A topic that gets little attention but is probably at the core of what is going on in the West is the collapse of the intellectual Left. Not so long ago, at least for men my age, you really could not be an intellectual unless you embraced the economics of the Left, which meant some form of socialism. Even intellectuals well outside political-economy would make clear they were fine with some form of socialism.
It’s how, for example, you could be a good liberal, like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and also a critic of what we now call multiculturalism. The Left in the West started with economics as the core of the ideology. There was simply no way to be a man of the Left and not embrace some form of economic socialism. It was the intellectual engine of the Left. It provided the goals and most of the justification for the great liberal project.
The collapse of the Soviet Union put a stake in the heart of socialism. The stagnation of the 70’s in the West did a lot to discredit socialism. The economic liberalization of the 80’s and subsequent economic boom had socialism on the ropes, but the collapse of the Soviets killed intellectual socialism forever. It still staggers on in the domestic policies of Western countries, but that’s just cultural inertia.
Progressives no longer have a coherent economic ideology. They have accepted global capitalism without thinking much about it. Many of them come close to arguing that economics is no longer in the domain of politics. Instead, it should be left to supra-national organizations like central banks and global trade organizations. The EU is the most obvious example.
Technocratic managerialism has absorbed the political and intellectual Left like an anaconda swallowing a small animal. Through the outlines of the creatures skin, we can still make out Marx, Engels, the old FDR coalition, the Fabians and so on, but each passing year it is more difficult to detect them. What’s left of political-economy is a debate over who has the better spreadsheet skills.
Progressives used to think they were on the side of the angels, because they wanted to bring economic prosperity to the masses. The central argument of the Left from Rousseau until the early 90’s was that the correct economic arrangements would result in surplus and prosperity. The math was therefore simple. The rich had too much and the poor too little so polices that addressed that imbalance were a moral duty of the Progressive.
The collapse of the Soviet Union took with it the economic arguments of the Left. If market capitalism was able to dominate the premier socialist enterprise, it was no longer possible to argue for socialism. Not only that, but the opening of the Soviet Block also revealed the true horrors of socialism. They even managed to rape the very earth on which they stood. Chernobyl, in many respects, came to symbolize the idiocy of socialism.
The problem for the Left was that the road to salvation could no longer run through the economics department. What was the point of massive government intervention in the lives of citizens if economic equality was no longer a legitimate goal? That’s when they lurched into identity politics. Salvation was now about making sure the black guy or the lesbian felt wanted.
The problem here is no serious man of science accepts the claims of the social justice warriors. That’s why the Left is now just a collection of fashion statements. It has no intellectual underpinning. It makes no claims to transcendent truth. It’s just a bunch of people, who think they can gain salvation by harassing other people. Modern liberalism is a cargo cult with no real point beyond salving the emotional wounds of the adherents.
That’s why Bernie Sanders is such a threat to Hillary Clinton. Free stuff from your neighbor is a terrible idea, but at least it is an idea. If you are a young person loaded down with college debt, debt relief sounds pretty good compared to Clinton’s weird howling about transgendered rights. Something always sounds better than nothing, even when that something is just a museum piece brought out of mothballs by a guy who looks like a character from another century.
That said, nuts and bolts commies like Sanders are seen as a threat to the boys and girls running the Cult of Modern Liberalism, because he exposes the core problem of their new religion. If the people start caring about material stuff again, they may not be willing to sign off on the cultural suicide that promises salvation. If politics is once again about material prosperity, the Left has nothing to contribute. That makes old school commies like Bernie dangerous.
The quest to invite the world into Western countries is in many respects an attempt to create a new victim class the Left can defend. In a world where the poor are fat and live long lives, being the champion of the little guy is not so glamorous. When the oppressed have their own cable channels and control the national culture, even the fanatic has a tough time feeling heroic on their behalf.
That I think is what lies at the heart of the open borders fanaticism. Angela Merkel and her coreligionists are inviting the Muslims in so they can be victims in need of protection. It’s Mother Theresa having run out of lepers giving the village a plague so she can tend to them. It’s Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Instead of being a nurse that poisons her patients, Merkel is a politician, who poisons her country so she can cure it.
That’s why guys like Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK are a symptom. The intellectual Left has collapsed. What’s left is the spiritual trappings that have nothing to offer other than short term spiritual relief to the adherent. While there is always a market for crackpot religions and suicide cults, you cannot build a large scale political movement on them. Bernie Sanders is the ghost of socialism past, warning the present they are headed for destruction.
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Haven’t read all the comments, but I thought this was a pretty brilliant analysis of our current situation. Only thing missing: what do we do immediately to stave off more dissolution and build a better foundation for the future? I mean, besides not voting for Sanders or Clinton and not voting for Trump, thereby losing our minds in a different direction. This was a great big picture analysis. People who retain their sanity and humanity need to be banding together and taking some kind of effective political action because something will come into the void. I doubt it will be benign. (As I write this, I’m thinking, Trump is, for the mean time, filling the void.)
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I have difficulty with the thesis of this post. The reason there is no longer an “intellectual left” making the case for socialism is that, contrary to the assertion in this post, the socialists won. There’s no one for the “intellectual left” to debate over socialism anymore because all mainstream conservatives who used to form the “intellectual right” now accept without question the central premise of socialism, i.e., that the proper role of government is to redistribute wealth from the rich and middle class to the lower class.
Virtually every meaningful market in America has been socialized. A baby born in America today is born in a health insurance market that has been socialized by Obamacare. (If the baby is black there is a 70% chance that the mother is on welfare and the taxpayers picked up all expenses for the birth.) The baby will live in a housing market that has been socialized by Fannie/Freddie’s complete dominance of the mortgage market and a massive HUD bureaucracy that subsidizes housing costs for the “poor.” The baby will eat food subsidized by agricultural programs and food assistance programs. K-12 education–completely free. College tuition at public universities is subsidized by taxpayers; student loans and grants widely available and subsidized by taxpayers.
Upon graduating from college with a useless degree in SJW studies he/she will either slouch into the ever-expanding public sector and/or service sector, whereupon his/her loans may be forgiven after 20 years of minimal payments. If completely unemployable, he/she goes on the dole. By contrast if he/she graduates from college with a marketable skill set, enters the work force, and establishes a solid career in a high-paying field, he/she is escorted into a tax system which will consume approximately 50% of his/her income in order to pay for all this government largess.
This is the state of America in 2016 ,and it is due in no small part to the complicity of “conservative” Republicans. As you have stated in previous posts, the role of the “intellectual right” in America has been to rearrange commas in the tax code. There is no longer any serious intellectual opposition to the fundamental premise of socialism.
@ Guest – This isn’t an American problem, it’s a western world problem. American, and in some regards, much of Europe, has deindustrialized and automated much of what use to be real paying jobs. No industry, no jobs. And unlike our fathers who could leave high school and work at GM or VW, those jobs simply don’t exist today. Just look at the automated Amazon warehouse…mostly robots, very few people.
It’s not socialism, it’s unemployment and lack of jobs. It’s why Spain has thousands of unemployed young graduate engineers who simply can’t find work in Europe despite our new borderless EU. It’s why British students are also having trouble finding work in their own country and why many German grads have left for China or India. On the flip side, the jobs that are offered are low paying, part time and often with limited benefits.
At the end of the day, you have to ask yourself, are you willing to let people starve in the streets and live in card board boxes as they do in Mexican border towns? Are you okay with the fact it could happen to your own children in today’s economy as the demands for work decline and people simply can’t make a living? No civilized society is okay with the slums of Rio or Mumbai, especially when it could happen in your own back yard.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe in handing out free money for nothing either especially with German taxes around 20% for the average middle class working family of four. There are plenty of streets to be swept, garbage along the highways to collect. Work that these people could, and should, be required to do in exchange for social benefits. I don’t want to see prison inmates picking up garbage, they should be doing hard time. Let the social welfare people do that work. It’s a fair exchange of pay for labor that would be a win-win for everyone and benefits all of society. We already pay them a boat load of money in benefits, so why shouldn’t we expect something in return? It’s just a matter of people, and politicians, having the guts to implement these sorts of laws.
Karl, I have followed your posts with interest, largely because for all the bad blood between the UK and Germany we still feel closer to your world than to say France or the Med countries. After all, the House of Windsor is German in origin and for all the devaluing of the monarchy (embodied by Elizabeth currently, though less so Charles the Nut should he ever get the throne) it counts for a lot still.
One small point I would make here, allied to the things you have said: I have a distant relative through marriage who is Jewish. She lives in London and works in the Arts business. She is good at what she does and makes a decent living at doing things that wouldn’t exist say when I began my working life fifty years ago. It might back then have been a sort of paying hobby rather than career, but that is how it is now.
Yet, for all that capitalism has brought her (and her family) this woman is a staunch supporter of rampant socialism, going on marches to condemn the ‘Nasty Tories’ and holding up signs saying ‘welcome refugees.’
The curious thing that she cannot, or will not see, is that this open welcome will turn against her sooner or later. Her work may not be threatened immediately by hordes of immigrants from muslim countries (indeed some of her work was with promoting refugees through popular art), but they surely see her as a problem. She may not have noticed but not only so a lot of muslims not particularly like the west and with that any women who are independent, but they dislike Jewish people even more.
But trying to talk to her about it is impossible. She is convinced these new arrivals are oppressed and bring enormous benefits to the nation, usually insisting that surveys ‘prove’ these unskilled, unwilling-to-integrate people take less out of the benefit system than the average Brit. She also posted on her Facebook page a poster of an immigrant who was a brain surgeon, helping to maintain the illusion that the west is entirely benefitting from all these newcomers. She doesn’t, however, see the open abuse of vulnerable young women by these newcomers (almost all of who have no ability or interest in being surgeon) in the UK’s less attractive cities and towns. To her it that reality is a myth, to be shouted down.
I just hope her shouts of outrage about people being ‘suppressed’ doesn’t turn into cries for help in a world where help may not come quickly.
@ Uker – I suspect ancient Germanic blood runs through the veins of many northern Europeans. Germanic tribes that split off and headed north to become Danes and Swedes wasted no time in building ships and make raids and settling your lands, including England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Here in Germany, tribes could farm and had all the resources they needed, so wandering around was unnecessary. I suspect you and I, and many of our fellow countrymen, can trace our roots to a common ancestor. 🙂
With regards to your Jewish friend, here’s part of a very interesting perspective on American Jews and why they are pro liberal and socialist. This may shed some light on the root cause of the attitude your friend seems to display, which may well work against her in the long run. The other thing to keep in mind is that there were many German Jews that never thought anything would happen to them in late1930’s. They served in WW1, they were good citizens, good Germans, they had worked hard to rebuild the country and the economy they were honest decent people – so why would anyone want to harm them? We all know how that turned out and I agree with you, there needs to come a time when you say, “No more!”
To the article –
“The Torah says, many times, that our experience of oppression is meant to lead to ethical political action. “The stranger that dwells with you shall be to you as one born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers once in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34). “You shall not mistreat a stranger, nor oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 22:21) “You must open your hand to your poor and needy brother in your land… and you must remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt.” (Deuteronomy 15:11–15) And we remember, more recently, our Diaspora Jewish experiences, whether in the Holocaust or during times of anti-Semitism. Or, not too long ago, when we were disempowered peasants in Eastern Europe and new immigrants to America — just like the new immigrants (coming to America and Europe).”
http://forward.com/culture/153882/why-are-american-jews-so-liberal/
Yes, but this is why the Left is more dangerous today than ever before in the history of the U.S. You can argue with an intellectual position (say, heirloom Socialism a la Bernie), but not a batch of purely emotional propositions and demands.
To a person who is paranoid (in psychiatric terms), any event, act, or comment supplies further proof that the demented belief is correct. To the SJW, proof of victimization is everywhere. It can only be fought be destroying the victimizer (Western civilization, white people). There is no middle ground, no possible compromise.
The new, New Left — Operation Permanent Indignation — must be either surrendered to (which is what our culture has mostly done so far) or suppressed. I don’t like the idea of suppressing any political brand, however repulsive. But the all-emotional Left leaves no other option.
@ Elbert Marx – I suspect what’s new in today’s news regarding the stories about American campuses will pass soon enough. America is way more resilient than a bunch of winey mouthy college students pissing and moaning about their emotional struggles. Ask yourself, does anyone really care about these people? No, they don’t. Does America care when their soldiers, who volunteered, return from the middle east? Yes, they do. And guess which one gets hired; the whiney student from Yale or the ex-Sergeant who finished an online degree while deployed? I think we all know the answer.
These kids are the same idiots from 50-years ago who chanted anti-Viet Nam slogans and showed disrespect towards soldiers returning from the war. The same bunch who smoked pot, chanted “down with the man” and ended up working at the local gas station after graduation. These are the exact same bunch of liberal arts majors with no real future except blogging, keeping up their Facebook pages and will most likely end up working a part time job at Wal-Mart while living in their parents basement.
Am I the only one that’s noticed the “whiney brown” students don’t include Chinese, Indian, Mexicans or pure African foreign students who actually appreciate an education? And that the sympathetic whites are the same liberal teachers who can’t get real jobs? That’s because serious students are way too busy at the library, or in the science labs, studying real subjects, like engineering, math, physics or pre-med and don’t have time for this nonsense.
These childish whiners and moaners will fall to the way side and be so much of yesterdays news soon enough. They are not the true representation of what America is all about. They are nothing more than the fringe that’s getting some attention. It’s what they grew up with, it’s what they know – bitch and moan and mommy comes running. So let them enjoy their pitiful moments of fame while the media makes a big deal about nothing.
If these colleges and universities are going to self implode, so be it. Every commodity in a free market has its day; the housing bubble, the dot com bubble and now the university bubble. Universities which prove themselves to have the least value will simply go away like buggy whips and free AOL subscriptions especially when businesses decide not to hire their graduates.
Matthew 3:12 – “He is ready to separate the chaff from the wheat with his winnowing fork. Then he will clean up the threshing area, gathering the wheat into his barn but burning the chaff with never-ending fire.”
Same basic concept applies to these students today as it applied to the Pharisees 2,000 years ago.
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A disagreement- they are very employable.
They are future government employees in training. The New Left is firming the ranks.
They are interns to the Red Guard Brigades, demonstrating Party loyalty.
It’s their beginning portfolio of job experience.
@ Alzaebo – Fair point. I hadn’t considered those career fields. Actually, with a liberal arts degree, they’d probably be over qualified. At least if they’re anything like the government employees we have here.
The Merkel insight is right on, and you saw it here first.
Something HUUUGe is going to happen in the next year or so. Cultural virtue signalling will look as childish as it actually is when things really hit the fan.. The Black Swans have hatched and are fledging.
John Mauldin has a free daily rumination that has some interesting observations today which started by looking at negative interest rates.
“Some think the federal government is missing a chance to borrow gobs of money at super-attractive interest rates.
Kocherlakota would like to see the Treasury issue as much paper as it takes to drive real rates back above zero. He would use the borrowed money to repair our rickety infrastructure and to stimulate the economy.
It is an appealing idea – in theory. In reality, I have no faith that our political class would spend the cash wisely. More likely, Washington politicians would collude to distribute the money to their cronies, who would build useless highways and bridges to nowhere. The taxpayers would end up stuck with more debt, and our infrastructure would be little better than it is nowThe fact that this is a “monumentally” bad idea doesn’t mean it will never happen. There’s an excellent chance it will happen. Yellen and the Fed are clearly looking in that direction.”
and on the HUUUGE governmental entities in our present world:
“Normally, when a sovereign country gets into financial trouble (generally because of too much debt), it will devalue its currency so that the prices of products it imports go up and labor costs and the prices of products it sells abroad go down. But since Greece could not devalue its currency (the euro), it was essentially forced to allow its labor costs to fall drastically. Since it is basically impossible to go to everyone in Greece and say, “You need to take a 25% cut in your pay, even though the prices of everything you’ll be buying will still be in euros,” the real world simply produced massive Greek unemployment – precisely what you would expect in a deflationary depression. Greece will likely continue to suffer for a very long time, whereas if the Greeks had left the euro, defaulted on their debts, and devalued their currency, they would likely be enjoying a quite robust recovery.”
I’m not personally familiar with Greece or Greeks, but from what I read they are a pretty lazy group. Is anything going to fix that?
“The EU is the most obvious example”. I read that quickly and thought you used the word
odious instead of obvious which would have been more appropriate.
The political doctrine of “tax the rich” is great while the taxed remain rich. Once they have been taxed to the point they haven’t got anything left, there is far less money coming in for the people organising the taxing. When that happens the tax-makers have to lower their aim of taxation, at which point they turn to both the old-poor and the newly-poor alike, because the need for taxation does not go away with supposed “equality.”
But don’t tell socialists that. It upsets them to realise that they haven’t got a clue.
As (I believe) Churchill said, it works until you run out of other people’s money. At that point the police state really kicks into high gear.
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Are you not aware that Corbyn is an open-borders nut? : ) He’s crazy about it. He doesn’t even pretend to be sane about open borders. In that sense he’s quite different from Bernie. Though they’re both socialist nutcases from the fringes.
Also, for students, transgender ‘rights’ are a Something to Believe In. It may be unhinged, but it’s Something.
Putting frosting on a turd, it’s still a turd.
How remarkable, even revolutionary, it would be if a politician from either party actually proposed policies to assist ordinary people to become both prosperous and useful.
Why is there any reason why the political class is required to give their blessing for what are primal rights of all men to begin with?
Those components of liberty, prosperity and happiness only require unfettered self determination.
Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear enough. The political class has spent the better part of fifty years creating ever more elaborate burdens on the “primal rights of men” and impediments to their exercise. I just thought it might be refreshing, for a change, to have a political class that actually espoused and encouraged those “primal rights” in those they ostensibly rule, and nurture the energies and common sense of ordinary men and women rather than hinder them. This would, to a large measure, require the political class to abolish itself, or at least to radically transform its current preoccupations – neither of which is likely.
“Instead of being a nurse that poisons her patients, Merkel is a politician, who poisons her country so she can cure it.” Interesting perspective, but highly unlikely since the problem isn’t one she could cure if she wanted to. There’s simply no way she’s going to suddenly become the “Retter von Deutschland” (Savior of Germany) in order to save the CDU party. The Bavarians are already challenging the legality of her decisions in constitutional court, and other states may join in.
I would suggest that if you look back in Frau Merkle’s background, it’s simply her upbringing kicking in; a Christian do-gooder father, but with twist of East German hard-core socialism mixed in. The fact is she’s a 61-year old career woman who has never had a child of her own, so there’s no material instinct to kick in, no child so save, even at a political level.
When asking why would someone do this, one only need to look back at the formative years. President Obama even wrote a book about his; a self professed Kenyan, mentored on the white-hatred of Rev. Wright and pro-Communist agenda of his mixed race family. Did you really expect anything else from him? At least Angela was smart enough to get a PhD in physics, so she’s got the brain and logic power to rationalize her behavior and decisions. Unfortunately her formative years were a mix of the DDR schools and propaganda supported by a Lutheran father who was sympathetic to the communist regime. Not a great combination for a future politician. Like Obama, Frau Merkle ended up in a pro-western, pro-capitalistic, pro-democratic society; ideologies fundamentally opposite to what they grew up with.
No one really understands exactly what happened or why she made this 180-degree turn from her 2004 “multiculturalism has utterly failed” speech, but here’s a thought. Our pacified German military never played much of a role in the middle-east conflict either in direct or indirect support of coalition forces. As such, perhaps her true intentions were to at least provide genuine help to the Syrians that were caught in a horrible situation. Most Germans were mutually sympathetic and supported the idea of providing aid, rather than firepower.
Unfortunately the refugee policy was a text book example of good intentions paving a path to hell; poorly planned and executed, completely uncontrolled thus resulting in utter chaos as thousands crossed one border and then another. And when they arrived and things really turned ugly, it was quickly suppressed by the government and the media. Much like your own middle east intervention over the past 15-years, no one really understood the cultural or religious implications, nothing worked out as planned, lies were told, innocent people were hurt, and things have only gotten worse.
It’s not Munchhausen syndrome, it’s her Fallujah.
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Well done. The EU elites are preparing for, or trying to nudge towards, Silk Road Il (East Europe, the Turkic states, and Persia) and the expansion into Mediterranean Union (co-opting the Nile, the Levant, and Near East Gulf routes.)
I was heartened when I heard her say multiculturalism has failed. And when the migrant crisis became a tsunami, I heard her say Europe needs to unite in the face of this crisis and I took it to mean that Europe must act to stop this wave of immigration : ) Haha! I couldn’t believe that she actually means Europe must unite in letting them in!
Now, I’m pretty sure that everyone misunderstood what she meant when she said multiculturalism was a failure. She actually meant that Europeans must adapt to various Muslim customs (and vice versa) in order to create a uniting culture. I’m quite sure that’s what she means and it’s probably what she meant at the time. Of course these Muslim immigrants will not let go of Islamic norms but Europeans can be pressured to bridge the gap by adapting to Islamic mores and then to bridge the gap again and again. In Merkel’s mind there’s probably a happy median, some happy middle-ground, but in practice this can only lead to ever-increasing Islamization and to actually stopping non-Muslims from living as they did in the past.
In other words she is a cultural national traitor.
You’re spot-on. As to what comes next, well…. ther’s a political movement that has plenty of ideas, with science!(add as many !s as you feel it needs) to back them. It gives every True Believer a crusade to join (and spiffy Party uniforms and armbands with which to virtue-signal). And it assures a decent level of material prosperity, rising as one’s rank in the Party rises. Best of all, its ideas are so old they look new again — witness all the doofus college kids who think Bernie’s warmed over Eugene V. Debs act is a radical innovation. Old left and old right teaming up against what they consider internationalist parasites…. yep, antidisestablishmentarianism has it all.
” The math was therefore simple. The rich had too much and the poor too little so polices that addressed that imbalance were a moral duty of the Progressive.”
I’d love to buy this, but I meet too many Progressives that still bitterly cling to the above formula, and therefore are (at least in degree), economic socialists who thrive on economic class warfare.
Bernie is just a Socialist Jew, he is like the American Leon Blum but we’re not going to be luck in seeing him whiskied to a German concetration camp.
@ Magical gringo – The Jews were the intellectuals, bankers and industrialists, artists, musicians and basically hard working, honest people who made a positive contribution to Germany and Europe. Unlike the influx of Islamists and their pure hatred of all things non-Muslim we have here today.
The Nazi’s did more than wipe out 6,000,000 people, they obliterated an entire generation of great minds and thinkers and stole humanity from the rest of the world. Thankfully many Jews made it to America (Albert Einstein, Béla Bartok, Raphael Lemkin are just a few) where they could flourish away from that brutal regime. Please…I would appreciate it if you would differentiate Germans from Nazis; the words are not synonymous.. Danke! 🙂
The problem with the world’s highest IQ group is that half of them aren’t the patriotic, empathetic other half. I call them the Golden Calf faction, it goes all the way back.
Their capability makes them dangerous, and the good guys get lumped in with the blame.
Physician, heal thyself!
Let’s just say I’d rather have 1,000,000 Jews trying to come here than that same number (and more) of Muslims. Just look at the state of Israel; in 1948 they took a desert and in less than a generation, turned it into a garden. Meanwhile, their neighbors have yet to get over their envy and hatred of people who know how to work and make things better for themselves and those around them. You need only look up the number of patents and inventions coming out of Israel vs. those from their neighboring countries. Seriously, who would you really want for a neighbor? Pretty simple choice.
Karl, swallow the red pill. Six million? Hmmm. People over here are waking up and figuring out we’ve been sold a load of bullshit. Everybody forgets that both Germany AND the Soviets invaded Poland– and nobody seems to consider that between those two, America might have picked the wrong side. Cultural Marxism and Internationalism/Globalism, (aka New World Order, aka Global Technocracy) are crushing western civilization. One wonders how things might be different if Stalin had been defeated. Stalin’s spies in Washington DC and Hollywood would have been orphaned, and maybe the Cultural Marxists would have been stopped in their tracks. We’ll never know.
The German people need to start taking their own side again. Maybe that starts by questioning the stories you’ve been told for the last 70 years.
@ BB – There’s no question the numbers are higher, 6-million is just a number people know since it’s well published. What many don’t understand about the end of the war was the effect on the German psyche. We had been told we were the future leaders of the world, a thousand year Reich. And then it all came apart. The Americans didn’t just defeat the German army, we were a conquered people and occupied nation just like Japan. That didn’t happen in WW1. On top of that, Germany lost around 3-4 million working age males which is why if you look at old footage of people picking out bricks from the ruins of Dresden or Kassel, it’s mostly women doing the work. We are a nation of women, liberal women.
When you have a few minutes, go look up who the Defense Ministers are for Sweden, Norway, Netherlands & Germany. All your questions will be answered.
Them’s some good insights, Z. Establishmentarian conservatism is dying. Economic progressivism is dying. What’s next? De Codevilla’s country class (your dirt people) versus the ruling class (cloud people).
If I was the cloud people, I’d be shutting down the identitarian progressives fast. They’re stirring up the dirt people… politicizing them. If I was in the ruling class, I’d want my political shills out handing out Big Macs and tickets to Cirque de Soleil, not provoking the country class to buy guns and ammo.
Angello Codevilla’s piece is seminal and cautionary as you say, not very many reference it’s provincial premise.
Big Mac’s don’t stop ruling class psychopaths and other tyrants. And they are no substitute for liberty either. It is always left to the Dirt People to do the ugly dirty and nasty bloody work of balancing evil.
Inviting disaster to save themselves. So short-sighted, and the same as the Deep State grifters.
Nobody is working on the two great emergent problems of surplus: automation and the swelling horde of Southern Hemisphere savages.
Dude, don’t you get it? The bastards don’t give a shit about America, importing those savages is the final solution to the dirt people and bitter clingers. You think any of those illegals aliens care about rule of law or a constitutional republic? Rule of men is all they know, and if it’s a gravy train in America and nobody is shooting or bombing them, they are not going to be questing those running the show.
Excuse this southern hemisphere savage for tossing another shrimp on the barbie. 😉
You’re living proof that colonialism is the only thing that works!
(By the way, the second most popular talk radio show in the US is the Savage Nation- Michael Savage)
So we have Brits, Krauts and Aussies on here? Nice international exchange!
Diversity is our strength!
Couldn’t possibly be anything to do with the lowest common cultural/political denominator? The nasty dirty underlying bedrock precepts of cultural marxism?