The Insanity of History, a blast from the past from September 2020

Posted on by accordingtohoyt

Good morning boys, girls and dragons. It is sweet to see your glowing morning faces. [note from 2022. Stop glowing. We have enough of that.]

What time is it at According to Hoyt? You’re right. It’s heresy time!

My husband has long ago learned that there are places it is not safe to take me, because he just ends up dragging me out while I’m still trying to get a last zinger in at the speaker.  Yes, that has included churches. We don’t attend there anymore.  But mostly it’s lectures or movies or theater performances, where the person in charge believes we’re in need of hearing just a little more of that ol’ time (what? He’s been dead a long time. And most of his adherents are either fossilized while living or brain dead, so….) Marxist religion.

Yesterday we almost added museums to that list. It came this close. You could smell its tail when it went by.

You see we thought it was safe to go to a WWI museum.  And as you guys know I’m interested in the era. Partly because I think that’s when the wheels came of Western culture and we started skidding on dangerous ice. Without wheels. Downhill. And there’s fire at the bottom of the ravine.

In a way the visit was good — the exhibits are excellent, and we might go back because I didn’t get to look at all the guns as I would have liked to. I’m not an expert, no, but the national variations on light machine guns are fascinating, and I still have to write World War Dragon — because it solidified a) what went wrong. b) why lately — like the last three years — the history has been “tasting” as if it rhymes with WWI.

My talking back, though started with the introductory movie.

I’ve told you guys before the causes I was taught for WWI, which included fervent nationalism, militarization and idealization of the military, as well as Germany coming late to industrialization and feeling hemmed in.  That last is probably true, btw.  Though at this point I’m in no mood to give consequence to “historians” infected by Marxism and therefore prone to running headlong down stupid blind alleys towards brick walls.

I have bad news.  In the forty years since they’ve pounded that arrant nonsense into my head, they’ve added more.  To that list is now added “Social darwinism” (Talk back “Did they confuse it with the SECOND world war?”) “Which believed that evolution applied not only to organisms but to cultures and that the fittest culture would survive!” (Talk back “And you don’t? Why not? What the hell do you believe? Or are you confusing culture with race again?”) Income inequality (Talk back: “As compared to what fluff brain? ANY time before that the inequality was greater.”) And the terrible treatment of the working classes in cities (tb: “Again, compared to what? Have you been asleep while India and China industrialized?”) which led to socialism (TB: “I too love to blame socialism for just about everything. But for world war I it’s a step too far.”) which was sweeping the masses, so practically every worker was socialist (TB: Snort, Giggle “No, butt-brain. The intellectuals were socialists, and it’s not hard to recruit petty criminals and useful idiots to swell your ranks. But no. Most workers were not socialist.”) AND THEN the one that made everything click: “Imperialism. Those darn hyper nationalistic states of Europe were going to Africa and Asia and creating colonies.”  And it clicked.  Particularly since the next point in their description was about how the Balkans didn’t like being under the heel of the Austro Hungarian empire.  (Not that I blame them. I mean, for a brief time Portugal was too, several centuries back.)

And the back of my brain went CLICK.  And now I need to descend into heresy from everything you’ve been taught. Although note, I’m not going to rewrite history. I’m not one of THEM. I’m just going to challenge the way it’s been interpreted and force fed to generations of people.

There is a very stupid meme going around facebook that talks about how terrible it would be if Europe had ever been treated the way that Africa and Asia were treated, and partitioned and repartitioned at random by uncaring colonial powers.

It’s one of those that makes me faintly nauseous, (like the one that claimed the pilgrims had white privilege) because it betrays just how far our schools have gone into not teaching the kids any kind of history beyond “Europe bad” and “everywhere else good.”  It would be less criminal if they simply didn’t teach them to read and write (wait, that’s true!)

Because of course, not only was tribal, mostly pre-historic Europe partitioned more or less blindly by conquering powers: Greeks, Romans, Phoenicians. But it was then repartitioned again and again at the whim of invaders (Goths — yes, their horned helmets were all black. Someone bop the comedian on the head and drag him out in the alley, please — Ostrogoths, Swabians, Franks, Alans and only Bob knows what — he’s very learned Bob — else.)  In fact the “national” borders of Europe are no more “real” to the genetic make up of peoples than are national borders anywhere else.  They are mostly where they ended up.  The fiction that the things inside the walls are “races” or ethnicities is a creation of public schools and national poets and … well, fictionalizing historians. Something the left should be quite familiar with.

This is not to say there should be no borders — more on that later — but frankly if the rest of the world wants to have the same “inside border” cohesion as Europe what they need is not to redraw them and moan about colonialism: it’s a shameless and ruthless propaganda machine to convince school children of bullshit. That should be easy. Communists can do it.

Anyway, the point is that “colonialism” and the “unrest in the Balkans” are not because of nationalism and “people becoming aware of ethnic differences” (I swear to Bob they said that. Do Historians nowadays know bloody nothing of history?) and dragging poor Darwin into that stew (fish stew. with heads in) is just purely mean.

Industrialization and the rapid change of ways of life does come into this because Man — and woman, child, infant and dragon — does not live by bread alone. Some wise Rabbi said that, and He was, as grandma would say, covered in reason (Hopefully the Reason of the Postrel era. It’s gone down hill.) I.e. men who can see time before and after their lives and whose lives are far too brief for their minds, need a narrative to fit into.

For a long, long time the narrative had been religion and a way of life.  “I farm, as did my father, my grandfather, his father etc. etc. etc.”  When you moved away from the village, where you could visit the graves of all your ancestors, you needed a narrative to be part of. Which is where nationalism and to an extent militarism fit in. (To the other extent militarism was always part of it, and now there were dime-novels talking of adventure, which is often in war or happens to military man.)

But there was real unrest at the time.  And while we know of a few where socialists spoke, etc, I don’t believe it was at all “socialist” or “Marxist” even.  I mean, look, I’m running on stories I heard from my grandparents who heard them from their parents (their being children during WWI.)  And other people’s grandparents, too, in other countries.

Oh, sure, the intellectuals loved Marx. They still do. They’re a very conservative constituency.  And the organized Marxists (which at the time flew under a number of banners, including gutting and wearing the skin of Anarchists. They also still do) were running as hard as they could to get ahead of the mobs that were getting pissy.

But the mobs weren’t getting pissy because they wanted socialism. Socialists just happened to be the only organized ones who could claim credit/responsibility/ stir things their way.

The unrest had more to do with a lot of dislocated people living in a large group than ever and running around without a narrative to fit their lives into.

But there were other things….

Glanced by in the presentation is the fact that most of the ruling class of Europe was related to Queen Victoria.  They didn’t talk about it, but here’s the thing, the other problem is that the vast empires of Europe had been vast for a long time, but not really centralized.  It’s possible Americans don’t know this, but large European countries (Sometimes you can swing a cat not needing a passport for the cat) were “one country” only in name.  The regional variations in everything from dialect to cuisine, not to mention the administration of local laws, and even local laws imposed by the local grandee made them effectively several tiny, locally-administered countries overseen/protected by an overlord.

In the nineteenth century that changed.  Not only was the ruling class running in possession of faster means of transport, and the wealth from the industrial revolution, but heaven help us, most of them had IDEAS.  (A lot of those ideas very similar to Marx’s.) They, by gum and golly were actually going to govern ALL of their holdings. Down to the smallest village.  (This had started with Louis XIV, may his name never be sufficiently damned, but in the 19th century they had the ABILITY as well as the desire to stomp on every peasant face forever.)

So what that presentation never connected (they had drunk too much Marx) but should is this:

Just before WWI people were rebelling against distant and often dogmatic rulers, who frankly didn’t know anything and cared even less about local needs and conditions.  This applied equally to European villagers and to Congo tribesmen.

And the European Elite, basically one family, was about as clued in and with it and insulated from the consequences of their bullshit as out would be world elites today.

So, yeah, they were having the equivalent of tea parties and yellow jackets outbreaks, which of course the socialists infiltrated and tried to claim — stop me when it sounds familiar — which explains what actually happened where the presentation used all sorts of passive voice “the respect for established monarchy was broken.”  Uh no.  People were sick and tired of distant rulers who didn’t get them trying to tell them how to wipe their behinds.

So yeah, things were breaking down and the ruling hierarchy found something to distract the people: a long, and bloody war.  Although to be fair, they were probably trying to grab more territory to mis-administer from afar. It just all came together in a perfect storm.

And afterward the Marxists blamed….  nationalism and the free market.  And tried to force internationalism — aka more control from afar — on people and treating people as faceless members of nations, with the guilt and victimhood ascribed to groups, not people.  And when that blew up in WWII… they doubled down.

We’re now in the middle of a massive, new revolution (Call it the digital revolution, though I don’t think that’s exactly right) in the way people live and work, and the old narrative doesn’t fit.  Unrest is breaking out all over, and the socialists, who are now, by and large the ruling elite, keep trying to appropriate it, and ascribe it to the same old same old.

If we double down and prescribe more internationalism, which they do, it might kill civilization and humanity with it.

And to be clear I am for borders.  I see the point of larger countries (commerce and military mostly) but the administration must be as local as possible.  When it comes to government it should always be as small, local and personal/adaptable as possible. Because people aren’t groups, or widgets that fit into groups, be the groups race, cultures, or nations.  Or even villages (trust me.) And because if the local government is doing something particularly idiotic, you can go and have a talk with them.  While if — oh, at random — all of Europe is governed from Brussels, you can’t even vote the bastards out, much less go and have a pointed, finger to sternum, conversation with the worst offender

What we’ve been doing for 100 years now is doing the same thing over and over again (A war? Let’s erase national barriers, and have people governed by impersonal groups far away! That will cure it!) and expecting a different result.

And we all know what that means.

If we don’t break out of this loop, we’re headed to World War Three and afterwards the socialists will try to set up ONE government for the whole of the Earth, because that will stop wars (they never heard of civil wars, the idiots.) [And it won’t work, because they’re sort of like the Jim Jones cult with universities. They have no contact with reality- SAH 2022]

Let’s stop this, shall we. Do not buy the narrative. Speak up, talk back, disrupt the “accepted causes.”

Disrupt the story of the accepted causes of everything really.  And keep talking back. Because everything has been infected with Marxism. And we must drive this heresy train all the way.

Good thing it has no brakes.

153 thoughts on “The Insanity of History, a blast from the past from September 2020”

  1. “In fact the “national” borders of Europe are no more “real” to the genetic make up of peoples than are national borders anywhere else.
    and why tiny nations like Belgium and Switzerland have multiple official languages and most of the others have various other languages old as the hills as well.

      1. Poland was land locked a few times. Prussia has come and gone in odd ways too. Parts of it now the P got so silent it fell off (Kaliningrad, once Königsberg

    2. There are people in the north of Scotland who speak a version of Old Norse.

    1. That was my thought. I was taught they’d created a mass of interlocking treaties to make it “too expensive,” to go to war and then those interlocking obligations dragged everyone into it.

      1. Funny thing is, it’s never too expensive to go to war to defend yourself; unless you actually think slavery is a viable option.

      2. As I recall, the interlocking treaties was touched on in my high school American History class, circa 1968. If memory serves, that was the official narrative then and supposedly the primary(!) cause for the war.

          1. Thanks for the link. Before I get a chance to delve into the articles, I’m currently under the opinion that the treaties were a factor in turning a regional conflict into a much larger one, but weren’t the primary cause.

            Kind of like a metastable state in physics or chemistry; when it’s triggered, it’s going to be big, but the trigger isn’t inherent in the metastable state. OTOH, you don’t need much for some reactions.

      3. It was likely part “my ally country activated our mutual defense treaty, so I need to go to war to defend them”, and part “I have a mutual defense treaty with my ally, and I can activate it if I get attacked by my rival over this matter”. The Kaiser supposedly saw the list of items that Serbia had agreed to from the AH Empire’s demand list, and said that the war had been averted. Obviously he was wrong, and I wonder how much of that had to do with the fact that the AH Empire knew that Germany would come to its defense if Russia came to Serbia’s aid?

  3. My beloved dragged me out of church once because he said he thought I was going to rip the pastor’s lungs out. It was the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and his service included a “ritual of penance,” in which we were to meditate on how our behavior might have caused the event. He made the mistake of allowing attendees to stand up and talk about their feelings. So I did. I had two guys thank me for it afterwards. (The guy was actually a good preacher when he wasn’t cutting and pasting his favorite authors).
    Later, in the same Northeastern church, I watched my beloved go after a different minister for asking the congregation to lobby their representatives for more social spending. I doubt we’ll ever go back.

    1. I’m rather amazed that the Bishop in San Francisco has the cojones to ban Pelosi from Communion for her position on abortion. The RCC has been pretty squishy on things, especially since Frankie got put in the Pope seat.

      1. Pelosi stopped providing even the smallest cover for herself, and Cordileone was put in a bad position. He has been really, really patient. (There were some earlier skirmishes that went under the radar, back when he was first bishop, and she backed down.)

      2. I love that bishops name, Cordileone. I think that is literally “Heart of (a/the) Lion”. About time a bishop actually hammered someone for not obeying the rules. Even this congregationalist/baptist spiritual descendant of John Calvin knows that one is supposed to be in a state of grace (usually via recent Confession) to receive communion in the Catholic Faith. Advocating for abortion seems to be viewed the as being personally advocating/being responsible for murder (one of the 10 commandments though we may disagree on its cardinal number…). How the heck do I know this and an (alleged) lifetime Catholics like Pelosi or Biden don’t? Also if they think the Catholic faith is wrong in this matter why stay? I’m certain the liberal parts of the Episcopal (ECUSA) church would accept them in a flash and the super liberal parts tend to be very high church and try to out ceremony the Catholics with all their smells and bells. Similarly most of the liberal Mainline churches (UCC, PCUSA, ELCA etc ad nauseum) are fine with it too having seemingly decided Baal/Moloch worship is less of an offense than actually preaching the gospel.

        I suppose asking for intellectual rigor and honesty from Nancy and the Turnip in Chief is delusional on my part.

        1. It’s integrity that they lack.

          They claim to be Catholics but hold an Anti-Catholic “belief”.

          If they had integrity, they’d had left the Catholic Church long ago.

          So says this Baptist.

          1. Beats me Drak. I kind of don’t have a dog in that fight 🙂 . Just seems danged odd to me to stay where you’re not wanted.

          2. I suspect they think the D after their name gives them the same immunity from consequences that is obtained in American jurisprudence. Arggh.

            OTOH, they’ll have a fun time trying to explain that at the Pearly Gates.

        2. The other day I saw that the Antipope just banned, or wants to ban Latin Mass. A well done one is very entertaining even for this nontheist. A pox on Pope Commie.
          Nan’s Bishop and others have warned her that the interpretation/excuse she was giving was NOT Catholicism, and she risked punitive action if she persisted.

          1. He’s trying, but hasn’t succeeded yet. I was at one just a few days ago. He and his fellow modernist demon-worshipping communist pukes are part of that same elite globalist cabal that’s trying to kill the rest of the world, just narrowed in on a smaller area.

            1. I’m more worried with the fact that he’s canonizing priests with guns from South America. He says they died for the faith. I’m sure they did, but it was Marxism. Let the Marxists canonize them.

        3. The Catholic Church for people like Pelosi is probably just a social club at most, and a tick on the “voting groups who I might attract” at least. The actual beliefs of the religion are of no concern to her. Further, she’s probably gotten her own way for so long, and spent so much time running roughshod over others, that the idea that she might be denied communion by some mere BISHOP(!) never even occurred to her.

          I mean, can you imagine!? Some mere bishop thinks that he can tell the Speaker of the House of the United States of America what she can and can’t do in church (which she probably rarely attends anyway)!?

          And note that the same thinking would likely apply if it were an archbishop, or even the Pope (not that he’s likely to do something like that) were the ones issuing the ban.

          1. Not to mention the ludicrous notion that mere VOTERS could turn her shriveled old ass out of office!

            I have a dream…MaligNancy is standing on the Capitol steps with a stunned expression, holding a box of office knickknacks…

            1. Voters will never be able to turn Pelosi’s wrinkled butt out of office as long as she has faceless minions able to stuff mail in ballots into post office boxes in the dead of night.

        4. I suspect it’s part of the “narrative” that Sarah was talking about. Pelosi sees herself as Catholic, because her family has been Catholic since way back. She doesn’t think about whether she actually accepts the tenets of the religion any more than the farmer whose father was a farmer whose grandfather was a farmer whose great-grandfather was a farmer etc., stops to think, “Wait, do I actually like farming? Would I be happier if I moved to the city and became an apprentice in a dye house?” It’s just part of who she is, and I think she’d be insulted if you suggested that, just because she doesn’t actually believe in its dogma, she isn’t Catholic.

          1. Cultural Catholic.

            It’s called a Cultural Catholic.

            She probably feels weird if she doesn’t go to a fish fry on Fridays in Lent, she hits Easter and Christmas, she has saint stuff, all the… group events, she’d feel weird not doing.

            It happens with all groups that are solid enough to have a culture– look at Evangelical Christians who don’t actually believe any aspect of Evangelical faith, that’s just what they ARE.

            1. Heinlein summed that up in, “To Sail Beyond the Sunset.” Maureen and her husband raise a large family in various denominations, but they believe none of it (apparently none of their children believed, either).
              In the real world, there was a commenter over on then Wall Street Journal comments who quite candidly admitted to being an atheist who took his family to church for the social benefits.
              It never occurs to these people to wonder “why,” the superstitious wing nuts make such safe and useful companions for their kids.

              1. I’d argue the atheist who recognizes the value of the group’s teachings is the inverse, honestly.

                My husband was an agnostic who was willing to recognize that no, really, all the stuff this group was teaching was GOOD STUFF.

                He just didn’t believe the woo-woo.

                ….he eventually came to believe the woo-woo. Is maybe a little cranky, still.

                Pelosi wants the credit of Being The Good Guys.

                But doesn’t want to do the Good Guys work.

                1. I suspect the ‘leaders’ of the Catholic Church lost their way about the time they lost the gifts of the Spirit, and no longer were capable of performing miracles like healing, casting out of demons, etc.

                  1. 1) Those miracles are still happening. You have to have at least one documented to be recognized as a saint.
                    2) When the apostles were doing it, they weren’t the leadership.
                    3) The Boss scolded them for getting pissy about somebody outside of their organization doing it, so He clearly doesn’t hold it’s got anything to do with leadership.

                  3. Leadership does not not give you the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Holiness does, by God’s grace.

            2. Like the “Trump is the darling of the religious right!” nonsense in the 2016 primaries. Trump did well among people who the demographers call “evangelical”: white people who claim to be Christian but not part of a mainstream denomination. He actually fared quite poorly among Christians who went to church at least once a week during the primaries.

              1. And that doesn’t surprise me. Primaries are where you vote for the candidate you WANT. The general is where you choose between “candidate who’s actively hostile to Christians” and “personally sinful but will defend my right to worship”.

        5. She can head to the United Church of the Holy Gentrification. (I’d link, but don’t want to get eaten. YouTube “Horus Ruins Christmas 2”)

      3. He did the right thing. I just loved Whoopie-the-Moron’s comment about it, that it wasn’t his business. Talk about irredeemably stupid…

    2. Wow. That’s… wow, he’s lucky nobody came up and ripped him limb from limb. Thank you for speaking up.

      “Obviously America was wearing a short skirt, so she had it coming.”

      1. It was Rhode Island. They’re civilized. (Ugh).
        I know I told them I felt like I was listening to an abused wife: “He beat me! He wouldn’t beat me if I hadn’t done something to deserve it!”

        1. “Civilized” the same way the “Civilized Peoples” in Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories were “civilized.”

  4. Thank you Sarah, your insights about WW1 are making reevaluate a lot of ideas about that era. Before, I had thought that there was a nature/nurture cycle in the popular theory of how people work. Where the 80’s and early 90’s was nurture. And, much to my distress, nature has been gaining ground lately. But was it always Marxists, the nature theory of how people work feeds their egos for the need for ‘the good people’ to manage the inherently stupid people.

    And yet in my own life, I’ve rarely met a person that is stupid about things close to them. A reason for local government. People can have all sorts of stupid ideas about the people over the next hill, and it’s a nightmare if they make policy for people over the next hill.

    1. I’ve found information decays with distance. The further it must go to reach a decision maker, the worse the information they actually get is.

      And, most decisions just require good data far more than great insights, so for the overwhelming majority of decisions, even a not very bright person who is right at the source of the data can make a far better decision than even a genius planted hundreds of miles away.

      So it makes the most sense to push the actual decision making as far down the hierarchy as possible, so the people with the best access to the best information are the ones making it.

      And actually, I suspect most of the decisions that end up having to be pushed up the hierarchy, really only have to go up as high as they do because they’re tied to distant information as well.

      If it really does depend upon the price of tea in China, then it has to be made by someone with access to the price of tea in China. Of course that also implies you’ve got a system that’s likely to be running on a lot of old and rotting data, so it may be in your best interest to either remove the dependence on rotting data if at all possible.

  5. I volunteer at the WW1 Memorial and Museum in Kansas City and would be honored to do a walk through with you if you want to get another look at all the guns.

  6. a) prescient
    b) I think the idjits are not competent enough for WWIII or a one world government
    c) ok, one world government is pretty impossible, and competence would not make it possible

    1. Bob, I’m just going to be a contrarian on the world government impossible thing. The Libertarian Party that has movie nights around here, had a Socialist Monopoly movie night, which culminated in two groups of us playing the recently banned Socialist Monopoly (banned because Socialists claimed it wasn’t real Socialism since they couldn’t win it, it is a corporative game, the challenging kind with ranking at the end.)

      The Libertarian Party Movie night crew, had in one group won easily, in the other group (mine) one gentleman declared that he wouldn’t let the Socialists win and proceeded to work very hard at making our group lose.

      The joking conclusion we came to after the games was that ‘Socialism works if run by Libertarians’. 🙃

      My analysis was that Libertarians are well aware of the kind of sacrifice and responsibility inherent in being in charge, people that advocate for Socialism what the rewards without the work. A world government run by people that hate and distrust government might work.

      1. ” A world government run by people that hate and distrust government might work.”

        I’d say that applies to any government at higher than the large village level. The best way to select “leaders” is to pick the ones who have to be cajoled into it, and who can’t wait to get out.

        1. @ Bob C > “The best way to select “leaders” is to pick the ones who have to be cajoled into it, and who can’t wait to get out.”
          It doesn’t matter how you select government leaders – once they discover the allure of spending other people’s money, particularly on themselves and their pet projects, you can never get them to leave.

          “Every politician goes to Washington to do good, and stays to do well.”

          1. I didn’t say they were especially common, but there have been a few who left because they wanted to, starting with Washington, so I’ll stand by my assertion about “best”.

    2. There will be a dysfunctional one-world gummint, think 666; but it will be as bloody-handed as our worst nightmares…

        1. Well, that would be a great conversation over a pot or three of nice coffee (or some other seasonally-appropriate office beverage). And probably at least one meal.

          Maybe one day I will be blessed enough to meet you and go over that.

          It would be really nice to compare what I’ve been taught, what you’ve been taught, and the verses behind it.

          Thank you for giving me a new research project!!!

          1. Well, depends on how far you want to dig and where you dig. I think the premill reading of Revelation and Daniel are wrong (and that’s the historical premill – don’t get me started on the dispensational premill), and I’m a Amill who leans mildly postmill Particular Baptist.

            1. I think we could find a lot of decent theological discussion between pre-, mid-, post-, and no- rapture; but I want to grill the juniior pastors at my church—all current seminary students—to see their views and find out more than what I think I read…

                2. I would probably just stretch their kowledge over a rhetorical rack, as even their toddlers are probably tough enough to take me in a fair fight.

                  Plus I’m not sure my cancer doctors would prescribe grilled preacher, even with steamed veggies and a wild rice pilaf.

    3. Oh they are quite competent at getting into war. Whether it’s winnable is another question.

  7. Europeans have a long tradition of peasantry and serfdom, its in their DNA and still in effect today. The concept of liberty and being a free person in a free country is mostly unique to America. The free market (free enterprise) system is an engine for breaking the fiefdoms and setting people free (economic liberty). Socialism enslaves, fascism enslaves, communalism/collectivism enslaves.

    The centralizers don’t care about people, they care about gaining power/control (and implementing their perverse ideals).

    1. I absolutely agree that the centralizers want power, they basically want to be slave masters of the world.

      I am going to be nit picky about language though, communalism is the word I use when trying to break people away from thinking collectivism works. I think I picked up the differentiation from a post by Sarah a long time ago.

      When I use the word Communalism I am referring to monasteries, I think I’ve heard of Christian, Jewish, and Buddhist monastic communities that manage to hold everything in common successfully.

      Collectivists will often make a bait and switch argument citing these sort of communities success in holding property in common.

      So I usually point out, that those communities usually are 1) small enough for everyone to personally know everyone else. So you know if someone isn’t pulling their weight in work. 2) Have a trial period where the community can kick lazy bums out. 3) Usually has a shared religious or philosophical mission that everyone is working towards together. 4) Joining is voluntary so people are choosing to be servants to the mission of the community. Collectivists want people to be slaves to the state.

      Sorry to be nit picky, but I have actually had some success in getting useful idiots to recognize that there is a vast moral and structural difference between communalism and collectivism.

      1. Sorry. but “slave masters” is super-problematic. They prefer to be known as “influencers” and “thought leaders” instead.

          1. I’d rather call them “Would-Be Slave Masters” as I won’t be their Slave.

            1. I have an even less polite term for them. It… rhymes with manure, shall we say?
              Or, if one is fancy, perhaps they are coprocephalic.

      2. Perhaps I should have used the phrase ‘forced communalism,’ in any case, though, being a part of a community should be voluntary nonetheless. The ‘it takes a village’ mentality smacks of a ‘tyranny of the majority’ that too often seeks to impose conformity.

        1. Thank you for understanding and not taking my words the wrong way. 😎

          I am a bit put out with the world lately. It’s really hard seeing all the really bad choices being made by ‘the good people’. And I’m sorta bracing for the ‘Who could have known, we meant wells!’ From the useful idiots. 😞 And I really wish I could find a solution to mass starvation in certain parts of the world.

          I realized last week, that I need to remember that the kids have almost no basic understanding of government at all. A young man was asserting that socialism is perfect on paper, to which I kept saying no it’s not. I did go through the whole if Men were angels socialism would work, but if Men were angels we wouldn’t need socialism. But finally after, I think his third assertion of the perfection of the intent of socialism. I said ‘I just don’t think forcing people to share is right.’ To which he said, ‘I wasn’t saying anything about forcing people.’ Which made me realize I really should have started in Socratic mode, and led him to the base definition of what is and is not a government. After all paper socialism without force is charity, not socialism.

          Socialism is a great screen for people who DON’T want to share unless everyone else is doing it, to hide their lack of virtue compared to those who do practice charity even if no one else is doing it.

          Sorry, I’m seem to have a bunch of rants today. 😞

          1. @ TurquoiseThyme: You can pick up some good arguments about how socialism always results in force from Hayek’s masterpiece, “The Road to Serfdom.”
            Of course, your target audience must be able to recognize how logical connections work.

            Click to access Road%20to%20serfdom.pdf

  8. The lectures on the First World War I got going through the Naval War College identified 7 different causes. But my own analysis is that there are reasons why the war started…and very different reasons why it continued.

    Basically, Europe was a hotbed of political discontent in the 1910s. The UK had had a soft revolution in 1908 that gutted the House of Lords. Russia was a cauldron of revolution. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was a dynastic state that was being torn apart by nationalist sentiment. Germany was under pressure to democratize. And France kept the Third Republic mostly because they could not figure out what a replacement should look like.

    None of this caused the war. But once it started, the Communists were circling like sharks, with their dogma of bloody revolution. The Central Powers were ahead on points, but any government that made peace was likely to get torn apart by the Communists. So the conflict continued…on, and on, and on. Well past any rational point.

      1. I’ll agree that the political instabilities were probably not nearly as severe as they are usually made out…and that the Communists were at the core of many of them. They were in the bomb-throwing business before anybody else heard of the notion.

      2. And I may not have been clear…the political issues were not the cause of the war. THAT is a very different story. Fending off the Commie-sharks was what kept the bloody mess going.

    2. Judson’s The Habsburg Empire is a newer book about the Empire, and is revisionist, using Austro-Hungarian documents. To sum up, the empire was a lot more flexible and durable than it seems now. Yes, there were nationalists, a lot of whom wanted more privileges inside the Empire, but were content to keep the Habsburgs as heads of a confederation. The peasants in the eastern lands preferred the Habsburgs to the local nobles, especially to the Hungarians and Poles (which sort of sums up who the nobles were . . .) We hear about the “tear it apart, it is failing already” nationalists like Benes and Tomas Masaryk and Pilsudski because those were the ones who had the ears of the Entente Powers, and who won.

      1. Puts a different spin on all those “tear it apart, it’s failing already” types we have running around right now. (My response to them as with the CW2 and French Revolution fetishists is to go all lugubriously Alan Rickman and be like “Do not wish for it, Miss Dashwood.”)

      2. Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihin made this point in Leftism Revisited. When I first read it, I dismissed it since he’s was Austrian and I figured it was just partisanship, but the more I went through his footnotes, copious as all Austrian writer’s footnotes are, followed up the references, and found my own, the more truth I found in it. At this point, I believe that the destruction of the empire was catastrophic.

        This is one of the first times that I had to come to grips with the fact that my history books were mostly propaganda. Didn’t quite make me a revisionist, but it came close.

        Kuehnelt-Leddihin on Woodrow Wilson is worth the price of the book, his electoral maps around the election of Nazis even more so. Read it along with the novel Radetzky March by Philip Roth for the point that the Hapsburgs would never have stood for the holocaust.

        1. Speaking of Woody, if he’d continued keeping us out of the war, would it have ground the combatants down to a point where they could have worked out a (more, at least) equitable peace and avoided laying the foundation for WWII?

      3. A good many of the more intractable Polish and Czech nationalists were funded by the Entente Powers, just as the 1916 Rising in Ireland was partly instigated by the Germans. The disgruntled locals had been there all along, but each side in the war deliberately stirred up the most violent elements behind the other side’s lines and helped them organize.

        Of course, the most successful exercise of this kind happened when the Germans gave one V. I. Lenin safe passage from Switzerland to the Baltic and encouraged him to find his way into Russia.

        1. And then provided him with a printing press and plates to counterfeit Russian rubles, as well as pouring money at him. On the up side cor Germany, Lenin stayed bought and brought Russia out of the war. On the down side, well the rest of the century and all of this one, thus far.

      4. Technical question. I dealt with (wish I could have taken his class) a history professor who defined the, he called them schools of analysis differed in their fundamental assumptions and defined them as follows:
        Traditionalist: Us good. Them bad. Analyze accordingly.
        Revisionist: Them good. Us bad. Analyze accordingly.
        Re-revisionist: What do the original documents say?

        He’s the only one I’ve heard that from and I was wondering if it was just his breakdown or if it actually has a broader application.

  9. From reading the history book “Dreadnought” by, I think, Massie, I wondered (and he didn’t say this) if Kaiser Wilhelm’s left arm hadn’t been damaged at birth would he have been so aggressive (or defensive). The book covers the years leading up to World War I. It includes stuff I’d never heard of like the Algeria incident of the early 1900s (by now I only remember that Germany was involved, but I’d have to track the book down for details).

    Yeah, supposed mistreatment of lower classes in the cities is not something I can see causing WWI. (Not saying there wasn’t any, and contented people don’t, I assume, plot assassinations.) Discontent and assassination may have provided the final spark, but the primary cause lies elsewhere.** I don’t see a mechanism for discontent to become war (except for that spark). But who scattered all the kegs of power?

    *Except for the Kaiser’s discontent with his empires compared to his cousin’s.
    Hubris? Greed? See also: https://www.neatorama.com/2014/03/19/If-World-War-I-Were-a-Bar-Fight/ (and neatorama gives credit to another site from 2010.)

    1. That’s what Churchill speculated. That if Wilhelm II had been truly physically capable of being a War Lord as he was trained to be, he’d have been a lot less prone to posture and threaten so much. Wilhelm bluffed, because had had to be “seen” as a war leader even though he couldn’t handle a rifle or saber. shrugs No idea, but it is an interesting speculation.

    2. It’s an interesting alternate history. A Wilhelm II without quite the chip on his shoulder would have made for a lot less tension in Europe. Although I could see him getting killed learning to fly an airplane…

        1. The FICUS hasn’t made any actual decisions in at least 3 years — including running for President and which socks to wear. Biden is a dummy with half a dozen ventriloquists. An empty suit animated by sheer spite and vanity. Don’t expect anything to approaching sense or sanity to emerge.

          If they just turned the teleprompters around so the audience can read them directly it would be much less confusing for everybody, including Biden.
          ———————————
          ‘Progressives’ believe everybody else is even stupider than they are. This explains a lot.

          1. Recent article claimed Biden us determined to run again because he alone can save America from the abyss of Trumpism. The article implied he’s the only one who thinks that.

            1. What they really mean is that his handlers are thrilled with having complete control over the presidency and have no intention of giving up their power to rule in Biden’s name.

              1. I find myself wondering just what would happen if FICUS left office (I assume toes upward), and VFICUS got put in place before she met one of Hillary’s little friends (or the political equivalent). Would she actually try to rule on her own (I didn’t say “govern”, nor “lead”) or would the same puppet masters give her a teleprompter and an explosive vest? (Making the rash assumption she could read a speech without her usual inanities.)

                1. It depends. If Pelosi is still Speaker, I suspect Kamala has an “accident” in short order so that Pelosi can ascend to the presidency, as she certainly has visions of ruling as royalty in her head. If on the other hand the Democrats are unable to fraud and cheat their way into retaining the House, I fully expect the Democrats to go full Weekend at Bernies for both Biden and Harris to prevent a Republican Speaker from becoming POTUS.

                  1. Pelosi would only become POTUS if no VP has been nominated and confirmed by the Senate, and something bad happens to Harris. Once a VP has been confirmed, then it would be Harris, the new VP, and then Pelosi. (Like Agnew resigning, so Ford was nominated and confirmed, then Nixon was out, so Ford became VP and Nelson Rockefeller was nominated and confirmed as VP to Ford.)

                    1. My bad fantasy is Kamala nominates someone we’ve never heard of, a “moderate technocrat,” who’s the only guy all the factions will accept because of his “lack of ambition.”
                      You know, a reliable Party guy with an innocuous title like “General Secretary.”

                2. Expect more priceless gems of wisdom like “When you’re on an electric bus, um, well, it’s a bus, and it’s electric, and you’re on it.”

                  1. Expect comments like that to be proof that she is so much smarter than we are, and we’re not even fit to latch her sandal.

    3. supposed mistreatment of lower classes in the cities is not something I can see causing WWI.

      One of my childhood history books made a point that I don’t think I’ve seen anywhere else: revolutions and rebellions generally don’t happen when things are at their worst. Rather, they happen when things are getting better, but not fast enough to keep the common people happy. (Likewise, depressed people don’t kill themselves when the depression is at its worst; they kill themselves when they’ve recovered enough to formulate and execute plans but before they’ve recovered the will to live.)

      The text made the point in regards to the French Revolution — the lives of the peasants under Louis XVI were generally better than that under Louis XIV, but the greater wealth and literacy made them more aware of how unfair the system was. I think you can make similar arguments for the lives of many Eastern Europeans on the eve of WWI. Their lives were getting better, but their expectations were also higher. And contentedness is when reality meets or outperforms expectations.

  10. Every time the rulers in Europe and England tried to centralize, there was a spasm of protests and peasant wars, or noble rebellions. Or “yes.” No one really cared to have their traditional rights and privileges codified and micro-managed, or to have a “more efficient” government taking over. To give credit where credit is due, the labour historians and Marxist historians were some of the first to really dig past the royal and noble sources, and to take the other documents and quotations at their word. (Granted, they then went off the deep end, but they opened up the sub-field in the early 20th Century.)

    You’d think there was a pattern or something . . . thoughtful kitty look

  12. They keep trying the lunatic with an evil scary gun massacres innocents and all Americans are doing are buying more guns and yelling “glowie!’ They’re baffled on why it’s not working. Still looking for an explanation on why an 18 yo Highschool drop out had a hella expensive truck, several pricy rifles and pricey body art you can’t pick up at the local hardware store.

        1. Even if not. Apparently the cartels have been recruiting mules on TicToc and that was an area where there is a lot of border movement.

          I gather that’s why they had a CBP Swat team office within running distance of the school.

        2. Supposedly, his family was poor. Hmm.

          I notice that the MSM is doing their damndest to keep the cross-dressing element out of play (and some Arschloch got a random picture of a tranny and spewed it all over the net, trying(?) to poison that approach).

          I keep remembering the MK Ultra experiments in the 1950s and wonder just how far the deep state has “progressed” at creating wind up toys. And that’s without the usual Fibbie trick&treat.

    2. Sorry body ARMOR. Everything about this guy, working in fast food, living with his grandmother screams low income. Why did he have all this expensive stuff?

      1. Same thing on the Buffalo guy. Lots of expensive kit, where the heck did he get the money? Once is happenstance twice is coincidence, third time is enemy action as the old saw goes. We’re up to two any guesses if we see number 3?

          1. That may be. But I don’t remember other incidents being that blatant. Tragic (e.g. Sandy Hook) especially due to severe mental illness and our societies unwillingness to constrain/help those that are dangerous, but not the feeling of Fast and Furious 2 Electric Boogaloo that these 2 have had. Is the mask slipping because the Brahmandarins/Tranzi’s are so desperate to have anything that distracts the (alleged) voters from what an absolute Charlie Foxtrot this current set of would be rulers presents as? They say “Hey,Look War in Europe, Roe V Wade overturned, Mass shootings that cry for gun control!!!.” Next think will be “Look Carnivorous Squirrels from Canada stealing Baby Formula”. Is the American populace THAT stupid? Sadly it appears H.L. Mencken was right…

            1. AFAIK none have been provable in a legal sense. Strongly indicative (AKA “blatant”), to the point that anyone with 2 neurons to rub together should be able to see it, OTOH…

    3. Well since WordPress seems to have eaten my second comment I’ll restate: he had Body ARMOR (not art) where did a kid working at Wendy’s get that?

      /pol/ is claiming he was groomed by a fed at Discord.

        2. So he spent money on a totally useless piece of kit. I’ll bet even a plate carrier is a couple hundred bucks (sans plate). Moving into conspiracy thoughts (4/10 we’re only up to grass knoll levels here) feels like someone said “Here kid here’s some body armor” egging on this mentally unbalanced teenager knowing that the plate carrier without plate would end him up in suicide by cop when he depended on it. I really wish to protest, I am NOT liking this timeline it’s looking like I’d be safer in a red shirt on Kirk’s enterprise…

          1. “So he spent money on a totally useless piece of kit. ”

            Best case, he was buying in stages and didn’t time his psychotic break right. OTOH, you have to wonder what sort of legal income he could earn given his apparent issues.

            1. Apparently he’d been working nearly full time at a Wendy’s for ~ a year. So he had SOME income (not sure what apprentice burger flipper pays in Uvalde TX). Guns were also pricey, but apparently you can get those on a payment plan (?!?) from the place he got them. If you expect to not be around to pay it sort of frees up money. I’m slightly less suspicious at this point, think we need to see what information comes out. Problem is it’s going to be focused on what the media wants it to be.

              1. Apparently Wendy’s pays better than we thought.
                https://www.the-sun.com/news/5419019/texas-school-shooter-plot-wendys-quit-saved-enough/

                “Cruz exclusively told The US Sun that Ramos openly talked about how he was using the money from the job to buy guns and ammo and suddenly quit weeks before the school shooting after making enough.

                It has been estimated that the teen would have spent around $4,000 on his weapons, ammunition and tactical-style vest.

                One of the weapons the gunman bought was an $1,870 Daniel Defense weapon which he reportedly posted a receipt for on Yubo.”

                1. Yeah he’d apparently dropped out and had just been working at Wendys for almost the last year. If he got 30 hrs a week at ~$10/hr for 48 weeks you’re looking at ~14K gross, ought to take home at least half that. He lived with others (parent/grandparents) so that’s all disposable income. So we have the cost covered. Just one seriously screwed up kid. Reading the Sun article you posted we’re kind of looking at a “Known Wolf”. People knew, nobody did anything, because who do you tell? Not like the police will (or can) do much.

                  Two things 1) why the heck do I have to go to a US version of a British tabloid to actually get news, the US outlets have diddly squat (this is a rhetorical question I KNOW why) , and 2) We’re happily blaming Video games in particular Call of Duty again. Heck if playing first person shooters and being picked on made you a psycho killer half the males in my two daughters high school and college classes would be one. Indeed younger daughter herself has probably dispatched well into 5 figures of Halo grunts, Stormtroopers, Gungans and Ewoks to electronic Valhalla. At least the 50’s nonsense with comic books finally ended.

      2. Ah.

        Thanks.

        Feds are suspicious, given the body armor also on the NY shooter.

        But, things are weird enough to be worth caution.

        Texas shooter situation has some unverified rumint that would make shooter a very poor prospect for a political false flag.

          1. Beto O’Rourke is sort of analogous to the traditional view of Orange cats. The traditional view of Orange cats is they have one brain Cell between them that is time shared. Beto seems to time share one brain cell with the Squad and several other Tranzi politicos. It is clear that he was swapped out of the brain cell at that point in time… And heaven help them (and us) if someone takes a drink while the brain cell is swapped in.

            1. A former King of the East (SCA) claimed when you’re crowned, the crown sucks out your brain for six months. At the end of your reign, it drops a brain back in…but it’s not necessarily the brain you started out with.

              1. My husband swore that as soon as a log scaler became a supervisor check scaler, they were scheduled for lobotomies. One who just went private to be a check scaler didn’t get that treatment, just the ones who went to management side. Not really. Just as soon as they went to management side they had to drink the ink of the board of the not-for-profit outfit he worked for. (Labor VS Not.)

  13. The WWI era….
    You cause me to recall that the starting period was also when the original ‘deep state’ really started taking off and when all of Marx’s ‘Brilliant Ideas’ were getting popular and being used in various places. I find this interesting upon reflection. It also is about the same time that the ‘professional management classes’ really had gotten there initial stride going in ‘running things better’.

    I suspect that much of this is related.

  14. Because the True Believers of Globalism (International Socialism) can only tell ONE story – theirs. No other words exist, no other ideologies – only theirs. Theirs is the absolute narcissism of State – all else is meaningless to them.

      1. If there is a way for me to leave a comment other than – or c4c, to follow future comments, I would. But I can’t. I know nothing about the cause of or why WW1 continued the way it did. Let alone how it teaches us about what is happening now. Following the arguments is interesting. I just can’t contribute, yet …

        1. As Our Hostess mentioned, the First World War sets up the next 100 years, in the way that the Napoleonic Wars set up the 19th Century.

          Without the hecatomb of 1914-1918, neither Lenin nor Hitler come to power. Wilson isn’t able to go high-order on fascism in the United States. And without those three making trouble, the history of the world is vastly different. Almost certainly less bloody. No Second World War, no Holocaust, no Communist purges.

          It’s probably a pretty nice place. The Edwardian world was remarkably civilized. Not perfect – but they didn’t need to lock their doors.

    1. The Biden* Regime’s Ministry Of Truth tribunal is ‘paused’ but now Turd-o is instituting the Thought Police.

      If only Leftroids were as eager to punish actual violent crimes as they are to punish imaginary crimes…
      ———————————
      The government can mandate stupidity, but they can’t make it not be stupid.

    2. Answer to the question regarding why we need ‘weapons of war’ on the streets of America: Ask the Ukrainians . . .

  19. The intellectuals were socialists, and it’s not hard to recruit petty criminals and useful idiots to swell your ranks. But no. Most workers were not socialist.

    The irony being the workers being nationalist wasone of the biggest roles played in the war, keeping armies in the field longer they would otherwise.

    The willingness of workers to kill each other for their nation was the failure of Marxist theory Leninism (vanguard party), fascism (socialism in one nation), and gramscism (false consciousness) rose to explain/fix. That when socialism did arise it was in an industrializing nation instead of a mature industrial one only hastened the damage.

    The first two were at least honest about the need for change in socialism to work. The third, which is what underlies modern leftist, is just lying to themselves to feel superior.

  21. One of this morning’s Babylon bee articles featured a Democrat complaining of the Republicans not acting as the Party of Lincoln.

    Lincoln’s defining political act was the first American Civil War.

    To complain of modern Republicans not acting in the spirit of Lincoln, is also to complain of them not waging the boogaloo actively against the treasonous murderous Democrats.

    1. Lincoln waited until the Democrats started The Boog…

      “Why would you adhere to the political party that enslaved your ancestors, rather than the one that freed them?”

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