
The First World War casts a dark shadow over the 20th century. It shattered the relative peace that had reigned since the Napoleonic Wars, killing some 9 million combatants and 7 million civilians. It is also blamed for causing the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the postwar decline of traditional morality—the flapper era, and the rise of fascism. In short, if WWI had never happened, the world would today be very different … and perhaps much better.
Last week, I argued against the first charge of this indictment. Russia was already pre-revolutionary in 1914; the war merely helped the process along. A large part of the population, especially urban workers, had become committed to revolution not as one option among several but as the best and most likely option. The authorities responded with repressive tactics that initially worked, particularly during the Revolution of 1905, but the appeal of radical change was less easily repressed. There would eventually be another revolution on a larger scale, with or without the war.
This week, I will turn to the second charge: the First World War paved the way for a decline of traditional sexual morality that is still ongoing. As historian James R. McGovern pointed out, this charge suffers from two defects:
– In its earlier stages at least, the change in morality seems to have been stronger in the United States, which had entered WWI halfway-through and would escape its ravages.
– The United States was already experiencing this change before the war.
McGovern argued for an alternate view of history: the new morality was “much more the result of earlier intrinsic social changes than either the sudden, supposedly traumatic experiences of the war or unique developments in the Twenties”:
Even a casual exploration of the popular literature of the Progressive era reveals that Americans then described and understood themselves to be undergoing significant changes in morals. “Sex o’clock in America” struck in 1913, about the same time as “The Repeal of Reticence.” One contemporary writer saw Americans as liberated from the strictures of “Victorianism,” now an epithet deserving criticism, and exulted, “Heaven defend us from a return to the prudery of the Victorian regime!” (McGovern, 1968)
Yes, this sexual revolution was facilitated by single women moving to the city and taking the jobs of enlisted men who had gone overseas. But a similar influx was already under way before the war:
A significant deterioration of external controls over morality had occurred before 1920. One of the consequences of working and living conditions in the cities, especially as these affected women, was that Americans of the period 1900-1920 had experienced a vast dissolution of moral authority, which formerly had centered in the family and the small community. The traditional “straight and narrow” could not serve the choices and opportunities of city life. As against primary controls and contacts based on face-to-face association where the norms of family, church, and small community, usually reinforcing each other, could be internalized, the city made for a type of “individualization” through its distant, casual, specialized, and transient clusters of secondary associations. The individual came to determine his own behavioral norms. (McGovern, 1968)
It wasn’t just urban life that weakened traditional moral authority. Some inventions, like the car and the telephone, were likewise helping young people to evade parental and community surveillance. Before the war, advice columnist Dorothy Dix had dubbed the car the “devil’s wagon” and observed that “the average father does not know, by name or sight, the young man who visits his daughter and who takes her out to places of amusement.” Meanwhile, moving pictures were breaking the silence on sex and showing forms of sexual expression that had previously been poorly known among teenagers and even many adults:
According to one critic the “sex drama” using “plain, blunt language” had become “a commonplace” of the theater after 1910 and gave the “tender passion rather the worst for it in recent years.” Vice films packed them in ever night, especially after the smashing success of “Traffic in Souls,” which reportedly grossed $450,000. (McGovern, 1968)
As a result, the youth subculture diverged more and more from the adult subculture, as a female college student confessed to her diary just before the First World War:
We were healthy animals and we were demanding our right to spring’s awakening. […] I played square with the men. I always told them I was not out to pin them down to marriage, but that this intimacy was pleasant and I wanted it as much as they did. We indulged in sex talk, birth control…. We thought too much about it. (McGovern, 1968)
Women’s dress reflected this evolution, exposing arms and legs and becoming deeply cut in front and back. In 1915, an American editor declared: “At no time and place under Christianity […] certainly never before in America, has woman’s form been so freely displayed in society and on the street” (McGovern, 1968).
American men were going through parallel changes:
Between 1910 and 1930, Victorian definitions of manliness declined in favor of recognizably modern forms of manliness that developed as a concomitant of the heterosocial youth culture. The key to understanding the change in the cultural ideal of masculinity in these years is the shift from a culture of “character,” in which men were expected to be good Christian Gentlemen and in which the keywords to describe manhood were “morals, manners, integrity, duty, work,” to a culture of personality, in which men were expected to cultivate the “performing self.” The culture of personality placed greater sexual demands and expectations on men. (White, 1993, p. 180)
This shift in values could be seen in the popularity of muscle magazines like Physical Culture and in the growing concern among young men over flaws in their sexual attractiveness: blackheads, off-white teeth, dandruff, and bad breath (White, 1993, pp. 22-23).
Conclusion
The sexual revolution wasn’t caused by the First World War. It was a culmination of trends that had begun earlier, circa 1910, specifically the growing ability of young men and women to evade external controls over morality, partly by using new channels for communication and culture-creation and partly by opening up new spaces for private interaction.
It’s questionable whether WWI played any role in this process. The notion that it did is largely due to our use of wars as a way to divide up the passage of time. We speak readily of the “postwar era” and the “interwar years,” not to mention “wartime.” This is understandable because both world wars marked the beginning and end of many regimes and even some countries. Unfortunately, by using these events as convenient bookends for periods of history, we may simplify and even distort our understanding of the past.
The culture of the interwar years, and the flapper era in particular, actually took shape on the eve of WWI. Similarly, the postwar era’s look and feel owed a lot to the late 1930s: the first comic books; the invention of TV; the rise of suburban living; and the showcasing of how science and technology would transform the future—a good example being the 1939 New York World’s Fair and its “world of tomorrow” theme. The trajectories of history often follow separate paths and cannot be easily tied together into prewar and postwar bundles.
McGovern, J.R. (1968). The American Woman’s Pre-World War I Freedom in Manners and Morals, The Journal of American History, 55, 315-333.
White, K. (1993). The First Sexual Revolution. The emergence of male heterosexuality in modern America, New York: New York University Press.
Obligatory:
Video Link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDseiUZ-vUM
Video Link
The mass produced and thus afordable car pioneered by Ford certainly altered sexual mores and Ford owed a lot to Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Protesant ethic being extended in the economy under the guise of comercial rationallity.
I think the secularised Protestant ethic of Progressivism was behind the sexual revolution. Progressives tried to use the law to discourage vice such as drunkenness (Prohibition) . The old sexual morality placed all the blame on women, Progressivists thought education was the answer, and tended to take the social opprobrium away from women.
Legal concepts of delinquency replaced the traditional religio-societal strictures. And the new way, like so much tinkering with society by the well meaning and self styled enlightened, just didn’t work.
In short, it was technology that made the difference – as I and others have said before.
It was also the new way of making money. Industrialization created an entirely new way of life. Rather than working on family farms or in family businesses, strangers were thrown together in big factories, mines, mills and so on. Young women often earned their own money in factories and watched movies for their amusement. Men in huge work gangs had no access to women except the prostitutes that set up shack near boomtowns.
The American West was unmoored from the traditional way of life starting in the mid-19th century. I know a thing or two about it because my family has been out west since before the Civil War, first as soldier settlers following the Mexican War, and my grandfather told me tales of life in the mining towns of the Sierra Nevada. Once he told me that on Friday after work there would be a line of miners going to the bank to pick up their wages on one side of the street, and a line of hookers on the other waiting to lighten their pockets. This would have been Virginia City in the 1920s, by which time this practice had been established for generations.
My guess is that by the 1960s American morality had become so “industrialized” (for lack of a better term) that the sexual revolution was inevitable. It was only the influx of European immigrants with traditional religious and family values and the fact that large numbers of Americans in the east, south and midwest still lived a pre-industrial lifestyle that prevented it from occurring much earlier.
One book I can relate to a great deal, and that I’ve mentioned here before, is Sometimes a Great Notion. Another work of fiction is the film There Will be Blood. Both depict the greed, license and radical individualism of the West. Also the total breakdown of family ties, brother against brother and father against son. I know of this from my own family experience. The great drama of the settling and taming of the American West was long seen as an adventure tale, but when I look back on what it did to us, it’s at least as much of a tragedy.
If you go take a walk in the hills of the Sierra Nevada, you will often find broken down old sluices, steam engines, ghost towns and so on. These rusting hulks and abandoned towns don’t bring an abandoned civilization to mind so much as they do relics of a war.
Bill P, it goes further back. When the Ulster Scots came over in the 17th century, Americans’ standards of decency were outraged by the Ulster women having skirts that exposed their bare legs right up to the knee.
Technology Jay? Charles Fourier is supposed to have thought the seas would be made from lemonade. It was utopianism, or meliorism and one strain traces back to Fourier. The mother lode was Puritans (Calvinists basically) of SE England. They got rid of all ceremonial and feast days and stripped religion down to what was based on the Bible. Then they found the Bible was not reliable. Hence AMERICAN TRANSCENDENTALISM.
I’m not sure that Continental Europe’s sexual liberty was ever really repressed, even in the 1700s or 1800s or at any time. When we watch “period movies” that depict that era based on documental evidence, in countries such as France or Spain or Holland, we see plenty of sex, fun, and bawdy activities in brothels.
Recently, the embattled IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, currently on trial in France, pointed out that his lavish sex parties were part of France’s age-old tradition of “libertinage” — freewheeling sex, dating from the 16th century:
“Mr. Strauss-Kahn characterized the sex parties as libertinage, or freewheeling sex and pleasure among multiple and consensual partners, an age-old and legal practice in France dating from the 16th century.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/11/world/europe/dsk-dominique-strauss-kahn-trial.html
More recently, in the 1920s, American journalists visiting Germany were astonished to see “young women at parties dressed only in transparent panties embroidered with a silver fig leaf – and, unlike ‘bunnies’ in American clubs, they ‘could be freely handled’” – unthinkable in the US at any time, even now (“Hitlerland”, Andrew Nagorski).
In Germany, the so-called Frei Korpus Kultur (Free Body Movement), which advocates nudity, began in the 18th century. Germany has historically had an extremely liberal attitude to nudity – even in prior centuries, it seems.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freik%C3%B6rperkultur
So, I would definitely distinguish between the Anglosphere and Continental Europe. It’s not my impression that the Continent was ever all that repressed.
There were also murderers, homosexuals, pedophiles, etc. in Continental Europe in the past. This doesn’t mean that most people were murderers, homosexuals, pedophiles, etc.
Weimar Germany was regarded as very cosmopolitan and not very German. The sort of sexual and moral licentiousness that prevailed in Berlin – in large part due to economic desperation and wealthy urbanites taking advantage of it – was viewed negatively by ordinary Germans and motivated much of the popular support for the Nazis who promised to clean it up and restore more traditional mores.
the secularised Protestant ethic of Progressivism was behind the sexual revolution
In a sense, both were manifestations of the same trend toward individualism. Late Protestantism was a form of Christianity that made it possible to abolish Christianity. Once religion becomes simply a matter of personal faith, it eventually becomes a means to divinize personal desires, no matter how whimsical they may be. Do you want to change sex? Fine, that’s your personal choice … and everyone else has to accommodate you because your choice is divine.
Catholicism underwent a similar evolution via Personalism. Initially, Personalism seemed to be a way to revive Catholicism, but it eventually became a way to liquidate Catholicism from within.
In short, it was technology that made the difference
Indeed it did. Technology has exposed the pre-existing contradictions of traditional culture. For instance, in the past there was no porn addiction because the quality of visual pornography was poor. There was literary pornography, but literary porn does not pose the same danger of chronic hyperstimulation.
The American West was unmoored from the traditional way of life starting in the mid-19th century.
Frontier societies have always been sexually libertine because of the high ratio of men to women. For many men, prostitution was the only way to have some form of sexual life.
It was only the influx of European immigrants with traditional religious and family values and the fact that large numbers of Americans in the east, south and midwest still lived a pre-industrial lifestyle that prevented it from occurring much earlier.
Immigration has tended to accelerate the individuation of American society. Immigrants assimilate, and they assimilate into a melting pot that increasingly is little more than a set of propositions: pay your taxes, vote every four years, and be ready to fight in foreign wars.
I’m not sure that Continental Europe’s sexual liberty was ever really repressed, even in the 1700s or 1800s or at any time.
In the 1700s, there wasn’t much difference in sexual morality between England and the Continent. The difference was most noticeable during the Victorian era, and even then it was a difference of degree. Continental Europe had a more permissive attitude toward prostitution and mistresses; other than that, family values were just as conservative on the Continent as in England.
Recently, the embattled IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, currently on trial in France, pointed out that his lavish sex parties were part of France’s age-old tradition of “libertinage” — freewheeling sex, dating from the 16th century:
DSK will say anything to get a good blow-job.
It’s not my impression that the Continent was ever all that repressed.
I can’t say that’s my impression. Nor am I sure DSK would want to see his daughters giving blow-jobs to dirty old men. Prostitution is one thing. Family morality is another.
Weimar Germany was regarded as very cosmopolitan and not very German
I agree. The same could be said for Victorian England. Even back then, London had plenty of night clubs and brothels.
“Last week, I argued against the first charge of this indictment. Russia was already pre-revolutionary in 1914”
But far from certain. Also, social crisis might have led to major reforms or less radical revolution.
Bolshies demolished the moderate provisional government(that already toppled the Czar) because of the continuation of the war. So, the war did put Bolshies in power.
Vietnam War seemed to have sexualized the 60s though.
WWI did make a lot of rural lads see whores for the first time.
WWII seems to have been de-sexualized, at least in the US.
Some of the old Indian temples depict couples of different kinds engaged in fairly adventurous sexual activity. Wonder if it was an indication of the dissolute ways of the ruling class, that led to the country’s conquest by Islamic invaders.
Early 20th Century America was an extraordinarily dynamic society, especially due to the combination of wealth and technological advance meaning that cars, telephones, and movies were rapidly becoming available to young people.
But far from certain. Also, social crisis might have led to major reforms or less radical revolution.
There was a less radical revolution the same year. Even without the war, it would not have lasted long because much of the population, especially the intellectual class, had become converted to radical change. Dostoevsky saw this first hand and described the revolutionary nihilists of his time in his novel The Possessed (1871):
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Wonder if it was an indication of the dissolute ways of the ruling class, that led to the country’s conquest by Islamic invaders.
India had become pacified, like all advanced civilizations, with the result that only specialized castes had the ability to wage war. Islam took root among peoples that were still at the clan stage of historical development, where all men were expected to use violence on a regular basis, and not just in war. Islam was thus able to mobilize people who were psychologically more willing to engage in violence, even at a high risk to their lives. This was not the case in India, where the ruling classes had long imposed a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. The average Indian was much less likely to use violence in his personal life than the average Arab or Afghan.
Early 20th Century America was an extraordinarily dynamic society
The sexual revolution was facilitated by America’s self-confidence. By the 20th century, there was a widespread belief that change could only be for the better and should thus be embraced.
See also M.G.’s work showing the liberal sexual attitudes that were in place post WW I:
Those Who Can See: Boats Against the Current
John Reilly wrote an interesting article along these lines some time back.He speculated on what would have happened if the Germans had won WW1:
http://www.firstworldwar.com/features/ifgermany.htm
“Even without the war, it would not have lasted long because much of the population, especially the intellectual class, had become converted to radical change.”
But the population’s idea of ‘radical change’ was land and peace. Nothing more. The majority soon began to protest against the Bolshies and more moderate socialists would have won a free election but Lenin suppressed the movement and ruthlessly ended all freedoms.
In the ensuing civil war, whites almost won and would have if not for their factionalism.
In the Spanish Civil War, the right won because the left was divided.
Most intellectuals were not Bolshie, which is why Bolshies had to create a vast secret police network to round them.
Without WWI, there’s no way Bolshies could have won.
The war sunk Kerensky’s government like the Vietnam War sunk Johnson.
Though sexual changes were on the way, I think the horrors of WWI did serve as an amoral justification for the new way.
Also, it weakened the moral force of those who opposed the new trend because young people could say “but your ‘great western civilization’ led to the greatest slaughter of all time.”
Still, the fact is even most people in American cities were remarkably sexually conservative up to the 50s, at least by the standards of the sexual revolution brought upon by the pill, youth culture, the new shamelessness, feminism, sex-ed, legalization of pornography, and sleep-around culture.
I’m thinking of Catholics immigrating into cities in particular. Up to the 1970s Catholic enclaves in major cities were among the last holdouts of traditional values in urban America. Also, some of the most resistant to calls to fight in foreign wars, especially prior to WWI.
But maybe these immigrants did accelerate the overall trend toward individualism, although you wouldn’t know it from the valiant efforts of a great many Catholics who were doing their best to hold back the tide. Some of the greatest artistic indictments of the atomization of American society came from Italian American film directors in the 70s. It sometimes surprises me that many younger people think everyone was on board with the sexual revolution back then, because when you watch the film classics from that time the majority of them come off as somewhat to very judgmental about the changes in lifestyle. It wasn’t until it was a done deal that films started to celebrate it.
So using pre-Islamic India as analogy, history is repeating itself. The West has adopted similar libertinism and has become pacified, thus opening itself to soft conquest by outsiders, a large chunk of whom happen to be Muslims.
The thing is Bolshies could not have won without military uprising, and WWI drove Russian soldiers to finally rebel.
WWII ended just 70 years ago. Fought by the same pacified population as is now in Europe. Men did not engage in violence on a regular basis in their personal lives, yet the war machinery created by them could have annihilated any clannish society around the world if they wished.
Neither lack of regular violence nor a specialized caste is a problem. We can only blame rapid swing in culture. It is really sad how deep societies can fall.
Also clannish societies can go through cultural changes which prevent them from creating any decisive force.
There may have been a Russian revolution regardless, but it may not have been led by Lenin. Maybe the Mensheviks would have prevailed.
Many GIs got a taste of French mores when visiting Pigalle, known to them as Pig Alley, and seeing Can Can dancers at the Folies Bergère during their liberty in Paris. They mailed many French letters and postcards, and sent a lot of French maps ;p
Interesting about Catholic Personalism, whichseems to have been a bit later in the century. Alasdair MacIntyre would put the begining of individualist (what he calls emotivist) morality at the Enlightenment.
Morality according to Hare is to ‘subject one’s own interests, where they conflict with those of other people other people, to a principle one one can accept as governing anyone’s conduct in like circumstances”. The thing is, as with DSK’s case, it is always in the individual’s interest for everyone else to act according to the aforementioned morality of subjecting their own interests to a principle they accept as governing anyone’s conduct in like circumstances. But what is in it for the individual?
Even you, Syon? Pushing revisionist history? People can hardly tell what actually happened, let alone describe the cone of possibility emanating from an event, the reality of which we know only by the one line of actuality it produced. Take, “…grew logically out of Nietzsche and Wagner and Freud.” Anyone want to pretend this means anything?
Weimar culture would have happened even if there had been no Weimar Republic.
Yes, even if the Kaiser had won the war or simply negotiated an honorable peace, there would still have been the same liberalization of culture and morality. He would have been like Ronald Reagan or the two Bushes — a nominally conservative leader presiding over an increasingly liberal culture.
In the ensuing civil war, whites almost won and would have if not for their factionalism.
They didn’t lose simply because of factionalism, although that was one reason. They also lost because they were never able to govern and mobilize the territories they did control. They were little more than passing caravans. In contrast, the Reds made a point of creating administrative structures at the local level and mobilizing the people through a sophisticated war of propaganda. The Whites never really tried to rally the Russian people to their cause:
Freeze, G.L. (ed.). (1997). Russia. A History, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Also, it weakened the moral force of those who opposed the new trend because young people could say “but your ‘great western civilization’ led to the greatest slaughter of all time.”
You’re confusing rationalization with reason.
Up to the 1970s Catholic enclaves in major cities were among the last holdouts of traditional values in urban America.
Unfortunately, enclaves usually don’t control enough territory to keep out undesirable cultural influences. The Amish can hold on to their culture because they systematically exclude modern liberal culture from their lives. The same with the Hassidic Jews. Catholic Americans were not willing to be that extreme.
Another thing. Enclaves don’t control the government. There is evidence that “open housing” laws in the Northeastern U.S. were partly motivated by liberal hostility to Catholic Americans. The aim was to break up Catholic neighbourhoods and disperse their inhabitants over as wide an area as possible.
The West has adopted similar libertinism and has become pacified, thus opening itself to soft conquest by outsiders
The West has delegated the legitimate use of violence to the government, i.e., the army and the police. That arrangement worked as long as the government was on the side of the people. This is no longer the case; the government is now dominated by globalist elites who feel no special loyalty to the people they rule.
WWII ended just 70 years ago. Fought by the same pacified population as is now in Europe.
See my last comment. Europeans can be very violent if ordered to be violent by the State. There’s a big difference between that kind of violence and Islamic violence, which was much more entrepreneurial. The Islamic Expansion was not driven by a centralized state, at least not in its early stages. It was driven by clans of Arabs moving out from the Arabian Peninsula. The same with the corsairs who raided the coasts of Europe. They were typically organized by small gangs of young men.
Luke,
I agree. Lenin gets too much credit for the Russia Revolution. It was a much larger phenomenon.
“The Whites never really tried to rally the Russian people to their cause.”
One reason was factionalism. There were too many divergent interests among the Whites.
Also, the fact that right-wing ideas and images had lost their luster to such a great extent owed largely to Russia’s entry into the war and disaster that ensued. Many families had lost sons in the war and had lost faith in the Czar and the Church that had stood alongside him, urging families to give up their sons for the battlefields.
So, the lack of appeal for right-wing ideas and sentiments cannot be divorced from the war.
If the war had ended with Russian-French victory, would there have been a revolution in Russia? Not likely. Many Russians would have been filled with a great sense of national pride. And even if there was, it wouldn’t have been led by the Bolsheviks.
But then, another reason for the fall of the Czarist and Provisional Government order was that they were too nice, at least relative to what the Bolsheviks would soon do.
After all, conditions in the USSR were far grimmer and uglier under the Bolsheviks in the 20s and 30s than under the Czar. Many more people were shot, starved, sent to prisons, and etc. Also, the Reds lost a war to Poland that drove back the communists. Stalin decimated the military class. There was vicious infighting among the communists, especially Stalinists vs Trotskyites, with Stalinists winning and then leading a massive purge. People were filled with disillusionment and anger.
Why did Bolshies survive all the horrors they unleashed on the people that led to mass poverty and grim conditions for the masses, even killing millions of peasants at one time. Why didn’t the masses rebel even though things were far worse than under the Czars?
In the end, the material conditions seem to mean little. It’s really about the conditions of politics and psychology(or mass psychological manipulation). The Khmer Rouge created one of the most hideous systems, and yet they remained in power… and were only driven out by the Vietnamese invasion. South Korea was booming in the 80s but was shaken by massive demonstrations that led to end of military era. North Korea was a land of famine and oppression in the 90s but the regime remained intact and there wasn’t as single protest in Pyongyang. Mao killed 30-40 million in the late 50s and early 60s in the Great Leap, but the CCP was as firmly in power as before.
The Nazis held power to the very end even though they created hell for Germany. Same with the military government in Japan.
Hussein didn’t fall after the debacle of the Gulf War either. Not a nice guy at all.
The Czar could be brutal at times, but even his brutality was kid stuff to the real hard stuff done by really tough leaders. In the end, he was too nice as he tried, willy nilly, to be a civilized leader whose recourse to violence was seen as a ‘necessary evil’ than ‘business as usual’.
But I still think shouldn’t discount the effect of WWI.
After all, what the Bolshies promised the German was national capitulation. It was total defeat and national humiliation. The fact that Bolshies gained popularity by bringing upon such total national shame is proof that the war had deeply traumatized Russians. So much so that Russians preferred peace via national shame over war for national pride.
When the Argentine Regime fell in the 1980s, it was understandable. The regime had promised victory but failed and lost.
In contrast, Bolshies took over the government and then subsequently and almost immediately signed a surrender agreement with Germany that ceded huge parts of the former Russian empire to German sphere of influence.
(We should also keep in mind that the German Government during the war, though right-wing, protected and aided Russian leftists to subvert Russian governments. Lenin was sent back to Russia by Germans. Indeed, many Bolshies had been in exile and found their way back in via the German connection.)
Under normal circumstances, such a thing would have been seen as treason. But why did it go over well with the Russian public? Because the war had been terrible for them.
Even so, had the Tsar been a more galvanizing, intelligent, and inspiring leader, things might have turned out differently. But he was as colorless as the Shah of Iran. He seemed to be up in the clouds than with the people. He was certainly no Napoleon or Hitler who, though a bad guy, had rallied the nation around him(and certainly was no nice guy either).
There was also the failure of the Russian military. In the Ottoman Empire, it was the military officer class that produced the new revolutionary elites that both embraced modernity and preserved Turkish national pride. They had big ideas but as, military men, also tended to be grounded in reality and pragmatism. They too were hastened into power by WWI that effectively ended the Ottoman Empire.
Maybe Russian military class was disadvantaged in having failed to form a truly modern nationalist consciousness(like that of the Turkish officer corp)since so much of it had been developed by the Germans. The Russian-German rift during World War I left Russian system in a kind of limbo. It owed so much to German talent and ways but left to function on its own during the war years as Germany had become enemy #1.
The key to peace prior to WWI was German-Russian peace. And WWII could have effectively ended in 1941 if Germany and Russia had kept the peace(with UK eventually coming around for negotiations). And future peace of Europe will again depend on German-Russian mutuality, which is what Neocons don’t want. Germany, the biggest industrial giant of Europe, and Russia, with great natural resources, make a natural pair. It might actually be more formidable in the long run than EU. But that would decrease US influence.
Didn’t the Vietnam War play a big role in America’s sexual revolution – didn’t the 60’s war protests, feminist rights, and homosexual rights parallel each other.
Interesting about Catholic Personalism, which seems to have been a bit later in the century.
I was thinking about Quebec, which in the early 1960s went from being a very conservative and very Catholic society to being a very secular and even anti-religious society. This “Quiet Revolution” was made possible by Catholic idealists who wanted to personalize Catholicism and make the world a better place through social action, and not empty ritual. Unfortunately, this reform shifted the Catholic bureaucracy away from religion and toward increasingly secular concerns (health care, education, foreign aid, etc.). By making faith a personal commitment, and not a socially reinforced one, a lot of people simply fell away from the church entirely.
Some personalists were aware of all this. Afterwards, they said it was the only way to de-Catholicize Quebec society.
Warren, J-P. and E.-Martin Meunier. (2002). Sortir de la « Grande noirceur ». L’horizon « personnaliste » de la révolution tranquille. Septentrion.
http://www.septentrion.qc.ca/catalogue/sortir-de-la-grande-noirceur
If the war had ended with Russian-French victory, would there have been a revolution in Russia?
If the British had won WWI, would there have been a revolution in Ireland?
Didn’t the Vietnam War play a big role in America’s sexual revolution – didn’t the 60’s war protests, feminist rights, and homosexual rights parallel each other.
No and No. The sexual revolution had recommenced in the early 1960s before the Vietnam War heated up (the period from the mid-1930s to the late 1950s being a time of conservative push-back, e.g., via the fundamentalist revival, the Hays Code, etc.). Gay rights was a very peripheral issue in the 1960s and even the early 1970s.
“Many GIs got a taste of French mores when visiting Pigalle, known to them as Pig Alley, and seeing Can Can dancers at the Folies Bergère during their liberty in Paris. They mailed many French letters and postcards, and sent a lot of French maps ”
As the title of that 1919 hit song said, “How Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree)?
“If the British had won WWI, would there have been a revolution in Ireland?”
Ireland is small potatoes.
“When the Ulster Scots came over in the 17th century, Americans’ standards of decency were outraged by the Ulster women having skirts that exposed their bare legs right up to the knee.”
In 1830s Cincinnati, a proprietor of a local business was forced by outraged local, mostly female, opinion to paint a longer skirt on a signboard portrait of a short peasant-skirted Swiss maiden.
While peasant women in the country might of necessity wear short skirts, urban women and women of higher classes in the West were always full-skirted until the teens of the 20th Century, no matter how licentious the age, and no matter how much cleavage was exposed according to the whims of fashion.
Don’t Blame It on WINNING the War. Russia LOST the cold war. Trotsky started off a brilliant theoretician, who was convinced industrial workers would make an unbeatable army. But his big contribution to winning the the Civil war was ordering that the families of Tsarist officers were taken hostage, thereby forcing them to fight for the Red army.
Alexandra Kollontai was opposed by Lenin who wanted Soviet maidens engaged in wholesome oudoor pusuits (he no doubt wouldn’t have been keen on that sacrosact symbol of modenrity the thong). Kollontai was the only survivor of the original Bolshevik central committee Stalin left alive, although he packed her off to Norway.
This passage in Montaigne caught my eye in a new way, and really only got my attention for the first time, after I read Righteous Mind.
“Early 20th Century America was an extraordinarily dynamic society, especially due to the combination of wealth and technological advance meaning that cars, telephones, and movies were rapidly becoming available to young people.”
Don’t forget popular music-American music of the early 20th Century was undergoing rapid evolution and maturation, everything from cakewalk to ragtime to jazz that Tin Pan Alley put out contributed to this cultural dynamism.
And the sexually suggestive dances that went arm-in-arm with this new music, like the tango, the fox trot and the turkey trot, contributed much agita to the conservatives of the day.
“The sexual revolution was facilitated by America’s self-confidence. By the 20th century, there was a widespread belief that change could only be for the better and should thus be embraced.”
Actually, mainstream American belief since at least the 1830s, (with a short time-out in the post-Civil War let-down), held that change, progress, and reform were both positive and necessary. Only a few reactionaries, notably in the South, fought against the currents of the age.
“Conservative” was something most Americans of the era considered to be a European affliction, contrasting with liberal America and its onrushing, heedless march into the glorious, golden future.
There’s always been loose morals, that’s why we have that adultery commandment, obviously it was needed as well as that long list in Leviticus. I think several things finally led us to where we are now, decline of Christianity, birth control options, divorce, and finally the loss of a Father’s authority over his children, especially his daughters. Whether it ends in our being conquered by a more conservative people, or somehow we break the pattern is yet to be seen. How long did the dissolute Ottoman empire last?
Of course, one must also bear in mind that even the “conservative push-back” of the ’30s and ’50s still accepted much of the revolution in sexual mores that occurred in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.To cite only the most obvious of examples, there was no return to the “courting” practices of the early and mid 19th century, where romancing a girl meant spending evenings at her house under her parents’ watchful supervision.In the ’30s-’50s, “dating” (unsupervised excursions with a boy) was an accepted notion.
“Still, the fact is even most people in American cities were remarkably sexually conservative up to the 50s, at least by the standards of the sexual revolution brought upon by the pill, youth culture, the new shamelessness, feminism, sex-ed, legalization of pornography, and sleep-around culture.”
I once read a study which estimated that over 90% of American women marrying in the 1910s and 1920s were virgins on their wedding nights, and another study which estimated that a majority of American women marrying into the 1960s were such as well.
Years ago I read an account of a famous Hollywood actress in my Grandmother’s National Enquirer, I don’t remember who it was, unfortunately, telling of her life as a high school student in the 1940s, how most girls, and “even many of the boys” were virgins in the “puritanical forties”.
It is important to keep in mind that a trend may capture popular attention, yet the actual devotees of that particular trend may very well be a distinct minority of the population. Trends may take a very long time to filter down into the society at large, and trends are often magnified all out of proportion by the media also.
” The sexual revolution had recommenced in the early 1960s before the Vietnam War heated up (the period from the mid-1930s to the late 1950s being a time of conservative push-back, e.g., via the fundamentalist revival, the Hays Code, etc.).”
The phrase “sexual revolution” existed in the 1920s, as did “Ms.”, curiously.
Two books by Frederick Lewis Allen, “Only Yesterday” (An Informal History of the 1920s), and “The Big Change” (1900-1950), are very good at discussing the massive cultural changes of the early 20th Century, as is “Middletown”, by Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrill Lynd.
Quebec does seem to have had some Personalist intellectual currents before WW2.
Bruno Latour (a practicing Catholic) has a rather heretical ’empty ritual’ view of his faith. I think I read Blaise Pascal said something similar about doubt being stilled, not by cognating on the points of faith in a darkened room, but by taking mass with believers. Mirror neuron and associated functions are probably activated by rituals in a very powerful way that good works don’t achieve.
Another important change that happened in 1913 was the passage of the Federal Reserve Act, and it was the death knell for America.
This Idea of India having a centralized state is laughable. India was A very feudal country with many strong tribes . In fact India and Iran as well still have many tribes ( Depending on how many constituent a ”clan” you could say I’m from an Iranian Clan) . Iranian and Indian history is filled with people from clans and from the tribal periphery coming to power.
This Idea of India having a centralized state is laughable.
I’m sure it would be, but that wasn’t my argument. I was arguing that states impose a monopoly on the use of violence, with the result that social relations become pacified in advanced societies. By the time of the first Muslim incursions, most of India was covered by various states of one sort or another where a ruling class monopolized the use of violence. Often, this role was confined to a specific caste, the Kshatriya.
Iranian and Indian history is filled with people from clans and from the tribal periphery coming to power.
Exactly. The central region becomes dominated by a ruling class that seeks to limit the use of violence, partly to protect itself from its subjects and partly because violence disrupts social and economic relations, thus hindering the creation of wealth. Eventually, the central region can no longer mobilize enough fighting men to defend itself. It either recruits barbarians or falls prey to barbarians. Either way, they eventually take over and form a new ruling class.
What I’m trying to say is that in my opinion the Idea that the Arabs had a ‘one up’ on the Indians because of their tribal nature is false because tribes are not alien to India. Tribes and clans have always existed in India.
also in many cases tribes retain their ability to mobilize and fight within a state structure like in Iraq recently, although admittedly I don’t know If this was the case or not In India.
What I’m trying to say is that in my opinion the Idea that the Arabs had a ‘one up’ on the Indians because of their tribal nature is false because tribes are not alien to India.
In India, tribal societies are found mainly in peripheral regions, like the foothills of the Himalayas and some parts of the south. Those were the areas that most strongly resisted the Muslim expansion into the Indian subcontinent.
We see a similar situation with the Muslim expansion into southwestern Europe. The Muslims were able to overrun Spain and southwest France because those regions had long been pacified and could not raise large numbers of fighting men. The Muslim expansion halted when it came up against areas ruled by the Franks, among whom almost every man was a warrior.
disagree, as always. Not one word about psycho psychoanalysis, freud’s gift of a “plague” of sex. Not one word like Marcuse, Reich, and the cultural marxists who brought the sexual revolution in the 60s. The sexual revolution was part of the shift , largely by Jews, from marxism to psychoanalysis. Utopia not in the end of the class struggle, but in endless orgasms, or polymorphous perversity, the neologism of Nobbe Brown, another jew of the times. maybe you had to be there department.
I was there, and watched it unfold. I needed a divorce in the early 60s but guilt kept me married. All of this was still a time of sexual conservatism. Ditto in France, the home of Revolution. May, 68 was fundamentally about sex, not revolution, with the Young wanting an end to being chaperoned…read girls for young.
Granted that Modern Times brought wackier sex, but not One word on the Jews? Not one word on the Cabballistic theme of what the French call l’amour flou. OF course, Revolution always brings with it wacky sex, but between the 60s and Vietnam for the US, the Plague had moist and fertile ground.
You guys are afraid of the Jews. You are cowards.
Joe Webb
A Russian revolution that wasn’t Bolshevik would not have been the Russian Revolution we know and think about, that dominated so much of 20th century history. Bolshevism, Leninism — that was the nightmare scenario. Don’t you think Germany’s shipping Lenin to St. Petersburg as a cynical war move is partly responsible for the way things turned out? Just as the Allies’ issuing the Balfour Declaration to help draw in the US has had real consequences too. On the latter, see Friedman’s The Question of Palestine 19-14-1918. I am a Zionist please understand. But still …, without WWI there would not have been WWII. And then there was the pathetic psychology of Kaiser Wilhelmn. Have you read about him?
Technology of course by itself doesn’t do anything. Technology consists of high leverage tools; what exactly those tools leverage is going to be determined by the control and use of those tools.
For example, Thomas Edison invented motion picture technology and then formed a consortium to monopolize the production and distribution of movies. Edison and the consortium aimed to produce only movies that promoted Christian, traditional American values. However, Edison and the consortium lost control of the technology to other parties who did not share the same values and aims and thus produced and distributed different sorts of movies:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2010/11/thaddeus-russell/7-ways-the-mafia-made-the-u-s-a-betterplace-renegadehistory/
OT, but Dr Frost & other commentators may wish to comment on this appalling straw man piece by Dr Rutherford, who I thought would have higher standards.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/mar/01/racism-science-human-genomes-darwin#comment-48268761
You guys are afraid of the Jews. You are cowards.
Joe Webb
I’m not afraid of Jews or “The Jews.” I simply don’t share your view that they’re responsible for most of the problems we face. With or without Jews, we would still be facing the sort of problems that concern me and other columnists on this site.
I did a Google search for “Joe Webb.” It seems to be a pseudonym. Who is the coward here? I’m willing to publish my views under my name and I’m willing to pay the price. You aren’t.
A Russian revolution that wasn’t Bolshevik would not have been the Russian Revolution
I was once a campaign manager for a slate of candidates who won control of our university student council. It was a wide-ranging coalition that included people not only from the left but also from the centre and even one person from the right. Yet, over time, the far left came to dominate, not because of any conspiracy but because they were more motivated. They showed up at all the meetings and put in more overtime work.
The Russian Revolution was initially dominated by centrists, like Kerenski, but that faction was less organized and, frankly, unsure about what it wanted to do. The Bolsheviks, for all their faults, knew what they wanted to do and lost no time doing it. Regardless of the scenario you run, the Bolsheviks would have become more and more dominant.
Mr Frost, my name is real, I live in the Palo Alto area, I have a piece on AmRen, and I am known in the White Nationalist community.
You can google Joe Webb and Uncle Sam, and see my street performance that I did a few years ago at San Francisco demos and which significantly altered the thinking of a large part of the peacenik community at the time, much to the alarm of ANSWER, the Trotskyist outfit locally, and of course, the Jews whom I have also jambed up real good in Palo Alto on a couple of their capers, like the imposition of an Eruv on Palo Alto, which we stopped back in 2000.
I have been threatened by the commies and the Jews in my area, and have been assaulted as well…and have responded in kind. very successfully. My main sign was “I want you to die for Israel”…Uncle Sam of course.
Indymedia published my address and also allowed one guy’s demand that I be set upon with a baseball bat, etc.
[email protected] is my address. I write several times a week and use my own name. Of course, I am retired and thus have no job to lose.
——
I in no way blame the Jews for everything. The wars are for Israel certainly. But as I argue, the reason for White Protestant softness on the Jews is rooted in our religious history/luv of the Jews and the OT. Then there is the Puritan City on a Hill, a light unto the world. This is pure Jerusalem worship and another example of our White pathological altruism which was a trait developed over tens of thousands of years when we were NOT subjected to intense rivalry with our brothers for land and resources, and consequently developed trust and cooperation …. relatively of course, compared to other races. This altruism worked when we were by ourselves….but now it is self-destructive.
So, like the old New Yorker cartoon of the boy scout and his scoutmaster who asks him what good deed he did today…the boy says he helped an old lady across the street. Scoutmaster: well that was nice and did you feel good about it? Boy: not exactly. Scoutmaster: why? Boy: she did not want to go.
I just finished reading Paul Gottfried’s Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement, 2012. Super book, clear, and concise. Gottfried I assume is a paleocon and his mission fundamentally is to rescue the conservative movement from its subversion by the Straussians and their freak children, the neo-cons, not that Strauss & Co are Normal.( There are a quite a number of righteous Jews….like Gottfried and Unz. Unz’s article on the Jewish takeover of the Ivys is a gem in this regard)
These folks also cashed-in on the City on the Hill White race obsession with helping others to be Free and Democratic. The logic of these folks is a joke, but effective in seducing Whites into Endless War for funny ideas.
By the way, my anti-metaphysical meta view is that evolution and race and biology/traits are the fundamentals. Hence, there is plenty of room for genuine difference in races and even cohorts within a race, due to prolonged isolation in various breeding grounds/nations, etc.
Joe Webb
Further, Mr. Frost , your account of the Bolsheviks which does not Name the Jew is another example of your, if not cowardice, then psychological evasion of the Truth. Everybody knows that the Jews fundamental led the Bolsheviks. Just take Solzhenitsyn, as probably the most “credible” of sources.
I was part of the New Left in the 60s. Went to jail over Vietnam (civicl disobedience) but was astonished by the Jews and the Black Panthers at the time. It took me a long time to overcome my philosemitism which was a product of my family script…parents were communists or fellow-travellers.
The New Left was basically just re-cycled Old Left…the chillun , jewish of course, like the Chicago 7 from the 68 Chicago Democratic Convention. All jews but for tom Hayden who went on to a career as the Santa Monica half jew in the California Assembly.
There again, the Jews used White Altruism to attack White Power and White Civilization…it was a race war under Bolshevism, and it continues to be a race war today.
If jews had any brains, they would realize that the wretcheds of the earth want their hides, and that the only rational course is to stop attacking Whites and join us.
But since when does rationality come easy, to anybody?
Joe Webb
Regarding India and foreign invasions, the story has always been that Indian rulers and states were totally self-obsessed and had little idea of (and interest in) what was going on outside the subcontinent. They also tended to fight a lot, but with each other, and were not averse to making temporary pacts with foreigners to gain advantage over other Indian rivals. The details are murky about the 12th century Islamic invasions, but the story is that the main ruler (Prithviraj Chauhan) standing against the foreign invader (Muhammad Ghori, a Turk based in Afghanistan) was betrayed by another Indian ruler named Jaychand, who chose to not lend support against the Turk.
So infighting can be seen to be at least as much a reason behind India’s submission to Islamic invaders as pacifism or restriction of martial rights (which had served Indian rulers fine until that time; the Huns of Central Asia were beaten back in the 5th-6th centuries.) Such infighting is attested during the 18th century British takeover of India, where the British picked off states one by one, allying with the enemies of those states. Similar infighting leading to foreign domination can also be found in other lands, like Scotland (dominated by England) and possibly the Byzantine Balkans (conquered by the Turks.)
Yet if you look at say, the Japanese in WWII, the average Japanese soldier came not from a Samurai class (which was small) but a workaday peasant or urbanite who had little personal violence, was not used to daily violence, and would not ever THINK of doing violence in his home country or expect it in return.
And yet the Rape of Nanking, and the rampage in Manila, both cases against orders from higher-ups, suggests that the capacity for violence even amongst men who are not physically imposing (as the average pre-WWII Japanese man was on the short side) nor used to daily violence; was and is quite high.
Westerners are horrified by beheadings of Coptic Christians and burning alive of a captured Jordanian pilot not to mention that of random Western and Japanese captives from NGOs and media groups by ISIS. Yet the mild, conformist Japanese men did things even worse as a matter of record. The same holds true for the combat in the Pacific of WWII Marines and Army men, often engaged literally in hand-to-hand combat from a highly peaceful home society, or Germans in WII for that matter: pre-War Germany was absent daily personal violence (for non Jews anyrate).
“The Russian Revolution was initially dominated by centrists, like Kerenski, but that faction was less organized and, frankly, unsure about what it wanted to do. The Bolsheviks, for all their faults, knew what they wanted to do and lost no time doing it. Regardless of the scenario you run, the Bolsheviks would have become more and more dominant.”
This isn’t really true. Kerensky’s problem was he knew very well what he wanted to do, and that’s what undid him. He wanted to keep fighting the war and win. It was this determined effort on his part that was exploited by the ‘anti-war’ Bolsheviks. Had Kerensky managed to keep Russia in the war for just a little longer, Russia would have been co-victors with the other Allies.
But the war had become so unpopular that Bolshies took advantage of exploiting against Kerensky’s patriotism. And when soldiers began to rise up, Bolshies rode on the wave of power. At the time of the Bolshie takeover, Lenin was being moved by events than moving the events. Even Trotsky didn’t think it could happen so dramatically.
True, the Bolshies were disciplined and determined. But they couldn’t have won without the turn of events. Likewise, Nazis were determined and disciplined. But if the Depression hadn’t worsened in 1929, no way they could have rode to power.
You discount the nature of geography. In Spain and Southern France, Arab cavalry was decisive as it was in North Africa and the Levant. Up against the rivers, valleys, and critically, mud and ice of Northern Europe at Tours, well the lightly armed cavalry with its mobility was reduced to infantry fighting at which the Muslims were very bad, and Franks very good.
You saw the same thing with the Mongols. Their light ponies and compound bows were useless in the constant rain and mud of Northern Europe which caused the glued-together bows to fall apart and their ponies stick in the mud easy prey for infantry.
Moreover, the experience of fighting men in Europe was generally different than the ME and other societies. The Greek Phalanx, the Roman Legions, were comprised mostly of citizen farmer-soldiers, who had little personal violence among them unlike the nomadic barbarians, but were able to stand in line with their fellows and commit slaughter like reaping of grain or olives. Indeed battle among the infantry was likened to a particularly grim harvest, and the fighting relied upon a different kind of courage and discipline. Not heroic warrior skills but the ability to critically, stand in line with your fellows and slaughter while seeing your fellows fall.
The Western Way of War was and is very different than most others: relying on shock battle of annihilation, mostly with infantry, to destroy completely the fighting force of the enemy. Even in Greek and Roman times, Western writers would note the courage of the enemy was different — able to fight individually but not as a group facing annihilation or victory. Conclusion: small farming prepared mentally a far different way of fighting that was lethal against nomads in favorable geography for infantry that was heavily armored/armed.
“Yet if you look at say, the Japanese in WWII, the average Japanese soldier came not from a Samurai class (which was small) but a workaday peasant or urbanite who had little personal violence, was not used to daily violence, and would not ever THINK of doing violence in his home country or expect it in return.”
Paradoxically, the end of the samurai era led to the universalization of samurai virtues.
When Japan was a closed society, only the samurai could be samurai, could be like samurai, could act like samurai, could think like samurai, and etc.
Non-samurai better not even think of acting like samurai. They could not own swords or act like warriors. If they were artisans, they were to make stuff. If farmers, they were to farm stuff.
If merchants, sell stuff.
For a non-samurai to put on samurai airs could have meant punishment and death. (To be sure, some merchants did become rich and won the right to carry swords.)
When Japan was closed, the samurai elites sought to maintain power over the masses. Thus, samurai-ness was about elite privilege. Only samurai caste could be samurai and could be like samurai.
But once Japan opened up to the world, Japanese elites began to see power in terms of us Japanese vs them gaijins(or foreigners). So, all Japanese had to be inculcated in Japanese nationalism, and as Japan was soon to go head to head with great powers over spoils of Asia in China and Southeast Asia, the warrior code had to be inculcated in all Japanese.
So, even though samurai-ness was finished as a caste system, its essence had been nationalized and universalized(within Japan). It’s not surprising that some of the most fanatical military junior officers who were willing to act bushido-like and sacrifice their lives for the Emperor were of farmer-background. Though not samurai in lineage, they were very samuria-ish in national spirit.
And as if to over-compensate for their non-samurai farmer backgrounds, they were willing to show their mettle and commitment to warrior code.
“Further, Mr. Frost , your account of the Bolsheviks which does not Name the Jew is another example of your, if not cowardice, then psychological evasion of the Truth. Everybody knows that the Jews fundamental led the Bolsheviks. Just take Solzhenitsyn, as probably the most “credible” of sources.”
Jewish role in Soviet communism was indeed important. Many of them formulated the way of modern totalitarianism. But Lenin was only 1/4 Jewish. And Trotsky was long a Menshevik before he finally made it to Bolshevism.
Also, what of China and Vietnam where the communist movements were led entirely by gentiles?
Maybe as East Asians, Chinese and Vietnamese had talented leadership even without Jews.
But maybe one can make the case that as most Russians are boorish drunkards, Russia needed hardworking Jews to get the revolution really off the ground.
As far as “the Jews” this amounts to IMHO a ghost-dance mixed with Witchfinding. The strength and weakness of Western Culture has been the ability to use technology to the limit to find military and social advantage in the many competitive nations that make up the West, all fighting against each other.
For example, with the introduction of gunpowder (from China, where it was poorly utilized), Western nations went from tiny feudal levies led by hideously expensive Knights, who required training from age ten or so, and the support of the manorial system, to mass levies of poorly trained peasants with arquebuses, then matchlocks, then flintlocks, with training manuals printed by the printing press to allow those with literacy to conduct training. Army sizes went from around 5,000 or so to 50,000, then 150,000 in the period of say, 1300 to 1648 at the conclusion of the Thirty Years War.
By contrast, neither China nor Japan was willing to sideline their feudal armed classes, the Samurai and the Chinese warrior class, and thus did not push constantly new armaments and ways of fighting for advantage. Given in particular little threats to Japan, this was understandable but led to a rigid and fragile system unable to adapt to new technology.
The West has always been outnumbered, with deep divisions and rivalry, and that along with the embrace of technology willingly shattering old world-views, social structures, religious views, and fundamental relations between the sexes has led it to both dizzying heights of domination and weakness of purpose and will.
Initial nuclear weapons development was only possible in both a deeply atomized (no pun intended … maybe) society that also had great wealth created by such atomization. The West’s internal moral and social collapse is directly a result of its pursuit of military, commercial, social, and personal advantage as a result of adopting technology ruthlessly to find advantage.
Blaming “Jews” or the Frankfurt School or Gramscian long marchers or Witches evades fundamentally the strength and weakness of the West which is the same: willingly fracturing society to find advantage in technology. Starting with the stirrup and mold board plow and continuing on with the compass, gunpowder, printing press, steam, steel, modern medicine, electricity, internal combustion engines, radio, television, nuclear power, the internet, ballistic missiles, and jet engines.
Other societies do not and have not embraced technology. The Ottoman Empire forbad printing presses until the 1890s. ISIS and the AQ people have forbidden music, much of science education, and the sort of atomization that science and technology depends upon. They can opportunistically take advantage of Western advances but have proven incapable of providing their own, not just now, but since the dawn of the Industrial revolution and arguably since the 1100s.
I find blaming Jews both stupid and useless because it evades the fundamental aspect of Western identity. No I am not a Jew.
Mr Frost, my name is real
Please accept my apologies. At least, you’re more than just an anonymous keyboard warrior.
I in no way blame the Jews for everything.
Well, at least we’re making progress. I agree that Jewish scholars played a key role in reviving and radicalizing antiracism from the 1930s onward. This war on racism included a systematic effort to purge academia of “racists,” thereby decapitating any intellectual opposition to the demographic change that is sweeping through North America and Europe. So, yes, the consequences of antiracism are serious.
But that demographic change itself has other causes. It’s not the jews, jews, jews. It’s your local home builder. It’s the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. It’s the profit that comes from cutting labor costs. And much of that profit gets ploughed back into efforts to keep the ball rolling: lobbying, fake economic studies, PR of all sorts … and antiracism. Antiracism has become a means to legitimize and support globalism.
Jewish people support antiracism for historical reasons that are understandable but nonetheless injurious. In any case, there is no single person — Jewish or non-Jewish– who can tell antiracism to take a break. There is no “off button.” It is a headless horseman that rides on with no one in control. It will probably end up doing as much harm to Jews as to non-Jews.
And yet the Rape of Nanking, and the rampage in Manila, both cases against orders from higher-ups
The Japanese field commanders ordered and condoned the Rape of Nanking:
This was a recurring problem with the Japanese expeditionary force in China. The field commanders tended to be more reckless and ruthless than the military command in Tokyo, which in turn was more belligerent than the Japanese government itself.
I will discuss “genetic pacification” at greater length in a future column. Briefly put, State societies impose a monopoly on violence and thus tend to remove violence-prone males from the gene pool. This selection pressure acts more strongly against personal violence than against violence that has the perceived approval of higher authority. This was one of the conclusions of the Milgram experiment, i.e., people are much more willing to inflict violence when it is done under orders. Of course, “people” means white Americans. When the experiment was repeated in Jordan, the subjects were more willing to inflict violence on their own initiative:
https://www.unz.com/pfrost/milgram-experiment-cross-cultural/
Up against the rivers, valleys, and critically, mud and ice of Northern Europe at Tours, well the lightly armed cavalry with its mobility was reduced to infantry fighting at which the Muslims were very bad, and Franks very good.
The Battle of Tours took place in October. There was no mud or ice, and the lay of the land was no different from that of Spain. Contemporary observers attributed the Frankish victory to the quality of the Frankish soldiers:
From 1877:
“The most interesting by far of the conspirators are the women. The type of character which they represent is one which is very unfamiliar to us. We find it difficult to believe that young girls, belonging to what we should call the upper middle classes, well educated, and by no means destitute of culture, can leave their homes and go away, of their own free will, to lead a hard life among strange people of a lower class — and all for an idea. We can understand such a sacrifice being made in the cause, let us say, of religion or loyalty, but for the sake of irreligion and disloyalty it appears unaccountable. Yet it was just because these young women refused to respect any existing laws, whether claiming to be of divine or of human origin, because they looked upon Church and State as equally obsolete institutions, and because they wished to sweep away all political and social distinctions, and to leave nothing but a common land equally divided among the working classes, that they gave up their homes, and severed themselves from their kith and kin, and went into the wilds of Russian city life as Nihilistic missionaries. They had nothing to gain by the changes which they desired to bring about; they had everything to lose if their efforts should be detected. And yet they worked on, amid discouragement and discomfort, with never-ceasing energy and determination.”
“The Bolsheviks, for all their faults, knew what they wanted to do and lost no time doing it. Regardless of the scenario you run, the Bolsheviks would have become more and more dominant.”
Perhaps. By that logic, will Isis ultimately prevail in the Middle East?
The question of whether the world would be better now without WWI is something of a straw-interrogation. How about the world without either WW?
What if, in the spirit of BHO, the Anglos and their Kraut cousins could have worked something out both times?
The idea of social liberalism, technological progress and civil order without diversity is truly head-exploding.
By that logic, will Isis ultimately prevail in the Middle East?
Isis may or may not prevail, but there is clearly a conservative reaction in the Middle East to the penetration of Western liberal culture. Western liberalism will prevail if it can “deliver the goods” — a higher standard of living, cheap food, etc. If it can’t, an alternate ideology will take over.
Ideological change is not restrained by political alliances. Turkey is nominally a “Western ally,” yet it has steadily been moving toward an anti-liberal, anti-globalist critique of the West. This is true at the grassroots level and even within the government.
What if, in the spirit of BHO, the Anglos and their Kraut cousins could have worked something out both times?
The idea of social liberalism, technological progress and civil order without diversity is truly head-exploding.
This is a point I hope to develop in the future. Short reply: there would still have been some kind of global conflict between the two, even without WWI. Western liberalism was on a collision course with the social conservatism of continental Europe. With or without WWI, there would have been a conservative push-back, and this push-back would have been more extreme in those societies that were already less able to cope with the liquidation of organic forms of social organization (family, community, ethny, etc) and their replacement with the State and the market economy.
The same thing is playing out today. We in the West are trying to export our way of life to the rest of the world. Even in our own societies, this way of life has many dysfunctional effects, although we are better able to cope because of our longer history of liberalism and hyperindividualism. In other societies, the effects are more disastrous. This is why much of Eurasia is moving toward social conservatism. It’s not because of Putin’s alleged shenanigans; it’s because our way of life is less suitable for them.
“By that logic, will Isis ultimately prevail in the Middle East?”
“Isis may or may not prevail, but there is clearly a conservative reaction in the Middle East to the penetration of Western liberal culture. Western liberalism will prevail if it can ‘deliver the goods’ — a higher standard of living, cheap food, etc. If it can’t, an alternate ideology will take over.”
No, ISIS will not prevail because they’re too crazy. Bolsheviks could be rabid but they were ideologically united and very organized. ISIS is a form of disorganization taking advantage of the chaos prevailing in the Middle East thanks to Western meddling.
Bolsheviks had a vision of what kind of society to create.
ISIS does not. They call for sharia law and all that, but they have no ideas about statecraft, economics, and all the things necessary to create a long-running state.
It’s like the Germanic barbarians overran Rome but couldn’t keep the power for too long. They reveled in chaos but didn’t know how to create long-lasting order.
Likewise, China went through the Taiping Rebellion period that was very disruptive, but the movement was too crazy to sustain for long. And in the 20th century, the breakdown of the newly founded Republic led to the Warlord Era during which China was divided up along various warlords and clans. But the warlord period couldn’t last since warlords for the most part had no longterm goal or plan.
I’m not sure if the reactions in the Middle East are really against ‘Western liberal culture’. I think it’s more toward Western global power.
After all, there’s plenty of demented, sicko, and excessive junky porny culture in Japan and Hong Kong. And in Mexico and Brazil too. And with or without western influence, African culture is heavily sexualized and wild.
But the Muslims and Arabs of North Africa and Middle East seem especially angry at the West. Why aren’t they equally angry with Japan with its massive porn, Brazil with its ass-shaking Mardi Gras, and black Africa with its naked women shaking their booties? While Muslims and Arabs in the Middle East may look down on all such things, they don’t much mind because they don’t see Japan, Brazil, or black Africa as major presences in the Middle East.
But US, EU, and Israel are big players in the Middle East. And they’ve been shooting missiles, killing Arabs/Palestinians, killing 100,000s through sanctions, invading, and using drones to blow up people. So, it’s really about power than ‘culture’.
After all, Afghans sided with ‘decadent’ US against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Though Afghan Muslims didn’t see eye-to-eye with Soviet values, communist values were still closer to Muslim values than with capitalist values. Communist values tended to be spartan, austere, collective, and puritanical(like Muslim culture) in contrast to the lascivious narcissism of American culture. And yet, Afghans accepted US aid in the war against USSR. Why? Because Soviets had a powerful presence in Afghanistan. US did not.
In the early 70s, US values were closer to those of the USSR than those of Red China under crazy Mao. And yet, US and China cozied up to one another. Why? USSR was the common enemy.
So, regardless of how Arabs/Muslims feel about ‘western liberal culture’, the reaction is really about power. (Iranian youths tend to be more pro-American because there is no effective US presence in Iran itself. But when Iran was heavily influenced by US power under the Shah, there was massive reaction… even from secular Iranians who sided with the Islamists to overthrow the Shah.)
The great irony of all this is that the crazy radicals running around Iraq, Syria, and Libya would not even be where they are if not for Western meddling. Western invasion and/or intervention created power vacuums in vast regions of the Middle East and North Africa, and wherever there’s a power vacuum in some potentially unstable part of the world, there’s gonna be breakouts of violence.
But would US be any different? Suppose a big comet hit Washington DC. Suppose centralized power was gone. Suppose order in big cities broke down. I’ll bet there will be massive secessionist movements all around, and ‘radicals’ of all stripes will try to take power. I personally would join any ‘radical’ movement to roll back the tide of the ‘gay agenda’.
I would say the effects are just more immediate. Which is actually advantageous as you can spot them.
With something growing silently in background, people usually notice it when it is too late.
#61 and Whiskey… ghost-dance mixed with Witchfinding is his Rational answer to the matter of Jewish Power. The Ghost dance was amerindian magical thinking that they could make themselves impervious to bullets.
The Jewish sociologists Lipset and Raab, decades back, estimated Jewish money in US political parties at about 50% for the Dems and 30 % for the GOP. Since then, you can probably almost double those numbers.
As I recall Unz and a few other researchers also Jewish, concluded that Jews are overrepresented at the Ivys by 400 % and Whites are underrepresented by about 600%.
I had a talk with a Jewish acquaintance a few months ago about Unz’s article. He said he had read it and that it was about Asian underrepresentation at the Ivys. I had not read the article then, but had read several reviews. So, I told my interlocutor that I thought he was wrong, but that we should both go home and read the article. He denied the 400 % and 600 % deal, it was NOT in there. And he claimed to have read the article. So a few days later we met and he refused to acknowledge that he had made a mistake. Then he launched into an argument that using the SAT scores and National Merit Scholarships, as the criteria for determining who should get into the Ivies, was a worthless methodology.
That discussion with my Jewish acquaintance ended our relationship. And this guy of course is a PhD. (he often would end his remarks. with..ENd of Story.
So, Whiskey….of course I am just looking for a witch. What I am focusing on here is the self-deception of people like you.
Joe Webb
Britain’s social, economic, and technological progress had been in relative decline compared to Germany since Bismarck.
What Britain did have was a large overseas empire that provided a safety release valve for excess or discontented population in the Home Nations as well as access to relatively cheap commodities and labor.
Germany however did not have anything comparable to the British or the other major European empires or to the United States. It was basic Malthusian concerns in this context that motivated Germany to war. Hitler makes this clear in chapter 4 of Mein Kampf. At that point, most of the world’s territory was under European control, and thus seeking more territory inevitably entailed clashing with European powers. Hitler argued that if you were going to attack European countries, it would be more practical to do so to acquire more land in Europe than abroad. It was these sorts of Malthusian concerns, not ideological ones, that motivated war.
Liberalism is a luxury that is more tolerable when people can escape and homestead in colonies that have been conveniently cleansed of hostiles. The Germans had less of such a luxury. German homesteads and communities in the East were surrounded by hostiles. The war’s aim was to remedy this situation.
No-one denies they are an important part of the elite. Or that the (predominately white gentile) elite is not interested in the welfare of white gentiles as such. But the extent to which the Jewish part of the elite have interests that differ from the rest of the elite and win out over them, is not clearly so great. Fact is the white gentile elite could send them packing if they wanted to, but they don’t want to. Not a single white gentile billionaire campaigns against cheap labour, sorry, immigration. There is certainly a sharp difference in interests on Israel and yes the US is smashing every country the Israel lobby does not like (Iran is next). Big effect there no question, and that is out there now with political science professors Mearsheimer and Walt’s best selling book.
As for the topic of the post the origin of the sexual revolution yes they approved of it (gentile Hugh Hefner received the ADL’s freedom award in 1980) but then again they certainly didn’t cause or create that change which was something inherent in white gentile and even Catholic elite intellectuals’ developing ideas. A lot of smoke but not much fire. To ascribe the causality in widespread societal change to them attending to their own particular interests you need to show they have more that a second order effect. I just don’t see where you have provided a proof to stake your generalisations on. And yes, in my book you have to advance a very good case with evidence rising to the level of proof, if you are boldly claiming your views to be a theoretical advance of the first order which any rational non-deluded person must accept, as you are.
What are you judging this by? Other societies seem to have higher fertility rates, or if they don’t, have much better control over their borders than we do.
Weimar Germany is an interesting thing. I’ve just finished reading Konrad Adenauer’s biography and its quite clear that there was a large cultural divide between Catholic and Protestant Germany. Weimar seemed to be quite “progressive” in the major Northern cities of Germany, whilst Catholic and rural Germany held their nose. A German satirical magazine of the time, Simplicissimus frequently mocked the “progressivism” of Prussia (Protestant) and the backwardness of Bavaria (Catholic).
If you look at the voting patterns of the 20’s and 30’s in Germany you see that embrace of modernity was largely in the Protestant areas of Germany. The Great loser during that time the DNVP party which could be loosely considered as the traditionalist Protestant party of the time, whose voters seem to have abandoned it for the Nazis. The other powerful party in Germany at the time were the socialists who also had their strongholds in the Protestant areas.
The Catholic cave in to Modernity came much later, in the 60’s with the increasing liberty afforded to individuals following Vatican Two. For instance, as late as the early 1970’s the average number of lifetime sexual partners for a woman in France was 1. But even if the Church had not changed, the mass effect of media and modern modes of living would have made traditional Catholicism hard to keep up. Still, it is my contention, that had the Church not promulgated Humanae Vitae and shot itself in the head, we would be in a more conservative cultural landscape at the moment.
They don’t have much better control over their borders if all their best people leave for the West, and the country spirals down into a hell hole.
We cannot blame the American people for the bizarre Netanyahu fascist minded state of the union address.
Propaganda works – the human mind just gives into anything that is repeated over and over. No counter message is allowed to be spoken.
The people to blame are Gentile elites like John Boehner who have sold America out for personal political gain – end of story.
In reply to both your comments (reply to Frost and next one), I certainly can’t speak for Mr Frost, but it doesn’t seem as if we are all that far apart philosophically. And of course I lack your freedom or Mr Frost’s courage in self-identification, I must stand mute on the subject of my name. Nevertheless, my objection is to your blanket “the Jews” when referring to some segment of Jews who are virulently Marxist and/or Zionist. As you note, Ron Unz and Paul Gottfried are righteous. I could add many other names to the list. And as you also note, Christianity is the real root of our disease. It is the Catholic and Lutheran Churches bringing hundreds of thousands of African “refugees” into America. It is the Catholic Church harboring illegal mestizos. It is the tens of millions of evangelical Christians eager for our next war on Israel’s behalf. It is american christians who are Netanyahu’s biggest cheerleaders while our largest Jewish group, Reform Jews, are opposed to him. On all this it appears that we agree.
So when numerically the Christians actively pursuing our destruction outnumber the Jews pursuing our destruction (and their own subsequently) by a hundredfold, what benefit is obtained with saying, “The Jews .. The Jews”? We all know the Jews are more intelligent (on average) than the Christians and that this advantage is weighted toward verbal IQ so they carry an influence greater than mere numbers suggest. But I still fail to see any reason to blame “the Jews” for what the majority of Christians and indeed 100% of Christian leadership fervently advocates. America’s Christians are listening as much (or more) to their Pastors and Priests than to Moishe Goldfarbsilversteinowitz. And I’m sure you’d agree that a Jew weighing his beliefs will be alienated by any movement where every other advocate is railing endlessly against “the Jews .. The Jews!” Don’t we really want and need more smart white people to awaken to our cause? Based on the numbers of secular Jews and Jewish outmarriage rates, the number of Jews who self-identify as “white” rather than “Jew” is on the rapid rise. But secular or not, they’ve been fed “The Holocaust” with their mother’s milk from birth. My suggestion to you then isn’t that you change your mind, but that you become more specific in your condemnations. Instead of “the Jews .. The Jews” perhaps “the Zionist Jews and their Christian pals”? Or “the Christian and Jewish Zionists”? Or “white genocide favoring Christians and Jews”?
“But the extent to which the Jewish part of the elite have interests that differ from the rest of the elite and win out over them, is not clearly so great. Fact is the white gentile elite could send them packing if they wanted to, but they don’t want to. Not a single white gentile billionaire campaigns against cheap labour, sorry, immigration.”
But if the argument for diversity or immigration was purely economic, there could be an effective movement against it that is either elitist or populist. The argument isn’t merely economic but moral and intellectual. The prevailing ideology–largely shaped by Jews–argues that it’s a moral imperative for a nation to increase diversity. Furthermore, the ideology says it’s a terrible wrong for the national majority to act in its own racial/ethnic/national interest–with the exception of Israel, of course.
Jews have been very active in formulating ideas. Even gentile-dominant European nations have elites who were heavily influenced by Jewish thinkers, American or otherwise. More so since the end of WWII as US became the intellectual capital of the world and English became lingua franca–and Hollywood movies dominated images around the world.
If the argument for diversity were only economic, the anti-diversity crowd could rise up and argue that diversity is bad for native Americans, especially whites and blacks. But the argument is moral. So, if you oppose immigration, you’re said to be ‘racist’ or ‘xenophobic’. Furthermore, you are said to be like those isolationists who didn’t take in Jews during WWII. Also, any sentiment about white unity or identity is seen as evil. So, for moral reasons, white majorities cannot be morally pro-white/majority and cannot be anti-diversity/immigration.
Do you know what it is ISIS wants to achieve? I’d suggest reading a very insightful and well sourced piece in this month’s The Atlantic:
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isis-really-wants/384980/
They want to live there – under their caliphate. I say let them all go. They will fight the heretical Shiites. Let them. Then eventually they believe they must almost all be killed by “Rome” – sounds good to me. And eventually when they’re down to just 5,000 left they think Jesus will come and save them. I’m not convinced my Mexican landscaper is interested in going over there to rescue them, but I fail to see what any of this has to do with America.
“And as you also note, Christianity is the real root of our disease. It is the Catholic and Lutheran Churches bringing hundreds of thousands of African ‘refugees’ into America. It is the Catholic Church harboring illegal mestizos. It is the tens of millions of evangelical Christians eager for our next war on Israel’s behalf. It is american christians who are Netanyahu’s biggest cheerleaders while our largest Jewish group, Reform Jews, are opposed to him. On all this it appears that we agree.”
But which Christianity? Likewise, when we say ‘Jews’, which Jews?
It’s certainly not the Hasidim who are causing all the problem. Nor is it the sephardic Jews who are mostly into tradition and minding their own business.
When we say ‘Jews’, we basically mean Liberal Secular Jews and opportunistic Neocons.
As for Christians, it is only recently that so many Christian groups have become actively anti-white and anti-western. After all, Lutheran Church didn’t always bring African babies to America. The Catholic Church has a long history of being anti-Jewish. During the Fascist era, there was a pact between Mussolini and Vatican, not unlike the pact that exists between Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church. American Catholicism was very suspicious of Jews and culturally very conservative for much of the 20th century.
So, why did the change happen in Christianity? It’s because Christian theology came under influence of ideologies such as Liberalism, Marxism, feminism, ‘gay liberation’, and etc. Also, leftists and radicals studied theology and took over many churches not to preach ole time religion but to spread the new gospel of interracialism, ‘gay liberation’, diversity worship, etc. Some were non-believers who cynically used religion. Others believed in god but as a new formulation of him/her as a trendy social crusader.
As for Evangelicals being pro-Israel and rabidly pro-Zionist, how did that happen? American Churches were relatively less anti-Jewish than European ones, but American Christianity wasn’t full of praise of Jews either. After WWII, Christianity had to compete with the new great religion: the Holocaust Faith. This secular faith said that European-Gentiles murdered 6 million Jews, Jews died for the sin of white folks, and it was the greatest crime of all time.
So, who was to blame for the Holocaust? Christian West? Christians would like to say NO. The Nazis, who were pagan and atheist, done it!! True, some Christians collaborated with Nazis, but most good Christians were with the Jews.
But the Vatican worked with the Nazis, there were many anti-semitic priests, and American Christians were mostly isolationist before Pearl Harbor and didn’t do much to save Jews. So, Christians feel on the moral defensive. Since Holocaust is seen as the greatest evil of all time, Christians feel they must work extra-hard to prove to themselves that they are very good people and would have saved Jews and are so sorry if they didn’t do enough.
Without the Holocaust faith to compete with, Christianity would be morally more confident and less defensive. After all, the Vatican and Christians were full of pride against communism during the Cold War. But because Christian record of resisting Nazism is more checkered, Christians go out of their way to prove their worth to Jews, and this makes them sensitive to any accusation of antisemitism.
To an extent, America’s extreme support of Zionism cannot be understood apart from the Holocaust faith. Christians feel it’s their duty to do everything possible to prevent another Holocaust. And this psychology has been exploited to make Christians cave into every Jewish demand when it comes to the Middle East. So, Hussein was said to be the new Hitler. And then the president of Iran, the admandinijad or whatever. Even though he never said ‘wipe Israel off the map’, the media ran with that false story.
By control over borders I mean immigration control.
The problem is that the Jews are an “easy enemy” for low brows to latch on to.
You are quite right, the problem isn’t modern Judaism rather Christianity particularly Protestantism and its more malignant variants. However Jews have made themselves easy targets by;
1) Maintaining an outgroup identity whilst wanting to be ingroup.
2) Being so prominent and vocal for causes on the left.
3) Assuming prominent positions of power and influence out of all proportion to their ethnic group size and so on.
4) Engaging in behaviours which many non-Jews find disagreeable.
Its easy to see how the low-brows/cognitive misers find them “obvious” targets.
The characteristics of the Jews make them, like Blacks, easy targets to pin the blame on even when they are innocent.
The problem is whilst all the idiots are blathering about the Jews being responsible for everything no one pays attention to the real rot occurring.
Other societies seem to have higher fertility rates, or if they don’t, have much better control over their borders than we do.
You’re wrong. Fertility rates are much lower across East Asia, Southern Europe, and Eastern Europe, except for Belarus and Russia. Those two exceptions prove my point because they have made a deliberate effort to exit the Western cultural and ideological system.
As for border control, the situation in southern Europe is comparable to the American one. Spain, Italy, and Greece are now receiving large numbers of Afro-Asian immigrants, almost all of whom arrive unannounced.
K. Arujo,
I severely edited your last two posts because they were too long and because you have an almost masturbatory tendency to stick the word “Jew” into every sentence (sometimes several times in the same sentence).
The argument isn’t merely economic but moral and intellectual.
Moral and intellectual arguments can be heavily subsidized, and most of the money comes from very “gentile” sources, like Rupert Murdoch, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the Koch Brothers. Yes, a lot of the money also comes from Jews like Mark Zuckerberg, but it’s not because they want to stick it to the goyim. It’s because they want to cut labor costs.
The prevailing ideology–largely shaped by Jews–argues that it’s a moral imperative for a nation to increase diversity.
Antiracism was not a Jewish creation. It developed in the early to mid-19th century as a radical outgrowth of the abolitionist movement. (Did you learn about the Civil War at school?) It then fell into decline but remained dominant in the American northeast. When Jewish immigrants began arriving in America, they became antiracist out of a desire to emulate northeastern WASPs. It was as WASP proteges that so many Jewish Americans entered the antiracist movement. But even during the critical period of the 1940s to the 1970s, this movement was just as much a WASP thing as a Jewish thing.
Today, this WASP-Jewish dominance of antiracism is in decline. It’s still there, but the most dynamic antiracist groups are now Afro-Asian and/or Muslim for the most part.
I was broadly comparing European and non-European societies.
“I severely edited your last two posts because they were too long and because you have an almost masturbatory tendency to stick the word ‘Jew’ into every sentence (sometimes several times in the same sentence).”
Oh, it’s more like S&M than masturbatory.
“Antiracism was not a Jewish creation. It developed in the early to mid-19th century as a radical outgrowth of the abolitionist movement. (Did you learn about the Civil War at school?) It then fell into decline but remained dominant in the American northeast. When Jewish immigrants began arriving in America, they became antiracist out of a desire to emulate northeastern WASPs. It was as WASP proteges that so many Jewish Americans entered the antiracist movement.”
The Abolitionist movement was more anti-slavery than anti-race-ist. True, some abolitionists were totally into racial equality. But many wanted to end slavery while maintaining the importance of racial differences. Lincoln for one wanted to end slavery but wanted no integration with the Negroes. And abolitionists didn’t much care about whites moving westward and mowing down Indians.
True, there were wasp progressives. But their tradition was one of reform than radical revolution. Their tradition was not one of bomb-throwing anarchism and vicious communism. Emma Goldman didn’t get her ideas from moderate wasp reformers. Men like Dewey were more cautious and conscientious change whereas Jewish radicals tended to be fiery, pushy, chutzy, and Chico-like.
Furthermore, wasp liberals were into practicing what they preached. They were open to criticism and self-reflective. They were willing to look into their own moral failings. Amy Chua says in WORLD IN FIRE that when she tried to bring up the issue of Jewish oligarchs, the Jewish-American official she interviewed didn’t wanna talk about it.
Let me dip into Matthew Arnold, the mid 19th Centruy critic and poet (whose Dover Beach, even for those with a tin ear for poetry, should read). I am going to quote from his celebrated essay, Culture and Anarchy, written about 1867. My edition is Oxford World Classics, 2006.
The first thing to say about Arnold is that he was, like everyone around him at his time, a solid God-fearing Protestant Englishman. However, precisely because he knows his Protestantism and his world therein, and is aware of challenges from both the old Catholic world as well as the new age of Disbelief beginning to erode Faith, he is particularly keen on trying to prevent , shall we say, extreme Puritan narrowness from doing further damage to Christianity.
He remarks on the “confusion” of his time and that a necessary return to Authority can only be accomplished by “…going back upon the actual instincts and forces which rule our life, seeing them as they really are, connecting them with other instincts and forces, and enlarging our whole view and rule of life.” (p. 106)
This effort he calls Hellenistic, after the Greco-Roman culture of antiquity, as well as the breadth of the Catholic Church which preserved the original Hellenism and passed it on to Christianity. The contrasting view he posits is “Hebraism” a bitter and very narrow view of life. It is part of his own Puritan past and present, and his argument in Culture and Anarchy, is that its Hebraism is leading to anarchy, both in the Protestant churches, and in society in general because of the splintering of Protestant sects, and their fanaticism. Hair splitting in doctrinal matters, fighting with one-another, and a general tendency of what we call today, my way or the highway, to put it crudely, is the psychological tendency. The Hebraic spirit needs to be softened, not eliminated all together, by Hellenism, a more generous, tolerant, and relaxed attitude of mind.
This is the problematic for Arnold himself who saw the Age of Faith withdrawing (Dover Beach). If Christianity withers, the fanatic spirit morphs into secular culture, at least the Culture of our own out of control politicians, think Billary and John McCain and many others, while the softer Hellenism is forgotten. The folks bringing it on are liberal totalitarians.
Since, from a Realpolitic vantage, there is now almost nothing to Contain the US. The old Balance of Power “Realpolitic” of folks most recently like Kissinger, wherein no single state could dominate the world or a region, is gone.
Joe Webb
I am noting a tendency in the Press (liberal totalitarian) to seize upon every police shooting of criminals as an Aha! experience. Strange but true in our run-up to civil war caused by the Liberal Abolitionists….abolition of sense and reason.
Also, like Lincoln, the Abolitionists did not want the Negroes here, they wanted them shipped back to Africa.
The HBO series, Deadwood, that I keep praising has Alma, the east coast elite gal in the series, scorning the Brook Farm gropers. Deadwood is becoming a kind of bible to me…I confess it. Cannot stop watching it. Every moment is perfectly acted and executed. a morality tale, but you have to adjust to some of the vulgarity at first.
Joe Webb
“Today, this WASP-Jewish dominance of antiracism is in decline. It’s still there, but the most dynamic antiracist groups are now Afro-Asian and/or Muslim for the most part.”
Wouldn’t you say ‘racism’ hysteria has been eclipsed by homosexual hysteria? Even blacks have been put on the defensive for ‘homophobia’.
And it’s perfectly okay to mock and blast Muslims. While anti-Jewish sentiments are forbidden in the EU, millions marched in France for the right to trash Muhammad.
And plenty have blasted Obama for not naming Muslims as the culprits in ISIS horrors in the Middle East. Muslims simply don’t have much if any power in western government, media, banks, courts, law, and academia.
Blacks scream ‘racism’ all the time, but they are only as effective as the extent to which their complaints and messages are conveyed by the media that are not owned by blacks.
But ‘racism’ or no ‘racism’, ‘anti-racism’ has never been a uniform condemnation of bigotry. Even anti-racism favored certain ‘racism’ over other kinds. Often in the name of fighting ‘racism’, even Liberals resorted to crude stereotypes of certain peoples. So, fighting white ‘racism’ entailed presenting white southerners are subhuman caveman types. White southerners were dehumanized. Consider Fried Green Tomatoes. And in the fight against Japanese evil and bigotry during WWII, American propaganda presented the Chinese as heroic Asians while depicting the Japanese as buck-toothed freaks.
So, anti-racism often came with its own ‘racist’ tropes.
So, when we say Jews and Wasps have been ‘anti-racist’, we need to ask in regards to which group? In the US, Americans have been encouraged to see Palestinians and Iranians as less than human. A case of ‘racism’ against Muslims used to fight ‘racism’ against Jews. In America’s lionization of Mandela as a symbol of anti-racism, US has perpetuated simplistic stereotypes of evil Afrikaners that were ‘racist’. And US turns a blind eye to all the anti-white ‘racism’ by blacks.
Take Ferguson. Angry blacks attacked and destroyed the lives of Arab and Pakistani businessmen. Where was the moral outrage about black ‘racism’ against Arabs and Asians? Or the moral outrage about black murder of a white Bosnian-American?
So, ‘anti-racism’ has been a tool used by certain groups to favor the interests of certain groups over others.
After all, there’s no outrage over ‘Russophobia’ in Hollywood movies. And yellow peril in stuff like the remake of Red Dawn is also allowed. And it’s been routine to present Muslims as terrorists or white slavers(as in Mamet’s SPARTAN and the TAKEN movie). And what was 300 but neocon war porn against Iran?
The Abolitionist movement was more anti-slavery than anti-race-ist.
The Abolitionist movement had two wings. There were those who feared the steady displacement of free labor by slave labor and who thought that the United States would become like the Caribbean colonies, with a small white elite lording over a mass of black slaves. These were the ones who argued for repatriation to Africa. But the other wing was just as numerous and, also, ideologically more motivated. They wanted more than simply an end to slavery:
Goodman, P. (1998). Of One Blood. Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality, Berkeley: University of California Press.
http://books.google.ca/books?hl=fr&lr=&id=Zy47hp0QjFQC&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&ots=f0ONCiUl-T&sig=TDfjRtlGuGRd-kxwZ8fXlL8OpCU#v=onepage&q&f=false
It was this radical wing that prevailed during the Civil War and after. It is difficult to say where Lincoln stood in this debate within the abolitionist movement, and perhaps it doesn’t matter. What matters is what happened. Antiracism became written into mainstream American culture, particularly in the Northeast.
Wouldn’t you say ‘racism’ hysteria has been eclipsed by homosexual hysteria?
No, I wouldn’t.
And it’s perfectly okay to mock and blast Muslims.
I don’t know where you live, but here in Canada it’s definitely not O.K. to mock Muslims. In my local paper, most of the letters to the editor condemned Charlie Hebdo for its insensitive and racist depictions of Mohammed. The post-Charlie-Hebdo-attack cartoon was not published in most Canadian papers, even though it was pretty tame (a picture of Mohammed weeping and saying “All is forgiven”).
I was once an antiracist activist and still am familiar with the movement. Among older antiracists, opinions on Israel split half and half. Among the younger ones, sentiment is overwhelmingly anti-Israel. This partly reflects a demographic change. There are fewer and fewer WASPs and Jews in the younger generation.
I get the impression you feel “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Because Muslims are potential allies in your anti-Jewish crusade, you feel more sympathetic toward them and thus end up parroting a lot of pro-Muslim, anti-Israel propaganda. Maybe you should step back a bit and apply some of your critical analysis to yourself.
I don’t want to get into a long and boring discussion about the Middle East. I agree that there was ethnic cleansing of Palestinian communities during Israel’s War of Independence, but there was also ethnic cleansing on the other side. How many Jews remain in Aden? Zero. How many in Algeria? Zero. I could cite many other examples. I’m not saying that two wrongs make a right, but I dislike your tendency to angelize Muslims while demonizing Jews.
Finally, when I read these comments by yourself and others, I understand why “White nationalism” has been such a flop. The Church of Scientology probably has more political influence in North America than does White nationalism.
“Antiracism became written into mainstream American culture, particularly in the Northeast. ”
But if that’s really the case, and anti-racism has been a core element of American ideology for the last 150 years – which has been exported since 1945 to the rest of the West – what hope is there actually for changing this state of affairs? If anti-racism is an essential part of the USA’s system and has been central for a large part of America’s elite for most of the US’ existence, nothing short of bringing down the US and ending American hegemony would suffice to break the anti-racist spell. And that’s unlikely to happen. Your analysis isn’t very encouraging, to say the least.
I see that the first couple paragraphs of my last piece were edited out. The rest of the post relates to those paragraphs. I referenced Netanyahu’s speech before Congress and perhaps too energetically took the position that Congress’s Protestants were panting after the prophet from Israel, in the same way that Protestants have taken the lead from the Old Testament for centuries now.
Thus, I continue my effort to link up our religious Protestant History which is soaked in OT Hebraism, with our Jewish Problem. To put it another way, it is NOT so much Jewish Money and intelligence, and networking, but our own profound luv of the OT. The Catholic Church has at least kept the OT on the back shelf and declared the Spirit, not the Law, as the Christ Principle.
Joe Webb
“And it’s perfectly okay to mock and blast Muslims.”
“I don’t know where you live, but here in Canada it’s definitely not O.K. to mock Muslims.”
In the US, ‘Islamophobia’ is one of those permitted ‘bigotries’. It’s on Talk Radio all the time. Muslim this, Muslim that. Republicans who dare not say anything about Jewish power and even homosexual agenda(as the fix is in that GOP will bend over to it) will rag on and on about the Mooslims. Chinese and Russians are also approved targets of opprobrium.
I think us-and-them mentality is innate and part of our makeup. Since it’s taboo to knock Jews, blacks, and homosexuals in the US, the pent-up rage of Americans is directed at Russians, Chinese, and Mooslims. Russians and Muslims make especially welcome targets as far as American Jews are concerned because of Middle East and Ukraine issues.
Americans need some kind of outlet for their us-vs-them passions. For American Liberals, the hatred is directed at ‘homophobes’. For American Conservatives, it’s hatred on Russians and Muslims. Sometimes on the Chinese… or North Koreans as stand-ins for yellow peril. (I mean they all look alike.)
“I get the impression you feel ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ Because Muslims are potential allies in your anti-Jewish crusade, you feel more sympathetic toward them and thus end up parroting a lot of pro-Muslim, anti-Israel propaganda. Maybe you should step back a bit and apply some of your critical analysis to yourself.”
No, I don’t see Muslims as my allies or friends or whatever. I just think we should leave them alone. I don’t like Muslim values, and massive Muslim immigration to Europe and Australia sickens me, but then, Muslims don’t control immigration policies of the West.
One thing I do admire about Muslims is they still have a warrior culture, and Muslims fight for Muslim interests. In contrast, white Christians are either total wussies(especially in face of the homosexual agenda) or fight for Neocon interests that don’t serve Christians. Besides, look at what Western meddling in the Middle East has done to Christian Arab communities(that used to be protected by secular Arab leaders/autocrats).
“I don’t want to get into a long and boring discussion about the Middle East. I agree that there was ethnic cleansing of Palestinian communities during Israel’s War of Independence, but there was also ethnic cleansing on the other side. How many Jews remain in Aden? Zero. How many in Algeria? Zero. I could cite many other examples. I’m not saying that two wrongs make a right, but I dislike your tendency to angelize Muslims while demonizing Jews.”
Yes, but that was counter-ethnic-cleansing. Zionist pushed out the Palestinians, so some Arab nations pushed out Jews. It was tit-for-tat. It wasn’t initiated by Muslims.
But then, many Jews in those places left for Israel for greater opportunities. (And some simply left for Europe for the same reason many Muslims did: for a better life). Iran, the bogeyman of Israel and neocons, hasn’t expelled its Jewish community. Not under the Shah and not under the Ayatollahs. So, if anything, Iran has a better human rights record than Israel.
Counter-violence will follow violence. It was because US used violence to invade Iraq that many Iraqis decided to get even by ethnically cleansing Arab Christians. Iraqi Muslims equated the power of ‘Christian America’ with Arab Christians. But if US hadn’t used force against Iraq, Muslim Iraqis would have co-existed with Christian Iraqis.
US was the instigator of violence in Iraq.
Far, far, far more influence. The Jehovah’s Witnesses, despised as they are for disturbing people at home with their evangelism, have far more influence than white nationalism.
And I have forever said that this is due to two factors: (1) the anti-semitism and (2) the Christian do-gooders who are fanatic about excusing negro dysfunction and fanatic about their antiracism including all their “missions” in Africa.
Last, you might expand on the role of the Quakers in the early abolition and antiracist movement.
And made yet more unlikely when a vocal segment of the white nationalists insists on alienating and demonizing a high IQ population known for defending its interests. Which makes me say, “hmmm.” How many of the anti-Semites are trolls who want the Jews to stay on the liberal plantation? Surely the Jews know that when whites are gone the Jews are gone with us. The brown races won’t distinguish one white from another based on the shape of the pendent hanging from his neck.
As always, we suffer for millennia old mythologies.
Antiracism (i.e. Equalism/Blank Slatism) is only one of many US religions. It was dominant only during Reconstruction and the latter part of the 20th century. It’s already losing steam again. It most recently reached its intellectual/cultural peak in the 1970s, and its power peak in the 90s. Since then it’s been hanging on through increasingly repressive measures.
Faced with a credible challenge, it will crumble. This will probably happen when the system built on Equalist principles fails spectacularly, and that should occur pretty soon. We already had a taste of it with the subprime mortgage bubble and subsequent collapse. Whatever comes next will be a bigger fiasco. Maybe it will be some dramatic upheaval in our cities when the boomers begin to retire and entitlements no longer become feasible, and the antiracists themselves bring about the reversal of the urban revitalization that’s been ongoing since the mid 90s. The recent events in New York over the Eric Garner incident demonstrate that cities are currently resting on a pretty fragile foundation. One major riot combined with a demoralized police force could set off a chain of events leading to the collapse of the progressive power base.
It is very telling that the rationale for replacement of Europeans’ control of their historical states is phrased as ‘Diversity is our strength’. We are speaking of the level of states but Nietzsche is relevant here.
Yes. Like Captain Kirk to Scotty “More power!” Savonarola’s was a moral movement, sure, but it was explicitly intended to make Florence great.
The taproot of the Puritan work ethic was Calvinism.
Calvinism spread across to most advanced countries.
From new last chapter for Mearsheimer The Tragedy Of Great Power Politics
The French states inability to resist Austria caused the French revolution. Prussia emancipated Jews and Britain emancipated Catholics when the were up against the unbeatable armies of revolutionary France. The Russian abolition of serfdom followed reverses in Crimean war, and the Russian revolution was initially by parties who wanted to fight WW1 more effectively. The pattern is that the state tries to draw on and get all its resources pulling together as a team to match up to external challenge. The Soviets’ (in retrospect modest) nuke and space achievements put the US into a panic and money was thrown at maths and science education. The Cold War caused racial integration to be enforced by central government.
The modern western states are the outcome of that process and hence incredibly strong right now. The HBD underpinning of Western predominance is not yet apparent to the people that matter.
“Finally, when I read these comments by yourself and others, I understand why “White nationalism” has been such a flop. The Church of Scientology probably has more political influence in North America than does White nationalism.”
How do you distinguish between your NWE cheerleading and White nationalism?
It would seem it is not simply technology, but the wealth and subsequent welfare state created by technology, that allowed for the sexual revolution. The vast majority of women would not sleep with a man who was not her husband because the very possibly result would be pregnancy, with no provider to care for her. It was not all the “blame” placed on the woman, but the responsibility, for the very clear and understandable reason that she becomes pregnant. One cannot easily chase down the cad she sluttily cavorted with. When one could, it was called a “shotgun marriage”. But there was none of this silly WIC nonsense for women who make decisions with their loins instead of their brains. Which was, in fact, why women had a very limited power in the political and economic arena, as, to paraphrase Disraeli, she had so much power in the sexual one.
“Surely the Jews know that when whites are gone the Jews are gone with us.”
Don’t know about that, there seem to be quite a few Jews who genuinely believe the antiracist narrative and still are more scared of supposed threats from white gentile antisemites than of the very real violence from Muslims (at least that seems to be the case in Europe, though this might have changed somewhat in France).
But I agree, it should be obvious that the demographic changes in the US and Europe can’t really be good for Israel’s long-term interets.
Thanks for your reply. I’m in no position to judge the situation in the US, but from the outside it seems to be pretty dire. I’m astonished at Obama’s behaviour (his one-sided interventions in the Trayvon Martin, Ferguson affairs, his promotion of blatantly ethnocentric underlings like Eric Holder, his amnesty plans etc.), and there seems to be very little serious pushback from Euro-Americans. And unfortunately the US is something of a model for other Western countries; pernicious American trends like “critical whiteness studies” have already turned up this side of the Atlantic. I find that rather troubling.
Well, keep in mind that there was a real repression of anyone who had any credibility as a right winger or white nationalist back in the late 90s/early 2000s. It was on par with the Communist scare of the 1950s.
Take Kevin Strom for example. The guy – really a squeaky clean nerd – was set up on fake kiddie porn charges by his wife and a federal agent who was sleeping with her(!). Then there’s the case of Bill White who, although probably a certifiable mental case, has been in prison for years and likely will be there for decades more for vague, non-imminent threats that should rightly have at most resulted in civil commitment and psychiatric evaluation.
Then there were the many, many examples of entrapment used to imprison militia people in the 90s by, for example, feds offering to teach them paramilitary skills then arresting them for constructing explosive devices that the feds instructed them to build.
White nationalism is problematic for obvious reasons (too much nazi baggage and pseudoscientific in its own right, and also of course the irrational Jew obsession that characterizes its theology), but it wasn’t entirely comprised of drooling morons. That it is today is in large part deliberate manipulation/decapitation by a very aggressive federal surveillance and prosecution effort.
Scottish poet Robert Burns managed to get many many women pregnant. It was fear of pregnancy and the bad reputation that women dreaded I think. I don’t think we have yet got a picture of what women’s sexual behaviour would be if their was no reputational cost to any choice. It has been my observation that when away from their home town attractive young women are astoundingly likely to choose a black African male as a sexual partner.
It’s basic evolutionary dynamics. Mobility tends between different social environments tends to promote less concern for the particular social environment. If you’re used to moving a lot, you’re not going to care as much about the long-term health of the neighborhood.
I was in Northern Europe a few years ago, and I ran into a drunk Swede at an Irish pub who had strong opinions about the US. He insisted that America was controlled by the “Yoos” as he put it. Being better at holding my liquor than your typical Swede (perhaps thanks to my largely Celtic ancestry), I calmly allowed him to berate my country for some time, and then asked him whether he liked moto-cross, hunting and the like. In his case, it was fairly obvious. Immediately, he lit up with a smile, switched course and started going on and on about the things he loved about American culture.
I then explained to him that in vast tracts of the US – most of it in fact – hardly anyone spared a second thought about the Yoos, and instead did normal redneck American things and lived a redneck American lifestyle, driving pickups, riding dirt bikes, hunting, fishing, etc. I told him that aside from the language and some cultural idiosyncracies he’d feel quite at home.
What Europeans don’t understand is how vast the United States is. They see only a tiny slice of America and mistake it for the whole country. There are in fact more ancestrally European people in the US than in any other country on earth. The problem isn’t America as a whole, but rather a tiny little segment of its population that is skillful at projecting a distorted image of the nation and its policies.
I’d argue that when Europeans pay attention to this distorted message coming from the US they empower it beyond its true worth not only abroad but at home. What Europeans have to do is stop identifying with the American left and stop giving it a podium. If Europeans told American progressives to go to hell the progressives’ world would immediately shrink considerably, because truth be told they have a pretty weak constituency at home. By my estimate, true white progressives in the US only comprise about ten percent at most (and probably somewhat less than that) of the total population, yet Europeans treat them as though they represent the combined will of the American people.
Stop giving them credibility they don’t deserve.
Right, the dynamics are a bit different in the US compared to Canada because of the larger demographic presence and influence of blacks and Jews in the US. In the US, blacks and Jews are at the top of the moral status hierarchy. Muslims enjoy some protection, but they rank lower in the hierarchy.
Muslims, along with Russia and China, serve as the relatively approved outlets for populist discontent and out-group hostility and aggression induced by demographic and cultural change. This serves as a useful pressure relief valve for the state to maintain stability domestically and as preparation for possible future intervention in the Mideast or conflict with Russia or China.
But if that’s really the case, and anti-racism has been a core element of American ideology for the last 150 years – which has been exported since 1945 to the rest of the West – what hope is there actually for changing this state of affairs?
I’m cautiously optimistic. I say “cautiously” because nothing worthwhile happens without hard work. Too many people want things to happen through external causes, typically a catastrophe — peak oil, war with Russia, a depression, etc. If you’re just waiting for things to happen, you’re going to wait a long time.
With that caveat, I see some cause for hope:
– Throughout most of Western and Central Europe, nationalist parties are steadily gaining ground. In France and the Netherlands, they are close to one third of the popular vote. Once they go over the top in those two countries, the logjam will start to break elsewhere.
– The Jewish community is starting to think differently on this issue, especially in France. This is partly because a day hardly goes by without an attack on Jews by “youths.” But it’s also because 70 years have passed since the last world war, and our geopolitical landscape has completely changed. It’s time to recognize that fact.
– There is a growing realization that human populations differ statistically across a wide range of mental and behavioral traits. I could mention the Minnesota Twin Study and the like, but the most convincing reasons (at least for me) are theoretical. The speed of genetic evolution increased by over a hundred-fold when humans began creating an increasingly diverse range of cultural environments some 10,000 years ago. We differ genetically mainly because we have adapted to different ways of life and, hence, possess different predispositions, personality traits, cognitive capacities, and patterns of emotional being.
Am I grasping at straws? Perhaps. Antiracism seems dominant everywhere, and overwhelmingly so. But that dominance is a hundred miles wide and one inch deep.
White nationalism is problematic for obvious reasons (too much nazi baggage and pseudoscientific in its own right, and also of course the irrational Jew obsession that characterizes its theology), but it wasn’t entirely comprised of drooling morons.
Political deviants tend to be psychological deviants. If the dominant ideology has a poor grip on you, it’s probably because your mind doesn’t work like the minds of most people. You may just be mildly autistic, or you may be a full-blown psychopath. Unfortunately, those are the people who are drawn to White nationalism.
The Internet exacerbates this problem by eliminating the normal face-to-face interaction that comes with building a viable counterculture. I enjoy the possibilities of the Internet but I recognize its limitations. This is one area where Europe is ahead of North America with groups like Generation Identitaire. People need to mature through real interaction.
What Europeans have to do is stop identifying with the American left and stop giving it a podium.
I can’t agree. The American right is no better and in some ways worse.
This is a good point. The vast majority of white America is unlike the left coast and the wrong coast. We like hunting and we like to just shoot guns at cans and other inanimate objects. We like motorcycles, snowmobiles, boats and jet skis. We drink beer. We drive pickup trucks as proven by the Ford F-150’s status as best selling vehicle in America basically forever (26 years now?) – one sold every 30 seconds I heard recently. We aren’t queer, but don’t care if you are so long as you don’t stick it in our faces. We don’t hate anyone, but strongly prefer working, playing, and sleeping with our fellow white folks.
The problem is that our media does not show this and our government is doing everything possible to make us a minority in our country as fast as it can. Our government sends our kids (never theirs) off to die in godforsaken places having no relationship to our home. And for decades our government has actively encouraged businesses to close down american factories and move them to central America or Asia. Foreigners don’t see the real America because neither our media nor our government represents us. And, more importantly, we lack the courage or patriotism to stand up and defend ourselves. Where is the American PEGIDA or Bloc Identitaire? The militias you mentioned aren’t analogs, they’re armed and looking for war. With 22% unemployment, you’d think people would have time to hold mass demonstrations. Are our guns our problem? We sit at home and think, “Well they’ll never come and take what’s mine anyway” while our european cousins have no option but the mass rallies?
As a once leftish guy, a father, grandfather, an MA from Berkeley (even when I was a bit unbalanced believing in Universal this and that as a leftist of sorts.always anti-communist) and an ex-probation officer (19 years) San Mateo Co. CA, I cannot state that I have met more psychos around White Nationalism than I have met in general.
Btw, what exactly is unscientific about WN racial views? Are Philippe Rushton and Richard Lynn unscientific? Is Jared Taylor unscientific?
What I see out there generally are mostly fools conforming to Billary, or the Repugnicans….with no intellectual grasp of the issues. However that is starting to change with Whites quitting the Dems and moving over to the Repubs. Are they crazy?
You centrist folks who seem sympathetic to the cause of stopping the racial disruption of the US and Europe, how do you differ exactly from the general White Nationalist position which is no immigration from the Third World, and so on? Please define what it is in a WN position, which is only slightly stronger than, say, the French National Front, that makes us psychopathic or just plain wrong?
The centrists are going along with the neocons and White wackos like john MeCain who want to invade Russia, bulldoze the Middle East, and whose record over the last few years includes probably a couple million Arabs, etc. dead from our bombs, etc. Then recall Madame Albright who said back in about the year 2000, that a half-million dead Iraqi kids was “worth the price” viz-a-vis the Iraq Sanctions…
So, who’s the psychopath here? It would be one thing if a war actually produced some good result. There has been no good result, for our national interest, or World Peace. So please inform us of how the centrists ,whom I guess Mr. Frost and lots of folks on this list might describe themselves, are psychologically in Good Mental Health, and politically, are making any sense or accomplishing something?
Now, I am not saying that WNs are Real Nice People. We are edgy cuz like in Hamlet..”If thou art privy to thy country’s fate, which, happily, foreknowing may avoid, Oh speak” we see it fully, what is happening. Maybe you folks see it, but your counsel does not add up to much, as far as I can see.
So, if WN is goofy from your Mature perspective, what perspective/program do you announce? What is to be done? as somebody said. You cannot have a Plan, if you do not have a diagnosis. And then that diagnosis needs a politically astute analysis of various tendencies, etc. I guess, instead of calling us crazy, why don’t you present a paragraph or two summing up the above? You know an alternative politics to WN?
Btw, the fundamental for WN is bio-culturism. We start with science , the Darwinian variety, and try to get real with regard to Values…values rooted in traits, and then flesh out a politics consistent with nature/traits and a genuine recognition of difference in races, and also ethnys within races, like our own. Our approach is to adjust to biological reality, and leave utopias to the liberals who are hastening general war and social breakdown. They want Everybody to be the Same, etc.(let me add that we have plenty of Christians and quite a few anti-Christians, myself, agnostic)
You know …you’re crazy, and I’m sane.
Joe Webb
Please forgive me but I cannot help my psychotic self:
You may have seen the DOJ released report, that even the NYT had to feature up front…that cop Darin Wilson back in Ferguson behaved exactly as he had said at the time with regard to the shooting and killing of Brown, the youth.
So, will the legions of mentally healthy news services apologize for their trial by Media of Officer Wilson? Will the Beyond Reason brigades of Blacks apologize for calling for the murder of Wilson and cops in general?
More importantly, will the media stop and take a gander at their drum beating for killing cops/accusing them of murder every day, etc.?
So, who’s the psychopath here my friends?
Which gets me to a remark or two on “psychopath” vs. “sociopath.” Taking the words at the simplest level, ‘psychopath’ suggests an internal/genetic flaw. The word ‘sociopath’ suggests that Society is responsible for bad behavior. ( I recall way back when when I coined the phrase, “crime is socially determined.” I beat the general pack of liberals to the punch by years. Natural born liberal I was…genetic defect…profound, promiscuous, pathological Altruism, the Achille’s Heel of Whites.)
Well, my present view is that Very Bad Behavior, that with zero empathy, etc. is an internal affair, that is, it is genetic. Psychopaths can be seen as early as 8 years old. Take Pelican Bay prison in northern California, where the worst of the worst are held. They should all be shot, end of story. And I like to say that the White psychopaths should get two bullets and the Black psychopaths should get one bullet….is that racist?
So all of these college educated nice Whtie liberals who tried, convicted, and sent down the gauntlet Officer Wilson, what are they anyway? They are not psychopaths, so maybe they are sociopaths, that is, extremely vulnerable to group think, particularly when jobs and promotions are in question.
So all you experts on mental health, please express yourself on the mental health of these folks , who get along, go along, and monkey see, hear, speak no evil.
Psychopathicaly Yours, Joe Webb
Well gee, I sure hope there’s an alternative to the autistic/psychopath explanation, because I’ve always been a political maverick whose mind doesn’t work like most people’s.
I couldn’t agree more. But it isn’t only the Internet that’s a problem in the US. First, we Americans work more hours than Europeans. Then we are spread out and have to drive everywhere. Finally, the US is far more authoritarian and restrictive in practice despite supposed free speech and association, which has a chilling effect on young people who get together without official/adult supervision.
But I’m personally working on it myself. Hopefully I’m not too much of a psychopath to cause any real harm. 🙂
The progressive left is the right, Peter. Definitely so in the traditional sense. Ask yourself who is most authoritarian when it comes to domestic policy and it is pretty clear.
There is no populist right in the US, except for a few outliers like Dave Brat. And, to tell the truth, they are more like the old Democrats my grandpa voted for than they are like contemporary Republicans.
“What Europeans have to do is stop identifying with the American left and stop giving it a podium. If Europeans told American progressives to go to hell the progressives’ world would immediately shrink considerably, because truth be told they have a pretty weak constituency at home. ”
I think you have a point about that. The problem is, the media in Europe (or at least in Germany, and probably also in Britain, can’t really tell about France, Italy etc.) present a very biased picture of the US – Democrats are good, blacks are always poor, oppressed victims of white racists, white Americans in fly-over states are religious fanatics and gun nuts (gun ownership of course is also seen as bad per se and just another sign that Americans aren’t quite right in the head). And unfortunately a lot of people seem to believe that distorted picture.
I don’t think the sexual morality issue was flappers, I think it was brothels and prostitution that accompany large military mobilizations. Flappers seem to be a rather expensive lifestyle that could not be supported during the war due to rationing, especially fuel. On the other hand rationing meant women had a reason to exchange sex for both rationed goods and quickly devaluing (due to war time money printing) money. And of course I am avoiding the issue of homosexuality altogether.
Many have noted the Puritanical note in American Thinking about lots of things, especially, in foreign policy, which antedates the neocons.
Was Wilson puritanical in his war to end all wars and his fiddling with the map of Europe?
And so on with regard to just about all our foreign policy, except for the steadying hand of George Kennan and his Containment policy of the USSR, which probably saved god knows what. Not that other Europeans are completely sane in this regard. But they are saner for sure. Now we, the US, is in the grip of both political parties. Endless wars, let us see…oh yeah, to Make the World Safe for Democracy. Who said that….first?
And I would add, for International Capital. The typical liberal, including subverted Reugnicans, likes to pin badges and medals on his breast displaying his/her Humanity. The backside of these badges declare their Interest in making money. Who among them declare themselves on Chinese totally anti-democratic and Communist Totalitarianism? Zip. Money don’t talk it swears…somebody said.
Again, I call for a statement of Principles from the folks who call White Nationalists mad. You could do it thus: Whereas….and Whereas…and Whereas. this is our Program.
Joe Webb
With regard to how deep anti-racism is today, it seems to me to very deep among certain groups, like White middle-class youth, the two coasts, and the college communities.
Who would have guessed this outcome, the present, 50 years ago (when I marched with MLK in Washington DC in 1963, having driven there with wife, going thru the South as well with a California license plate, and a borrowed .38 revolver to protect us from those awful White racist! Southerners.) ? Have a friend who went South for Civil Rights…that helped flip him into the ranks of White Nationalists. My innocence continued much longer.
I grew up around nothing but Whites…and my pronounced White altruism lighting the way, and also with a family script of Leftness. The American Age of Innocence is entering its adolescence of painful adjustment to racial reality.
Joe Webb
This could be more of a Canadian perspective or bias. Canadians tend to be followers, more conformist, and more passive-aggressive. Whereas Americans tend to be more individualistic, independent minded, rebellious, etc.
It’s not simply a matter of psychological deviance. Some may indeed be psychological deviants, but others are simply more intelligent and intellectually curious than the norm. The average American is extremely politically stupid and intellectually incurious. Whether they’re on the right or left, they just want quick and easy good guy/bad guy narratives from the approved, dominant social authorities.
Did you ever meet James Von Brunn?
You started here calling Peter a coward because he is does not agreeing with you about Jews. You’re you Joe, and you may not be the best authority on your decision making process and their correctness any more than your parolees were about their own choices. And while both masses and elite (which let us not forget are organised into rival states) have long been selected for going along to get along, their collective decisions are probably more reliable that any white nationalists’.
NO. The main opposition Wilson faced over the League of Nations was that ‘the Republicans demanded concrete security guarantees for France against Germany’. I think you need to have the courage to do some reading and rethinking before posting any more comments Joe.
“Political deviants tend to be psychological deviants. If the dominant ideology has a poor grip on you, it’s probably because your mind doesn’t work like the minds of most people. You may just be mildly autistic, or you may be a full-blown psychopath. Unfortunately, those are the people who are drawn to White nationalism.”
There may be some truth to this. Consider Klaus Kinski character in DR. ZHIVAGO, the ‘only free man in Russia’. He’s crazy but also the most nutty(given the context of what’s happening in Russia).
Paradoxically, the crazy may be less crazy when a system is ruled by craziness(but then, the crazy will naturally be more crazy when a system is ruled by sanity).
Most normal people want to get along, be liked, and win approval. What passes for ‘sanity’ is more about getting along than sticking up for one’s principles. As people are social creatures, their main emotional priority is to be liked. This is why we tend to be so adaptive. We may not be pro-Maoist, but if we have to do business in China, we are not gonna go around telling people that Mao was a piece of turd(though he was) in Beijing. The normal thing is to be liked and shake hands and do business.
Because sticking with one’s sense of truth is risky in many situations, it takes a special kind of ‘craziness’ for people to stick to principles at all times. Such people tend to be difficult because they will not budge and compromise. It’s like Strelnikov in DOCTOR ZHIVAGO. He won’t compromise with reactionaries or with other revolutionaries. He always stick to what he thinks is right.
Such a mindset can be reckless and crazy, but in a world where craziness has become the norm to which most sane people conform, it’s the ‘crazy’ who may resist the power of official craziness. Consider how so many normal and sane people went along with Nazism in Germany. In a way, it was totally understandable. As the psychological norm is to be approved and go along, it became the norm to be pro-Nazi when Hitler seemed to be doing great things for Germany economically and politically. Another norm is fear. As life is about survival, the psychological norm is to favor safe survival over risky individual principle.
So, even those who didn’t much care for Nazism followed their normal/sane instincts and either remained silent or pretended to support Nazism. It was much the same in Stalinist Russia and Maoist China. Most sane and normal people just went along. It was the ‘crazy’ ones with powerful personalities like Solzhenitsyn or Sophie Scholl who later refused to go along.
So, psychological deviancy is a double-edged sword. It may, in and of itself, be nuts, but when the official system is run by lunacy(as the modern West is I believe), it’s the crazy ones who refuse to do the ‘normal’ and ‘sane’ thing of going along to get along.
Mark me down for batshit crazy.
“It’s not simply a matter of psychological deviance. Some may indeed be psychological deviants, but others are simply more intelligent and intellectually curious than the norm. The average American is extremely politically stupid and intellectually incurious.”
Lack of curiosity is one thing. But it’s also cowardice.
In a way, cowardice is sane and normal. It’s courage that is usually insane and abnormal.
Look at nature, and most animals are cowardly. If they see a bigger animal, they just take off and run like a mothafuc*a. The main point of life is to survive and live for another, not take a stand and die for a principle or truth. The only truth that counts for life is SURVIVE and LIVE.
Cowards have a much better chance of survival than courageous folks do.
A lot of people are opposed to ‘gay marriage’, but many of them no longer put up a fight since they are afraid of the Powers-that-be that are arraigned to destroy anyone who sticks up his or her head and says he or she won’t go along.
We like to believe that we are on the side of courage than cowardice, but 90% of normal-and-sane life is about being good cowards.
But since cowardice is seen as a weakness and vice, we like to pretend that our cowardice is a form of courage. So, even though so many people caved into ‘gay marriage’ out of cowardice, they pretend they had a sincere change of heart and are for it out of courage. Stockholm Syndrome. How we love to fool ourselves.
“This could be more of a Canadian perspective or bias. Canadians tend to be followers, more conformist, and more passive-aggressive. Whereas Americans tend to be more individualistic, independent minded, rebellious, etc.”
Are most Americans really more individualistic and independent-minded? Or just most contentious?
Among Americans, I can only think of Jews who’ve been individualistic and independent-minded in intellectual and cultural affairs. And maybe blacks in style and music.
But most American groups have been more into fitting in and getting along with the dominant/official ideology. This has especially true of the German-American and Scandinavian-American North. And Anglo-Northeast.
So, if we compare Canada, which has been overwhelmingly Anglo-Canadian(for most of its history) with the Anglo Northeast and Northern parts of America(dominated by Germans and Scandinavians), we don’t see much of a difference.
The only ethnic group that really challenged the dominant Anglo-cultural/intellectual model were the Jews, and there were many more Jews in America than in Canada. But most Americans were not like Jews. They were followers than innovators.
Even so, as America was more the destination of immigration, Americans were bound to be more contentious if not necessarily more individualistic. When America was still underdeveloped and even poor in many parts, many immigrants from Ireland, Poland, Greece, Russia, and etc arrived in America. As they didn’t eye-to-eye, a kind of tribal mentality developed in many ethnic enclaves.
In contrast, most of Canadian history saw much lower levels of immigration, so Canada was less contentious with its mostly Anglo-population. One exception was the contentiousness with French-Canadians.
In more recent yrs, Canada began to take in more immigrants, but this was bound to be less contentious than American immigration of yesteryear. In the late 19th and early 20th century, many Americans were still poor and backward, and many immigrants were dirt poor, barely literate, and didn’t know a word of English. So, it was bound to cause a lot of headaches and ethnic clashes that led to ideological clashes.
In contrast, immigrants to Canada are arriving to a modern state with fully developed infrastructure and means to handle new immigrants. Also, the immigrants themselves tend to be well-educated, reasonably prosperous, skilled, and modernized. So, they are more likely to assimilate into Canadian society than feel as contentious as ethnic enclaves in NY divided along Italians, Greeks, Jews, Poles, and etc, who often fought one another in gang fights.
I’m sure ethnic divisions exist in Canada but nothing like the kinds of racial and ethnic tensions that marked American life in the early 20th century.
Most American are not independent-minded or individualistic. But they do tend to be more contentious, not least because of the huge black population. Blacks push, and in the South, whites do some pushing back. And the huge numbers of Hispanics in the SW is bound to lead to some major tensions.
Which is ironic because, besides that incident in Montana where the homeowner (who was not white) shot a German exchange student who broke into his garage, German tourists are usually murdered in places like Miami and Los Angeles.
In most of flyover America it’s much, much safer and saner than in urban centers, and people are a lot more tolerant of dissenting points of view, having a “live and let live” attitude rather than a progressive fascist one.
I think more Europeans should connect with heartland American communities. Lots of them already do, because so many have family ties in Europe, but it seems these parts of America get bad press for some reason. Maybe towns in Idaho, Wyoming, Iowa, Missouri and so on should offer special programs for European journalists who are interested in colorful, offbeat stories about the US. The Basques in Idaho, for example, make for a very interesting story. I’ve seen Basque ranchers in the Targhee National Forest herding sheep on horseback.
I grew up as a member of a Norwegian ski club. My kids’ great grandmother is a Bavarian who takes the family to Germany get togethers. There’s a Volga German community out in Wenatchee and Yakima that came in the 19th century and kickstarted Washington state’s huge fruit and wine industry. The American heartland is full of European culture and Europeans themselves. In fact, even out here in Washington state the single largest nationality by ancestry is German (the Boeing corporation was founded here by German American William Boeing). As someone of mainly British heritage, I’m a minority here!
Crazy people need jobs too.
Crazy people are entitled to political opinions.
Joe Webb. Cease and desist with the capital letters and all caps!
Answer my question Mr. Frost. How is white nationalism different from your premise that NWE is the best thing to come along since sliced white bread?
Joe Webb. White nationalism will not work. If it would work, I would sign on the line today.
Left to ourselves whites choose up sides and kill the hell out of each other.
Please forgive me but I cannot help my psychotic self
Joe, I wasn’t saying you or anyone else here is psychotic. I was just making a general observation. Speaking for myself, I don’t think I’m like most people, mentally speaking.
My wife will ask me, “What are you doing?”
I’ll reply, “Just thinking”
“About what?”
“About … stuff.”
A lot of people out there don’t seem to spend time thinking, at least not like me.
Canadians tend to be followers, more conformist, and more passive-aggressive. Whereas Americans tend to be more individualistic, independent minded, rebellious, etc.
My impression is that Americans tend to be more assertive and Canadians more timid. Americans raise their voices more and generally talk more loudly. But assertiveness can be used just as much to impose orthodox views as to challenge them. When I’m with a group of Canadians, I won’t bring up a controversial subject for fear of acting inappropriately. With a group of Americans, I won’t for fear of an angry, self-righteous reaction.
Answer my question Mr. Frost. How is white nationalism different from your premise that NWE is the best thing to come along since sliced white bread?
That is neither my premise nor my argument. Northwest Europeans have a longer history of individualism and weaker kinship, going back at least to the 12th century. They seem to have adapted to this weak kinship environment through a greater capacity for guilt and empathy and a greater willingness to obey absolute moral rules (as opposed to relativistic kin-based rules). This behavioral package has enabled them to organize their social and economic relations along lines that have nothing to do with kinship, such as the market economy or ideology.
If I were an extraterrestrial, I would consider NWEs to be very interesting, but I would also shake my head and think, “Poor suckers, they’re going to liquidate themselves.”
Doesn’t this mean that the effects are most disastrous in NWE societies? You said above that “In other societies, the effects are more disastrous.”
Doesn’t this mean that the effects are most disastrous in NWE societies?
Extreme liberalism has disastrous effects in all human societies, although NWE societies have adapted to individualism and weaker kinship for a longer time, so the effects are arguably less in their case. In any event, it seems that the societies that are most likely to pull away from the brink are those that have a weaker tradition of liberalism. Time will tell.
ok Cracker 1, what will work? I am all ears. Joe
Yes, it’s pretty strange how gun crime in the US is portrayed in the European media…should be obvious that white gun-owners in rural areas aren’t the problem (as for that guy in Montana who shot the exchange student, he seems to have been somewhat of a psycho, and got a pretty harsh prison sentence anyway). Crime levels among America’s white population are no worse than Belgium’s as far as I know…but of course pointing out that fact would be rather un-pc.
Thanks for your comments about the American heartland…didn’t know there are Basques in Idaho. The problem of course is that America is well on its way to becoming a majority non-white country…I think I read that 44% of under 19year-olds in Washington state are already non-white. Granted, a lot of them may be Hispanics who have at least some kind of connection (genetic and cultural) to European civilization, but that demographic change is bound to affect relations between the US and Europe, probably in a negative way (though of course Western Europe has similiar problems and is also in danger of being de-Europeanized).
What has always worked.
Choose up sides and fight.
Make sure when choosing allies that you give your side a better than even chance to win.
America isn’t a country anymore. It’s more of an empire, sort of like the Chinese and Russian empires, both of which contained lots of different ethnicities and several different races.
As soon as the idea of the “proposition nation” took hold in the 90s America was finished as a nation.
This doesn’t mean that white Americans will cease to exist. Actually, I think this loss of nationhood will only make them all the more aware of who and what they are. Remember, when the first Americans came to the continent, they were a small minority in a giant continent. Whites in the South were a minority for a long time, too. Yet we’re still here. Somehow I don’t think we’ll just up and disappear anytime soon.
Another thing to consider is that a lot of minorities will want the borders closed too. They’re the ones who stand to lose the most from continued mass immigration. Mexicans in the US, for example, would have it shut down already if so many of them didn’t have illegal relatives who want papers (even so, they aren’t that far behind whites in wanting immigration control). This idea that Latinos are liberal open borders fanatics is ridiculous. I bet if someone ran on border security and social conservative values while promising jobs and moderate social welfare he’d get at least half the Latino vote.
Mr. Frost, funny, my ex used to do the same to me..what are you doing? Nothing… why I got rid of her. Joe Webb
I admit I am no expert but I recently read something about this topic and I want to share it because I think it’s relevant.
“[The liberal Protestantism of the XIX century and early XX century] tended to emphasize the perfectibility of human nature and the ability of the gospel to achieve this perfection [abandoning the traditional Christian doctrine of sin as a kind of unnecessary hangover from an earlier and less enlightened period in Christian history]
But then came the First World War, which shattered the idea of human perfection [and hence, finished with the liberal Protestantism. As D.R.Davies said in On to the Ortodoxy
[So the First World War finished with liberal Protestantism as an ideology. Other ideologies (Fascism, Communism) filled the void after the War.]”
So it seems to me that the First World War had a significant effect after all. But I could be mistaken because I don’t know much about this topic.
“Extreme liberalism has disastrous effects in all human societies, although NWE societies have adapted to individualism and weaker kinship for a longer time, so the effects are arguably less in their case. ” Mr. Frost.
I don’t know what this means. First, extreme liberalism is how old? I assume that Mr. Frost might mean, say, from 1950 or so on. All of the extreme liberal, or born -agin leftie po-mo popcorn started after about 1970. Snap, crackle, pop went the prison-break after the modernist cage gates were smashed.. Every freak was Free to indulge him/her self (read self as Self).
Now Mr. Frost may setting ‘extreme liberalism’ release date to an earlier time but I do not perceive how that could be much earlier than my above point. Liberalism yes, Manchester Liberalism, JS Mill liberalism, the Liberalism that Marx loved and hated…but manners always remained , shall we say , uptight, formal, and especially sexual relations. Chaperones were always in place for the young ladies, and young men were also closely watched. This would obtain thruout the 19th C, at least for the middle and upper classes.
On top of which a serious and totalitarian church was always present. I remarked in an earlier post that May 68 in Paris was largely a protest against chaperones for the girls and so on, while at least in America, kids could pile into cars and go to the drive-ins and make-out. (Drive-ins, for the youngsters 0ut there, were an artefact 0f 50s and 60s car culture: drive in movies where one could hang a speaker on the window, roll up the windows and let them steam up and lock the doors. Hoo-boy…and what picture did we watch? I forgot Dad).
So, then the 60s arrived, rock n roll (as in coitus) and Groovie (as in the groove of the cunnus) and so on. Vietnam…and rock n roll…and the historically highest share ever and thru today as well, of national income getting passed on to the working class. (ruling class fear of communism?)
Recipe for Revolt. Be-ins. where one went to the park and Related, Man , to others, to strangers, and shared food and dope. What could be better and more revolutionary, and then there was the loosey goosey sex. Love the one you’re with…one of the lyrics of the times. No courtship, no formality, and no tears at goodbyes…see you later Man, gotta go.
Well, the 60s then lurched into the 70s with the alphabet soup of Marxist parties, “pre-party- formations”…loved that one, caucuses of the cantankerous, then the wymyn getting into the act, and so on.
Point: this for me was the beginning of extreme liberalism, and I think it was Wilmot Robertson who said, liberalism is the pimping little sister of communism, and so it largely was, the New Left as merely literally the kids of the Old Left.
So, if this was the beginning of ‘extreme liberalism’, then it has not been around for all that long.
Individualism has been around for a very long time, going back to our caveman days in Europe: traits developed in an environment in which large-scale collective efforts were not necessary, etc.
But wait!! We forgot Altruism and how it developed. We know that story so not necessary to repeat it. We Whites have the strongest dose of Altruism of any other race. We save the whales, we never enslaved our gals, we missionize all over the planet in the salvation of souls, and we invented Human Rights, Bill of Rights, now Animal Rights, etc.
This must be the time of extreme Altruism, promiscuous and pathological Altruism. ( one could go on to wonder about the dialectics of Individualism and then the self-perceived lack of affiliative impulses in our selves, and thus the Intellectual effort to overcome that Individualism by inventing Altruism. This would not seem to be very Darwinian, yet…who knows?)
It might help explain how this ‘intellectual and abstract “Idea” has run away with us, Altruism being the horse with its bit between its teeth (horses are controlled by a gap between their front teeth and their rear teeth, and the bit is held in place there by the bridle, thus allowing the rider to leverage his power thru the reins to steer and stop the horse (cruelty to animals for our dear lovelies).
Pursuing this line of argument, instinct and impulse, would be demoted and “cultural” factors would be promoted. I don’t recommend this line of thought, but it is conceivable.
How Individualism and Altruism developed as traits, not Ideas, is hard to figure out since they are highly contradictory. Of course, altruism is necessary for the family, so there is easily a genetic base there. But how it gets deployed for the larger community is slightly harder to theorize, although not impossible. But how Extreme Liberalism comes to be, remains, from a Darwinian perspective a much more difficult problem.
Welcome the invader onto your land? Allow extremely weird looking and weird behaving people to marry your daughters? Stranger and stranger. Then to deny Difference so profound as to astonish any ordinary person not suffering college-induced brain rot…how does this happen???
Well, mostly it is unfamiliarity with these Strangers –up front and personal –until it is too late. And propaganda …massive, almost totalitarian, and since we are eminently a social animal, shame and fear of ostracism, and joblessness, and the like…denial of a spouse, children, marriage. Pretty grim , tough stuff. If you refuse to salute the Rainbow, you are history.
So the Extreme Liberalism will self-destruct as more and more White Folks meet and interact with their Rainbow brothers and sisters.
This is how it works in Brazil. Then, in Brazil, there is way more social contact of Whites and Mulattos simply cuz they are about half of the population. Thus the Whites know the mulattos and consequently do not marry them… the top four-fifths of Whites, despite the propaganda which got started in the late 90s.
Conclusion: Altruism, not Individualism, is the problematic. Religion is heavily involved in the Rainbow Follies. Christianity in its liberal phase, starting say with the Unitarians around 1800, began the madness, first, slavery, and then race. The country remained resolutely racist unto about 1950, and still is in the heartland, church exhortation notwithstanding.
So as we are more and more forced into unnatural and unwonted and unwanted inter-racial social intercourse, the more conflict will follow. Altruism will be trimmed back to racial size, that is, caring for one’s own race to the exclusion of Others. This does not mean a hatred of Others, it just means separation. Go in peace, but go.
Joe Webb
right imnobodyOO.
I forgot to mention with regard to Matthew Arnold’s Protestantism, that he very frequently uses the word ” perfection,” that we are perfectible. Now his idea of perfection is probably more Hellenic than Hebraized, that is, perfection-within-reasonableness, or something.
But…yes…these folks were followers, at some remove of Calvin, and quaintly pursued Perfection, something that we now laugh at, maybe not cynically but is a slightly more worldly way.
Also, those of us of the Darwinian persuasion, recognize the full range of persons, both intellectually, emotionally (spiritually if you will), and physically. This is in accord with the ancients, the Realists of course, except for Plato’s and others’ attempt thru Philosophy to reach God. I suppose that is why one of the more recent Popes allegedly said that he would rather read Plato than Jesus ( I read that somewhere recently so i dunno about its truth).
Yeah, and many contemporary folks , world war 1, remarked how it seemed like a collapse of civilization, and personal despair was common. Western Civilization and its loss of Innocence, if that can be plausibly accepted. Why not? (9-11-01 brought out Game Changer, and some cliche about how Everything has Changed…I forget) Such nonsense, but emotionally understandable for American naivete, and history-less children/adults. The Civil War?…where was that now…it is on the tip of my tongue.
Who has not experienced a loss of Innocence, politically, if not personally. And yet, the Don Quixotes are back, naive, full of Certainty, Utopia, Zealotry, Romance, and Pride…they Know. Equality Forever, it is on our postage stamp. Fools, but….I was one for awhile mea culpa.
Except Don Quixote at least had his Sancho Panza (?) who could apply some common sense and identify reality, like Rosalinda (?”) not a Princess but a whore.
Joe Webb
Lots of ‘deep’ comments; personally, my only question is: who was blaming it on the war?
Joe Webb,
And if the Arab and Muslim states missed out on all the technological innovations of the post-WWI period you described, so too did they miss out on all the libertinism and distorted “Protestantism”/bastardized Christianity which has only increased its bastardization of Jesus.
I for one root for Muslims to retain a sense of modesty and civility and self-control in a world gone bonkers a la “liberalization.”
btw, it makes my skin crawl to think of “liberalism” in the terms you describe.
My definition, or mental perspective, anyway, of liberalism emerges from the Italian Renaissance and Enlightenment.
What you describe has nothing to do with classical liberalism and everything to do with libertinism.
The destruction of culture starts with the destruction of language.
PS. But all the same, your chronology does reflect the reality of how culture became perverted.