Tag: history

When the die was cast

The Zman looks at when Rome’s fate was sealed:

The die was most likely cast when the Republic began to compromise its own rules for limiting and distributing power. The system they had created was a reflection of the tribal realities of the early republic. In order to keep any one family from gaining too much power, they systematically limited the time anyone served in office. The system also forced an apprenticeship on those who went into public life. This had the benefit of making public men buy into the system. Therefore they were willing to defend it.

That meant the system had a policing mechanism to sort out enemies before they could cause trouble. An ambitious young man could not skip any steps on his way up the ladder, so once he got up the ladder, he was not agreeing to any changes in the process. Defending the system was a way to defend one’s prerogatives, but also a way to defend the system from lunatics. Verpus Maximus may be smart and talented, but he was not only going to wait his turn, he was going to do all the jobs necessary to prove his worth.

This system started to break down with the rivalry of Sulla and Marius. Sulla was the first man to hold the office of consul twice. He also got away with marching an army on Rome itself, in order to defeat his rival, Marius. Both of these acts were supposed to be disqualifying, but exceptions were made for expediency. Sulla sided with the Senate so the Senate bent the rules to serve themselves. A good case can be made that this is the point when it was all over for the Republic.

It was just a matter of time before someone used Sulla as a precedent.

The die-casting point that sealed the fate of the USA is a little bit easier to determine, in my opinion. The 1965 Naturalization Act that eliminated the restrictions on immigration by national origin is the obvious one.

Notice that in both cases, it was abandoning tradition and loosening vital restrictions that proved to be the fatal act.

Mailvox: the necessity of Christianity

Stickwick had some thoughts about the IQ-related video I posted yesterday.

I found the Rushton video interesting. During the Q&A, someone astutely asked Rushton why the difference in terms of societal output between whites and higher-IQ Asians. Rushton said the answer is not known, but he’s wrong. The answer is well known amongst historians of science: it’s Christianity.

Pearcey and Thaxton, in their book, The Soul of Science, explain in great detail that it was the ideals and assumptions of Christianity that led to science and thus greater technological advances.

These ideals and assumptions include:

  •     Belief that the universe was created and ordered by a transcendent, rational mind
  •     Belief that the universe is lawful and knowable
  •     Belief in the reality of the physical world
  •     Belief that the physical world is of value
  •     Viewing physical work as noble, as a divine calling
  •     The Biblical admonishment to test claims
  •     Viewing the study of nature as a proper form of worship
  •     Belief in linear time
  •     Belief that mathematics forms the substrate of the physical world

Every non-Christian culture lacks at least one, and usually several, of these, which are all necessary for the development and advancement of science. This is why the intellectually advanced Greeks, and the technologically advanced Romans and Chinese, did not develop science, while the “backwards” medieval European Christians did.

The implications are obvious:

  1. If progressives are ever successful in completely secularizing the West, we will be relegated to second-world status.
  2.  If Asians, with their superior IQs and self-discipline, ever become Christian in sufficiently large numbers, they will eat our lunch in terms of scientific and technological advancements. 

This is why any efforts to make America and Europe great are doomed unless they are centered around Christianity.

Socialism still doesn’t work

One of the many reasons I am so skeptical of “self-correcting” science is that humans quite observably learn absolutely nothing from history, even when logic, theory, evidence, and experience all line up conclusively in harmony:

Facing a bread shortage that is spawning massive lines and souring the national mood, the Venezuelan government is responding this week by detaining bakers and seizing establishments.

In a press release, the National Superintendent for the Defense of Socioeconomic Rights said it had charged four people and temporarily seized two bakeries as the socialist administration accused bakers of being part of a broad “economic war” aimed at destabilizing the country.

In a statement, the government said the bakers had been selling underweight bread and were using price-regulated flour to illegally make specialty items, like sweet rolls and croissants.

The government said bakeries are only allowed to produce French bread and white loaves, or pan canilla, with government-imported flour. However, in a tweet on Thursday, price control czar William Contreras said only 90 percent of baked goods had to be price-controlled products.

We shouldn’t be too contemptuous of the Venezuelans, though. They fell for socialism. We fell for feminism and civic nationalism. All three concepts are equally stupid, as all three fly completely in the face of our current understanding of the relevant sciences as well as thousands of years of written human history.

Decline and fall

In a single family. A Virginian inadvertently chronicles American genetic decline:

My people are pure Cavalier stock of the Virginia Tidewater. I am Frederick Venable Reed Jr, my mother’s maiden name being Betty Venable Rivers–a cousin marriage, which some will suggest explains a lot. The Venables were prominent in the gentility of Southside Virginia.

Why is this of interest, if indeed it is? There are reasonable people today who believe that traits such as politics, way of life, occupation, talents, and intellectual bent are genetically determined. Some time ago I found an interesting study showing that families–those studied were English–maintained distinguishable traits for many generations, suggesting that these were innate. For a generation or two similarities might be explained by children copying their parents. Over many generations, it would appear otherwise.

I wondered whether this would hold for my own family. It seems so. The first mention of Venables was of Walter de Veneur at the Battle of the Ford in 960. He did nothing astonishing, but I think that just being mentioned by name would suggest membership in something similar to the upper middle class. The name is baronial, from the town of Venables, near Evreux, in Normandy. In France, it morphed into various Latin and French forms such as le Venour, or Venator, or Venereux, becoming, after the clan came to England with William of Orange, Venables-Vernon. (Spelling was not an advanced science in those days.) These never sank into the lower classes nor rose to produce dukes or earls, but several barons, members of Parliament and such. Upper middle class. Honorable mention. Respectable, but not important.

Richard Venables is recorded as having purchased land in Virginia in 1635. The Venables became a distinguished family, of the ruling class but without doing anything to get them into textbooks. They were in the House of Burgesses. In 1776 Nathaniel Venable founded Hampden-Sydney College, which provided schooling for many of Southside’s leaders.

The Cavalier society of Tidewater was perhaps the high point of American civilization. The people were extraordinarily literate, steeped in the thought of the Enlightenment, imbued with a profound and kindly Christianity. From them came the Washingtons, Jeffersons, Madisons, the Lees and Custises. It is hard to imagine any modern politician, or his ghost writer, writing either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, the latter being the framework, enduring until perhaps 1960, of an entire nation. The Virginians did.

All that illustrious lineage, and now Fred is reduced to denying human biodiversity in defense of the members of La Raza Cosmica with whom he cohabitates. It rather reminds me of the women who are ferociously proud of their blue eyes and blonde hair raising their brown-eyed, black-haired children. They have proven themselves wholly unworthy of their heritage by virtue of failing to pass it on.

Fred writes: “The facial resemblance to the men in our line is strong. So is the character and cast of mind.” When the former disappears, the latter usually will as well. As Le Chateau likes to say, physiognomy is real.

See, that’s precisely the problem, Fred. They’re not your children’s people. You’re the end of the line. Whatever comes after is not that pure Cavalier stock of the Virginia Tidewater of which you are so proud.

Indeed, if my experience is any guide, people will very likely tell your grandchildren that they have no connection whatsoever to the Cavaliers and they are lying if they claim they do.

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.