In All Nations, Raise the Colors, a guest post by Bill Reader
I have written before in this blog about the value of nationalism. But this moment in history has both clarified some points of my argument that I have struggled to articulate, and motivated me to once again attempt to put these points forth so that they can be understood—even if not wholeheartedly adopted— by any good faith reader.
I realize now that I need to begin this article by stating explicitly certain things I consider to be true. If you disagree with these points, you will likely disagree with all I have to say beyond this point. I consider this to be a fair trade off, because if you disagree with these predicates, then from my perspective, your outlook on reality is so warped that reasoned discussion is going to be impossible on a wide range of points.
I believe fundamentally that things which are immoral for an individual to do, do not magically become moral when a group of individuals does them. I believe fundamentally that things that are damaging, dissipative, or foolish, when done by an individual, do not magically become healthy, productive or wise when a group of individuals does them.
I acknowledge there are many ways of successfully existing in the world, but I in no way concede that they are all of equal merit. I explicitly favor those ways of existing that first contribute the most to the survival, both short and long term, of the individual, to their comfort, to their safety; and also to the survival, comfort, and safety of those around them, in descending order of priority beginning from those most cherished by and related to themselves.
Those who maximize the first with no regard to the second trend towards sociopathy and—at any rate— rarely are successful in the long term when the game is iterated long enough. Those who maximize the second, while admirable in their own right, at the logical extreme will do too little to ensure their own survival, and grind the corn to feed the poor today that might be planted to feed a hundred times more people tomorrow. I do concede that the full extent of the best mode of being is not fully understood, and that its expression is in dialogue with the circumstances of a person to some degree (EG- you can be a good Christian in a church and on a battlefield, but what specific actions that belief is instantiated in will differ greatly).
I believe, therefore, that people are due grace regarding their differing approaches, in direct proportion to their good faith and reciprocal good will. And as a final and pragmatic point, I believe that all these truths are intrinsic properties of humanity and the world it inhabits— which is not to say that I believe humans cannot delude themselves, even in large numbers, into treating these points as untrue. It is however to say that when they do, their fundamental opposition to reality will bring them to ruin, fast or slow, but whether they destroy people who recognize the nature of the world and set back the progress of humanity before they destroy themselves is ever an open question.
From this I derive the duty and mission statement of this blog against the opponents of civilization— for in the long run they will always fail, but it is up to us to secure victory so their failure does not take the world with it.
Having laid out these premises I want to turn to my thesis. It has been time, it remains time, and by the grace of heaven I hope there will be yet some time tomorrow, for people of all nations to abandon the mad sickness of globalism and re-embrace nationalism. Not just Americans, the English, the Australians, the Argentinians—people of all places and all creeds.
I have stated before and I will state again that Europe took the very wrongest lesson from World War II in one particular.
In looking at the sins of the National Socialists in Germany, they attributed all of their sins to the Nationalism, and their leaders began to seek, from that moment forth, to eschew nationalism, while embracing socialism.
In this folly they had no small help from propaganda originating in their erstwhile allies from the Soviet Union. The cold war came, pitting these same people against their very way of life. They persisted in foolishness. The Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of its inefficiency, inhumanity and brutality. But its roots had grown too deeply into European hearts and minds for them to regard the implications. The interpretation of “the right wing” as being wholly defined by its nationalism— with socialism not just in name but fully embodied in policy, laughably excepted as inconsequential to the political alignment of a party— was accepted without thought (it could hardly be accepted any other way). Why? Because nationalism was nominally the difference between Stalin and Hitler. But of course, in practice, it was no such thing. Stalin was every inch the nationalist that Hitler was. It’s self-obvious from looking at his modern successor in Putin that the Russian Left is steeped deeply in Nationalism.
Globalism as preached by the USSR was a way of getting other countries to abandon their national identities in favor of a new Russian hegemon. It was always a weapon. They never meant a word of it.
How then can I advocate nationalism, if I begin by stating that two of the world’s most rightly-reviled ideologies were nationalist?
Because their sins did not arise from their nationalism.
Hitler and Stalin seized control of, both directly and indirectly, private industry large and small within their countries. That is the action of a socialist, not a nationalist. Hitler and Stalin disarmed their people and suppressed their speech— you have to do one to effectively do the other. That is the action of the socialist, not a nationalist. Hitler and Stalin confiscated the private property of their people for redistribution to their favored groups. They took from them everything up to their very lives for the primary crime of being effective opposition. They sought to control the people they ruled, and to expand their rule to all people. Every one of these actions is motivated by and wholly justified within the philosophical constraints of socialism, independent of nationalism. Every one of these actions is done today, to a greater or lesser degree, by every socialist country in the modern era, to include the so-called enlightened lands of Europe. Socialism is inextricably an oppressive, totalitarian ideology— and hence as a place becomes more socialist, its leadership becomes more totalitarian.
It has never been otherwise, because it cannot be otherwise. To build a government large enough to tabulate in detail the output and need of every citizen is to build a surveillance state. To justify the taking of a majority of the fruits of a person’s labor by the state, with or without their consent, is to make peace with theft. To justify the state control of their business is to make peace with slavery, howsoever gilded the cage that results.
To return to the premises we began with, what would we say of a man who spied on his neighbor’s every move; stole his neighbor’s wallet and took half its contents; helped himself to half the contents of his neighbors house or bank account; who inserted himself into the running of his neighbor’s affairs against their express consent? These actions do not become moral because a government does it, they merely become harder to oppose. Left wing thought always begins and ends, as I argued in one of my first essays for this blog, in the fundamental proposition that might makes right.
Countries that cast their lot in with socialism become evil even if they do not start obviously evil, because only evil men and women are comfortable with the mode by which socialism operates.
Moreover their conditions quickly worsen as the sensible citizen does not tolerate their idiocy. This is why every socialist country hemorrhages its best and brightest. Socialists raid their luminaries for their treasures, take a substantial cut for administration of their theft, and pass an inadequate pittance to their poor, with a promise to improve upon the pittance if re-elected. So the latter happens—but the prior, never. In consequence they end up inevitably with many more poor and dependent and many fewer rich and capable, and such rich as they do have must either not be the brightest (so as to not realize how badly they are robbed) or be so loyal to the country as to endure it out of love for it.
Only, of course, the latter is not allowed under the globalist regime, so perhaps you can work out what happens. The hangers on who believe in freedom but lack the means to leave endure oppression of every flavor from governments that, bit by bit, recapitulate every sin of totalitarianism in the name of defending against it. Europe’s final form, on the path it’s walking, is a man in a uniform, standing vigilant guard for any signs of a rising dictator… at the door of a dictatorship.
And what of nationalism? Nationalism is nothing more than the belief that your country’s ways are the best.
It is an earnest belief in one’s own language, culture, arts, priorities, morals, modes of thought. It has been a hallmark of every successful country in world history, whatever their moral valance. The Aztecs and the Spaniards were both nationalists of their own kinds. So too were the very people who actually fought the Nazis. Europe might have tried with some success to sell America on the idea of fighting on the side of “the allies”, but said allies were very much fighting on behalf of themselves. The French resistance was first and foremost a French resistance. It is not some inconsequential accident that the “Keep Calm and Carry On” sign is headed by the crown.
Europe didn’t have the luxury of being so stupid about this point until after the shooting stopped. Truly, how even does one articulate the desire of European powers to oppose Nazi Germany without acknowledging their justifiable fear that the Germans would wipe out their local customs in favor of their own? And what a tragicomic turn it is, therefore, that they went through all the effort of opposing the depredations of Berlin only to be willingly ravished in the selfsame manner by Brussels within the century (a tip that the Europeans would have done well to heed, and one well substantiated by the historical record, is that if you are going to be colonized by any country in Europe, pray to all the saints in the heavens that that country isn’t Belgium. They ought to have fought to the bitter end what they willingly acquiesced to.).
Why is this treated as some shock or surprise? Anti-nationalists are the kinds of people who would ask a man take a spouse but carefully never express any love for her.
They want the behavior of good citizenship while erasing the rights, duties and responsibilities of citizens. The individual version of the globalist philosophy is a person wracked by self-hatred not only at their own sins but at the sins of people they are merely descended from, sometimes so remotely that the sins of their fathers are practically the sins of everyone’s fathers. It’s a person incapable of asserting themselves to defend the most obviously innocent from the most transparently evil because some unspecified person somewhere in the dusty past with whom they might share a fragment of genetic code committed sins, and who then are they to stop a Muslim man from raping their countrymen’s children? No evil he can commit can ever make him not “oppressed” and no virtue of their own can ever make them fit to confront him.
You need not imagine this man, he is out in force applying his boot to his fellow’s face because unlike the people actually causing pain and distress in his country, he know his own countrymen will not fight back. What long term goal could he imagine himself to be serving except his own country’s extinction? And isn’t this, he thinks, in its final estimation, such an improvement on Nazism, to have all the horror of totalitarianism but turned entirely inward? For truly that was the problem with the Nazis, yes, the fact they believed in themselves, think the members of their police as they busily defend the violent third world antisemites who do to their citizens in peacetime what any European would be reviled for opportunistically doing in war.
But now at long last St. George’s cross is once again rising above England, and the southern cross over Australia. And while the destination is far from certain, in these embers lies a chance of rekindling the health and well being of these countries. In fact, on long enough time scales, nationalism taken to its logical conclusion could overthrow even socialism itself. The global Left, of course, believes that to be its intrinsic threat, but as discussed above, the global left fears the right thing for very much the wrong reason. Many of the “right wing” movements they revile are still heavily laced with Left Wing thought. They’re simply falling for old soviet propaganda. And yet, though they’ve done the math wrong, in a way they have come to the right answer in one particular.
Nationalism is rising at the moment because the leaders of nations are trying explicitly to destroy the health, happiness, and future of their own subjects. Where the USSR and 3rd Reich were homicidal, Europe is suicidal. It happens, however, that many of the good people of England are not particularly interested in committing suicide. So too in the US, hence Trump. So too in Argentina, hence Milei. But so strong is the cultish fervor for suicide among the global Left that mere belief in one’s own country now evokes the ghost of Hitler (nobody inform them of Hitler’s flagrant habits of drinking water, eating, and sleeping; or actually, perhaps do inform them, but film it for me).
The Left is committed to putting down its marker as the people devoted to sinking the ships aboard which the whole world floats, and they will tar all who oppose them as every -ist, they will censor, fire, and slander anyone who tries to pry the axe from their hands. And of all the things we could ask for at this moment, perhaps that is the best.
Because, at the heart of nationalism lies a belief that one’s nation is good and is worth supporting. That implies in turn a belief that the long-term well being of one’s nation is good. And the people turning explicitly against the well being of their own nations are taking an opportunity at every breath to declare fealty to socialism. Even if it were not the fundamental reason for their totalitarian behaviors, the fact that it’s the preferred draught of these fevered madmen will, I hope and pray, make its toxicity obvious if only by pure association. Europe’s socialists held a gun to their own people’s heads, and there is some small, faltering chance that having been the people to do so brings the wisdom of their other ideas into question.
But I will make even bolder, because I want to make a further point.
Right now, I believe the world is suffering more greatly than is fully reckoned for lack of nationalism. Iran in particular is being oppressed under Islam, which a bit like if a stone-age madman came up independently with all the worst parts of socialism but imagined them through the lens of a crazed desert raider. In fact Islam is subjugating much of the world under its banner and making huge chunks of the world unlivable Hellholes in consequence.
The result of this is two-fold—people flee the unlivable Hellholes and bring the source of their misery with them. It would be better, much better, certainly in Persia at least, for them to reclaim the history that preceded this madness. The Arab world at large, meanwhile, could use a different variety of nationalism. Rather than the arbitrary lines that keep warring factions bound within artificial countries, they could use borders that reflect actual coherent groups interested in self-determination. While they would still undoubtedly engage in constant tiresome warfare, at the very least they would have less built in internal conflict. Even a soupçon of an improvement in stability, combined with a sterner immigration policy on the part of the Western world, might do much to quell the relentless torrent of third world predators washing up on our doorstep. The history of this influx is, it must be remembered, relatively recent, and the conditions under which it did not happen, not so terribly remote.
South and Central America have much to offer the world in culture and resources, but they must spit out the poison pill of socialism. Argentina has lead the way, giving hope I never thought I would see in my lifetime on this front. Will the rest of the continent be wise enough to learn the lesson presented by their neighbors? Will they take anything away from the predictions of doom that fizzled, from the material improvements where the experts promised a deepening of the destruction (as if that was even possible after decades of socialists looting the ever-diminishing treasury)? Will any of them get a glimmer that when a man says what he’s doing, how and why he’s doing it, predicts what its effects will be, and then turns out to be entirely correct, that that is not a miracle, a trick, a fluke, a magic trick, but the man with two eyes coming to the fore in the land of the blind to don the crown? A cynic would say no, but an empty stomach, and an empty future, are as powerful of an inducement for change as any man in history has ever had. Call me a fool, but I harbor some little hope.
And last but not least, how much better could China be if instead of Communism with Chinese Characteristics, it were Chinese with Chinese characteristics? The great con game of the CCP, to make their own knock off of Marx’s work and tie it by pretzel knot logic into their own national identity, has lead to misery, market distortion and stupidity of a scale perhaps never before seen in world history. China wants to be dangerous, and it certainly is. China wants to be ascendant, but it never will be, because in the current of history it tied itself to the boat anchor of socialism. The best it could have hoped for was to temporarily be the top of the heap as the other countries suffering under the benighted political theory fell. Now I’m not even sure I give them that much credit. How much better might it be if West Taiwan gave it a rest already, for everybody’s sake, and rightfully shucked the fundamentally European sickness they’ve contracted, stopped pretending Marxism was somehow perfected by China (behold, my perfectly polished cowpie!). I grant you Chinese history is a frustrating ring of déjà vu all over again up until such time as the Mongols beat some sense into them, but even that morass of slow learning couldn’t possibly be worse than what they have currently.
Let the world’s people once again believe in themselves, pick back up the threads of their histories and begin to act again in their own self interest. We have tried the alternative. Nowhere has it succeeded. It has failed the people of every nation, and left a power vacuum which has been invaded by collectivist and stone-aged ideologies whose first draft might as well have been written in the seventh ring of Hell. Enough. Enough. Enough.
To all people, of all places—abandon these unworthy nightmares, turn your thoughts back to the lands your fathers built before you fell into this dreadful sleep, and as the Brits are doing now—raise the colors!
According To Hoyt 
Brilliantly spoken sir.
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Yep. I couldn’t have formulated it, but I agree with it in full.
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I probably agree with 99% of what you have said. It is obvious or it should be, that countries or groups of people can totally engage in sociopathic behavior. I think though that you are underestimating how popular Hitler and the regime was at least until 1941 or so. Russia was a terror state. pure and simple.
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The Bolsheviks had quite a bit of popular support at the beginning.
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I think at the beginning anybody would have had that’s true.. But by the time Stalin came along there was nothing. And again these are as I think you put this very well these were sociopathic regimes. So yes I think that Hitler had more popular support. You think that I am underestimating Bolshevik popular support, but the bottom line is why would any one to imitate in any way anything that leads to those outcomes. And they were similar. You put it so much better than I could.
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The Bolsheviks won the election, and so Lenin insisted on overthrowing the government.
They wanted to not be beholden to popular support.
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that was a very good point. And in the immortal words of Andy Capp(cartoon strip) not to be flogging a dead horse, it wasn’t any of the elections to the Duma. It might have been to the Soviets. just wondering.
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Yes and no. They were always a minority. But apparently through sheer doggedness and ferocity, they managed to beat out the other groups that were fighting for control of the government (including a foreign expeditionary force). I suspect that most of the country just wanted peace and stability after four years of the Great War, followed by the years of the post-Romanov civil war. As a result, they were likely happy when the Bolsheviks finally brought peace to the country, without necessarily caring what that meant. And by the time the politically disinterested realized what the Bolsheviks truly meant, it was too late.
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I have concluded that all the good in humanity boils down to accepting one simple axiom: Life has value — and applying it universally.
This is not to say that all lives have the same value, because people are not all the same. Some are smart, some are stupid. Some are honest, some are liars. Some are industrious, some are lazy. Some are sensible and responsible, some are…not. A very few are absolute monstrous savages that can’t be trusted to live in a civilized society.
The purpose of government is to prevent the stupid, dishonest, lazy, irresponsible, and violent from destroying society. Unfortunately, today’s left-wing governments are protecting the savages and punishing the civilized folk. Why? Because they believe they can gain power by doing so. They can’t understand that the savages will destroy them too in the end.
I think the biggest difference between ‘Right’ and ‘Left’ is in how we use language. The ‘Right’ use language as a tool for communication, a vehicle to express ideas, convey information, relate facts and truth, and explore alternate perspectives. The ‘Left’ use language as a weapon to manipulate people; to deceive by spreading lies and propaganda, to conceal facts and truth, and impose censorship on any viewpoint they don’t want heard.
You can have a civilized society, or you can have mob rule. You can’t have both.
You can’t restore a civilized society by pandering to the mob.
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The preservations and protection of society is not the fundamental goal of government. Rather, it is the protection of individual rights that governments are built to preserve. Group rights are an emergent property of that.
“all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”
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Extraction of resources from territory, to build armies to hold territory.
My model is maybe the model that a rectum would have.
With the correct weapons technology, a very broad sort of army is possible, allowing for a republic whose politics are very individual oriented and thus potentially outright tolerable where human rights are concerned.
The patronage of Roman culture is part of why their Republic was so top heavy and thus prone to politics so toxic. Measured bottom up peace consensus seems to be necessary for the sorts of political stability that we became used to having.
Or maybe I am just out of my mind this morning.
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How do the savages destroy society, though? By violently attacking people, and committing other crimes against them. Government can’t preserve society, at least not any society worth living in, unless it protects individual rights.
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IIRC there were Western Empire Romans arguing that those Franks coming into Gaul was a good thing, as they’d provide new sources of labor. The issue was, unlike when Gaius Iulius brought the Gauls into Roman governance a few centuries before, those Franks were not Romanized, they brought their own king and laws, and by that point the Western Empire lacked the means to force them to change.
Immigration/migration/invasion are not per se the problem – unassimilated masses inside an established polity are the problem.
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Here. Here. Not anywhere else. It should be. But it’s not.
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The savage will accidentally bring down civilization about them, and they will die in its ruins. The savage they use are too stupid and lacking in foresight to actively destroy them.
If they are actively destroyed, it will be by the monsters in their number. Moscow Show Trial, Cultural Revolution, etc.
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Zero Aggression Principle
Complete self ownership
You are your own first responder
No group has more rights than any single individual
Living on a given patch of Terra Firma doesn’t change the previous statements
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Ultranationalists of the world unite, (but only in the sense of agreeing that nationalism is a good thing, and that whatever else one may disagree with when it comes to factions in various other countries, that their ultranationalists are correct to conclude that it is right and proper for that country to remain itself, and not bend itself awry chasing fashions or friendships with outsider factions. I may agree with the wikipedia version of Japan’s far right in disliking communists, and in disliking the Japanese teacher’s union, but I can only joke about being in agreement with them in opposing the revisionist histories of WWII. Ultranationalists can only have an international consensus to a limited point.) you can only lose your chains!
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This. It seems the world wants us to ‘harmonize’ our policies with theirs in order to be an acceptable part of the world community. It seems, however, that that harmonization always tilts in the favor of restricting or abolishing rights we cherish such as free speech or KABA. Stuff that stuff with garlic and feed it to the hogs. Let them harmonize with us, and maybe we’ll let them play in our sandbox.
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I am enough of a xenophobe American ultra-nationalist far right extremist that I do not /want/ foreign elites to put any value on harmonizing with us.
They are already too much thinking in terms of having to harmonize with some foreign to them imperial capital somewhere. They get butthurt when we do anything that is not being what they emotionally need for us to be.
The nobility of Euroland really does seem to have convinced themselves that they must choose between having Brussels, Beijing, Moscow, or DC as the imperial center that they cleave to. That really does seem to explain their recent frustration and tantrums.
I think that they should instead first concern themselves with not screwing over their own countrymen when it comes to basic elements of the internal peace deal.
If they piss ordinary Americans off, it is not like we are going to just scrape up our personal savings, and go over personally to murder them. Their own countrymen are right there, and also have a lot of knowledge about procedures, and the way that physical security might be set up.
And, if they decided that they should care at all what we think, they should actually learn what we think, and how, and not just tell themselves a bunch of just so stories.
Aliens are alien, and it would be wise to remember that in setting goals where personal happiness is concerned.
I would rather they seek to become us than that they seek to become some totalitarian lunatic, but it would be healthier for them to just accept that they are them.
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Very good.
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Accepting that others have a choice in regards to their own lives does not mean supporting those choices no matter what those choices are. I can agree you have the right to choose without agreeing with your choice. Love the sinner, hate the sin. All but one sin, because it is a sin, a madness of the soul, and that choice is Socialism in all it’s horror. Only a true moron accepts Socialism/Marxism after more than a century of failure and death.
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I like the ideas here, but there are some “now” things that are presented as “inevitable” things.
I think you are presenting a false dichotomy between nationalism and socialism. That may be the split of o4ur age, but it is not a general split.
There’s something else sliding around in there that’s distressing, but I can’t identify it. This is a good example:
The individual version of the globalist philosophy is a person wracked by self-hatred not only at their own sins but at the sins of people they are merely descended from, sometimes so remotely that the sins of their fathers are practically the sins of everyone’s fathers.
That doesn’t follow. Globalism does not require that its followers be wracked by self-hatred. You are describing identity politics, not globalism. Granted that they are tightly coupled, right now, but they are not inherently tightly coupled.
Maybe it’s something else.
Let the world’s people once again believe in themselves, pick back up the threads of their histories and begin to act again in their own self interest.
What if the threads of their histories _are_ socialist? When does history start? (or end?) Your South American examples are good examples of this. North Korea is another good one. For the people living there, their history is communism. We can argue whether or not that is “true” North Korean history, but if they believe it, the truth isn’t very relevant.
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Oh, I think Bill Reader hit the nail on the head about self-hatred. When you hold the world up as the good, it pretty much says that the individual isn’t worth squat. That’s about what self-hatred boils down to.
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It’s terrifying to watch the UK be taken over and the natives replaced due to Globalists, Marxists, and Islam powers considering that the country has nuclear weapons.
It’s curious to note that 6, (possibly 7), German AfD candidates have died ‘suddenly & unexpectedly’ before a key state election.
It’s interesting to notice that the 2 largest demographic increases in the North Texas city next door to the one I reside in are Indians and Islamic. No chance of conflict there…
And the local elementary school two blocks from the house decided to open the annual meeting with parents in Spanish and told English speakers “We will get to you later, shut the f up and wait your turn.” Then shut the meeting down after conducting the entire session in Spanish. The school student population had a complete demographic flip in less than a generation. (The sheeet I have to pay taxes for…)
And on the technical front, Google wasn’t penalized for it’s browser/search monopoly practices. You can draw your own conclusions about the judge, but not native born and appointed by the Biden adminstration…
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There has to be something actionable in that.
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We are checking into what can be done. :(
Fully 40% of the local school budget goes to ESL, “refugee support” or related services. Four schools in the district had to be shut down due to drop in enrollment since the district was expecting a much large surge in “refugees” that didn’t occur.
Most good parents either try transfer to better schools in the district or move one city over if they can. A few can afford church, coop or home school. (Home school is usually upper middle class conservatives or religious in this area.)
The schools are their own little fiefdom, separate from the city government. The only thing in common besides location and some combined interests is they have property tax as a primary source of revenue.
The primary problem is two-fold. Government schools are required to accept all students, legal residents or not. Voters are so apathetic, just teachers alone voting is enough to pass school bonds.
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Maybe also look into whether the district council’s bylaws allow the public at large to “reopen” a meeting, or something similar, if the council ends it prematurely.
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And the local elementary school two blocks from the house decided to open the annual meeting with parents in Spanish … Then shut the meeting down after conducting the entire session in Spanish.
Be right lovely if next time they try that (if there is one) a native Spanish speaker showed up who happens to be a refugee from the Castros’ Cuba, or Venezuela under Chavez and minions, or a similar good-to-be-gone-from place; and let loose on all that in Spanish likely more authentic than those local “Officials” could ever muster. Oh, yes, and a parent with “at least one” child there, too…
Of course it’s not merely a nasty dirty trick, worked through a bald-faced lie and depending on the courtesy and forbearance of its designated victims. The pattern is (exactly) that of an intolerant majority language/culture “bringing the hammer down” on some marginalized, excluded minority group that it’s “okay to persecute.” So, likely it’s also sending a message, best sent and recieved at an unconscious level that escapes the cold light of logical analysis.
Britons, learn Saxon (or Danish, or Norse). Saxons, learn Norman French. Etc. The conquest is an accomplished fact, bow down to your new overlords and serve quietly, or else worse for you.
(Said the American in a ‘hopeless’ military situation: “Nuts!”)
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Nice explanations.
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The Islamic upsurge we see now is very like the Chinese revolutions, at least IMO—it’s something that was bound to happen sooner or later. If there was no Islam, they’d be using something else as a rallying cry—single-natured Christ, or Zoroaster, or who-knows-what.
A big part of it is reaction against a long period of having been dominated and kicked around by the West, and that very definitely includes the Soviets. The Reds’ shenanigans in Afghanistan did more to discredit Western ideas in the Middle East than almost anything. They were pushing things we’d think were good—female equality, education for all, and so on—but doing it in a way that would turn even you off those things. They’re also undergoing a lot of cultural change and cultural shock, and that breeds backlash no matter where you go. The 1920s Ku Klux Klan was far more motivated by dislike for the cultural changes that came in the wake of World War I than hatred of blacks.
And this, too, shall pass. I remember the days of the Cultural Revolution, when the Chinese were whipped up against capitalism in all its forms. Today (for all their rhetoric) they have a lot of the trappings of capitalism. They’re not fools and noticed how incredibly prosperous Hong Kong and Macao were.
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I would think the CIA’s meddling in the Middle East and Balkans, the reaction to Israel, the oil wealth in the area, the a-holes in Pakistan, and the stupid immigration policies of the West’s elite had more effect than a reaction to Russia for the Islamic surge.
The Iranian Revolution happened right before Russian invasion of Afganistan. Also all the major wars with Israel happened before that. The immigration mess in the US started in 1965. with Europe/UK around the same time frame.
The problem is large scale migration is invasion. Enoch Powell was right, rivers of blood is an understatement.
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They were fighting like nuts long before Israel. leave that out of it.
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Also no, it wasn’t being kicked around by the west that got them crazy. They were crazy in Roman times. And before. It’s the desert culture.
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True, totally tribal.
But blaming the West’s Islamic problem on late stage USSR, is like “Wut?”
Western elite opened the borders for various reasons a decade or two before Afganistan. In the US, the CIA/Deep State ‘Project Obama’ accelerated the process.
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No, the USSR weaponized them. They weaponized EVERYTHING.
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For the most basic of checks– look at who the weapons are from.
They’re not buying them from amoral American weapon manufacturers as so many movies are peopled with. (Oddly, those guys provide weapons to folks who’d object to being returned to Mother Russia’s loving embrace….)
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Well, the “oil wealth” states are slowly (and then all at once) shifting to align with Israel against the Shia Mullahs, so I am thinking oily money is not dispositive.
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FYI, There are a lot of deeply held grudges being carefully nurtured by a lot of families in the Middle Kingdom, and passed down generation to generation, regarding the Cultural Revolution. Lots and lots. And that is one of the things that make a society less stable – once things start to go, instead of forces pushing back against destabilization you see all those family grudges finally being acted upon, pushing society out of the stability zone. It’s like a pendulum carefully balanced pointing straight up – anything that pushes it off that balance point causes it to fall away rapidly.
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With respect, no. This happened long before Afghanistan. If you want to go back to the origins of the clusterfuck that is the Middle East, it’s the colonial pre World War one schtick by all of Europe, but most especially England and Germany. What really got it going though was when England, exhausted from two world wars, decided that they no longer wanted to deal with a world empire, but that they were going to put “Wiley Oriental Gentlemen” (What WOG stands for) that they could trust, IE guys that they had gone to school with back at Eaton, or where ever; in charge, because “well, I know him, he’s a reasonable man, we can deal with him.”
Then to make it worse, they drew lines on the map with straight edges, and said “Right then, we’ll make this Jordan, and we’ll put Abdullah in charge.”
“But, sir, that line includes a lot of Bedawin territory, and they HATE Abdullah.”
“Good, that will keep them busy fighting each other, and out of our hair.”
Add the discovery of oil, and with it the ability of the “Royal” family to ignore their people, except for their particular clan, and well… you have the shit show that is the middle east.
See one part of the problem is that practically every Abdullah, Mohamad, and Husain can claim “royalty.” It’s the clans of Scotland writ large. They mostly didn’t have a particular chunk of land that they called their own other than a few cities (often well spread apart) and caravan routes. Think Western US Plains Indians. Those often crossed other tribes routes. You can’t cut out a chunk of land in the ME and give it to one tribe, without cutting through land considered to be the possession of some other tribe. And so we have instability built into the structure from the start.
Humans being human, and the Mohammadi faith being one of tribalism, hatred, and conquest, built for a raider culture, the sort of disaster that is the middle east was nearly inevitable.
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In some respects, nationalism is tribalism writ large, or perhaps it would be better to say that it is the next step up from tribalism. While it is entirely possible to have a nation of a single tribe, it’s more likely a nation is a collection of tribes, and usually one that has coalesced around a commonly accepted core of ideals.
Nationalism, as opposed to globalism, is beneficial to mankind as a whole for the same reasons that individual sovreign (mostly) states in the U.S. are beneficial to America; they provide an opportunity for social-cultural experimentation, and a necessary diversity such that at least some of them have a better chance of surviving than others when bad things inevitably happen.
I won’t say that a united Kurdistan would be a utopia, but it might be a significantly better nation than all the ones the Kurds currently inhabit.
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Anyway, either this information is a deepfake or mind game of some sort, or dictatorship is a drug that causes serious cognitive impairment.
https://redstate.com/bobhoge/2025/09/03/the-creep-files-hot-mic-catches-putin-xi-jinping-discussing-achieving-immortality-n2193531
The red state guy is silly in his optimism to be saying ‘start’.
Anyhow, the mutability of human flesh speculation is maybe as unsound as the mutability of human minds speculation, and as intoxicating.
Anywhen, I guess that Putin and Pooh may be expiring faster than anticipated.
In related babbling, I hear that Kaiser Trumpahito must have expired, as his Marshals are less aggressive in continuing their subjugation of the central plains. Marshal Ney and Commissar Fuklaw are still sitting so patiently on Hainan.
(It is too early in the day to blame the silliness on being fatigued after a productive day. )
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There have been a sudden spate of rumors lately about Xi being in poor health.
There have also been rumors floating around for the last few years about Putin’s health declining.
Of course, as they’re rumors, there may or may not be anything to them.
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We are inundated with illegal aliens fleeing their 3rd-world shitholes — and once here, they continue to do all the things that made their old countries into 3rd-world shitholes.
They bring the shithole with them, and wonder why they can never escape it,
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Only it’s like the air that they breathe, the water that they swim in, the air that they fly through. Of course it can’t be true they’re unable to imagine anything different or better — it’s manifest in the “normal American” reality all around them — but their, um, “culture” and/or deep psychology makes it difficult or impossible to value, or embrace, or even likely accept it as a self-demonstrating fact.
Yet another form of “the hardest person to run away from is yourself” — and doubly true of groups huddling together on “reservations of the foreign flag” not individuals or isolated family units.
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It’s not kind to refer to Californians like that. Oh, Wait . . . Sorry.
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The Reader notes that some 3rd world shitholes are snootier than others. Doesn’t change what they are.
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An immoral act remains immoral even when carried out by a mob, but we allow actors in Law, whether monarchs or juries, to carry out actions that we do not allow to individuals. This needs to be cogently and coherently explained under your framework.
And a person of the deepest goodwill may do monstrous and irreperable harm if he fails to understand the full effects of his actions. We have forgotten that the road to hell is paved wirh good intentions, that good intent must be guided by what is variously called practical wisdom or prudence.
This latter failure comes under the heading of vincible ignorance, aka the moral obligation to know better. Voltaire famously wrote that those who can make you believe absurditiescan make you believe atrocities.
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Denying nationalism is evil? Why? Because it violates the principle of subsidiarity, of Home Rule, of letting people choose their own government in the most local possible unit, appropriate to the level of control–and of shared values and interests.
Hiding behind nationalism to excuse massively evil acts is also wrong. Borrowing C.S.Lewis’s simile about individuals (Mere Christianity, IIRC) a flotilla of ships must maintain their proper formation, and must maintain the internal integrity of each vessel. Nations should not micromanage each other’s affairs, but should speak out, and in extremis act, when other nations turn to evil. (And such actions should be guided by prudence and limited, where possible, by the danger of greater harms through action.)
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Bravo!
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Well said.
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The Reader notes that while US and other Western nationalism is bad, our media believes it is just fine coming from China.
“Yeah, just a remarkable sight to see here in Beijing. China very much flexing its military muscle, with the latest generation of ballistic missiles and drones in a carefully choreographed parade designed to show its patriotism and power,” Clennett boasted to co-host Michael Strahan ahead of the video portion of her report.
https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/nicholas-fondacaro/2025/09/03/abc-gets-hot-and-bothered-chinas-show-patriotism-and-power
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As Driscoll over on Insty notes, of course the j-skool reporterette would say good things about the parade sitting right there in front of Disney’s real CEO.
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Anyone else spot this gem over in PJ Media?
The CCP’s Cultural Weapon: Movies Built to Shape Obedience, Not Freedom – PJ Media
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Now compare ‘n’ contrast a typical historical presentation by “mainstream media” (not that there was much of any other kind back in those days) of a standard-issue Soviet May Day Parade in Red Square in Moscow, with all the goose-stepping troops and tanks and missiles, missiles, missiles.
It’s almost as if today’s (more blatantly, if perhaps not more thoroughly) captured ‘media’ have all somehow completely forgotten that Red China is still a Communist dictatorship, ruled from the top down and Peking outwards with an iron fist (exactly as displayed above). Or else, have simply all come over suddenly somehow to the idea that’s now a good thing…
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((this comment was supposed to be a reply to comment above, see:))
The Reader notes that while US and other Western nationalism is bad… etc.
((WPDE in aeternam))
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“Suddenly”. The Reader believes the only sudden thing about the media believing China (and before that the Soviet Union) were good things is how blatant they have become in the last few years.
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Teufung watch, southern Denmark.
https://redstate.com/streiff/2025/09/03/mystery-abounds-as-six-right-wing-german-candidates-die-of-natural-causes-just-before-an-election-n2193533
I don’t have an opinion on actuarial probabilities in that population, and in those age cohorts.
Having an opinion would require thought on my part.
I’d kinda been discounting stability concerns in the country in question as not serious, while also acknowledging that the elites have been involved in some serious magical thinking.
Hmm.
Bit over two and a half years of the Soviet Paratrooper’s three hour tour.
Suppose Putin trusted Democrat and European assessments of Trump, and then found that they were drastically wrong for his purposes. After Jinping Xi, Putin is the murderous wackjob world leader I most suspect of having the means. I mean, could be excited youth randomly knifing old men, but if there were a statistically unusual cluster, it would possibly be someone already psychologically practiced in justifying that sort of act.
I’m clearly too silly to do anything productive, and am speculating instead.
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The count is up to seven. The PTB are claiming all seven are from natural causes or pre-existing con- ditions, nothing to see here, move along. But what else would they say?
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What, no suicides? They’re not even trying! 😲
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One suicide, I heard.
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Deutsche-Arkanicides, anyone? Except of course, here it’s simply “pure coincidence.”
It would be very interesting if someone (other than me) did a simple statistical study, to see where on the scale from “yeah, actually could be” to “less likely than being struck by lightning the minute you win the Multi Skillions Jackpot” this kind of event actually falls. (One could “bootstrap” from publically-available data of Germany’s active candidates just dropping dead, say over the past 30 years or so. Then again… how many of those candidates actually took the Covidiotic Clotshots? That seems to be correlated with excess “surprise” sudden deaths, ever since.)
Not going to be as much a deterrent as some might hope. Lots of people remember Germany as the country of Adolph Hitler, and assorted henchmen. But it’s also the country of the White Rose Society, so don’t discount the (occasionally mad) bravery of freedom-loving German patriots…
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Yeah.
One possible is that increased amounts of socialized medicine has increased the death rate.
Another is the hypothesis that the vaccines weren’t, but since it is Germany they may have used a different process or tech.
Third, tail end of summer, and they may not build HVAC there for keeping old people alive.
Fourth, a mildly abusive but not outright violent level of police harassment could stress people whose health is marginal.
I don’t think I trusted my stats analysis today for beans.
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Remember, Germany is still the land of the Stasi. They’re going to be another fifty years trying to make the East Germans into real human beings, if they succeed at all, and having to deal with Muslim invaders just makes that harder. Who’s surprised that Stasis Stasi?
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The one thing I have heard from no one is of any other candidates dying.
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I will believe Europe is heading towards something better when they start protecting their daughters instead of sacrificing them to the barbarians.
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The problem is that in pre-1945 Europe, being a minority in a nation infected with nationalism was often No Damn Fun. The Italians and Greeks both had linguistic minorities (Greek-dialect speakers and German speakers in Italy, Romance-language speakers and Slavic-dialect speakers in Greece) and “encouraged” them to assimilate by making their lives as unendurable as they could if they didn’t. Beatings and large doses of castor oil were by no means off the table, or so I am informed.
Same went for religious minorities. Protestants in Eire and Catholics in Ulster were both treated like dung, and non-Catholics could find life in places like Poland less than pleasant.
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>Because their sins did not arise from their nationalism.
Nationalism was the sin. We didn’t care about the socialism, racism, or mass killing. We fought them to make the world safe for globalist Bolshevism.
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TBF they were killing people in batch lots. Even FDR wasn’t doing that. So, please stop with the whitewashing Hitler.
And both Russians and Germans were internationalists in the same way. They both wanted to take over every other nation and erase their identities.
So, kindly put that in your pipe and smoke it. I believe you left your pipe where the sun don’t shine.
Pardon me for being blunt but there’s a level of bullshit I won’t entertain.
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Horseshit of the purest ray serene. It was Stalin’s Russian socialism vs Hitler’s German socialism. Nothing more than two street gangs on a national scale.
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They both wanted global power. Thank you Steve.
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Not necessarily The Best Ever™, but the best for me and mine. I’d call it a belief in, and allegiance to, “among the Powers of the Earth, that Separate and Equal Station to which the laws of Nature, and of Nature’s God, entitle” the land I call my Home.
That’s why most nationalist Americans have no problem with Milei and his Argentine nationalism, nor Netanjahu’s Israeli nationalism (“Zionism”), singer Lee Kernaghan being proudly Aussie, Conor McGregor’s Irish nationalism, nor Cardinal Sarah’s pride in Guinea.
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Hitler was a teetotaller and a vegetarian, and became a non-smoker after proclaiming himself Fuhrer. (*) He also ordered the creation of, if not the first, then one of the first national health programs, including screenings for cancer and tuberculosis, as well as adopting that fancy new British “eugenics” as a matter of national healthcare policy.
From existing records, he only slept a few hours a night, and when on a roll during wartime, he used methamphetamine and cocaine to stay awake even longer. (legally prescribed and administered by his personal physician)
Add in the anti-Semitism, which seems to be a big thing in liberal/progressive circles now, and it looks like he should be their role model instead of a bad guy.
(*) he initially tried to ban smoking completely, but even the power of the Fuhrer was not absolute, not with a whole nation of tobacco addicts.
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