DebateGate

In the eastern part of the European continent, today is Victory Day, which marks the surrender of the Nazis to the Soviet Union. The official surrender was signed on May 8th, 1945, but it was already past midnight in Moscow. It was the biggest public holiday in the old Soviet Union. Now it is celebrated in most of the former republics, with parades and public commemorations. Under Putin, the Moscow military parade was brought back after a hiatus under Boris Yeltsin.

It is hard for Western people, especially Americans, to grasp why Victory Day is so important to the people of the Russian Federation. The events of the war, when remembered at all, are recalled for the purpose of promoting current narratives rather than a sense of national pride. Of course, the memory of the war in Europe is highly stylized and fictionalized. For the people in the East, the war and the triumph over the Nazis is an important part of their national identity.

America lost about 400,000 soldiers in the war. The Brits lost about the same and the French lost close to 600,000. For narrative purposes, the Axis powers are not allowed to talk about their dead. The Soviet Union lost twenty million people. Countries like Poland, Hungary and the Baltic states lost close to ten percent of their population as a result of the Nazi invasion and then the Soviet invasion. This is why the war still looms so large in the consciousness of those people.

The war is why the word ?Nazi? resonates much more with the people of eastern Europe than even the nuttiest social justice warrior in America. In America, the cartoon version of the past turns villains like the Nazis into hollow figures who represent whatever the current year harpies fear about themselves. For eastern people, the word conjures memories of an existential threat to their existence. The Great Patriotic War, as the Russians call it, was a war for the survival of their people.

This civilizational angst is what lies at the heart of the war in Ukraine. The Russians see themselves fighting a war for the survival of their civilization. Volunteers from all over the Russian Federation are now fighting in the Ukraine because they see themselves at war with a West that threatens their existence. Washington is not threatening genocide, but something almost as bad, the erasure of their national identity. The Chechens like being Chechen and they will die for it.

This civilizational sensibility is hard for Western people to grasp. America, of course, has no real identity. It is a collection of economic and political slogans that holds together a continent full of strangers. Europe still has some vestiges of national identity, but that has been anathematized by the ruling elite of the continent. Nationalism is now a synonym for fascism. In its place is the concept of European which is even less meaningful than American sloganeering.

Civilizationalism got the people of the East through the war, but it also carried them through communism. Despite the homogenizing ethos of Marxism-Leninism, the national character of the people of the Soviet Union survived. It was this sense of self that has been the basis of revival after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The same sensibility that allowed the people of Eurasia to survive the Mongol invasions has allowed them to survive the invasion of Wall Street bankers in the 1990?s.

Again, this is hard for Western people to fathom. Unlike communism, liberal democracy has been highly effective at reoriented its victims to see themselves in purely economic terms, shedding their cultural identity. Western people are baffled as to why Russians would give up drag queen story hour to seize the Donbas. Western planners even assumed the people of the Russian Federation would rather have McDonalds than a connection with their ancestors.

Washington?s war on Russia brings up two bits of irony. One is the people of the East overcame communism only to find the alternative was worse. The communists promised to steal your labor and the dignity that arises from it. Liberal democracy promises to steal your soul and replace it with consumerism. The communists built monuments to the workers while the liberal democrats destroy the monuments to your ancestors and replace them with planned developments.

The other bit of irony in all of this is that if the West is going to survive it is going to need to embrace civilizationalism as well. The promise of the EU was that it would unite the countries of the Europe for the common good. The trouble is the elites embrace the cancer of multiculturalism. That cancer will have to be removed and replaced with a civilizational sensibility that respects the variations within the culture, traditions and demographics of people with a common history.

This concept is not entirely alien to the West. Europe rallied to defend Christendom against the Muslims. It was not nationalism that led Sobieski to lead his men against the Turks at Battle of Khotyn. It was a civilizational identity that saw the Turks as alien invaders who must be repelled in order to preserve Western civilization. Into the last century, there was an understanding among Western people that despite their differences, there was a West and he had to be defended.

Perhaps the psychosis of liberal democracy will finally be beaten out of the West in what is looking like another futile and pointless war of choice. Despite the disparity in wealth, the Russians merely have to continue to exist in order to win. For the West, liberal democracy requires the unconditional surrender of Eurasian identity to the homogenizing forces of Liberal democracy. History shows that this is every bit as futile as the crusades against Islam.

The big difference between this civilizational war launched by the West and the one launched against Islam is that the East matters. The West has deep economic connections to the East. That means this war will have real costs to the people of the West, in terms of living standards. It is unlikely that the people will be willing to sacrifice the only benefit of liberal democracy for an abstract war against a people who they naturally see as civilizational allies.

https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=27348

It?s easy to forget, with all that is happening, but the racket known as democracy is the one thing not being forced to close by the local tyrants. The state of Kansas had its primary yesterday. The race of interest to white people was the Republican primary for the senate. Far left Rep. Roger Marshall faced off against the moderate former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. Marshall, of course, had the support of both parties, as Kobach favors some minor limits on immigration.

Marshall won with the support of the usual GOP suspects. He got the endorsement of the U.S Chamber of Commerce, the Kansas Farm Bureau, the National Right to Life Committee. If he wins in the fall, the tech monopolies and agribusiness will get a much-needed voice in Washington, but the people of Kansas will remain unrepresented in both houses. Of course, President Trump did nothing to support Kobach. Instead he spent his time tweeting about something.

It used to be that the three ?I?s? controlled American politics. That was Israel, Ireland and Indiana. The money men, working class whites and heritage whites controlled the political process. It?s still the three ?I?s? today, but they stand for Israel, India and the investor class. Politics is now controlled by the Israel lobby, open borders fanatics and the financial class. Even the very mild skepticism for open borders by someone like Kobach is completely out of bounds.

This race was interesting for another reason. Mitch McConnell organized a $15 million ad campaign against Kobach. The ads claimed he was a white nationalist who employed invisible Nazis on his staff. It is a great example of how today?s heated rhetoric from the Left becomes conservative dogma tomorrow. No one should be surprised if the GOP slips in some language into their platform condemning your ancestors and supporting the black lives matter nonsense.

The other interesting McConnell angle is that he now runs the GOP. Trump is not even a figure head at this point. He is a non-factor. Both parties are now preparing for the Biden presidency and will make sure a guy like Trump is never allowed to step foot in Washington ever again. They said Nixon ushered in the imperial presidency. McConnell is now ushering in the legislative supremacy. Both parties have locked shields to impose their will on the executive branch.

That really is the story of the last four years. Disaffected whites rallied to put Trump in the White House to send a message to both parties. It was not that people were charmed by Trump or thought he was a great man. White people backed the pompous and crass Trump as a rejection of official politics. A good chunk of whites were sick of the wars, the open borders, the corporate piracy. Voting for Trump was a rejection of the status quo in an effort to wake up the political class.

The political class responded by making sure this never happens again. Look around at Republican races since 2016 and you see a maximum effort to eliminate anyone that supports populist policies. The Democrats, of course, have spent the last four years turning Washington into a circus of conspiracy theories. Instead of cutting a deal with Trump, which would be easy, they are working with their friends in the GOP to undermine Trump at every turn.

In the fullness of time, the 2016 election will be viewed as the last legitimate presidential election in America. Using the excuse of the pandemic, states are ushering in vote by mail schemes. As Gandhi once said, ?It?s not the people who vote that count, it?s the people who count the votes.? What that will mean moving forward is the wrong votes will be shredded by the party men counting the votes. There will be no way to audit this process, so voting will become ceremonial.

Then there is the fact that the vote counters will be the wokest of the woke. If you vote the wrong way, your name will be leaked to the right people and before long you will be facing the mob. The point of the secret ballot is so people feel free to be honest in their choices. The point of the mail in vote is to make sure you know someone will be looking over your shoulder as you fill in the ballot. Feel free to vote your conscience, but they will feel free to make you suffer for it.

One other thing from the Kansas race worth noting. The party man got the support of the National Right To Life Committee. There is no better example of the corruption inherent in democracy than the anti-abortion movement. For generations they have been hoovering up millions and have nothing to show for it. A candidate opposing abortion may as well claim he opposes leprechauns riding unicorns. It is the most meaningless position in politics.

In the end, it is another reminder that there is no voting your way out from under a corrupt ruling class. The only solution for that is the hangman. If the interests of white people were represented in the ruling class, then they would be represented in the House and Senate. The ruling class of America no longer has any connection to the average white American, so the interests of white people are ignored. There is no solution to that problem at the ballot box.

https://thezman.com/wordpress/

When I was a kid, serendipity landed me in a very nice prep school for boys. The student body was mostly drawn from the upper middle class. There were a few genuinely middle class kids and a few kids from very wealthy homes. The handful of poor kids, who got there on their wits and dumb luck, naturally stood out from the crowd. At that age, kids are keenly aware of differences in class. That?s because the awareness of group status is strongest at that age. As a result it was rough going for the poor kids initially.

My first taste of it was in the locker-room for gym class. A snotty little rich kid started giving me the business. He was smaller and weaker than me and it was obvious, at least to me, that he would not fare well in a fight with me or with anyone probably. He was not tough. He persisted and when he put his finger in my chest, I put his face into a locker a few times. The one thing poor guys know is that soft men do not react well to the sight of their own blood. My nemesis started to cry and then ran for a teacher.

His friends volunteered to tell the head master that I was the villain, so I was hauled away for interrogation. That was when I discovered that there was such a thing as bourgeois values. Poor kids never rat and they never run to the authorities. In the upper middle class, it is exactly the opposite. The winner is the guy who runs to the authorities with the most convincing tale of woe. It?s just assumed that some authority with the power to pass judgement will adjudicate matters, based on a set of unwritten rules I?d never unriddle.

Lucky for me, the school was not unfamiliar with this phenomenon. My adviser was a man who had come up from the lower classes, so he understood what it was like for us. This was why, most likely, he was assigned the poor kids. This was not obvious to me at the time. He just seemed to know what was in our heads, like he was magic. That made him extremely effective at convincing all of us that we had to adapt and learn how to outwit our enemies. By resorting to violence, I had given the others a reason to dismiss me.

The lesson we were supposed to learn is that in a civilized society, verbal and cognitive skill counts for more than physical skill. The lesson I learned is that the people populating the ruling classes of American society had decided violence was no longer a concern for them. They were never going to face a physical challenge. Instead, theirs would be a life of verbal jousting, while someone else guarded the walls. Later, I came to understand that they did not even think much about the walls or the people guarding them.

This is what I suspect is at the core of the problems vexing America. The Progressive ruling class lives in a world in which real risk, physical risk, is so alien that it may as well not exist. In fact, for them, it does not exist. The worst thing they can face is ostracism, which is why they obsess about the prevailing morality. That?s not a real concern, as long as they are aware of the boundaries. For most of the people in the elite, they have plenty of money, so losing a job is not a threat in the same way it is for the Dirt People.

Nicholas Taleb would say they lack skin in the game, but I don?t think that?s right. These people are not playing a meaningless game. It is very serious to them and they are ruthless in their execution.Those status points they hope to cash in at Davos or Jackson Hole mean everything to them. When Tim Cook walks into the bathhouse in Davos, he wants everyone to know that he is the guy leading the charge to purge dissidents from the internet. It?s important to him that he be seen as the most pious of the pious.

In a world where physical violence is a real possibility, the hierarchy of concern starts at the most personal and works outward to things like financial and reputation risk. In a prior age, the King had to worry about being killed or having his heirs killed. That was a sobering thought that led to a natural conservatism. In the current age, the rulers have no fear of physical violence and little fear of losing their stuff. That leaves them playing a game of school yard politics, in which status is set by words and signalling.

This seems to be the issue with the rising tide of censorship. They keep following a pattern. One platform bans a heretic and then it is a race for all of the others to do the same. Despite the overwhelming support for gun ownership, for example, the ruling class is racing to de-platform anything gun related. It?s monkey see, monkey do, as the Judeo-Puritan ruling class signals to one another their piety and then reacts to those signals with their own acts of piety. They are like lightning bugs on a summer evening.

What never crosses their mind is what could happen if they terrorize the wrong person and he decides to take action. They never think about what could happen if the public begins to turn on them in large numbers. No one in the ruling class thinks about the mob showing up with torches and rope. They don?t even think the mob will show up at the voting booth and cast a protest vote. Instead, they assume bad election results are the doings of gremlins and magic fairies with sinister names like Boris and Natasha.

The world they have created for themselves is one  that is surrounded by high walls and armed men that are invisible to the people inside. It is just assumed that the walls will hold and the guards will never turn their guns on the people inside. It?s never considered because they never think about it. It?s why the silly airheads on Progressive media sites can viciously attack people they claim are Nazis. They never think about the possibility of the person they ruined showing up outside their door looking settle things old school.

This is why they will keep pushing with the censorship. In fact, it is accelerating, as they furiously try to out signal one another in what has become a piety festival among our ruling classes. Some of the girls at Progressive sites, with heads full of rape fantasies, dream of provoking a response, but most simply don?t think a response is possible. They no longer see any humanity in the Dirt People. We?re just here as props in their endless morality plays they stage for one another in the land of the Cloud People.

http://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=14853

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSIVtPhXT-g

From the Journal of Democracy:
http://www.journalofdemocracy.org/sites/default/files/Foa%26Mounk-27-3.pdf

For supporters and detractors alike, U.S. President Donald J. Trump's July 6 speech in Warsaw was immediately recognized as the most important of his presidency to date. Since so much was crystallized by it - or perhaps brought to a head - it is impossible to begin making sense of this event without some preliminary broad-brush outline of its context.

The new dominant ideological polarity, on both sides of the Atlantic, exhibits remarkably similar characteristics.  Perhaps most strikingly, it displays the culmination of an ideological-class inversion, decades in coming, which has aligned the masses ? and in particular the native working class ? with the right, and social elites with the left. In consequence, populism has been firmly locked into place as a phenomenon of the right. Even those classical liberal stances most tightly bound to the advancement of commercial liberty, and thus most firmly associated with the conservative right, have not escaped radical scrambling, whether through re-assessment, marginalization, or complete inversion.

In this new and disconcerting epoch, business interest has ceased to be any kind of index for right affiliation, and popular opposition to free-trade no longer defines a substantial bloc on the left. If anything, the opposite is now true. Those on the left or right (including this author) who stubbornly maintain that ideological orientation to capitalism is the fundamental determinant of meaningful political polarity find themselves cast into a position of unplugged anachronism. The stunning magnitude of this transition should not be underestimated.

This is not, of course, a development without alarming precedent. From at least one perspective - which is by no means necessarily hysterical - the boundary between right-wing populism and fascism can be difficult to discern. Insofar as the affective context to Trump?s speech is concerned, this is without serious question the most important element.

Many books could be devoted to the new terms of political controversy, and almost certainly will be. Each of the still-unstable new camps is highly heterogeneous, and cross-cut with a variety of complex strategic interests regarding the way the great rift between them is described, so every attempt at articulation will be contested, often fiercely. Yet even amid the present shock and confusion, some basic structure is discernible. Beside the political opposition between left and right - in its present, re-adjusted, sense - it is not hard to recognize a corresponding globalist and nationalist emphasis, pitting universalists against particularists: defenders of the contemporary world?s institutional order against its opponents, or partisans of cosmopolitan openness against parochial localists, according to taste. Because, concretely, the insurgency marks a crisis of international social management, and of confidence in established, credentialized elites, to describe it as a struggle between technocrats and populists is roughly as neutral as we can get. Such terms are employed here as mere labels, rather than as judgments, or explanations. No extravagant disparagement is directed at either, relative to the other. The constituencies they name have substantial depths, exceeding any facile definition. They are obscure social masses in conflict, rather than competing ideas.

With Trump's arrival in Warsaw, two pairs of profoundly antagonistic political constituencies - one American, the other European - were mapped across each other, resonantly. Populist Red America had found its local champion in Warsaw, versus that of technocratic Blue America, in Berlin. These alignments were not seriously questioned, from any side. That the open-door policy of Angela Merkel's Germany, exemplifying its defense of EU institutions and traditional policy stances in general, were in fundamental affinity with the ideological intuitions of Blue America, were self-evident to all parties. Reciprocally, the identification of Trumpian Red America with the Polish stance of EU dissidence - on the immigration issue most pointedly - was taken as self-evident. Even before the visit, to those paying attention, the Polish regime had become an icon of ethno-nationalist popular revolt against technocratic transnational government, evangelical secularism, and mass migration. Everything clicked.

It is difficult to be confident about how much lucid strategy under-pinned the event. In all matters Trump, the default assumption tends to be not very much. Given Trump's characteristic bluster, and unusual comfort with low demagoguery, such dismissal is to be expected. This is not at all to suggest it is acute. If political instincts tuned almost to perfection played no part, then divine intervention - or some blessing of fortune functionally indistinguishable from it - is the next most plausible hypothesis.

The speech itself was rhetorically pedestrian, and even clumsy. It is hard to imagine any single sentence being remembered from it, unless for purposes of dry historical illustration. The language was tailored entirely to its immediate audience - both local and international - rather than to the delectation of future generations. The speech was, in this respect among others, a thing of the social media age, tuned to instantaneous feedback. It manifestly schmoozed, even by the dismal standards of such orations. The rapport it struck with its local listeners tipped into collective self-congratulation. Wow, we really are great seems to have been the consensus, among all directly involved. To those disinclined to identify with the speaker and throng in question, this can only have been annoying. Enemy rallies generally are, as conservatives learnt during the Obama years. The untroubled self-love of one?s foes, exuberantly manifested, is a truly horrible thing to see. Naturally enough, Trump has been no more distressed by this fact than his predecessor.

There is one further, and indispensable contextual element that needs to be raised before proceeding to the media reaction - which was, of course, the deepest level of the event - and that is the 'Jew Thing.' Everyone knows, at some level, we have to start talking about that, in some way, even those who - entirely understandably - really don't want to. Ignoring the topic is a disappearing option, because there's no reason, at all, to think it's going away. Perhaps it was mere coincidence that Trump's visit took him deep into holocaust territory, which, again, nobody really seems to want to mention, even though it was an explicit thread within his speech. It was, however, structurally essential to everything that followed. Unmistakably, even as it went unacknowledged, the Jewish dimension added greatly to the feverish intensity of the response.

The extreme sensitivity to Jewish socio-political anxieties that has prevailed in the postwar West is notably losing its edge, in a way that doesn?t seem plausibly reversible. At least in part, this is a consequence of the generalization of identity politics, predominantly under leftist direction, which has the peculiar cultural effect - in its late stages - that special cases are becoming increasingly difficult to make. Victimological status bursts its banks, among conditions of unbounded, and symmetrical, ethnic paranoia. Lurid grievance anecdotes - tailored to every imaginable social niche - are always in abundance, fed by Internet supply-lines. Persecution narratives explode from all sides. Demands to 'check one's privilege' have proven awkwardly mobile, and reversible, as they have been increasingly normalized, even to the point - in this particular example - of overt, caustic antisemitism.

The result is nothing less than a crisis of the diasporic Jewish left, whose argumentative edge has been blunted by decades of exceptional immunity to unflinching criticism. Defensive cultural strategies that have, for half a century, been accepted, unquestioned as a special ethno-historical privilege have quite suddenly become subjected to irreverent public inspection. Everyone wants a piece of ethnic survivalism now.

This is the key to what happened in Warsaw. It is evoked as the subtext to Peter Beinart's wail of distress, when exposed to Trump's line: "The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive." Beinart was quite correct in recognizing - horrified - the resonance of this sentence with the most extreme elements of the present transition, but that was no help to him. He had been ambushed.

Trump made his speech explicitly about ethnic survival, disarmingly aligned with WWII Jewish victimage, with heroic Polish resistance to foreign military occupation, and finally - most provocatively - with the contemporary situation of the West. It naturally helped him, overwhelmingly, that the Warsaw Uprising was an insurrection against actual Nazis. This provided a vaccination against the normal workings of Godwin's Law. You know who else wanted ethnic survival? Adolf Hitler!  - We have reached the core of the event now. There was simply no way this response, which was the only one that mattered to Trump?s enemies on the left, could conceivably be made to operate on this occasion. What was being celebrated was the Poles surviving Nazism, then communism, and now - infinitely awkwardly - again the Germans, this time cast in the role of principal executors for a transnational political order promoting mandatory multiculturalism, secular technocracy,  and the culture of Western historical self-flagellation. The result, almost inevitably, was a rout.

It took no great flights of oratorical bedazzlement to triumph on this battlefield. The situation did almost everything. Trump?s maddened enemies blundered into the trap, and were shattered. The left, for whom of course the West has no right to survive, found itself ideologically isolated to a degree that was unprecedented under the present administration. Their tactical allies in the 'Never-Trump' conservative establishment evaporated. Hardened Trump skeptics, such as Rod Dreher, David French, and Jonah Goldberg contributed their talents to hunting down the fleeing leftist remnants. David Frum only held his ground in opposition by arguing that Trump was personally unworthy of his own speech.

Beinart came out of the trauma worst. He will forever be haunted by his own definition of the matter at stake, which was immediately judged from all sides to be an unforced production of Alt-Right propaganda: "The West is a racial and religious term. To be considered Western, a country must be largely Christian (preferably Protestant or Catholic) and largely white." Across social media, much nodding ensued, from constituencies whose approval he would surely least appreciate.

Jonah Goldberg refused explicitly to follow what was now so vividly exhibited as the road of obligate European ethnomasochism and civilizational self-hatred: "What's ironic is that Peter's desk-pounding outrage about Trump's talk of the West is oh-so Western. The West's tolerance for anti-Western philosophies is a fairly unique feature of the West itself. We love to beat ourselves up." Defense of the West, therefore, is taken up as a cause inclusive even of its critics.

It is Rod Dreher, however, who best captures what Trump consolidated in Warsaw, perhaps for the first time. He says, comparing Trump to his leftist critics:

As is often the case with conservatives and Trump, no matter how much you may despise him and his pomps and works, in the end, you know that he doesn't hate your beliefs, and that he and his government aren't going to use the power of the State to suppress you as a threat to public order and all things good and holy. [...] That's not nothing.

However much Trump fosters aversion among many conservatives, he also provokes events that remind conservatives why they hate liberals (using these terms in their degenerate contemporary American sense). Plenty of conservatives hate Trump, and will continue to hate him, probably until the end of his second term in office, if not longer. But the way liberals hate him poses an obvious existential threat to all forms of conservative life. As Martin Niemoller never quite said, first they came for Trump and it was pretty damn obvious I was next in the queue.

Nick Land is an independent writer living in Shanghai.

https://jacobitemag.com/2017/07/12/trumps-warsaw-uprising/

In some parts of the world, I understand Hitler is regarded as a great leader who stuck up for his people. I think you'll have to wait about 200 years to get an objective view of Hitler and WWII. As Orwell said, he who controls the past controls the present, and he who controls the present controls the future. At this point in time, so many various factions have so much invested in how WWII is interpreted I doubt you'll get an honest accounting in your lifetime.

As for Trump, so far he's not what I'd hoped for, but on the other hand, he still beats the alternative.