Assume everything you’ve been taught about the 20th century is wrong. Okay, so most of it isn’t if you’re going with facts and figures.
But if you look at the conclusions drawn from events, at the bigger movements you were told were behind things, everything you were told is a lie. Pretty much. Except, of course, that sometimes the people telling you the lies thought they were telling you the truth. Either because they, themselves, had been lead up the garden path by philosophers or (and often and) because they couldn’t endure the truth. It didn’t fit with some incredibly appealing theory they had been sold, and which demanded the plainly obvious reason for something not, in fact, be true. Even when it was.
Yes, we’re back again to the vexed topic of World War I. And thereby to the topic of all the wars of the twentieth century. And the vexed topic of military service for “your country right or wrong.”
In the comments on memorial day someone left a comment saying “Whatever your politics, thank the war dead for your freedom.” Or something like.
Look, I’ve been surer or that than I am now.
Um… I am okay with thanking the war dead, because at the very least they thought they were defending freedom and the principles of our constitution, but as a friend (who is a veteran) said in his memorial day post, it is hard to imagine any of our honored military dead coming back and seeing what’s happening in our land and not being profoundly confused, if not disappointed. Because in fact our own — corrupted, frauded in — government is indulging in the sins of the Kaiser and often — sorry — using the tactics of the German National Socialists.
They’re doing this despite the Americans who shed their blood to stop crazy globalism, and partly because their government, their education and, oh, yeah, definitely their bureaucracy is running a program resting on the wrong conclusions taken from the clashes of cultures of the 19th and 20th century.
Look, I can never do this as a scientific theory, not because I can’t develop methods to test it (though those would be mostly examining history) or accept or reject my hypothesis, but because the “science” of sociology currently is caca, and I’m not going to give any college my head for washing to get the right credentials.
So, instead, I’ll write it into science fiction books, and maybe sometime in the future someone can codify it.
This is the thing, though: As far as I can tell, both from observation and experience (acculturating (twice)) and from reading history, cultures are not just the assemblage of a bunch of people under more or less arbitrary rules, which they follow because they’re conformists or stupid or something. Cultures are also not (rolls eyes) born with the person, nor do they transmit genetically. Yes, we do know from animal husbandry that individuals can be born more docile or rebellious, more people-oriented or introverted, etc. and that those traits are inheritable within reason. (There are always sports.)
However, humans are not just creatures of nature, and on the nature nurture puts a veneer that puts limitations on or enhances traits, that rewards certain behaviors or suppresses others. So, even though most people in culture x might be docile if a baby is brought to a highly rebellious culture, like the US and raised in it, he or she will “conform” by being rebellious.
I, myself, had no idea I was introverted. Not a clue. Why? Because Portuguese culture is highly gregarious and group oriented. So, even though I was considered weird and standoffish for there, once I got to the US everyone thought I was very gregarious and people oriented. The one and only tell is that I’m utterly wiped out by being around people too much — the definition of too much being way more than I’m used to — and I either have to get some time away (when I disappear from a con, I’ve usually run to my room to read or listen to music, or do not much of anything. And Dan and I have been known to run away and have dinner by ourselves) or I start showing weird symptoms, like losing my voice. Until I figured that, I thought I always got sick after cons. Actually most of the time I don’t. I’m just wiped out. This is because my natural introversion was shaped by the overlay of a culture where everyone lives in everyone’s pockets, all the time.
Anyway, though, I have come to the conclusion from observation, that while individual humans are plastic to a certain extent, humans in a group, all belonging to the same culture are harder to mold and shape arbitrarily.
It is probably part of human evolution, that cultures react like sentient group entities when attacked, destroyed or occupied.
There is only one way — known for sure — of destroying a culture utterly without killing every member of that culture, meaning it’s eradicated and doesn’t surface again, ever. That is to kill everyone over the age of 3, adopt the surviving children and raise them as yours with no awareness of a separate entity.
Even our savage ancestors didn’t do that, that we know. Oh, in pre-history — even modern primitives (for lack of a better term. Cultures with no writing, and sometimes no future verb tenses or a limited language. Yes, they exist. Mostly tiny tribes in remote places — it was fairly common, as far as we can tell, entire bands and tribes were completely wiped out, their culture leaving absolutely no trace in the future except maybe as a fragment of much-distorted myth. And probably there were times when only the babies were taken and adopted. (Or eaten. Look, there are no noble savages, okay?)
Most of the time, though, throughout most of history, fighting men (or all males) were killed and women, children and non-fighting men (maybe) enslaved.
Because of this, cultures developed what I can only call evolutionary adaptations to survive those events: the women become whores (usually for he conquerors), the men become submissive, and children learn the new language and lose the old, oh, and full blooded children of the old culture stop being born.
In fact most of the symptoms of what we believe are “decadent cultures” aren’t. They’re wounded cultures. Cultures which, sometimes wrongly, assume they’ve been conquered, and therefore go into “survive conquest” mode. This is the mode that will allow some (or most) of its traits to survive, by being passed on in stories, in what you teach the children, in “this is how we do things” even when a majority of those who carried the culture are killed or enslaved.
Now, when I talk of cultures deciding something it sounds like I’m going to break in paens of the Ashkantic records (sp) or perhaps start talking of the collective unconscious. It’s not. It’s a short hand. Because, you know, we are social creatures (even those of us who prefer to make friends over the internet and only see our close family on a regular basis.) This means when your subconscious adds two plus two and gets aardvark, you give certain signals most of them non-verbal. And when everyone does that, the culture acts like a collective entity. I refuse to explain this every single time, so I’ll say the culture does this or that. You will most assuredly deal.
Our culture, yes, is acting like a conquered culture. This is because through most of history for someone to come in and impose on you “new ways of doing things” and trying to shape you into something different, meant that you had lost a war and a lot of you were laying dead.
In our times this is because our intelligentsia was converted against its own culture (while still being part of the culture, which makes them funny. Or they would be funny if this were happening to someone else long ago) by Marxist and “progressive” theories that purport that both humans and cultures are infinitely plastic. Being part of the ruling bureaucracy and class, they imposed arbitrary rules from above, which felt to our subconscious like conquerors giving commands.
Which brings us back to colonialism. As we all know the left considers colonialism evil. It probably is, at least when engaged in from above and arbitrarily. What I mean is, if you conquer a people and impose your ways on them, they’re going to suffer and their culture is going to become corrupted in weird ways. Sometimes…. sometimes that’s an improvement. For all their — many — faults, the Spaniards did stop human sacrifice to the South of (and in some portions of the Western states of) the US.
But it is strong medicine and a high price to pay. Also the reason why all the dreams of the early science fiction writers (and the retarded would-be techno lords of today) of a world government are not just impossible but utterly and unspeakably evil.
Because if you try to impose a culture (and the current idiots it’s not even a culture, just the Marxist virus) on the whole world, it’s going to …. change. And what it will become is not what you set out to impose, but this weird, bizarre amalgam. When you take in account all the cultures of the world, that means what results will be … uh… alien is a good way to put it. And probably mostly Chinese. (Because their culture is older, and frankly while judged in terms of comfort to humans and ability to provide completely nonfunctional, nonfunctional in a way that has created mechanisms to increase the cyclic dysfunction. And those mechanisms will survive and infect everything.) And on the way to installing this maimed and maiming thing, you’re going to kill most of the population of the world, and only a few outright. Most of them with depression and internal destruction.
And here we come back to the age of Empires from oh, the mid-fourteenth but more obvious from the mid-19th century to World War I. That was straight up internationalism.
Cultures that were in the industrial revolution and needed resources, but more importantly, cultures that were absolutely convinced they had the right way to live stomped around the globe showing everyone else how to live, and sometimes hard-enforcing it.
“But Sarah, that’s nationalism,” you’ll say. Oh, is it? Because what they were trying to do was create international empires, all over the world, and enforce the one culture, with, in some cases (hi, Germany) the idea that eventually the whole world would be like them.
I don’t care what they call it. Particularly when you look at the alliances of the ruling families (kings, queens, emperors, empresses, and princes and princesses) it becomes obvious that it was an overarching supra-national elite trying to add more regions to their already vast domains, and make their dominance world wide if possible.
They were not, despite the nationalism of those in the trenches, fighting to preserve their own tiny countries, but their vast international alliances and empires.
Yes, the Germans were the most rampant case of this and they were stopped by the sacrifices of those in World War One and World War Two. And we’re grateful for that.
Our degree of gratitude doesn’t change, but their wasted sacrifice might make us furious when we see the global elite has either achieved their objectives through other means (We’re looking at you EU) or are trying to achieve the rest of it by even stupider means (We’re looking at you WEF.) Oh, and let their buddies in the Soviet Union go a-colonizing for most of the 20th century, and would do it again (the Soviet Union never really existed. It was always Russian colonialism) given half a chance. And are now trying to distract us with a fun proxy make-believe war.
World War I was not caused by nationalism. Though it shocked various internationalists, including the Marxists, that individuals would fight to preserve their countries against internationalism, rather than the workers of the world uniting.
It was caused by colonialist impulses and imperial land grabs.
We — nationalists — have been at war with internationalism for a long time, and it’s time we recognized it, shedding the wrong stuff we were taught.
Yes some cultures are appalling judged on the only standard that counts: Do they promote human productivity happiness and health?
Yes, cultures can change. What they can’t is “directed change.” America has infiltrated more cultures than I care to mention from the beginning, purely by example. Yep, some of the results — I’m looking at you, French revolution — were appalling, because they were the result of our principles being taken up by an entirely different culture, that couldn’t process them as we did. (Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Note this is what I mean that a world-culture would be unspeakably alien.)
It’s entirely possible overtime we can change most cultures into being more functional and better for their members. But we can’t do that by imposing it from above. (Is looking seriously at the EU where most of the members are behaving like conquered cultures. And therefore becoming increasingly more dysfunctional.)
Colonialism is evil because it wounds existing cultures, and often imposes more dysfunctional ones. But even functional cultures, as colonizers, can cause splintering they don’t understand and can’t prevent. It might be needed but it’s always a form of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Imperialism, the formation of vast international empires, is a form of colonialism, whether under the banner of the Soviet Union, the WEF or Kaiser Wilhelm.
Cultures evolve in isolation. In our hyper connected world, they’ll change and meld through contact. The best we can do is denounce the bad changes. And keep the local identities as much as possible.
Because in the end, nationalism is good. Despite our fantasies — and I often have them — both a culture imposed from above — whether a real or synthetic one — and a world in which our physical location doesn’t matter are unworkable. And if they worked, they’d be nightmares.
Even as we live and work across borders, even as we borrow each other’s food and clothing, it is important to remember that the national culture evolved for a reason, and that everything we experience of other cultures must be experienced through our culture.
It is important to remember other cultures we come in contact with are intrinsically different and shaped through millennia (or in our case centuries. Hey, we’re the annoying genius kid) of different evolution. Evolution suited to the needs and location of the majority of people.
It is important to remember that every immigrant-group will bring culture with them, and that they will process their acculturation through their culture. (For individuals acculturation is more complete and faster. Not to say that it’s always 100%. It’s not. See my figuring out I was not an extrovert.) This is one of the reasons open borders is stupid. (Sorry. Yes, I badly wanted to believe in a borderless world. But that just guarantees the least functional, most predatory culture wins over all. No.) It is also one of the reasons that countries should be able to vet who comes in, and keep it — if possible — to individuals. And countries must demand and enforce acculturation and integration.
Because cultures will war with each other, openly or not. And because there are no noble savages, and the deep background of our culture was formed in a time of utter savagery, if you let cultures war, the least functional will win.
Cherish your national culture. Protect your national borders.
The dream of a borderless world is a nightmare, where elites completely divorced from the regional beliefs and needs rule all, according to their arbitrary will and their philosophical illusions.
Think of the different cultures as the founders thought of states: Little laboratories of humanity, competing (but not warring. Not if we limit immigration and don’t try to grab each other’s land and people) to see which is best for humanity. The best at achieving prosperity freedom and innovation will spread naturally.
Which is why all over the world, the future already comes from America.
Let’s make it a functional future. Let’s make it an American future.
Get to it.
According To Hoyt 
“All Cultures Are Equal except for the Culture you like, it’s Evil”. Words of the Left to everybody who opposes the Left.
Of course, it can be humorous when Lefties face a “foreign” culture that does stuff that they hate (like a Leftish woman finding out that those people see nothing wrong with raping her).
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There can be no international melting pot without cultural appropriation from the best of other cultures. That’s what the racists of the U.S. utter fail to understand, or deliberately and with malice, misrepresent. And that sort of cultural appropriation is a bottom up method; not imposed on by the elite. Which is probably why the elitists of this country are doing their best to pound the cultural appropriation is bad soapbox.
And our hostess is right. Countries will war via culture. Those that have cultures that people can thrive under, will also generally thrive. Those who do not, will see their people want to leave. Which is what we are seeing with this vast invasion of America. The problem with that is such numbers overwhelm and replace; they do not integrate and acculturate.
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I’ve always seen it as the elites thinking divided societies are easier to divide and rule.
One of Stalin’s classic moves was to relocate a diaspora from one region to another region and then put them against each other. So he could always depend upon troops from A to be absolutely willing to grind and revolt in B to the dust, and vis versa.
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That technique is OLD. When the Assyrians conquered the northern half of Israel they took a large portion of the residents out and replaced them with people from their other conquests. Assyria had been doing that with all their conquests likely to minimize revolts and to break the cultures of the conquered peoples.
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True, but that just goes to my other point that this is a temptation of power that will always be with us, no matter how many times it gets beat back.
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So, is that why the Biden Administration and his backers, are going all in on allowing as many Central Americans and anyone else to invade the U.S.? To destroy any remaining American cultural cohesion?
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Maybe. Some of them have actually come out with variations on, “But where will I get my lawn boys if we don’t let them in?”
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They don’t want a melting pot. They openly reject the idea of the melting pot. They consciously endorse the idea of everyone keeping their original culture while unconsciously attempting to impose their woke culture on those same people (largely because they refuse to acknowledge that most non-Westerm cultures are evenly more violently opposed to wokeness than American conservatives are).
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They’re going to be shocked when they realize just how anti-woke some of these cultures are, not that they shouldn’t’ve have figured it out forty years ago. It is very hard to worry a whole lot about pronouns when you’re from a culture where bombs are falling, bullets are flying, and you’re having to work your tail off just to keep your family fed.
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The bizarre thing is the left doesn’t believe in culture, while believing it’s genetic.
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But they certainly believe in Hegel.
The antithesis they’re promoting has a single motivation: Will to Power, and a single core belief: that oppression is the basis of Power.
They’re trying to challenge the thesis, expecting the thesis and antithesis will fuse into a synthesis. Which will be the new thesis, to which they will provide the new antithesis, as they nudge us ever closer to Utopia. Or at least Plato’s Republic.
Except Hegel was FOS.
There are at least as many thesi as there are people.
And anybody who believes in the straightforward fusion of thesis and antithesis, has never had dirt under their fingernails.
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Will they ever realize? Putin has said it any number of times. It is one of the claimed justifications for the New Russian Empire. Hungary is trying its best to keep woke out. The EU clerisy is constantly complaining about it. Africa – of all places – is becoming the bastion of Christianity.
It’s in their faces, right now, all around the world. There are none so blind as those who choose not to see.
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Been saying this for years. Once people are safe, and not having to worry about their next meal, the cultural affinity for “more conservative than leftist Americans can ever imagine” will come out hard. That’s why they have to keep pushing illegal immigrants over legal ones. Because the illegal ones will never be safe, and will provide a ready mix of “inhabitants” to help them fraud population surveys and elections.
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The missionary our tiny church sponsors made it very plain “machismo,” as practiced in Honduras, means. “I can rape any woman I want, whenever I want to,” which isn’t a mindset I want to import. (She also said the woman agreed with her about the evils of rape….until it was their uncle, cousin, brother, whatever who was guilty. Then it was automatically the woman’s fault).
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The woman literally cannot put responsibility on any man in her family. It must be the other woman’s fault, because by the patterns of the culture SHE is responsible. If SHE had been doing her job, her husband wouldn’t have needed to do that. If her DIL had been doing her job, if she had raised her son right, etc. It will always be a woman’s fault, and if she acknowledges that the other woman wasn’t a whole the responsibility comes down on her own shoulders. It’s simple self defense, mandated by cultural expectations buried so deep that most people sleep right over them.
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A missionary of my acquaintance talks of his time (15 years, I think?) in a tribe in Papua New Guinea. In that culture, girls were considered public property until married. Now imagine living amongst that for a decade, trying to acculturate, learn the language, develop a written form, teach literacy, to eventually translate the Bible and start a church.
I can understand the colonialist impulse to end the evil now, as with suttee, or Aztec sacrifice and many other examples. But I must admire the conviction he showed that cultures are better changed from within by the gospel, rather than external force.
That tribe still has limited contact with the world, but its fledgling church has ended the wholesale rapes and limited the polygamy and abuse of the entire tribe even outside of the believers, without external coercion – it’s their culture now.
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Maasai. As long as you don’t sleep with a man of your father’s generation.
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“But it is strong medicine and a high price to pay. Also the reason why all the dreams of the early science fiction writers (and the retarded would-be techno lords of today) of a world government are not just impossible but utterly and unspeakably evil.”
Heinlein figured that world government could not work when he traveled around the world. Stay-at-home Isaac Asimov never did. Nor did others many others who did travel more.
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Asimov, despite his undoubted intelligence and status as somewhat of a polymath, was at bottom a parochial New Yorker, with all the baggage that entails. I remember reading an account he wrote of someone telling him that he got something wrong about a particular firearm, and that his thought was that he was uncomfortable with anyone who knew much about firearms. To which my thought was, “So, you understand in detail how nuclear weapons work, and as a biochemist you probably know quite a bit about chemical weapons, but someone who knows about guns makes you nervous?”.
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German colonialism …. Seems to have been a bit different from what post-Versailles opponents claim. The Germans got into the game late – after 1844 – and several times it was because the locals asked the Germans to come in as as stronger third party who wasn’t the French or British. From what I’ve been reading recently, yes, the Germans encouraged the locals to give up slave raiding, cannibalism, unending wars, and the like, and did what they could to replace those cultures with something more European (free-market for produce instead of for slaves). They were very hands-off in terms of management compared to others, unless someone started trouble, then they went in like a ton of bricks. Most of their colonies asked for them to stay around after WWI.
Now, the German were not perfect by a long shot. They did replace local customs with others. They did enforce new morals and standards on people. They did favor some native languages and groups over the others. They screwed up at times. The NSDAP wanted nothing to do with the former colonies. The NSDAP empire was European, not global, at least officially. The Fascists were a different story.
Full disclosure: I’ve been reading some books about British and German colonialism that use colonial-era records to rebut the more hysterical hand-wringing of modern historians, anthropologists, and sociologists. I’ve also read several of the vehemently anti-colonial works, including one that claims that the Herero War led directly to the burning of Louven. YMMV. This is NOT my specialty. And German colonialism ended in 1919. Could it have gotten worse had it continued? Quite possibly.
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To Sarah’s point – was colonialism worse than what was going on the ground in German Southwest Africa, Cameroon, German Samoa, and other places? It might have been, in the long run. Some people thought it was. Others at the time preferred it. It did change the cultures in ways that might not have been good long term. Tribal disputes linger and affect the politics in the different areas today.
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The family tribe quite liked the Germans, the French were very much unwelcome. (Cameroon)
The local shaman shapeshifted into a man-eating lion, or, er, something, is Africa, and killed French soldiers. This is immortalized in the name of the Cameroonian national soccer team.
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I have some experience of German colonialism in the 21st century. They’ve pasteurized Portugal, at least on the surface and turned it into discount Disneyland for Northern Europeans. Spits.
You’re all (deliberately?) misunderstanding. German colonialism turning on Europe to devour the world was WWI. And no, particularly under the Old Prussians I don’t think it would be better than now. Most of our current bad ideas come from the Prussians, from education to “you will obey the will of the state.”
And I might no longer be Portuguese, but that country CAN’T be pasteurized. Beneath the surface, dark currents swim. Not that my family sees it. They always wanted Portugal to be “nicer”. But all the same. The only reason there aren’t yet rivers of blood is that they stopped reproducing.
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It amazes me that the same culture, within less than 100 years, gave us both Marxism and volkisch National Socialism. (Yeah, I know, Mustache Boy was Austrian, and Marx did much of his damage in London, but still, both largely formulated their ideas within the boundaries of Germany or Prussian Germany.)
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I don’t think it’s all that surprising. Both are totalitarian socialism, with far more similarities than differences. That’s partly why they fought each other so much – they were too similar to offer a real choice. Just like the Shiite/Sunni split in Islam, or the Catholic/Protestant split in Christianity, they were two sides of the same coin and so had to fight to get and keep their followers.
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Bingo!
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The Reader sees the opportunity for some alternate history writing here.
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Heh. The worst of German colonialism is already festering around the world. Thank you, Karl Marx! Now where is that trash can I can vomit into?
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Roger Scruton prefers the terms “patriot” and “national loyalty” over the term “nationalism”. See his book England and the Need for Nations:
Using his preferred terminology, he writes:
and:
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“National loyalty involves a love of home…”
This should remind us that the left’s policies reveal a hatred of home.
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(Excerpt from “The Lay of the Last Minstrel”)
by Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)
Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land?
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d,
As home his footsteps he hath turn’d,
From wandering on a foreign strand?
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell.
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonor’d, and unsung.
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I first encountered that poem in Edward Everett Hale’s short story “The Man Without a Country”, which IIRC we read in Junior High. It made a deep enough impression on me that I memorized it. Thank you for putting in in your comment.
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I’m very bothered by the concept of “holy dirt”. Why not establish the state of Israel in Nevada? I think it is a very American (culture!) thing. We just haven’t been around long enough to have our own holy dirt (although some may disagree).
When I visited Yerevan, Armenia, I got an inkling of it. They have 2000 year old churches dug out of caves – and they’re still active. There is something different about standing in one.
I don’t disagree with the quote above, but I have issues with “homeland” being a particular place, rather than a group of people. In the context above, if we moved all of England to the moon, would it still be England? Perhaps not. But I do think if we moved all of the Americans (let’s define that as those who love, not hate, their country) to the moon, it would still be America.
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The village has a tunnel-grave for …. Marcus Junius Brutus remnant relatives or something. (Or at least the grave is marked with Junius carved over the entrance. Unused, with a rotting gate, but there it is.)
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An Israel, Himself gave them the land, okay.
To me the US is hallowed ground because of the constitution. If not here, where?
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There is a church in Chimayo, New Mexico (up in the Sangre de Cristo mluntains near Santa Fe), where pilgrims come to worship and take the “holy dirt.” It’s been considered a place of healing since before the Spanish arrived. The original soil is long gone, but the Church replenishes it from a nearby hillside. Since I assume they bless/consecrate it I’m good with that.
The church is partly full of tiny crutches and other symbols left by grateful pilgrims to express their gratitude for healing. It’s also got a lot of photos of military folks left in thanks (or prayers for) their safe return.
It’s a neat place. Well worth a side trip. And it’s literally “sacred earth.”
(As an aside, it’s also associated with a “black Christ.”)
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” the “science” of sociology currently is caca”
So very true. Now speaking from the very decidedly small sampling of two sociology courses, several psych courses, and a 1985 set of World Book Encyclopedias; I would recommend a working assumption that there is no science in sociology, and building your own frame of reference from studies that you’ve personally reviewed for logic and adherence to the scientific method, or at least logic and objective observations. Granted, that’s a lot of WORK; but damn it, it just seems like the entire edifice is rotten to the core, and we need to go back to first principles.
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I my own surveys, I have entirely dismembered and reorganized the subject. On one level, I have specific peoples, nations, and cities. On another, I have general principles that apply to all societies. Between, I have details of institutional and social organization and culture. It works for me.
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Sadly it seems there is little science even in STEM disciplines, as presented by our indoctrination, system any more.
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I made the mistake of taking the second Sociology course (201, maybe) as an 8:00AM session. Fell half asleep much of the time, but got a tolerable grade.
My “favorite” essay topic was “What is the utility of the distinction between Tradition and Modernity”. It’s been over half a century, and I still haven’t come up with an answer beyond “well, that way you know where you live”. (If anybody has a clue, I’d love to hear ideas on that…)
On the gripping hand, I call my gas grill Max, since it must have been a Weber who created The Carnivore Ethic and the Spirit of Barbecue.
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It’s a fancy way of making the distinction between us enlightened, superior moderns and those ignorant, superstitious primitives? Except that I’m not sure that having machines to do our work instead of slaves makes us all that much wiser.
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“If I told you to cook in the bathroom and shit in the kitchen, that would be a new idea. Doesn’t make it a good one.” — Jordan Peterson
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I’m having to end a series with a world government because there are no other good options for maintaining control of some things.
Another series has five major power blocs for this reason (that and I get to have all sorts of hilarity as well).
The World Government idiots are the socialists and communists writ large, the idea that everyone is a cog in the great machine of the world and a place can be found for you if they look hard enough…(well, an unmarked grave is a place)
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David Weber’s “Into The Light” had the beginnings of a World Government based on the government intended by the original US Constitution.
The main purpose of this World Government is to defend Earth from a dangerous alien “empire”.
To join the world government, a nation had to show that it was “governed by the people” and “supported basic human rights” as we would see as rights.
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The Bill of RIghts, and the “10” Commandments, are not a bad set of principle to develop a government from.
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He also commented back in the “Dahak,” series that a “democratic,” world government where some members aren’t democratic would be an abomination. One reason they ended up with an imperial government (that, and all the desperately needed technology was programmed to run on that system).
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But, an Imperial system is always one Evil Overlord away from Hell On Earth (or Hell Across The Galaxy, in Space Opera)
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As, “Heirs of Empire,” suggested. (With the “happy” ending that the would be Evil Overlord failed at the last minute).
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I’m not sure “failed at the last minute” is completely accurate.
His plan failed but he imagined that he was safe to try again only to learn that the Good Guys knew that he was the Bad Guy… just as he was about (as he imagined) to take an important role from which he could try again.
The Good Guys wanted him to “smell victory” just before he was arrested. :twisted:
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Worked for me.
Weber is very good at creating sociopathic villains.
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That he is!
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Gordon Dickson addressed that in the story “Call Him Lord”. The solution as shown in that story was workable, but like all such (for instance, the Eternal Emperor in the Sten series) it crashes when the emperor changes.
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Nod, but the Imperial System in the Dahak series had various safeguards “built into” it.
One of which was “Mother”. “Mother” wasn’t a True AI (like Dahak) but was able upon a vote of the Imperial Parlaiment to remove control of the Imperial Navy from the Emperor.
While it’s not mentioned (IIRC) in the books that an Emperor was disposed, it appeared that the system worked as intended for several thousand years until the Empire got careless with a “Super-Bug” that wiped out all life on the vast majority of the Imperial Worlds.
In any case, no human system that depends on humans will last forever.
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Or, “How can imperfect people create a Perfect World? How could imperfect people live in a Perfect World?”
But the Leftoids can’t figure out even that much. They’re Believe in their Perfect World; they just have to eliminate all those imperfect people who don’t fit in it.
———————————
“Hey! All the Perfect People out there, raise your hands. Now keep them up so we know who to hang!”
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The first 10 amendments, courtesy of the anti-Federalist faction, are the Constitution. The guts of it, anyway.
Most of the rest is just procedural instructions.
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The Bill of Rights are important. But those “procedural instructions” were very important in bringing about a workable union of Thirteen Independent States.
Thus they’d be important in bringing together a union of Independent Nations that don’t want to be “under the control” of one of the other Nations.
In the Weber book, the remains of the US controls access to the alien technology and wants a union of the remaining nations of Earth. And for example, the remains of Canada (while friendly and wanting the alien technology) doesn’t want to be under the control of the US.
So a federal system like the US has under the Constitution would look better than the US controlling Canada (and later controlling Brazil).
Things like the Bill of Rights are tools to decide which nations can join the “Earth Union”.
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What many of the leftists forget is the fact that, you are either a benefit to society, or you are purged. Indeed, the squeaky wheel does get greased, purged, folded, buried, exterminated….
The last thing the new leaders need is a bunch of revolutionaries causing trouble.
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Yep, just as Oceania’s Party eventually disposed of original revolution members Aaronson, Jones, and Rutherford.. A core feature of totalitarian leftist regimes are the constant and never ending purges.
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Elites divorced from the needs and beliefs of the regions they arbitrarily ruled is how we got the French Revolution.
The temptation though is that those elites lived extremely well until then. And many did not live to see the purge, either.
I honestly don’t see China’s system surviving outside of Chins proper, and maybe not even then. They’ve been effective at absorbing barbarian tribes that invaded them, but that mostly seems to be because rice farming bureaucracy provided a better quality of life to the barbarians than otherwise given China’s climate.
But I don’t see that holding if/when they come into full conflict with the west. Their corruption is poisonous, but the most I can see them doing is dragging themselves back into the middle ages and bringing down governments who glued themselves to them.
But in the end, free markets and free minds are so much more productive, I don’t see how they can swallow the world and keep it. Despite everything.
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Oh, not China’s system. Just the worst parts.
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I’m not sure even those can survive except as the ever present temptation of power.
As near as I can tell, the most dehumanizing parts of China’s culture come from manual rice farming being what seems to be the most brutal and regimented method of bulk calorie generation in existence. And as long as your logistic train depended on how tightly regimented your farmers were, they could survive as an intensely illiberal society.
But we’ve got machines that can do that now, and the only way to pack that genie back into the bag is to go full NK.
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“But we’ve got machines that can do that now, and the only way to pack that genie back into the bag is to go full NK.”
All you have to do is make sure the machines don’t have fuel or parts or fertilizer or…..
You know, like what our “elites” are trying.
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True. But remember the Cubans and their cars too.
And it means you need to not just dedicate a large population to subsistence farming, but also to keeping them from building those machines to get more done for the same work.
And people are nothing if not innovative about how they will be lazy.
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Essentially what the WEF crowd is doing is trying to undo the industrial revolution for everyone except themselves, believing that somehow they can enjoy the fruits of modernity while depriving everyone else of it. They can’t succeed but they can do a lot of damage as they fail.
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I guess that’s the difference between the WEF and the bad guys in the novel Rainbow Six. In the novel, the bad guys knew what would happen to society, and had plans to would semi-realistically allow them to survive in mostly modern comfort. The WEF just assumes that the parts of the system they like will continue and the bits they don’t like will vanish into neat and tidy piles of leaves or something.
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Well, the Rainbow Six solution to such elites works for me… ;-)
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And note this is the thing about cultures. They’re the fruit of a time and place, but they linger, almost as though they were sentient.
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A bit like the original idea of a meme, as Richard Dawkins coined it. A bit of culture or an idea that eventually starts to replicate, either because it is useful (and power is a use) or because it provides an answer to something. I’ve referred to certain cultures as being made of Velcro™ because they latch onto useful bits of other cultures, either as is or modified, and jettison other bits. (Or submerge them so deeply that they’re no longer truly visible even within the culture.)
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I’ve recommended elsewhere that we the people print, pfd, mail, email. slide under doors John Quincy Adams 4 July 1821 address to Congress, -to reach as many of our beloved leaders as possible; https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/july-4-1821-speech-us-house-representatives-foreign-policy
That was nationalism and we’ve strayed far off course. Reminding our “representatives” of such may get them to pause and at least consider. Possibly, probably not, but hey worth a try.
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“Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be.
But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.
She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.
She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”
So THAT’S where Jerry got that from. Thank you!
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There’s a reason European royalty tended to address each other as ‘cousin’. King George V, Tsar Nicholas II, and Kaiser Wilhelm II were grandsons of Queen Victoria. Didn’t help stave off WWI.
Family squabbles can be the most vicious.
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Slight correction: Nicholas was not a grandson of Victoria. His wife Alexandra was Victoria’s granddaughter, but as far as I know, he had no direct blood ties to the ruling line of Britain. Nicholas was cousin to both George and Wilhelm, but not through Victoria. With George, their mothers, Empress Marie of Russia and Queen Alexandra of Britain, were sisters, Danish princesses. The relationship between Nicholas and Wilhelm is more complicated, but the upshot was that they were second cousins once removed, in multiple different ways.
Beyond that, I don’t think WWI was really a “family squabble.” Everything I’ve read suggested that Nicholas, at least, genuinely liked both his cousins. But ultimately, that didn’t stop the conflict when first Russia and Britain, and then later Russia and Germany, had differing interests.
There’s a lesson in that for modern politics: ultimately, it doesn’t matter if foreign leaders like the American president, as they did Obama, despise him, as they did Bush and Trump, or are generally contemptuous of him, as with Biden. What matters is whether our interests are the same or not, and if they’re not, no amount of personal friendship between the leaders will change that.
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There might not have been recent family ties between Victoria and Nicholas, but look a few generations back, and it’s unusual not to find links between any two European royals.
Consider three cousins: the two German princes George I of England (ancestor of Victoria, etc.) and Tsar Peter III, and Peter’s wife, murderer, and successor, Catherine the Great (ancestor of all Romanovs following her, whether or not Peter fathered any of her children). All three were descendants of spare English and Russian princesses that were married off to three petty kingdoms south of Denmark. Then the Tudor/Stuart/Orange and Romanov lines thinned down to two childless women in the early 1700’s, and these three were brought back as replacements. All three were related to the Swedish royal family, and probably cousins in many other ways since their lines had often married their petty-royal neighbors.
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If we’re going to talk about Imperialism, it seems useful to go back and review the 19th century. The Portuguese had been first on the scene, but had long been bypassed by the Spanish. The Spanish empire was already breaking up thanks to Latin America’s various attempts to imitate the American Revolution. The French revolution resulted in the French becoming more imperialistic than ever before under Napoleon and his successors. Britain was the most successful imperial power, but was in a hot technological race with the United States, which mostly confined its imperialist ambitions to its “Manifest Destiny” of dominating North America. Germany was up-and-coming, but the medieval remnants of Austria were still important and involved in Eastern Europe, Russia, and the Ottoman empire even after Napoleon had uprooted the old Holy Roman Empire. Russia had been expanding across Siberia and was attempting to mix the scientific revolution and its fruits with a feudal social order, all of which caused severe indigestion. So, this is roughly the background for the 20th century version of imperialism.
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“Elites divorced from the needs and beliefs of the regions they arbitrarily ruled…”
That certainly describes a large part of our ruling elites–the pundits, the intellectuals, the politicians… Some even proudly describe themselves as globalists: If they do not think of themselves as citizens of any particular nation, then every nation should return the favor.
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Agreed. Since they consider themselves to be citizens on no nation, they should be considered by all nations to be “stateless persons”, with all that implies.
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“War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.” Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler USMC, two time Medal of Honor.
Perhaps because my mother’s family were mostly professional British imperial soldiers, I’ve always been somewhat ambivalent about it all. I absolutely respect those who served and it would be utterly unpious to not honor the dead. Still, one can honor those who served without honoring what they served and certainly we can honor those who served and what they served if what they served has been betrayed. I remember a trip to Gettysburg National Cemetary with the Boy Scouts when this tune simply wouldn’t get out of my head:
Well, how do you do, young Willie McBride?
Do you mind if I sit here down by your graveside?
And rest for a while in the warm summer sun
I’ve been walking all day, and I’m nearly done
I see by your gravestone you were only nineteen
When you joined the great fallen in 1916
I hope you died well and I hope you died clean
Or young Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?
Did the beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly
Did they sound the death march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?
Did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind
In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined?
Although, you died back in 1916
In that faithful heart are you forever nineteen?
Or are you a stranger without even a name
Enclosed in forever behind the glass frame
In an old photograph, torn, battered and stained
And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame?
The sun now it shines on the green fields of France
There’s a warm summer breeze that makes the red poppies dance
And look how the sun shines from under the clouds
There’s no gas, no barbed wire, there’s no guns firing now
But here in this graveyard it’s still No Man’s Land
The countless white crosses stand mute in the sand
To man’s blind indifference to his fellow man
To a whole generation that were butchered and damned
Ah young Willie McBride, I can’t help wonder why
Do those that lie here know why did they die?
And did they believe when they answered the cause
Did they really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the sorrow, the suffering, the glory, the pain
The killing and dying, were all done in vain
For young Willie McBride, it all happened again
And again, and again, and again, and again
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Those lyrics made my hair stand up on my scalp. Literally.
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Bogle, the writer, also wrote the band played waltzing Matilda which has the verse
So they collected the cripples, the wounded and maimed
And they shipped us back home to Australia
The legless, the armless, the blind and insane
Those proud wounded heroes of Suvla
My grandfather served at Gallipoli, won the military cross. Picked up some shrapnel and had nightmares all his life — drove him to drink. My Uncle John served with the Guards at Anzio, won the MC and a DSO later, picked up some shrapnel and a few Mauser bullets, and had nightmares all his life. My Uncle Paddy served with the Inniskilling’s at the Gargliano crossing on the way up to Casino, American artillery fell short, he didn’t come back. Friendly fire.
My da ended up with a Bronze Star and Purple Heart at Pusan because all the officers were dead and they commissioned him into the infantry.
Sure I honor them, had the bugle blown, I would have gone, should the bugle blow, my sons will go. That’s the blood tax we owe. That doesn’t change that all war is a racket.
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https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/last_of_brigade.html
“The poor little army departed, limping and lean and forlorn.
And the heart of the Master-singer grew hot with “the sconrn of scorn.”
And he wrote for them wonderful verses that swept the land like flame,
Till the fatted souls of the English were scourged with the thing called Shame.
O thirty million English that babble of England’s might,
Behold there are twenty heroes who lack their food to-night;
Our children’s children are lisping to “honour the charge they made –”
And we leave to the streets and the workhouse the charge of the Light Brigade!”
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Do we owe it, though?
I’m thinking maybe THEY owe it — to us.
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They don’t matter. Sure, my views on it all are conflicted. I didn’t go into the service. Number two son has been thinking about it, but I’m not sure a I want him to go. The Bidenista’s would sacrifice him for less than nothing, Still:
Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said
This is my own, my native land!
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Which is why I think THEY owe blood to US. This is my own, my native land. And instead of honoring and protecting the only home I have in this world, a giant cabal of human-shaped pieces of excrement in powerful places are instead plundering and defiling it. To say I’m angry about that would be an understatement.
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My grandfather won medals as a Marine in WWI (don’t know what; he left them in a Philly rooming house, and all he would ever say is that they only reminded him of lost comrades). I served in the Marines in the Nam. We didn’t serve for the government, and sure as hell not for any politician, but for the ones back home. But mainly for our fellow jarheads.
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Gallipoli was one heck of a mess. A rather small British and colonial army was landed (without specialized landing craft) on a spit of land less than 100 miles from Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, with the obvious intention being to clear the strait for the British fleet to sail right to that capital. They could overwhelm the Turkish forces stationed there, but would be swamped when the Turks called in reinforcements.
What were the planners (including Winston Churchill) thinking? The expectation was that the Turkish troops were poorly equipped, poorly trained (quite brave, but better at dying for their country than making the invaders die for their country), and very, very poorly led. They thought the landing force would have a nice long pause to consolidate their positions while incompetent Turkish generals struggled with just getting their huge army up to the front. They thought that once Turkish forces several times their number were finally ready to attack, they’d be able to beat them because the British and ANZAC units were better. They knew that this was a risky venture, but there was a chance and the possible rewards were huge: knocking one of the three enemy empires out of the war, gaining full access to the Mesopotamian oil fields, and gaining access to the Black Sea to send their shakiest ally, Russia, all the munitions and weapons they could spare.
But when the Turkish troops were defending the imperial capital, they got the best of everything, and this included the best general in the empire, Mustafa Kemal Pasha (later called Ataturk and President of Turkey until he died.) With Mustafa’s leadership, the landing force was fighting huge waves of attackers before it was fully in position, and waves of suicidally courageous Turks kept coming. Given the numbers, the landing force never had a chance against competent opposition, but men kept dying while it took too long for the British commanders to admit failure, and even longer to work out how to do a landing in reverse.
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I have a tape with that song somewhere; hearing it always breaks my heart. Because from what I’ve read, a lot of average joes really did believe that.
Not enough politicians buried….
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And then there’s the parody version by Bob Kanefsky.
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“Still, one can honor those who served without honoring what they served and certainly we can honor those who served and what they served if what they served has been betrayed.”
Tell that to the raging hate mobs who tore down statues and plaques and graves of all things Confederate the past three years. That’s all the vast, vast majority of us down here wanted to do. Honor our dead just as the Union honors theirs, and I have no problem with that. No one should. I acknowledge our flaws and acknowledge that things probably worked out better in the end (at least in some areas) but still respect the many virtues of people like Lee and Jackson and the sacrifices of six hundred thousand dead on both sides, the vast majority of whom didn’t have a dog in that fight but fought for their state and the men beside them. Until very recently this wasn’t a particularly revolutionary concept. Then the New Red Guards were everywhere and this is the result.
And the lyrics are absolutely haunting.
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“Johnny Reb” by Johnny Horton does it for me.
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Robbie Robertson may or not have been a sphincter of the highest order, but between his lyrics and Levon Helm’s incredible delivery, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” gets me every time.
That and Justin Townes Earle’s “Lone Pine Hill.” He’s a great songwriter. Not exactly Kipling, but still really good. And as a Virginian myself, one who grew up fifteen miles from Appomattox no less, it hits home.
I swear I see her in my dreams sometimes
Held up in the middle of the night
Shakin’ like a pistol in a young mans hand
There in the pale moonlight
Standin’ up the top of that lonely hill
Spared by the company mines
Is my blue eyed baby with her best dress on
In the shadow of a lonely pine
It was back before the war
When the company came
These hills grew wild and free
Me and baby we’d hide in the hollers low
Away from the cruel sun’s heat
But then they knocked down the timber
And burned off the brush
To get to the riches below
And when they pulled out
They left a cold black ground
And one pine standing lone
So take me home…
Lone pine hill
I signed up back in ’61
I’m an army of Virginia man
I’ve been from Manassas to Mackonackey
All the way to Sayler’s Creek fighting
For my home land
After four years gone and all hope lost
And Richmond under siege
Now we’re diggin’ out Five Forks
Waitin’ in the rain
For Sheridan to bring us to our knees
So take me home…
Lone pine hill
There’s a strange moon hangin’ overhead tonight
And if the rain keeps comin then the creek’s gonna rise
With the good lord’s grace
I’ll make it outta this place and
I’ll be in your arms come the morning light I swear…
So god grant me speed and grant me forgiveness
And carry me on through the night
Take me through your hills and over your rivers
Away from this awful fight
Cause I ain’t never known a man that’s ever owned another
Ain’t never owned nothin’ of my own
And after 4 long years I just can’t tell you
What the hell I’ve been fighting for…
So take me home…
Lone pine hill
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“…Johnny Reb…”.
Or “I’m Afraid to Go Home” by Brian Hyland. Or any other ballad written for/about the troops.
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Shelby Foot in his Civil War history wrote of a conversation between a northern and southern piquet , The northern piquet asked “hey Johnny, what you fightin for? You don’t own no slaves.” The southern piquet replied. “Well Billie, I recon it’s cause you’re all down here,”
This makes total sense to me.
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Yes. For some, it wasn’t about “the Cause”, whichever cause it might have been, but “protecting home from invaders.” Which goes back to the Celts and the Saxons, the Celts and the Romans, the Romans and the Marcomani, the Goths and the Avars, the Han and the Hsungnu …
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Yeah, we need to get into that “protecting home from invaders” mode — both external, and internal invaders.
Hey, I’ve even got some Celtic heritage. Where can you get woad these days? :-D
———————————
When the government subsidizes failure and punishes success, what do you expect?
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Heh. Try Etsy, or any group into home herbal dyeing!
Bonus, it’s a styptic – helps prevent bleeding when they do cut you.
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“March of Cambreadth”. And probably ten thousand others.
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I grew up in Richmond. My beloved and I went to Monument Avenue. What was done to it makes me sick.
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Oh, don’t get me started. I lived there myself for seven years and would sometimes drive down Monument Avenue on good-weather Sundays, it was beautiful. Now you can’t pay me enough to set one foot or tire, or spend one penny, in Richmond. Let them drown in it.
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I hadn’t heard that one before.
Straight truth, and strong.
I’d considered “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda” to be the most powerful song about war, but this one challenges it.
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Same author.
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I’d like to believe that war doesn’t start as a “racket”. There are people who come out the far side enriched, but are they the ones who start the war? Or even control (as much as one can) its progress? Lots of people got rich “bringing democracy” to Afghanistan and Iraq. Were they the idiots who came up with and implemented that “plan”? I don’t think so, but I admit that I may be wrong.
We may be sending billions to Ukraine, which is enriching far fewer Americans than one might think since it’s mostly surplus crap – to us – and the billions are mostly accounting fictions. But those people who are getting rich on the replenishment contracts (for the not-crap, even more expensive, state-of-the-art stuff) are not the people who started the war. Or are they?
It’s so hard to tell because Biden is clearly not driving anything and it’s not at all clear who is. The idea is sound: Let the Ukrainians die to destroy the Russian army. Pretty standard (if cold-hearted) proxy-war concept with the added bonus that when NATO troops stomp the Russian army flat, Russia will let loose the nukes, so we want to avoid NATO troops engaging. Why NATO equipment doesn’t count, I don’t quite understand, but it apparently does not.
In any case, the price is being paid in American dollars, not American blood, so it seems like an acceptable compromise – for Americans.
If only we were making the choice between Solyndra or HIMARS. Instead, we’ve embraced the power of “and”.
It’s a complicated mess and reducing it to a “racket” is far too cynical for even me.
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The Vietnam war sure started out as a racket. Johnson wanted a war to acquire the cachet of a ‘Wartime President’, his cronies that rigged the 1960 election wanted a war to revitalize all those military contracts, the CIA wanted a war to make them indispensable — everybody wanted a war except the American people.
And Kennedy. Look what happened to him.
———————————
Some of the politicians nominally on our side need to be taught the difference between ‘compromise’ and ‘appeasement’.
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I’m thinking that TPTB did not intelligently anticipate the unwanted outcome of unemployment, virtual schooling, and attempts to censor DOUBLE PLUS UNGOOD information.
1) People developed side hustles and other ways of bringing in $. This detached them from Tyrannical Woke Corporate America. Also, many used the Covid money to pay down debt, start prepping, and reduce their dependence in Uncle Sugar.
2) Virtual schooling both exposed the rotten underside of Government Education, but also gave many families experience with tackling Home-baseded. Many fled the Blue states/cities, and used the opportunity to take more control of what went into their kids’ heads.
3) People learned where the non-approved info was, and detached from Official Media dependency. Many headed the lessons of J6, and chose to act locally, with city government overreach, school board dictatorships, and other places that a few people could make a difference. As a result, the locally based non-Woke activism is thriving.
The Woke failed to learn from the experience of governments fighting Hillbilly Rebels. Throughout the world, it’s the Hill people – isolated from the sanctioned culture – who are the effective rebels in every country.
They made the mistake of isolating us. And, thus, they made us stronger.
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No, they have no clue.
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“…TPTB did not intelligently anticipate…”
That could be applied to damn near every idea TPTB have ever had since Og hit OOg with a stone ax.
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You know how dark my own view can be so keep that in mind as you read what follows:
The question to ask is not “how bar are things?” but rather “how bad would things be had our war dead not been willing to make the sacrifices they made?” Some of the Libernutzians think that had we just stayed home and nobody went out to make those sacrifices then everything would be all sweetness and light and we could enjoy perfect liberty without a care in the world. They are as deluded as the “socialism would do that if only the ‘right people’ [meaning them] were in charge” crowd.
We’ve lost a lot. We’re facing some dark times. But they’re somewhat less dark because of the sacrifices our war dead have made.
My shame ye count and know.
Ye say the quest is vain.
Ye have not seen my foe.
Ye have not told his slain.
Surely he fights again, again;
But when ye prove his line,
There shall come to your aid my broken blade
In the last, lost fight of mine!
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Yeah, I never thought if we stayed in our corner we’d be left alone.
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Peace through superior firepower needs the occasional demonstration of “f–k around and find out” to deter those who would do us harm.
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You have that right. And I’m afraid it’s coming around again, this time from TWANLOC.
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I find myself in agreement. The Prussians are where so much of the “scientific government” bs came from. And they would have pushed it further had they won in the Great War. And their ideological descendants would have pushed it had they won in WWII. And their ideological descendants will push it again if they win here.
I think the reality is life is always a struggle against corruption. Beating it back now does not mean it will not return tomorrow but surrendering to it today does not mean it won’t haunt us then either.
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People tend to conveniently forget that it only takes one a-hole to start a fight. And sometimes it’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
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“Cold Iron” is a different Kipling poem. This one about a knight returning home from war is “The Quest”. Leslie Fish did readings of both of them around 30 years ago, and I think the graphic here is the cover from the album that includes both these poems.
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In this case, “Cold Iron” is the album title. “The Quest”, which is what I linked and you quoted, is one of the poems as songs on it. See upper left corner.
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But, just for completeness:
Gold is for the mistress — silver for the maid —
Copper for the craftsman cunning at his trade.
“Good!” said the Baron, sitting in his hall,
“But Iron — Cold Iron — is master of them all.”
So he made rebellion ‘gainst the King his liege,
Camped before his citadel and summoned it to siege.
“Nay!” said the cannoneer on the castle wall,
“But Iron — Cold Iron — shall be master of you all!”
Woe for the Baron and his knights so strong,
When the cruel cannon-balls laid ’em all along;
He was taken prisoner, he was cast in thrall,
And Iron — Cold Iron — was master of it all!
Yet his King spake kindly (ah, how kind a Lord!)
“What if I release thee now and give thee back thy sword?”
“Nay!” said the Baron, “mock not at my fall,
For Iron — Cold Iron — is master of men all.”
Tears are for the craven, prayers are for the clown —
Halters for the silly neck that cannot keep a crown.
“As my loss is grievous, so my hope is small,
For Iron — Cold Iron — must be master of men all!”
Yet his King made answer (few such Kings there be!)
“Here is Bread and here is Wine — sit and sup with me.
Eat and drink in Mary’s Name, the whiles I do recall
How Iron — Cold Iron — can be master of men all!”
He took the Wine and blessed it. He blessed and brake the Bread,
With His own Hands He served Them, and presently He said:
“See! These Hands they pierced with nails, outside My city wall,
Show Iron — Cold Iron — to be master of men all.”
“Wounds are for the desperate, blows are for the strong.
Balm and oil for weary hearts all cut and bruised with wrong.
I forgive thy treason — I redeem thy fall —
For Iron — Cold Iron — must be master of men all!”
Crowns are for the valiant — sceptres for the bold!
Thrones and powers for mighty men who dare to take and hold.
“Nay!” said the Baron, kneeling in his hall,
“But Iron — Cold Iron — is master of men all!
Iron out of Calvary is master of men all!”
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As we all know the left considers colonialism evil.
Disagree, given they routinely engage in it.
What the left considers evil is anyone wielding power but them. Colonialism is evil when non-leftists do it. Even nationalism is evil when non-leftists (non-approved leftists that is) do.
After all, Stalin et al don’t call the war with Germany the Germany War or the Antifacist War.
They call it The Great Patriotic War.
Sounds pretty nationalist to me.
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Internationalism was fine when the Marxist-Leninists were founding Communist parties in China and Indochina, before WW II. Afterwards, when the Americans began trying to fill the vacuum left by the collapsing British and French empires, they suddenly became The Enemy. Doesn’t the seeding of Marxist dictators and wannabe-dictators all across Africa and Asia in hopes of creating Soviet allies count as a form of colonialism?
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But they declared that communists couldn’t be imperialists.
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Of course they did, According to the Soviet propaganda lexicon, “communist = good” and “capitalist = bad” by definition, and imperialist is practically synonymous with capitalist, Truth is whatever serves the party, lies are whatever does not. Even if these are sharply orthogonal to how the rest of the world defines these terms.
I’m appalled at how easily academics who have no moral framework of their own have adopted this this one.
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“Socialism in One Country.” Stalin’s ultimate goal. He may have been Georgian but he was a Russian hyper-nationalist.
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They routinely engage in what they very much “hate” in anyone else….
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“Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”
Return of the King,
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Yes, the Germans were the most rampant case of this and they were stopped by the sacrifices of those in World War One and World War Two. And we’re grateful for that.
I tend to disagree with the first. The war ending in 1918 with exhaustion if the US hadn’t joined would have led to a better 20th century as the German puppets in the East would have reduced the resources, and probably reach long-term (even to the point of ending Western bailouts) of the Soviets.
I’m not saying the Kaiser’s government was fine and dandy, but Imperial Germany would have been a much less destructive opponent for a post-WW2 Cold War. Yes, we would have had WW2, probably an East-West one of the European powers against the smaller USSR and Japan.
Where China would be is an interesting question.
If it had been Germany vs. the West China might have been a partner to a non-Nazi Germany with Japan winding up a weird ally a la the USSR in our timeline.
Once the die was cast as it was in our timeline (thanks to the worst president in US History, Woodrow Wilson, spit) WW2 was necessary, although I cannot help but wonder if Britain made peace in late 1940 and let Hitler and Stalin exhaust each other, then the US and Britain using the pretext of the Pacific War to clean up the remains wouldn’t have been wiser…but that’s 20/20 hindsight.
But on to nationalism.
I’ve been thinking lately about observations that Fascism is just late stage Socialism/Communism (or as Short Fat Otaku puts it, fascism is honest socialism) and something connected.
Modern nationalism, in the sense that was tearing apart Europe at the base level in the 19th century, mostly in Central and Eastern Europe against three existing empires and creating a fourth, was a product of the first successful Leftist revolution, the French Revolution.
Thus, that German nationalism created first the German Empire and later a second German Empire (or the third, hence its name) under a new Napoleon (history repeats/tragedy/farce) is not surprising.
Because not only is fascism the honest version of socialism, toxic nationalism of the soil and blood sort, is the honest version of Leftism going all the way back to the First French Republic.
The Anglosphere version of nationalism, what is generally called patriotism, is a natural outgrowth of classical liberalism because it is embraced freely out of mutual respect and affection.
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Patriotic nationalism is fine. Worship of the state isn’t.
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“Where China would be is an interesting question.”
China would have sided with whoever was against Japan.
During the Inter-War period, Japan developed some truly poisonous racial supremacy ideas, and combined them with a kind of hyper bushido. This contributed to the rise of the military, and all that went with it. The government in Tokyo wasn’t actively looking for a war with China (in fact, when the two countries finally formally went to war, one of the two most modern ships in the Chinese navy had been built in Japan just a few years earlier). But the military kept pushing and pushing and pushing, so the war started anyway. And once it started, it was going to be a long, hard slog regardless of who eventually won. Historically, it wasn’t so much that China won as it was that Japan just got too bogged down for too long while the US advanced steadily through the Pacific.
In short, China and Japan were going to war. So if Japan ended up as part of one alliance, China was going to be part of the opposing alliance.
And it’s unlikely that an “exhaustion ending” to World War I would have changed things for Japan. After all, Japan’s primary contribution to the Entente’s war effort was to grab a bunch of German colonies in the Pacific that Germany couldn’t properly protect from the other side of the world.
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The racial supremacy ideas existed well before the 20th Century and go back many centuries; just look at their attitude towards the Koreans who they tried (and failed) to conquer about 500 years ago. And they had some very not nice terms for foreigners after Europeans showed up.
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A certain amount of racism is normal across most cultures. And calling foreigners barbarians is nothing new. After all, “barbarian” was literally the Greek word for foreigners.
The important thing is that in the first half of the Twentieth Century, the racist attitudes shifted into something much nastier and meaner than they had been up until then. This was coupled with the hyper-bushido that I mentioned, as well, which seems to have developed at least in part due to responses to events in the Russo-Japanese War.
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it became eugenics which is pseudo-scientific racism.
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Or the attitude towards “the monkey people” of Okinawa.
Which weirdly, makes the Okinawans try to be more Japanese than the Japanese.
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I’d like to add that some of the poison and hyper-bushido actually came by way of Prussia. Emperor Meiji decided that the only way to not end up like China in the hands of “barbarians” was to modernize his country as fast as possible – and that meant hiring foreign experts and attitudes. Prussians and the military were one of the arrangements.
Of course another part of the mess came from the government deciding that modernizing meant abolishing the samurai class. They were supposed to be “just like everyone else” – in theory the untouchables were just as equal as ex-samurai.
That, culturally, did not work.
In my layman’s opinion, instead of going the “conquered” route to their culture being so drastically changed, Japan first went more rabidly insane instead. (Yes, I see some parallels to the current progressive… offensive, shall we say.)
And then apparently Theodore Roosevelt gave Japan a green light to take over Korea as a protectorate, because otherwise they might make more “unwise alliances” such as with Russia… I’m still digging into the facts on that bit, but there are people in South Korea who think the U.S. can’t be trusted because of that. Ouch.
(I started poking the history of the region from Rurouni Kenshin, and just kept going….)
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From what I’ve read, a lot of the Bushido crap was pushed down from the top. The Japanese had won the Russo-Japanese War, but at various points Japanese soldiers had surrendered. This struck the Japanese leadership as wrong. Victorious soldiers weren’t supposed to surrender. So they started pushing the “Death Before Dishonor” stuff using the hyper-bushido as the basis of it all.
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“The war ending in 1918 with exhaustion if the US hadn’t joined would have led to a better 20th century as the German puppets in the East would have reduced the resources, and probably reach long-term (even to the point of ending Western bailouts) of the Soviets.”
If any of you played the 1990s video game “Titanic: Adventure Out of Time”, you will recall that the premise of the game was that you, the player, were a British agent sent back in time from 1942 (during the London Blitz) to April 14, 1912, aboard the Titanic. You won the game if you accomplished three things before the ship sank: 1) recovered a priceless copy of the Rubayat from a mysterious Serbian, 2) rescued a painting by an obscure Austrian artist, and 3) found a list of Russian revolutionaries.
If you did #1, you prevented the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and by extension, WWI because the Serbians were going to sell the Rubayat to raise money for the Black Hand terrorists. If you accomplished #2, Hitler became a successful artist rather than a dictator. If you pulled off #3, you helped the Czar track down Lenin and the Bolsheviks before they could cause any trouble.
If you accomplished only #1, WWI was averted, but only temporarily because both Germany and the USSR remain powerful and end up going to war eventually anyway. Accomplish only #2 and you avert Nazism but the Soviets end up conquering the world. Accomplish only #3 and you avert the Russian Revolution, but the Nazis end up conquering the world. Accomplish all 3 tasks and you avert both World Wars AND the Russian Revolution so everyone is happy and peaceful. I was totally addicted to that game for a while, not just because of its great (for that time) graphics of the Titanic but because of the alternate history aspects.
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Wait, does the game allow for stopping the sinking of Titanic?
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No, it doesn’t. The ship still sinks no matter what you do, although you survive. Actually my summary of the various outcomes was a wee bit off as well. There are actually nine possible endings, one of which involves WWI and the Russian Revolution being averted, but not Hitler, which enables Nazi Germany to get The Bomb in the late 1930s and nuke England off the map.
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Sadly, #3 wouldn’t have done much. Lenin historically was imprisoned and spent time in the Gulag. But the pre-Soviet Gulag was a pretty mild affair for political prisoners, and my recollection is that spending time there was basically a rite of passage for most pre-Soviet Russian communists.
The premise of the game does sound like fun, though.
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Those alternate histories seem quite unconvincing to me. Avert WWI, and you’d avert Hitler, and avert or delay the USSR.
Hitler’s rise to power was only possible because defeat in WWI and the humiliating and unfair Treaty of Versailles destroyed most of the existing power structures in Germany, left the people vulnerable to a demagogue, and left the Weimar government so weak they could neither keep Hitler in prison for the Beer Hall Putsch, nor stop the SA from using violence to intimidate political opposition. If the Kaiser and noble Prussian military officers had still been running Germany, they wouldn’t have given a Corporal from a lower-class Austrian family a chance, no matter how good he was at making speeches; if he had managed to find followers for an attempted revolution or other violence, he and his deputies would have been in prison until they were old and feeble.
The Communists were able to come to power because the long bloody stalemate of WWI led to a social collapse of Tsarist Russia. This allowed the February Revolution by less radical revolutionaries, which created an opening for the Bolsheviks. It might have happened eventually anyway because the Tsar’s government and the Russian nobility were rotten to the core, but it would not have been in 1917 – and I think Russia was only slightly more vulnerable to social collapse than most of the other belligerents. Germany asked for an armistice in November 1918, only a year and a half later, because they saw their society following Russia down the toilet and needed to bring their troops back to stop an imminent revolution. The French and British granted it in haste because a German revolution would have easily spread to them.
On the other hand, I suspect WWI could have been delayed but not averted. The archduke’s assassination was not the cause of the war, but the excuse to start what many people in several nations already wanted. They would have found another excuse in a few years.
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He’d have been executed. (The fate Correia gives him in the Grimnoir books.)
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In one of Harry Turtledoves’s series (where the Confederacy had “won” their independence, the Union was allied with Germany and Germany won the Great War) Adolph shows up in the US (in a party of a German General) after the Great War still a German Corporal and shown as hating Jews. Oh, Turtledove calls him Schicklgruber.
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The assumption in the early 30s was that our next war would be with Britain. Note the name of our carriers -Saratoga, Lexington. Only when it became apparent that Germany and Japan were likely advisories was it Wasp, Hornet , and
Enterprise.
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Both the Lexington and the Saratoga were originally ordered as battlecruisers during WWI. They were repurposed after the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, but carried their assigned names.
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The next full-size American carrier was the Yorktown, named in 1933 after another British defeat. It was followed by the Enterprise, then the Wasp, a smaller carrier to use up the rest of the tonnage allowed by the naval treaties. When the treaties were abrogated, they built Hornet (a bigger Wasp) to the Yorktown plans, and then started on the much more powerful Essex class.
But the battle names indicated we were asserting equality with the Royal Navy, not that we intended to fight them. After all, the first two began construction when we were about to become allies of Great Britain, and most of the 24 Essex-class carriers were named after Revolutionary War battles, ships, and persons while we were allied with Great Britain in WWII.
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Another thing the “leftist we know best and it’s wonderful even if it’s really awful” types fail to understand fully is the vast size of America and the American culture. While all of the USA speaks English – of a sort – the kid from New Jersey when talking to the kid from Texas may need to have a translator around. There are huge differences from the New York City to Bear Creek South Dakota cultures but they all include a blend of “America” in them. City kid, country kid or someone from the coast or the mid-west all alike even when different.
The failure of “world elites” is to think of America as a single thing – we’re not. The other part is that there are chunks of Italy, France – heck all of the world – folded into America and that is part of what makes the American culture so flexible and resilient. The tendency of Americans to go along and get along as well as the plain ol’ shucks, weren’t nothing thinking of those of us in the USA can also fool many of those oh, so smart folks right up to the point they hit an American “no” button. Then they best be careful as the reaction can be very, very unexpected and can’t be controlled or contained.
We shall go through some hard times but will survive, prosper and persevere.
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The good news about ancient Chinese culture is that it really only exists in Taiwan.
The stuff they’re peddling from the nose-picking thugs in Beijing is a cheap ripoff of Stalinism with an extra side of genocide.
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You can thank Mao and his wife for that.
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They didn’t remake the culture. They remade the GOVERNMENT. And Taiwan isn’t, no. They’ve been influenced by the west, a lot, being dependent on the west, and much smaller.
The evil government? China has endured a hundred just like it. It claws out, and falls back in.
There are beautiful and admirable parts of Chinese culture. If I weren’t a Sinophile, I’d not have read piles of stuff on their history. HOWEVER the lovely things rest on a river of tears, a mountain of oppression, and the broken backs of a people who can’t fight back except in brief spasmodic moments.
And that’s on the culture.
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What Mao got rid of was most of China’s cultural heritage. Most of the artifacts and art created and preserved over thousands of years was destroyed in his attempt to remake the country. I wouldn’t be surprised if the only reason why the Great Wall is still standing is the amount of TNT that would have been required to blast the entire thing into rubble.
The culture is still being passed down. But most of the great works created by the culture are gone forever.
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Sounds rather similar to what the left is trying to do here.
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The Taliban tried to do the same in Afghanistan before they got chased out following 9/11. I expect they’ll start up again before long.
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They only ever have a playbook.
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Yes. I know that part. And some of the ability to make great works has to be re-learned too.
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Mao burned or destroyed everything. Year Zero…
Xi is trying to be the new Mao.
I don’t think we’ll get anything from them but slavery and death.
And we have friends from both China and Taiwan. We see. My wife, being Korean, sees it more clearly than I do,
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He bragged of thus being the First Emperor on a grander scale.
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Eh, don’t underestimate the ability of Communism to pick up culture. I have an abridged translation of La Russie en 1839 with a foreword by a member of the American embassy about how they recommended it as the best guide to the USSR.
That both countries were tyrannies helped.
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Don’t despair. We can hit them where it hurts, the greed of their backers. InBev, Bud Lite’s parent, is off 20% [ $26.5B) since they decided to mock the women. Target is off 16% ($11B) since they got caught letting their freak fly where the children could see it. Sure the market’s down a bit, but Wally World is only off 3%.
Hit them in the purse, again and again and again and it will stop. It’s been free up till now, once the money people start to hurt they’ll cut these clowns off and that will be that. Sure it’ll move onto something else, but we’ll know what to do.
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I wonder just what it’ll take and how much pain will suffice. Remember that there’s three companies–Blackrock, Vanguard, and I forgot the third one–that own stock in almost every company in the Fortune 500. And THEY’RE the biggest drivers behind companies going hellbent down the ESG road and getting into woke territory, for reasons that I genuinely cannot figure out because they seem counter-intuitive to making more money. If Target takes a 20% hit, will an institutional investor like Blackrock with ten trillion dollars in managed assets even really notice?
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Northern Trust.
The ETF sponsors are actually among the most vulnerable since about the only thing that can get a trustee, they’re just trustees not beneficial owners, is acting against the interests of the shareholders, Want it to stop? Make it costly. Get the state pensions out.
They have very, very small margins in fact. Doesn’t take much to really hurt them.
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Don’t forget the public employee pension funds like CALPERS, which are also major driving forces of wokeism and ESG.
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Wokeness isn’t a marketing plan designed to get more profits, it’s not even a religion the faithful are trying to spread, it’s a way for our self-proclaimed “betters” and they’re wannabe hangers-on to socially signal how much better they are then us unwashed deplorables. The less it works the more they’ll devote themselves to it, which is why the massive amount of money it always costs is irrelevant. Until eventually we get tired of them and line them against the wall-or guillotine.
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Executions may be necessary.
However, we should be cautious. Part of what makes the communists nuts is selling themselves on ‘necessary killings’ as a an aggregate goal. IE, “if people are not doing what I want, we need to kill more” and just automatically accepting that cost.
We think we know about an aggregate ‘state space’ across the population. We speculate that the distance between where we are now to our goal is made up of many ‘changes of state’ for individuals.
One difference between our concept of goal, and the communist concept is that the ‘communism never tried’ communists automatically are assuming the possibility of an aggregate ‘state space’ that has never been shown to be possible. Our concept of goal is a level of relative peace that we think we saw in a past iteration of our society. So, in theory possible again in the future.
Our explanation of the shift in state space is that communists lack capacity for peace, so a few more communists in some specific places can make for the appearance of a lack of a peace.
Naively, kill the communists and the people left alive in the population will have the capability for peace, and will come to a peace deal and deliver on it.
Practically, if you have a consensus to kill a thousand people, and only a thousand people, good luck implementing the killing so that only happens to the target list, and does not get out of control. Mass killings are hard to keep from running out of control, and from escalating.
We want at least four sets of state changes in combination. 1. go along to get alongs from supporting or tolerating the opposition to supporting or tolerating us. 2. free capital felons to imprisoned capital felons. 3. living capital felons to dead capital felons 4. people whose religious imperative is at war with peace having conversion experiences to a religion with a demonstrated track record of being able to be at peace with peace. (IE, communists converting to something like Christianity).
The go along to get alongs are dangerous. If they will go along with transing kids essentially by force, they would also as cheerfully endorse a mass murder carried out by the nominal right.
Converts from communism are going to have a long journey before they get all of the awful nonsense out of their heads.
The prisons are not exactly secure. Additionally, the courts may present the appearance of having been long corrupted to improperly refuse to uphold capital sentences.
This all creates a situation of possible uncertainty, and a need for us to be quite aware of where we can go badly wrong.
/We/ must be very careful with any hypothetical informal or irregular courts. There are going to be very few other available people equipped to be careful. There will be a great need for care and for caution.
Anyone sentenced capitally must be shown individually to be individually guilty of some manner of common law capital offense.
We must also avoid confusing the individual sentences with measurable steps to our aggregate goal. We might potentially stop future capital offenses by that criminal.
However, our aggregate goal is a return to internal peace. Which is not the same metric as how many graves we fill along the way.
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Bob. you’re going to have to change your name.
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I’ve always loved the line found in several of Donald Hamilton’s novels, along the lines that “We can’t assassinate someone just because he’s a son-of-a-bi?ch, because it’s too hard to know where to stop”.
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This, to be honest.
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I’ve always found a useful dividing line to be “Is he being a son-of-a-bitch to anyone other than the people who have invited him to be one to them?” If no, leave him alone. If yes….
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It’s not a bad standard, but invited is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting there. After all, we supposedly voted for Joe Biden…
Tyrants of all stripes will attempt to maintain the fiction of popular support – you voted for this, she was asking for it, see what you made me do…
So they eviscerate our vote with fraud, but fraud that looks like our votes, while spreading the black propaganda lie that if those ebul Republicans win, they will never hold another election.
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“After all, we supposedly voted for Joe Biden…”
I suppose there are stupid people who believe that…..
“Tyrants of all stripes will attempt to maintain the fiction of popular support”
Of course they do….. and as long as the populace is willing to go along with the fiction, they DO have popular support.
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Was in Wally World today (Great Falls, MT) and didn’t see a “pride,” display. Nothing in Hobby Lobby, either. All right, I did salute the rainbow welcome mat at Michael’s, but it was a very low-key raspberry and I didn’t see anything else there. (Personal take, based solely on wandering through a bunch of stores, is that Michael’s is in trouble. Messy aisles, empty shelves…this was one of the better-looking ones and their inventory for yarn and embroidery was almost embarrassing).
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Interesting. Where I live, three new needle arts (knitting, quilting, embroidery, needlepoint, what-have-you) shops have opened in the past two years, and all seem do be doing well. I’ve not been into Jo-Anns, Michael’s, or Hobby Lobby recently.
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In a more traditional world, I”d agree that cutting into a business’s bottom line would tend to create change. With federal governments & central banks creating ‘money’ far in excess of what’s sustainable, I can easily imaging bail-outs similar to the ‘too big to fail banks’ for ‘too big to fail companies’. That isn’t anything that will work for very long, but it would defer the immediate need to respond to public non-support,
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Y’know, obviously we here in America haven’t, since WW II at least if not a bit before, been interested in amassing a colonial empire. Otherwise, we’d have one, with all the attendant headaches. But I find it interesting that we’re kind of culturally colonial. We don’t take over other cultures, but we export large bits of our culture to them, through mass entertainment and such things. How many times have we heard folks in foreign countries complain about McDonalds popping up everywhere and our movies being unavoidable?
The irony is, as folks have mentioned in this thread and maybe the previous one, that flow is reversing as Hollywood goes full woke. Anime, manga, and K-pop are king (I have a teenage daughter, trust me, I know more about K-pop than I ever thought I would). The Little Mermaid live-action is absolutely cratering in China and the Chinese state media are now complaining that Westerners are complaining the Chinese are racist because of it. Should be interesting to see what happens when American cultural Maoism slams head-on into “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” (My money’s on the Chinese. They’ve seen the real thing and I doubt any of them, no matter how hardline Communist, want to take a great leap backward.)
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Americans are lousy colonialists. All they want to do is go home. However the soviets loved calling us imperialists and colonialists. The Commies still do. They project like an Imax.
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Well yeah, why would we want to run a Third World backwater when we could just send in the businessmen and slap it full of Burger Kings and Wal-Marts and on-demand streaming services? That’s safer and more profitable.
(I kind of wish we’d thought that about Afghanistan around, say, fifteen years ago or more.)
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We may be lousy colonialists, but we have fought a fair few “colonial” wars. Afghanistan and Iraq, maybe, didn’t start that way, but you actually have to squint not to see that’s what they became. Somalia? Libya?
To quote Smedley Butler again:
“I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.”
Sorry, I’m very sour today.
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At one time I proposed dropping penthouse magazines into Taliban strongholds.
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Going to chew this post a while; not only is it “current events relevant”, but the “immigrants must acculturate” and “you must defend your culture and borders or the worst culture wins” has implications for the story idea I’m currently working on….
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Yes, I badly wanted to believe in a borderless world. But that just guarantees the least functional, most predatory culture wins over all.
:musing:
So… kind of like “oh, just be natural, be yourself… hey you’re stepping on the invisible spot!” boundary-destroying in social situations, but on a culture-wide level.
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As an aside, for subtle signs….Cook’s magazine, aimed at an upper-middle-class, college educated audience, is running articles about how to stretch out meat and how to cook/prepare “more affordable,” cuts of beef. Also how to freeze your own veggies, though they’re presenting that as, “so much better than canned!”
I dislike what they did to, “Cook’s Country,” but it is an example of what happens when an elite takes over. The magazine used to focus on local/ regional American favorites. Now, the first article this issue was….Okinawan taco rice. Another issue talked about a Cambodian refugee’s efforts to bring Cambodian cooking to the US. Now, nothing wrong with the stories, but they’re out of place in what used to be a, “How to make (American or Americanized) meat and potatoes dishes,” magazine.
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One aspect of cultural change that you haven’t mentioned yet is religion. Most major religions carry cultural ideas of their own, which have carry-on effects in the cultures they spread to. For example, Islam’s idea of total submission to Allah has a tendency to make Muslims more tolerant of being ruled by dictators who themselves demand total submission. Christianity’s doctrine that “there is neither slave nor free… for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28) means that all Christians, regardless of status in the world, are brothers and sisters of equal value within the Church. And that, in turn, has led to cultures where Christianity flourishes wanting real democracy, and not putting up with dictators very willingly. Buddhism and Hinduism also have their own ideas that influence the cultures they spread, but I’m not familiar enough with them to expound in detail.
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@ Sarah > “Most of our current bad ideas come from the Prussians” (and harryvoyager ditto).
I did a lot of reading in German history, including the World Wars, over a decade ago, and recall one anecdote (roughly transcribed below) from WWI, which represented the acculturation situation in the relatively-new German Empire, as amalgamated from the multitude of Germanic principalities by Bismarck in 1871.
Germans from some of the formerly independent states had often gone to Great Britain to work, and many knew English well. At one location in the ubiquitous trench warfare, a contingent from Saxony lobbed a bottle across to the Brits with a message inside: “We are Saxon, you are Anglo-Saxon; let’s be friends.”
As happened more than once in that war, the two sides began an informal truce for much needed respite from the carnage.
Some time later, the Brits received another message:
“The Prussians are relieving us. Give them hell.”
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I believe it. “Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles” wasn’t originally “Germany conquer the world” but “Be a German, not a Saxon, Bavarian, Pfalzer, Hessian” and so on. That’s why there are several scenes in Triumph of the Will focusing on how all these people from different parts of Germany are all part of the NSDAP machine.
Prussians are still different from people in Husum from Bavarians from folks near Rostok from Hessians from OdenWalders from Schwarzwalders from Saxons from …
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C4c
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“Anyway, though, I have come to the conclusion from observation, that while individual humans are plastic to a certain extent, humans in a group, all belonging to the same culture are harder to mold and shape arbitrarily.
It is probably part of human evolution, that cultures react like sentient group entities when attacked, destroyed or occupied.”
It’s more than just human evolution, Sarah. It goes back at least twenty-five million years, to the first primates that evolved into social creatures. One of the trade-offs that primates have made over time is to become less instinct-driven and more learned-behavior-driven. That particular evolutionary trend has reached hitherto-undreamed levels in modern Homo sapiens — almost none of our behavior is instinctive, and almost all of it is learned, mostly in the first five-to-ten years of life. We are tribal creatures. We live for the Tribe, we die for the Tribe; the Tribe dominates and controls our lives even more than we realize. As long as we live in a societal group in which most of the individuals follow the same behavior patterns, those patterns get reinforced constantly. And like any other neural pattern, the more it’s reinforced, the harder it is to break it.
I figured this out, oh, probably a couple of decades ago, while I was deep in the weeds of paleo-anthropology and human evolution – fascinating subject, by the way, don’t get interested in it or it will eat your spare time like popcorn.
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Eh. I am interested in it. But it’s shaky in the depths, like literary analysis. There’s more there they won’t go into.
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Well….. maybe, but I don’t think so. “Won’t” suggests that they could but choose not to. I think it’s more a matter of that the scientists involved can’t go into those depths yet, because they lack a solid basis for it. I freely admit that a lot of my own thoughts about evolution, particularly human evolution, include a substantial amount of intuition. I think I’m right in those jumps, but that doesn’t make them scientific. You can’t do science based only or even mainly on intuition. I certainly don’t think that evolutionary biologists are holding back out of some political motive the way the “scientists” who “study” global climate change are.
When it comes to biology and evolution, there are just so many things we don’t know. Some of them we don’t even know we don’t know. How do you test a hypothesis scientifically when you don’t even know how to ask the question?
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It’s really in its infancy, yes.
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when I talk of cultures deciding something it sounds like I’m going to break in paens of the Ashkantic records (sp) or perhaps start talking of the collective unconscious. It’s not. It’s a short hand.
This happens all the time when people talk about evolution. In many cases, one can replace “evolution” with “god” and the sentence still makes sense. It is both a short-hand and the way people think. We attribute intention to nearly everything, even when it is clearly not there. For example, “the car didn’t want to start.” (at least not yet)
Just as with very small/short and very large/long space/time frames, we (most of us) just don’t have the cognitive oomph or language to deal with emergent behavior.
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In my parsing, Ashkantic sounds like akashic plus Ashkenazi.
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Akashic, that’s it.
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