The World At Large

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

The other day in a discussion, the concept of Europe going from zero to jackboots in ten seconds flat came up, and people asked whether that was because Europe was uniquely evil or because the rest of the world lives in permanent jackboots.

Well, from my perspective (and like everything on this blog, it is and remains YMMV) it’s neither. It’s definitely not the first. And it’s not quite the second. It’s both simpler and more complex.

And then I realized that this is probably what feeds a lot of the oikophobia in our culture. We know that Europe goes zero to jackboots at the touch of a button, or even if no one looks at the button, or even if the button is just looking like it would like to be touched. We know Europe spent most of its history at bloody war with itself. And we know the US at least twice came in and ended what promised to be one of Europe’s long-running set tos.

Because the rest of the world is not really like that, it’s easy to believe the reason Europe and America are like that is because they’re uniquely evil. This explains all the belly aching and tooth grinding about colonialism, and the behavior of the hastily misseducated products of third worlders swarming through our borders, who are convinced they are owed something because their countries of origins are only not successful because they lived under the boot of “colonialists.”

This does not explain why most countries that were colonized and where the colonialists left are now objectively worse for the people who live in them. And no, the explanation is not the Marxist cant that the colonialists took away everything worth money from such third world shitholes. That’s demonstrably not true. Mostly because what is worth money changes by the year, if not by the century, and that no country in the world is so devoid of raw materials it couldn’t come up with something to export. (Clears her throat at Japan and anime.) To try to explain the poverty of post colonial countries by “We wuz robbed” ends up in the idiot who told me Portugal would have its own computer industry, if the US didn’t steal and destroy all great Portuguese inventions.

In this as in anything else, and though I come from a Western country (but a marginally “first world” one) I have a different perspective.

Mostly, Europe and America aren’t uniquely evil or uniquely war like or uniquely much of anything. We are mostly “Uniquely organized.”

For America this comes from being Europe’s “child” and having inherited a lot of cultural history as well as in the way of adult children, trying to “improve” on the parents’ flaws.

For Europe it’s more complicated and to be fair, I’d guess it’s the result both of Roman invasions, which brought with it Rome’s great innovation: the erasure of tribalism. Oh, not totally but to a great extent. If you were a Roman Citizen you were a Roman Citizen, and that subsumed whatever you’d been before to the point it didn’t matter much. This allowed the tribe and race blended legions to work, and it allowed colonies to integrate as “Roman.” Further erasure of tribalism was brought by conversion to Christianity when everyone no matter how they looked or how barbarian (ah) their speech were “G-d’s children” and therefore human and treated as such. (Oh, not perfectly. Never in the history of ever has “if only everyone” worked. But that was the ideal, and as the ideal it had a great impact on how other humans were perceived and how one worked with/for them.

And then there were the pressures, from the Islamic invasion and aggression to the constant warrying of the micro states that emerged from the fall of Rome, the Germanic invasions, the Crusades that pushed back Islam. All of it resulted in loyalty to king/country (even when the country was so small it required a passport to swing a kitten.) which in turn brought a certain organization and discipline.

Look, it’s not that the rest of the world isn’t war like or doesn’t commit violence. It’s that the violence tends to be one on one. Crime is higher — and the statistics disguise that in various ways — and there’s more group on group hatred, from soccer riots to tribal warfare. It is an “of course” background to life.

Then there is the totalitarianism, face saving and information control. Any society that engages in this loses the ability to make war effectively.

They’re just not organized enough to do war the European way. (Some parts of Europe aren’t either. Looks at Russia, which bought its own propaganda and wasn’t aware its vaunted military victories were mostly due to the harshness of their weather.)

No, I’m not arguing that war is good. I am arguing that war is preferable to constant low level tribal warfare or group on group violence. It’s preferable both in its results, because war you can “isolate’ in a way and recover from and rebuild, since they are episodic break outs, while the rest is constant and grinding and so demanding that people never get organized enough to go to war as a country/civilization.

Also that lack of organization/ability to standardize and pull together also affects the good sides of civilization. So food, clothing, all the essentials, will be produced by less efficient means, demand more work, and therefore cost more, while the risk of everything being destroyed by interpersonal/group violence and uneven enforcement of laws worsens all of the above.

War is bad, of course. But it’s not the worst any civilization can face. The grinding sort of total lack of organization and TRUST in laws or your fellow citizens that brings a lack of ability to wage war also brings a lack of ability to have most of your citizens eat and have clothes to wear on the regular, and it renders things like electrical power and water service that don’t go out randomly aspirational, and things like AC and houses that aren’t in the process of falling down constantly the wildest of pipe dreams.

Europe conquered the world on being slightly more organized than the average bear. I mean, colonialism, that boogaboo of modernists is just a characteristic of all life on Earth. Not even humans. If plants hadn’t colonized the land, if amphibians hadn’t done the same, there would be no humanity. Every species colonizes, and every species tries to edge out others as they do. Ditto for varieties under those species.

What Europe did wasn’t anything strange and novel, but what every human civilization that can has done since the beginning of time. Europe was just much better at it than the rest of the world in the 18th through 20th centuries. Kind of like Rome was much better at the colonizing game than any of its contemporaries, and therefore left an outsized footprint in the history of humanity.

And what America did, coming in to stop wars and not colonizing was utterly strange, bizarre and wonderful. And yes, I grew up on the Marxist analysis, which told us that America “colonized” markets. I want to kindly — or not — tell the Marxists to kindly go do onto themselves like nymphomaniac with the dildo, but harder, faster, and using a chainsaw lubed with ghost pepper juice. America’s dominance of markets in the aftermath of WWII wasn’t due to anything America did but to Europe having succumbed to the raging stupid of socialism, first before WWII and then after. That there were two varieties of socialism doesn’t make it better. The war between various varieties of socialism destroyed all the infrastructure and their ability to produce. And their falling hard and fast for the crazy international socialism after WWII and keeping restrictions on, loving regulations, felating price controls and convincing themselves that any proper economy is regulated top down caused them to never become worthy competitors for the US, who btw was doing onto itself much the same, but slower, and with enough resistance to feed and clothe the world.

This doesn’t make America an economic colonialist or imperialist. It makes America so far the savior of civilization and means if we fall civilizations goes down hard.

I won’t go into the factors militating our fall. You know them. But there are enough signs of life and fight against to have hope. And at any rate giving up and letting evil have its way is not a rational course. If we must go down, let us do so with honor and still fighting. (And taking a body guard to hell with us, in minecraft, if it comes to that.)

Who knows? Unlikely wins have happened, and we’re the land of unlikely wins and third chances where the underdog always has one more try at pulling the win from the loss.

Just know though that when they push the “bad” of colonialism and European and American history, they have less than no point. What they’re pointing at is not uniquely bad. It’s uniquely organized, disciplined and non-tribal. Which are the same characteristics that have ushered in more prosperity than humans have known in the entire history of the world before us.

The default state of mankind is not just poverty. It’s poverty, tribal warfare, massacres of women and children, constant insecurity and grinding fear.

And that’s where we’ll fall if “evil” Western civilization falls. At the end of that tunnel there isn’t some imagined utopia. There’s the utter darkness of savagery, which is — like colonialism — very human, affecting every race and subrace at some time or other. And is a horrible, destructive trap that can stop humanity in its tracks, and mire us in suffering, hunger and loss for thousands of years on our journey to the stars. (All that colonizing material should by rights go to our species, yes. I mean, the blue xenomorphs of Alpha Centauri might be very noble and all, but I am human and therefore I’d prefer #teamhuman to win.)

Support Western Civilization unashamedly. The alternative is not only not better, it’s unimaginably (for those raised in Western civ) worse.

*Because these are my two weeks of fundraising, I’m obligated to add the following:
This blog is reader funded. I don’t have a grant or a patron. You’re my patrons and only you can compensate for the toil of keeping the blog going day after day, year after year. For the full explanation of why a funding drive, and what I intend to use it for, if you’re interested, go here.

There are several ways of supporting me.
GiveSendGo, for which I make no promises meaning I’m not giving you anything for your contribution; Chapterhouse, for which I will give you my fiction that is in process and yes there will be typos, backtracking, characters who change names suddenly and other mishaps; and Patreon, for which I give you cat pspsps posts. For the more exotic ways to donate: email me for paypal address. The book promo email will do for that: bookpimping at outlook dot com. And there is the snail mail address at: Sarah A. Hoyt, 304 S Jones Blvd #6771, Las Vegas, NV  89107.
I know times are tough — for all of us — and I don’t hold it against anyone who can’t contribute. But all contributions are greatly appreciated. – SAH*

62 thoughts on “The World At Large”

  1. They do seem to think Europeans and Americans are uniquely evil. Which shows an astonishing lack of perspective about innate human nature.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. Because Europeans and Americans are the top dogs. You can’t up-end the international order of things without first dealing with Europe and America.

      Also, America engaged in very little colonialism. So you have to engage in “guilt by association” due to the “evil white man”.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. Also because the whole ongoing cultish chant is all a sustained carefully constructed and funded psyop by the KGB, which kept rolling along after the KGB stopped pushing and paying because it had gained enough local cult members who were true believers.

        See also the “anti nuclear” movement, and the organizational takeover of “Aren’t Trees Pretty” groups like the Sierra Club.

        Liked by 3 people

        3. The “no nukes”, and in particular the “peace march for disarmnament” in the mid eighties, was GRU.

          USSR/Russia also suffers from alphabet agency soup. “Turf wars” happen, including here.

          Heh.

          Liked by 2 people

          1. The thing I will always remember about the period after the USSR fell was how, all over the world, all these diverse totes home grown and not centrally managed and controlled from Moscow committed revolutionaries and liberation movements suddenly dried up. Even the IRA stood down and cut a deal with the Brits.

            It was an amazing wave of peaciness that spontaneously swept around the world totally unrelated to the fact that there was no more Soviet money coming in anymore.

            Liked by 1 person

              1. The actual weak point of liberal democracy was already clear then: massive unaccountable bureaucracy and the underclass.

                Liked by 1 person

      2. You know what’s really funny? Marx himself was broadly pro-imperialism. Countries couldn’t become his imagined utopia of workers controlling the means of production and dictatorship of the proletariat if it was still stuck at a tribalistic, primitive pre-industrial earlier stage. European colonialism was a good thing because it would bring the primitives up to a level where they could have factories and then read his book and take over the factories.

        Liked by 2 people

        2. As I understand it, “Imperialism” was the theory ginned up by Lenin et al to explain why capitalism wasn’t collapsing economically and impoverishing everyone the way the original Marxist theory said it would. “It’s keeping itself going with an illusion of prosperity by colonizing and looting!” (Which also turned out to be a textbook example of projection on the commies’ part.)

          Liked by 1 person

          1. He knew it was false because he lumped together the United States with others to hide that the investment money wasn’t going to the colonies, but to the industrialized powerhouse.

            Like

      3. I had a chat with an Army chaplain from Liberia a few months back, and he told me something of Liberia’s history, remarking that the U.S. dropped off the Freed Slaves who joined their Liberia project and left them to their own devices generally, and now, in the middle of all the bad-off ex-colonies that comprise West Africa, Liberia is the worst-off of them all. I said it seemed to me (and he agreed) that the U.S. in its 19th c. aversion to Having Colonies abandoned the very real colony they did have, and actually running it honestly and responsibly as a colony under our authority would have been far better in thr long run for all concerned.

        Like

      4. The most toxic product of colonialism is the export of socialist thinking: foolishness in Europe, but a terror to Africa and southeast Asia.

        Like

    2. They don’t think it’s true, they think it’s useful. They rewrite history on the turn of a dime because they don’t care about truth.

      Liked by 1 person

  2. The most horrific and fairly recent example of tribal warfare being Rwanda. Where I suspect most of us couldn’t tell the difference between a Tutsi and a Hutu if you paid us.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. Certainly the Belgians couldn’t, which is why they assigned people to the two ethnic groups based on the number of cattle they owned and the width of the bridge of their nose.

      Liked by 3 people

  3. While the Better Organization is a factor, there is also the fact that Europe never formed an Empire (after the Roman Empire) which meant that there was not a major force for stagnation in Europe.

    China in many ways was more advanced than Europe at several points in time, but became stagnate because China’s ruling class strongly disliked change and China lacked neighbors that could challenge China in term of “technology”.

    And Ancient Egypt was (at earlier times) was safe from most external enemies and definitely became stagnate.

    Europe on the other hand had several strong nations/cultures that never really united into an Empire so the various nations/cultures had neighbors that could challenge them.

    But Europe had a sort of cultural unity because of Christianity. New ideas and technology could spread outside a given nation because the educated class had a common language (Church Latin).

    So new ideas spread throughout Europe and there wasn’t a Ruling Class strong enough to prevent the ideas from spreading.

    Of course, the idea of Science was strongly supported by Christianity’s One God who was a Lawmaker. It was easy to see that the natural world operated under rules created by God and humans could learn those laws.

    Note, Islam’s Allah was viewed differently by Muslims so idea of science didn’t have much support in Muslim territories.

    Liked by 3 people

    1.  …China’s ruling class strongly disliked change…

      Yes, but it’s actually much deeper than that, and not the ruling class’s fault, per se.

      One of the strongest currents through Buddhism is that, in the world (as opposed to in your soul), stasis is either the ideal, or the unavoidable universal outcome. Yin and Yang always balance. They have to. One can improve or sully one’s soul, and thus move closer to or further away from nirvana, but the world just goes on, same as it ever was, as the Shaolin monks the Talking Heads once said.

      If your culture, at root, believes that things never really change, then stagnation is not only inevitable, but frankly desirable, since things will return to the same state in any event.

      Liked by 3 people

      1. While you may have done a greater study of Chinese culture than me, I can’t help but wonder if their distrust of change came from Buddhism or did they accept Buddhism because of their distrust of change. [Crazy Grin]

        On the other hand, there appears to be a patten in Ancient History where most of the changes come from outside of the various civilizations rather than from inside the civilizations. This may be very common as most of the time, change within a society is most often disruptive than helpful.

        Liked by 1 person

          1. The answer to almost any question involving social interactions where more than a dozen people (often fewer; sometimes far fewer) are involved is the same.

            And FWIW, “disliked” should be “dislikes”, at least as applied to the ones in power. Even Mao didn’t really change that, and Xi is almost the poster child.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. OK, so, then, on top of that, add another layer of “with China, it is always even more complicated than that”, because, in part, there are four thousand years of continuous history and culture.

              Whatever your baseline of “it’s more complicated than that”, China is more so, usually to the power of ten at a minimum.

              Like

              1. Ummm…OK. Sort of. But I’d add that China has no more valid claim to “four thousand years of continuous history and culture” than does Egypt, Iran or India, to note just three. None of them have what I’d call a continuous history or culture. Is China different? Maybe so, maybe not.

                Like

                1. Persians – as opposed to Iranians – would agree with you. I’m not sure about Egyptians, but it wouldn’t surprise me – with the pyramids standing right there.

                  That rather makes the point that it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. It’s part of the cultural mythos.

                  Like

    2. Also, lots of quarries. This enabled them to build stone castles, which had their advantages until cannons came along. So Europeans innovated cannon more.

      Also, Euclid and Pythagoras. No Chinese ever became a Great Historical Figure through mathematics. Higher math gave Europe a great advantage in fields from artillery to abstract science.

      Liked by 2 people

  7. The idea of American (USA) colonialism is so very amusing. Consider how the USA had the Philippines… and gave them to the Filipinos. And how the USA had Cuba, and left it to the Cubans. Yeah, there’s Puerto Rico and Hawaii… and it might be best if the USA follows the Philippines & Cuba model with them, too.

    Liked by 2 people

        1. From what I’ve read there was much self delusion during the Cuban revolution about Castro really being a democrat revolutionary…until he announced he was full commie and intended to father Canadas future Prime Minister, and everyone was shocked, shocked.

          Liked by 1 person

            1. But are you absolutely sure there wasn’t a mad scientist and a planned brain transplant involved there?

              Like

              1. Now there’s a premise. An aging dictator achieves immortality by having his brain transplanted into a clone/son, but something goes wrong and he comes out a theater kid.

                Like

        2. A few years ago my friend’s daughter was parroting the views of the media about Cuba. There were a bunch of photos and videos going around showing all the old cars and vintage stuff, she wanted to leave the poor natives alone to preserve there quaint impoverished culture.

          I responded, do you think Nevada is poor? Do you think they are backwards? Before communism, Cuba was basically Nevada on an island. There might have been corruption from organized crime, but they weren’t poor. They also had more respectable industries like a Hershey chocolate mill.

          That is the scary thing about Cuba, they were very similar to the U. S. but communism ruined them.

          Liked by 1 person

    2. To be fair, the Brits gave India to the Indian people too. Eventually.

      Note also that had no British (or French, who had a run at it too) colonialism taken place, where India is now would most likely be a chopped up mishmash patchwork of lots of individual countries rather than the one big democracy.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. India had Hindu vs. Muslim. It was after all how the British were able to divide and rule. They certainly couldn’t ship enough British in to actually conquer the place. When the British had the most number of “colonists” there, the native population still outnumbered them 50 to one.

        The big question with India’s independence was how they would manage to keep the Muslims and Hindus from massacring each other.

        Well, they got independence, and they massacred each other, and they ended up splitting into two countries (India and Pakistan), and just massacring the people who didn’t move.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. From the “Yes, Prime Minister” episode “A Victory for Democracy”:

          “We should have divided [fictional island]. That was always our policy in returning colonies, like in Ireland and Cyprus and Palestine and India.”

          “Didn’t that always lead to a civil war? It did in Ireland and Cyprus and Palestine and India.”

          “Yes, but if they were fighting a civil war, we didn’t have to formulate a policy for them.”

          Like

        2. Even within those there were separated individual kinglets. That’s how the Brits (East India Company army mostly at that stage, which was never really that large compared to what they absorbed) were able to get it all, one little kinglet at a time, piece by piece. If there had even been a united front just a little bit it could have stomped the Brits and the French when they first landed, but the bigger ones were not that concerned about the coastal ones, and each was successfully played off against the others all through that conquest period.

          Like

        4. The point about the Brits not having enough troops to conquer India outright is well-taken, but 50 to 1 sounded low to me, so I looked up some data. The population of India in 1881 was ~255 million, including ~238,000 British (actually, “having English as their mother tongue”). So it’s more like 1000+ to 1.

          (Of course, that’s somewhat apples to kumquats; the ratio of British troops to military-age Indians was almost certainly skewed somewhat in favor of the Brits, but not enough to improve the odds significantly.)

          Like

      2. And the Brits gave India a common Language, English.

        India has several Official Languages and English is one of them.

        Like

    3. Consider how the USA had the Philippines… and gave them to the Filipinos.

      Um, eventually. From the end of the Spanish-American war to the end of World War II (go ahead, subtract the Japanese occupation during the war if you like), they literally were an American colony. And for the first ten-ish years or so, the US Government there was pretty much the most horrific embodiment of the standard caricature of colonialism. (Though, be it noted, any given Filipino you talk to today will be happy to say we redeemed those first ten years by World War II, if not before. Filipinos love the US.)

      That’s a decade of the caricature being true, and close to half a century of genuine colonialism. To say that we ended it voluntarily is not the same as saying we never did it at all.

      In short, what William Graham Sumner foresaw and warned against in “The Conquest Of The United States By Spain” pretty much came to pass. And the resulting ballooning of government is still with us today, on mega-steroids.

      Liked by 1 person

  9. To paraphrase Winston Churchill-“Western Civilization is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

    For the most part, that we have any kind of progress is due to the Judeo-Christian civilization that has existed. And mostly via the English and French branches of it.

    It’s not perfect-it never is, but until somebody can prove that there is something better, I’m fighting for our civilization. It’s the only one that matters.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Some might disagree, no doubt, but what I see is that those Belief Systems consider ‘covet’ and ‘envy’ as different. As I see it…

      Covet: “Joe has a great $Z. I want Joe’s $Z!”

      Envy: “Joe has a great a $Z. I want a $Z like Joe’s.”

      And coveting is bad, but simple envy – by itself – is not. “You want a $Z like Joe’s? Fine, go get your own – and good luck to you!”

      Liked by 1 person

      1. They all want a $Z just like Joe’s (or better) but they don’t want to work for it.

        So they pretend that Joe got his $Z by exploiting them, and they are all owed $Z’s too.

        Then they ‘mostly peaceful protest’.

        Like

  10. The concept of aspiration, as “ we aspire to be better” is sadly lacking in American civic education. América is the only nation founded on a set of aspirations—equality, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. We are imperfect and flawed but we try, as a people, to improve, to be better, to move toward our aspirations. What other country does that? Do Belgians or Congolese or Chinese have high- minded aspirations built into their national DNA? Only here. I tell my grandkids, “ The founding fathers lived with slavery but they aspired to abolish it. They were not hypocrites because they lived in an imperfect world; we all live in an imperfect world. They were noble because they aspired to improve it. So honor them.”

    Like

  12. Europe going zero to jackboots quickly is facilitated by the fact that the citizenry is generally not armed. Add to this that there is no guarantee of free speech rights; people in Europe do not have the fundamental protections against their governments as to fundamental liberties that those in the USA have, even as those protections in the USA have been whittled away at for over a century and children are indoctrinated to hate the USA and individual freedom by the leftists who now control the institutions and wear them like a dead animal skin .

    Even more importantly, there is not the widespread cultural history of those individual liberties being superior to any government. When combined with the fact that the citizenry has been disarmed, it is easy for tyrannical governments to seize control over people’s lives. The strongest cultural belief in freedom is now in Eastern Europe, because they have had the experience of the Iron Curtain and the horrors of communism. This is the same reason the globalist elites in Western Europe and the USA hate the Eastern Europeans who refuse to embrace neo-Communism.

    President Reagan was correct when he said that liberty is always just one generation from extinction. Leftists intend for the current generation of children to be the generation where it goes extinct. Fortunately while their intentions are ambitious, their competence is as poor as their ambitions are great. Unfortunately, they can still cause a lot of damage on their way out.

    Like

  13. If you were a Roman Citizen you were a Roman Citizen, and that subsumed whatever you’d been before to the point it didn’t matter much. This allowed the tribe and race blended legions to work, and it allowed colonies to integrate as “Roman.”

    I was just reading Plutarch’s Life of Romulus (the Romulus), and he traces this practice as far back as the earliest days of Roman expansionism. We’ve heard a bit, maybe, about the Rape of the Sabine Women: the very next episode is the defeat of the (rest of the) Sabines and their “exile” as it were to Rome. Romulus (in Plutarch) makes a policy of dragging people back to Rome to become his citizens, and redistributing their former lands elsewhere. Weird from the 21st c. view, but effective.

    Like

Comments are closed.