Tag: history

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.

Who we are not

Ross Douthat offers an older historical fiction in exchange for a newer, more obviously false one:

The problem with this rhetorical line is that it implicitly undercuts itself. If close to half of America voted for Republicans in the Obama years and support Trump today, then clearly something besides the pieties of cosmopolitan liberalism is very much a part of who we are.

This self-undermining flaw makes the trope a useful way to grasp the dilemmas facing Trump’s opponents. In seeking to reject Trump’s chauvinist vision, they end up excluding too much of what a unifying counternarrative would require.

The exclusion happens by omission, in the course of telling a story about America that’s powerful but incomplete. In this narrative, which has surged to the fore in response to Trump’s refugee and visa policies, we are a propositional nation bound together by ideas rather than any specific cultural traditions — a nation of immigrants drawn to Ellis Island, a nation of minorities claiming rights too long denied, a universal nation destined to welcome foreigners and defend liberty abroad.

This is obvious nonsense, as Douthat observes.

Given this story’s premises, saying that’s not who we are is a way of saying that all more particularist understandings of Americanism, all non-universalist forms of patriotic memory, need to be transcended. Thus our national religion isn’t anything specific, but we know it’s not-Protestant and not-Judeo-Christian. Our national culture is not-Anglo-Saxon, not-European; the prototypical American is not-white, not-male, not-heterosexual. We don’t know what the American future is, but we know it’s not-the-past.

But the real American past was particularist as well as universalist. Our founders built a new order atop specifically European intellectual traditions. Our immigrants joined a settler culture, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, that demanded assimilation to its norms. Our crisis of the house divided was a Christian civil war. Our great national drama was a westward expansion that conquered a native population rather than coexisting with it.

Then for a variety of reasons — a necessary reckoning with white supremacism, a new and diverse wave of immigration, the pull of a more globalist ethos, the waning of institutional religion — that mid-century story stopped making as much sense. In its place emerged a left-wing narrative that stands in judgment on the racist-misogynist-robber baron past, and a mainstream liberal narrative that has room for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Alexander Hamilton (as opposed to the slightly more Trumpish genuine article) and Emma Lazarus, but feels unsure about the rest.

Instead of presenting the truthful alternative, Douthat pushes the civic nationalist myth, complete with the 20th century “Judeo-Christian” lie, not once, not twice, but THREE times!

But meanwhile for a great many Americans the older narrative still feels like the real history. They still see themselves more as settlers than as immigrants, identifying with the Pilgrims and the Founders, with Lewis and Clark and Davy Crockett and Laura Ingalls Wilder. They still embrace the Iliadic mythos that grew up around the Civil War, prefer the melting pot to multiculturalism, assume a Judeo-Christian civil religion rather the “spiritual but not religious” version.

Trump’s ascent is, in part, an attempt to restore their story to pre-eminence. It’s a restoration attempt that can’t succeed, because the country has changed too much, and because that national narrative required correction. The myth of the “Lost Cause” had to die, the reality of racial wrongs required more acknowledgment, the Judeo-Christian center had to make room for a larger plurality of faiths.

But so far we haven’t found a way to correct the story while honoring its full sweep — including all the white-male-Protestant-European protagonists to whom, for all their sins, we owe so much of our inheritance.

Notice that Douthat retreats to an older false narrative, the 20th century civic nationalist narrative, in preference to the 21st century multicultural narrative. But both narratives are entirely and absolutely false. Both narratives are fiction.

America is not, and never was, any more “Judeo-Christian” than Israel is “Hindu-Judaic” or Japan is “Islamo-Shinto”. The melting pot is rhetoric that is every bit as false, and every bit as weaponized for the benefit of immigrants to the detriment of the native population, as the multiculturalist rhetoric.

The fake story of history

Steve Sailor can’t help but concur with Mark Zuckerberg’s globalist manifesto:

“History is the story of how we’ve learned to come together in ever greater numbers — from tribes to cities to nations.”

As we all know, independence and diversity have always been the enemy of progress. For example, that’s why Thomas Jefferson wrote The Declaration of Dependence submitting the American colonies to the British Empire.

Similarly, the father of history, Herodotus, wrote to celebrate the mighty Persian Empire’s reduction of the various Greek city-states to a satrapy ruled from Babylon.

Likewise, every year Jews gather to admit that their stiff-neckedness provoked the Roman Empire into, rightfully, smashing the Temple in Jerusalem on the holy day of We-Had-It-Coming.

And, of course, who can forget Shakespeare’s plays, such as Philip II and Admiral-Duke of Medina Sidonia, lauding the Spanish Armada for conquering the impudent English and restoring to Canterbury the One True Faith?

Similarly, Oswald Mosley’s prime ministership (1940-1980) of das englische Reich is justly admired for subordinating England’s traditional piratical turbulence to the greater good of Europe.

Likewise, who can not look at the 49 nations currently united by their adherence to the universalist faith of Islam and not see that submission is the road to peace, prosperity, and progress? If only unity had prevailed at Tours in 732 instead of divisiveness. May that great historical wrong be swiftly rectified in the decades to come!

Since they believe there is the same as here, then why should any globalist complain when the nationalists send them out of the West?

Equality is not “the rights of Englishmen”

An article on Alexander Hamilton’s opinion on immigration is revealing for what it shows about Jefferson and the false foundation he provides the civic nationalists for their pseudo-nationalism:

Although Alexander Hamilton was himself an immigrant, he was adamantly opposed to the open immigration policies that President Thomas Jefferson proposed in his first annual message to Congress in 1801. Although the incoming president had once opposed unlimited immigration, Jefferson now saw it as a way to secure the future political dominance of his own party over Hamilton’s Federalists.

Hamilton, like most Federalists, was concerned about French influence on American politics. Although the French Revolution had descended into terror and led to the rise of Napoleon, Jefferson and his Democratic-Republican Party persisted in their attachment to the French. Hamilton feared that Jefferson’s proposal for unlimited immigration would lead to the triumph of the radical principles of the French Revolution over those of the more moderate American Revolution.

Writing as “Lucius Crassus,” Hamilton argued: “The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias, and prejudice; and on that love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education, and family.”

Invoking Jefferson’s own “Notes on Virginia,” Hamilton observed that “foreigners will generally be apt to bring with them attachments to the persons they have left behind; to the country of their nativity, and to its particular customs and manners.” He argued that “it is unlikely that they will bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism.”

He continued: “The influx of foreigners must, therefore, tend to produce a heterogeneous compound; to change and corrupt the national spirit; to complicate and confound public opinion; to introduce foreign propensities. In the composition of society, the harmony of the ingredients is all-important, and whatever tends to a discordant intermixture must have an injurious tendency.”

Hamilton concluded: “To admit foreigners indiscriminately to the rights of citizens, the moment they put foot in our country, as recommended in [Jefferson’s] message, would be nothing less than to admit the Grecian horse into the citadel of our liberty and sovereignty.”

As I have repeatedly noted, the openness of certain of the Founding Fathers to non-English immigration was not based on principle, and equality was very far from a core principle of the American Revolution, much less the “sacred” and primary principle that the civic nationalists falsely claim it to be.

Equality was not a core principle of the American Revolution at all, nor does the false and ahistorical conservative distinction between “equality of opportunity” and “equality of result” have anything to do with the famous rhetorical phrase that Jefferson inserted in the Declaration of Independence. The equality to which Jefferson refers is actually the “liberté, égalité, fraternité” of the French Revolution for which he subsequently showed such enthusiasm. Equality is a French concept, not an American one, and is not among the Rights of Englishmen.

Moreover, the Congress rejected Jefferson’s unprincipled and tactical call for open immigration, as it restricted naturalization to “free white men” and ” further directed the clerk of the court to record the entry of all aliens into the United States” in the Naturalization Law of 1802.

An amazingly bad idea

Greece completely fails history:

Athens’s half a million Muslims are set to get their first official mosque in more than a century.

The city has not had a formal mosque since it drove out occupying Ottomans in 1833, and Deputy Foreign Minister Ioannis Amanantidis told parliament last year that it was the only European capital “to be deprived of such a religious space”.

For years Muslims have resorted to praying in hundreds of makeshift sites, in crowded basements or dark warehouses targeted by racist attackers.

In May, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras declared building a mosque long overdue. The government, he said, would push ahead “out of respect for the Muslim residents in our capital, but also because we are obliged to actively defend our values.”

All I can say is that World War III is going to be beyond all imagination. These are truly the Crazy Years.

One can understand how the USA and Western Europe are naive about the existential threat posed by Islamic expansion. But one would have thought that Greece and Spain, at a bare minimum, would remember.

This demonstrates, again, why Christianity is absolutely necessary for Western civilization. It’s barely been a decade since some Western nations abandoned their state churches, and they’re already committing societal suicide.

Of false dogmas and founding myths

Now, I love and respect John Wright for many reasons. He is, among other things, a science fiction and fantasy grandmaster, and one of the three best writers of his generation. But I am in complete intellectual harmony with no man, and his civic nationalism – which I will note that other men I respect such as Mike Cernovich and Donald Trump share – is one of them. The problem is that their civic nationalism is almost entirely based on myths and falsehoods, as anyone who has done the necessary historical research already knows.

America has a dogma. America is based on the proposition that all men are created equal. Anyone learning and loving that dogma, who comes here, is a candidate for becoming an American, and, upon legal naturalization, will be as much an American as the man whose ancestors arrived on the Mayflower.

America does have a dogma. It is, like many national founding myths, a false dogma. There is no more truth to the idea that America is based on the proposition that all men are created equal than there is to the idea that Rome was founded by Aeneas and the Trojan refugees. John clearly has not read Cuckservative, or some of the relevant writings of various Founding Fathers.

Why should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our settlements, and by herding together establish their languages and manners to the exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our language or customs, any more than they can acquire our complexion?
—Ben Franklin, Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, 1751

Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson happen to disprove the romantic notion of the civic nationalists as well. They believed foreigners could assimilate, so long as there were sufficiently small numbers of them, and their blood literally intermingled with the English blood of the actual Americans in time.

The policy or advantage of [immigration] taking place in a body (I mean the settling of them in a body) may be much questioned; for, by so doing, they retain the language, habits, and principles (good or bad) which they bring with them. Whereas by an intermixture with our people, they, or their descendants, get assimilated to our customs, measures, and laws: in a word, soon become one people.
—George Washington, letter to John Adams, November 15, 1794

Although as to other foreigners it is thought better to discourage their settling together in large masses, wherein, as in our German settlements, they preserve for a long time their own languages, habits, and principles of government, and that they should distribute themselves sparsely among the natives for quicker amalgamation, yet English emigrants are without this inconvenience.
—Thomas Jefferson, letter to George Flower, 1817

The Left, in order to destroy this concept, wrote immigration laws and misinterpreted constitutional principles, to make it so that anyone with an anchor baby, or any relative, living here, could be welcomed here. This was done by enemies of American and is alien to our entire way of life.

Now, this part is correct. But recall that the Left achieved its goals by appealing to the very founding myths to which the civic nationalists subscribe.

America is not a nation in the sense that nations in the Old World are. We are exceptional. We are a new concept.

If America is not a nation in the sense that nations in the Old World are, then it is not a nation at all. There is absolutely nothing new about the idea of giving citizenship to small numbers of foreigners or permitting entry to immigrants in the futile hope that they will strengthen the nation without transforming it into something that it is not. And the Swiss confederation preceded the American by more than 500 years.

Why do I need to be explaining to you something we have both known since childhood? How can anyone American or not, who is aware of America, be unaware of how America works or what is the secret of our unparalleled success?

The difference is that I understand that the national founding myth is a myth, of no more truth than George Washington’s famous cherry tree. If America’s civic nationalists were Romans, they would insist that the secret to Rome’s strength was that the blood of Trojans flowed in their veins. Immigration and equality have very little, if anything, to do with America’s success, as the previous success of the British empire should suffice to show. America was successful because it was founded by one of the most successful peoples in the history of Man, and founded on a vast and wealthy continent protected from the powers of the Old World by an ocean. Moreover, Australia has hardly been a failure; its success can certainly be described as being reasonably comparable to the USA’s, especially given its relative geographic disadvantages.

This reminds me of the very popular view among economists that the secret to the USA’s post-WWII economic growth was the massive amount of government spending during the war, forgetting the considerably more important fact that the USA was the only industrialized country whose population and infrastructure was not devastated by the war.

Now, certain loudmouths on the Alt-Right heaps contempt on all these ideas, but never says anything that actually addresses or casts honest doubt on them. Aside from the emotion of scorn, there is no argument there. It is shouting, but no words underneath the noise.

I leave it to the reader to determine the veracity of those words. What aspect of John’s argument for civic nationalism have I failed to address? Point it out, by all means, if you can, and I shall do my humble best to amend any failures in that regard. One reason the Alt-Right’s rise is inevitable is our intellectual ruthlessness and our determination to accept even those truths that are most painful to us. We are not at war with the civic nationalists; they are not the enemies of the West. But if we are to see  the situation as clearly as possible and understand the current challenges as deeply as we can, we cannot permit ourselves to be hampered by their conceptual baggage.

If you want to get up to speed on this subject, I strongly suggest you read Cuckservative, by John Red Eagle and me. We learned a lot in the writing of the book, so it is safe to assume you’ll learn something by reading it.

Magic Dirt Fail: Byzantine edition

More historical lessons courtesy of the great historian Charles Oman:

The chief modifications which must be marked in the character of the empire between 320 and 620 depend on two processes of gradual change which were going on throughout the three centuries. The first was the gradual de-Romanization (if we may coin the uncouth word) alike of the governing classes and the masses of population.

In the fourth century the Roman impress was still strong in the East; the Latin language was habitually spoken by every educated man, and nearly all the machinery of the administration was worked in Latin phraseology. All law terms are habitually Latin, all titles of officers, all names of taxes and institutions. Writers born and bred in Greece or Asia still wrote in Latin as often as in the Greek which must have been more familiar to them. Ammianus Marcellinus may serve as a fair example: born in Greece, he wrote in the tongue of the ruling race rather than in his own idiom.

Moreover there was still in the lands east of the Adriatic a very large body of Latin-speaking population—comprising all the inhabitants of the inland of the Balkan peninsula, for, except Greece proper, Macedonia, and a scattered line of cities along the Thracian coast, the whole land had learnt to speak the tongue of its conquerors. By the seventh century this Roman element was rapidly vanishing.

Three hundred years for the cultural de-Romanization of the Eastern Roman Empire. We’ve seen significant cultural de-Americanization in 72 fewer years as America 1.0 gave way to America 2.0, and now 3.0, and the linguistic devolution is already well underway.

I also note the similarity between the failure of the Byzantine men to embrace the masculine duties of their citizenship during this period of decline and the failure of Western women to embrace the feminine duties of theirs.

Some of the developments of the new idea were harmful and even dangerous to the State. They took the form of laying such exclusive stress on the relations between the individual soul and heaven, that the duties of man to the State were half forgotten. Chief among these developments was the ascetic monasticism which, starting from Egypt, spread rapidly all over the empire, more especially over its eastern provinces.

When men retire from their duties as citizens, intent on nothing but on saving their own souls, take up a position outside the State, and cease to be of the slightest use to society, the result may be harmless so long as their numbers are small. But at this time the monastic impulse was working on such a large scale that its development was positively dangerous. It was by thousands and ten thousands that the men who ought to have been bearing the burdens of the State, stepped aside into the monastery or the hermit’s cave.

The ascetics of the fifth century had neither of the justifications which made monasticism precious in a later age, they were neither missionaries nor men of learning. The monastery did not devote itself either to sending out preachers and teachers, or to storing up and cherishing the literary treasures of the ancient world.

One could even observe that the office is the modern version of the nunnery, where unmarriageable women who will never have children go to spend their barren lives and busy themselves with make-work until they die.