that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

In fact, if humanity’s past record is a reasonable guide, globalism may represent the single deadliest threat to mankind in our long, murderous history. The Economist has reported that in the last century, more people died at the hands of their own governments than in all the wars and civil wars combined—170 million deaths vs. 37 million. However, the implications of this fact for global governance have not often been considered.

Supporters of globalism are optimistic that under the aegis of a single government, the world will experience peace, one way or another. But even if we put aside the questionable notion of an enforced peace, which the Balkan conflict demonstrated is merely a matter of putting off today’s violence for tomorrow, it must be understood that an end to war is not synonymous with an end to violence and bloodshed.

Just as soldiers going into battle for the first time tend to think in terms of what they will do to the enemy instead of what the enemy will do to them, globalists envision one-world governance as an efficient means of imposing their views on others. This is why political activists of nearly every stripe tend to embrace globalist institutions even if they oppose a specific aspect of globalism. Thus the radical environmentalist who protests the World Economic Forum nevertheless supports the Kyoto Treaty on global warming.

But there is no guarantee that a one-world government will respect the laws, customs, and institutions of the traditional freedom-loving West. Indeed, the institutions which are most deeply enmeshed in the globalist movement show strong signs that it will instead imitate the autocratic habits of its intellectual predecessors. For example, the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights states in Article 29, section 3, that:

These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

Jawohl, Reichsfuhrer Annan! Consider also the possibility that a coalition of Arab and African states might take control of the global government in the same way they’ve been able to exert undue influence over the U.N. General Assembly. Then everyone could enjoy the religious freedom enjoyed by Jews and Christians living in Saudi Arabia and the Sudan .

Unfortunately, that’s far from the worst possibility. Two of the governments responsible for the worst civilian massacres in history, Russia and China, boasting 62 million and 37 million murders, respectively, hold permanent seats on the U.N. Security Council. And for those who argue that Russia isn’t the same government as the Soviet Union, I have only one thing to say: If they’re not, then what is Russia doing on the Security Council?

Even in medieval times, intelligent people understood that the fact that one king was a wise and benevolent ruler didn’t mean the next one wouldn’t be a complete psychopath. For those of you without historical reference, I’m talking about a situation like the one depicted in the movie “Gladiator,” wherein Emperor Marcus Aurelius was succeeded by his son Commodus. The peril of central power is why America’s founding fathers decided to ditch the whole concept and did their best to break it up, scattering it as far and as wide throughout the land as possible.

Regardless of how global governance is implemented, it is sure to attract every evil, power-seeking individual and organization like pedophiles to a public schoolyard. The intrigues and conspiracies will make Byzantium’s internecine power struggles look like a student-council debate by comparison. Every would-be Hitler, Lenin, Mao and Mugabe will be converging on a single institution, and the most ruthless of them will be the winner.

The National Socialists had a saying that still sounds ominous now, 50 years later. “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer!” One world, one government may not sound so scary yet, but it should. Because one thing is certain. Totalitarian government doesn’t improve with size.

Mailvox: on balkanization

An informative email from someone who witnessed the most recent Balkan wars from the front row:

I am writing you because whenever somebody talks about war in Yugoslavia or I hear balkanization, I think people misuse the term. So I would like to tell my view on the subject. I am a Croat, and I was a teenager during the war.

Balkan and balkanization as a term is specific of its geography where there are lots of small valleys, and a history of Ottoman rule, which together produced clannish behavior in Balkans. Croatia has roughly third of the country that can be considered balkanized and Bosnia and Hercegovina is epitome of the term. Thus war in Croatia was regular army vs clans in valleys, and war in Bosnia was clans free for all. Clans were excellent in defending their valleys (knowledge of the terrain and faith in fellow clansmen) against other clansmen. Croatian regulars which started with no weapons, when armed easily defeated clan-people in full frontal attack over wide front. Bosnia was a mess where Croats owned half of the land (17% of people) and were supplied from Croatia, Serbs (31%) had the most guns but little land and Muslims had 43% of the people and lived in cities and near a river bordering Serbia. Since you cannot hold occupied territory without removing original inhabitants, Serbs cleared Croats from north of the Bosnia and Muslims from the river bordering Serbia and populate those areas with Serbs who fled from Croatia.

Two main things influenced Balkans: geography and Ottoman rule. Geography is very important because most of the Balkans consists of small valleys trapped by high mountains. Ottoman ruled over most of Balkans for some 300 years. Ottoman reach can be roughly correlated with Hajal line. This had consequences on characteristics of its people. Geography and Ottoman rule made people clannish, i.e. most important allegiance was to 5-20 thousands people who live in the valley. Funny enough these people referred to each other as “zemljaci”, derivative of “zemlja” which means both country and soil. Up until WWII there was not a lot of movement between areas so these characteristics were preserved.

After WWII Yugoslavia embraced a toned down form of socialism and government companies and government itself grew at accelerated pace. Clannish behavior demands that if somebody of the clan gets any managerial position he is required to employ its “zemljaci” foremost. Since this was going on for some 40 years most of the people in the police, military, and other government positions were from the other side of the Hajal line. The problem was clearly evident in Croatia because roughly the third of Croatia is east of Hajal line and most of those people were Serbs (in numbers Serbs were 12% in Croatia and majority in the areas east of Hajal line). It was no wonder that Serbs participated in police and government disproportionally to their population. When socialism fell these Serbs rightly thought that if Croatia gained independence their share in government will be reduced to their population share. Sprinkle a little incentive from Milošević and support from Yugoslav army and you have a recipe for a war.

War in Croatia was vastly different than war in Bosnia. Croatia was a functioning, Catholic, almost western country albeit without any armament (one year before the fall of socialism, Croatian government gave up its weapons to Yugoslav army, as opposed to Slovenia whose socialist leaders were not traitors). Serbs were 12% of population but in defendable valleys with ample weapons and ammunition. It took several years for Croatia to rearm itself and take over Serb-controlled areas. In the final battle, evacuation corridors were established so all Serbs that felt the need to flee can leave. Proportion of Serbs in Croatia went down from 12% to 5%. After siege of Vukovar and Dubrovnik the end result was never in question, only question was will reintegration be peacefully or not.

Siege of Dubrovnik is excellent example of the war. It was a turning point in the war after which Serbs never won another battle. The crucial battle was battle for Srđ, which was a battle for a Napoleon fort overlooking Dubrovnik. Numbers are interesting: there were 880 people defending Dubrovnik (some 50 000 civilians), forces in siege had 30 000 people and 100 tanks (hard terrain meant the tanks were of no use, and most of the soldiers were forced recruits). Actual battle for the fort started on Dec 6, 1991. 600 people and two tanks were stationed to attack the fort, but only 40 soldiers of the Yugoslav army special forces were directly involved in fighting. 42 people defended the fort. After a lot of artillery on the fort, two groups advanced to the fort. The advancing tanks were quickly neutralized, but after some fighting fort was overrun, defenders were out of bullets so a broken arrow order was given. After artillery died down defenders started to sing patriotic songs so attackers were in disarray, several wounded, without knowing who shot the mortar on them. Attack was broken and attackers retreated. Fort was resupplied by carrying ammo up the 600m hill on foot and the battle was over at sunset.

War in Bosnia was different because, especially in the beginning, there were not a lot of official armies and usually there were no established frontline but each valley established paramilitary and defended itself. This is very consistent with clan theory and defenders were very efficient in defending their valleys, because they knew the terrain, they trusted their flanks, and if they did not defend they would be slaughtered like in Srebrenica valley. When it was evident that the war in Croatia was over USA gave a go-ahead to defeat Srbs in Bosnia as well, but then stopped the attack after Croatian army swept some 40km of territory in one day, fearing flight of all Serbs from Bosnia.

Key takeaways: The number of soldiers in active fighting was low on any side. Clans are best in defending their territory but ineffective in attack. If you occupy a territory you cannot hold it unless people originally there leave or die. Trust that your flanks won’t desert their position is crucial, which would mean that homogeneous nation is essential for a successful recruit army, especially for defense.

We can draw a parallel with western Europe where ghettos can be equated to valleys and people in ghettos show similar characteristics to clansmen. Croatian victory shows the path, coordinated attack on all valleys at once and established corridors for retreat of the civilians.

The threat to free speech

While Milogate has dominated the news, the flamboyant ex-Breitbart editor is far from the only observer concerned about the future of free speech across the West. Military historian and Castalia House author Martin van Creveld has observed as much as well:

Freedom of speech is in trouble—and the only ones who do not know it are those who will soon find out. The idea of free speech is a recent one. It first emerged during the eighteenth century when Voltaire, the great French writer, said that while he might not agree with someone’s ideas he would fight to the utmost to protect that person’s right to express them. Like Assange and Snowden Voltaire paid the penalty, spending time in jail for his pains. Later, to prevent a recurrence, he went to live at Frenay, just a few hundred yards from Geneva. There he had a team or horses ready to carry him across the border should the need arise. Good for him.

To return to modern times, this is not the place to trace the stages by which freedom of speech was hemmed in in any detail. Looking back, it all started during the second half of the 1960s when it was forbidden to say, or think, or believe, that first blacks, then women, then gays, then transgender people, might in some ways be different from others. As time went on this prohibition came to be known as political correctness. Like an inkstain it spread, covering more and more domains and polluting them. This has now been carried to the point where anything that may offend anyone in some way is banned—with the result that, as Alan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind has shown, in many fields it has become almost impossible to say anything at all.

Let me give you just one example of what I mean. Years ago, at my alma mater in Jerusalem, I taught a course on military history. The class consisted of foreign, mostly American, students. At one point I used the germ Gook. No sooner had the word left my mouth than a student rose and, accused me of racism. I did my best to explain that, by deliberately using the term, I did not mean to imply that, in my view, the Vietnamese were in any way inferior. To the contrary, I meant to express my admiration for them for having defeated the Americans who did think so. To no avail, of course.

And so it goes. When the Internet first appeared on the scene I, along with a great many other people, assumed that any attempt to limit freedom of speech had now been definitely defeated. Instead, the opposite is beginning to happen. Techniques such as “data mining” made their appearance, allowing anything anyone said about anything to be instantly monitored and recorded, forever. All over Europe, the thought police is in the process of being established. Sometimes it is corporations such as Facebook which, on pain of government intervention, are told to “clean up” their act by suppressing all kinds of speech or, at the very least, marking it as “offensive,” “untrue,” and “fake.” In others it is the governments themselves that take the bit between their teeth.

When people as diverse as Roosh, Milo, and MvC are speaking out about the danger to free speech, you can be certain that it is a serious problem. And, of course, this threat is only one aspect of the larger, existential threat to Western civilization itself.

On a related note, a visual guide to how social justice warriors coopt organizations and communities.