When one era ends and another begins is always a hot topic for historians and academics, because history does not make it easy. The old staggers on for a long time, despite it having become pointless or exhausted. The new is not always ready to take center stage, so it is never clear as to when it started. It is Sorites Paradox. Just as we know there is a point where grains of sand eventually become a heap, we know one epoch gives way to another, but exactly when is impossible to say.
Of course, while you are in such a transition period, it is even more difficult to know when the old has finally receded into the past and when the new has begun. History is full of false starts and false transitions. Ideologues are always sure the great transition is right around the corner. For the people living through a transition, it just feels like a “great muddling through” for those aware of what’s happening. For the rest it is just the way things are, as they try to not to think about such things.
Whether we are in such a great transition is hard to know for certain, but people who think of such things are thinking about it. This paper on how NATO can adapt to the populist era is such an example. It is written by Jeff Giesea, someone who has been on the edges of populist politics in America. The focus on the paper in how NATO can adapt to the rise of populism in Europe in order to maintain itself and address some of the issues that give rise to populist movements.
NATO is a great example of why marking the end of one period and the start of the next is so difficult, especially for the people living through it. The senior administrative staff in NATO probably started their careers in the Cold War. Many of the senior political leaders in the West are still people who came of age in that era. NATO has already outlived the Cold War and now may be outliving the age of globalism. It is a legacy institution that still staggers on for no obvious reason.
That’s why they invest time and money thinking about how the institution can adapt to the new age, whatever one calls it. What started as a temporary alliance among Western nations to guard against Soviet aggression in Europe, is now a permanent part of the European landscape. It’s like a union job or a government contract. No one wants to see it end. The Red Army is long gone, but NATO remains ready for them if they ever reappear on the European Plain.
It is a good example of the problems of post-nationalism. NATO was always a national entity, designed to defend nations. In a world without borders, having a military organization built for defending borders makes little sense. Critics of the organization always point to the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the bigger problem for NATO is that it is rooted in the concept of sovereign nations. Each member contributes men, material, bases and money to maintain a joint military force.
In a world where European countries don’t have control of control over their own budgets and cannot mint their own coins, how can they possibly have an active voice in a military alliance? Italy, for example, has to get permission from Brussels to operate a new landfill or power plant. The EU regulates the acceptable size of bananas and how much can be spent on picking up dog droppings. Globalism reduced nations to dependents with no agency of their own.
NATO also underscores a hidden truth about globalism and that is it only exists because the American empire exists. NATO exist because America keeps it going. If America ever started acting like a real country again, it would abandon legacy entities like NATO, as they serve no national interest. The same is true about globalism. The EU has been allowed to flourish, because it enjoys American protection. Take that protection away and Europe returns to a continent of nations.
It’s also an example of how the people muddling through a transition period may be all wrong about what they are noticing. The conventional wisdom says the world is transitioning from nationalism to post-nationalism. Global entities will supplant nation states and global corporations will manage the global economy. These populist uprisings we see in the West are just rearguard actions by those who will not be part of the glorious multicultural global paradise that is tomorrow.
In reality, we may be living through the opposite. The Cold War era may have been the globalist era, dominated by two great democratic empires. On the one side was the democracy of communism. On the other was the democracy of natural rights. First the Soviet Empire collapsed and now the American Empire is receding. The flurry of cosmopolitan globalism is not a rearguard action, but more like the scavengers profiting from the end of that great epoch in Western history.
What is called populism today is simply the West waking up from the long slumber that was the great battle between two empires. Generations of Europeans sublimating national interests for a common defense are now waking up from that period to assert those interests again. In the US, regional and now racial interests that have long been suppressed are bubbling up to the surface. Just as NATO is an entity from a bygone era, cosmopolitan globalism is the echo of a bygone age.
For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!
Even normie is getting territorial where I live. Suddenly, in the last month, a lot of questioning the way things are being managed. Hearing ‘divisive’ language I haven’t heard since I was a kid. Masculinity reasserting itself. Exciting!
The thing these Globalists never get is that identity is based on commonality. The Globalists *seem* to have lots in common — Globohomo sure seems like a consistent set of values — but if you watch what they do and ignore what they say, it’s clear that Globohomoism is based on *competition*. They’re all bitchy cat ladies, always jockeying for status and stabbing each other in the back. In short, they hate each other. In my white pilled moments I’m confident they’ll collapse under the slightest pushback. They’ll have the same choice the Romano-Britons (etc.) had in the collapse of… Read more »
Globohomo are mean girls. Catty. Superficial friendships. Quick to dissolve when opportunity presents itself.
“Frenemies”
Great column.
I’ve always felt grateful to have been born in the age and society I am: I’ve seen a revolution first hand.
The old guard has no idea what’s coming for them; the internet changed the rules, and we’re only now starting to figure out what the new rules are.
I’ve been alive long enough to see (and muck through) a few revolutions. It’s interesting how time gives a bit of perspective, isn’t it? Downside – near absolutely none of the crap we’re dealing with today wasn’t done and dusted in the past, having to relearn old lessons is as costly as fighting the revolution; upside – these “revolutions” seem to be getting less and less bloody as decades go on.
I’ll second all of that, Felix, for all that I often kvetch about “Our Times.” The internet and cell communications have made it possible to have the best of both the low density rural and high density urban worlds, in many ways. The trick is in teaching our people how to use these advantages without being wrecked by their downsides (Faceberg dopamine sinks, Twitter rage, porn & butt-stuff, to name a few) As most probably already know, I’m not a Trad Luddite when it comes to tech. Of all the possible futures for Our Thing, I see being “fundy-Trad” as… Read more »
We lost a couple of our best soldiers in Afghanistan last week. I hear a lot of normies asking “why are we still there?” A decade ago it was just accepted, now some people at least seem to be waking up and asking “what’s in it for us” when it comes to global commitments.
Soon, instead of “thank you for your service”, rural people will begin to ask people in their community who enlist “What are you, stupid?”
A better question would be “Why aren’t you on the Southern border?”
@Bartleby
Yep, the invasion is on our southern border but our imperial military is deployed on literally the other side of the planet protecting the borders of imperial client states for the profit of globohomo elite.
Not so much. Rural folks know that so many job opportunities have been sucked from the rural parts, necessitating their kids finding employment and/or training where they can. An earlier example would be the many Irish who enlisted to serve in the Brit army. Employment for rural flks with a sense of shame is not optional, it is mandatory. And they have no solicitous urban champions to siphon training dollars and programs ot the hinterlands in the way they do in urban areas.
I think that joining the military can be useful for training someone who is smart but not particularly interested in college. I think the key is being careful about what kind of field you sign up for.
One son just started an electrical apprenticeship. He told me that out of 13 new apprentices, every one of them is a veteran. ( and white, if that matters to you)
And yet outsourcing manufacturing and importing the third world continues at record levels. It’s as if voting doesn’t matter.
Until that day happens, we will still be in Afghanistan.
“WeGottaFightThemOverThereSoWeDon’tHaveToFightThemOverHere” among flag-waving normie-cons is thankfully long gone. Even a lot of those guys don’t think we should be there, yet there’s no robust movement to bring the troops home, other than Gabbard talking about it. Even our prez can’t get them home.
When normies start the “we have to fight them over there…” bit, I say that if we wouldn’t let them come here, we wouldn’t need to fight them anywhere.
The only thing that allowed cosmopolitan globalism to gain the traction it did was the technology boom and easy capital. One just needs to look at money required to maintain the massive propaganda apparatus and use of soft power to realize what an unsustainable model it all is. As more and more lies need to be propagated and commissars need to be hired to oversee wrongthinkers, the cost of maintenance increases exponentially. Even AI is not going to be able to curb the cost. Our best hope is a hard recession where Capital gets tightened and normies actually feel the… Read more »
I’m fond of saying that populism is when people the ruling class don’t like pursue their own interests. And fascism is when those people win. We’re living in a world where someone who believed what, say, congressman Sonny Bono believed, would be considered an extremist: “It’s illegal immigration. It’s illegal. Enforce the law.” -Congressman Sonny Bono, California’s 44th District.
The cure for fascism is almost always more fascism.:
https://orthosphere.wordpress.com/2017/01/27/the-cure-for-fascism-is-almost-always-more-fascism/
Non-whites are not celebrating globalism, they are celebrating victory over whites.
The Superbowl halftime show was a celebration of Latino hegemony over white lands:”The Laraza (race) is great”. The Academy Awards celebrated Blacks, Blacks, Blacks, Jews, Jews, Jews, Latinos and Koreans. Normal white guys are geriatrics or more than half way to being geriatrics. Any white guy under 50 is probably gay or a fellow white.
When the tide turns let’s move Hollywood to Peoria.
Oy vey goyim, you‘re reaching lampshade levels of knowing!
Just force Hollywood to move to Israel so it’s plainly obvious who is pulling the strings.
Peoria will just be filled to bursting with Somalis and Latrinos.
You’re going to have to move it to Antarctica.
Let’s move Hollywood to Jerusalem.
Along with the Cold War, the horrors of WWI and WWII made Western Europeans – especially Germans – willing to give up their national identity for globalism. In the states, 24/7 propaganda plus our history of successfully blending different European tribes into generally one people (although with definite regional differences) made American whites believe globalism. (It also didn’t hurt that we led that globalism.) But the Cold War and the Great Wars are finally fading into history. For my kids, WWI and WWII might as well be Rome vs Carthage. They can’t even understand the Cold War because nothing really… Read more »
Nature will reassert herself against the forces of GloboSchlomo. Over the weekend, looking at videos shared far and wide, among them was AOC and her white boyfriend lecturing to us white people how we’re racist and how we need to always work on combatting racism. He sounded effeminate and weak and the video was roundly ridiculed. Another video showed a white couple kissing the boots of several black guys in public. Again, extremely weak and pathetic. The reply tweets were unanimous in their disgust. While videos like this, along with the ubiquitous articles explaining how whites “need to do better,”… Read more »
There was a story going around a week or so ago about how evil Orange Man made some people in the Pentagon very sad and a female soldier cry by saying they were a bunch of dopes and babies who could not justify why NATO even exists. Brave Rex Tillerson went on to explain how vital NATA was to the world order and all the things his imagination could come up with that could go wrong from ignoring NATO and they weren’t dopes and babies, but very brave heroes. That all the things that could go wrong in the world… Read more »
Odd, that you connect Rex Tillerson and “status quo” in the same comment. Too bad Tillerson did not fight for the Boy Scouts as he fights for NATO. Rex Tillerson single-handedly sold the BSA out to the homo’s *and* 3rd wave Feminists! Let no one forget when mentioning his name.
The European evolutionary transition is more fundamental. Once upon a time, European nations were in perpetual war with each other over many centuries. This cauldron of conflict was natural selection in hyper-drive. Survival of the fittest honed the European DNA into hard men with supreme robustness and a talent for overcoming hardship. Those peoples were built by selection to prevail or die. But that mind, body, and spirit is now in sharp decline. And it is that transition that should worry everyone.
To be fair to the Euros, I think the double whopper of WW1 and 2 knocked them on their ass in a way no one can quite recover from.
Yeah I think you might have missed the boat there, Z. NATO isn’t obsolete, the EU is. Britain just opted out, and I am betting Italy is next. In one of there smaller towns, all the black migrants were rounded up and kicked out. Front end loaders went in and scooped up all the trash, followed by street sweepers and hose trucks… and 48 hours later all vestiges of Africa was gone and the place was white again. The fags at The Guardian were incensed, because it looks like most of those migrants will be getting sent back. More of… Read more »
I think the problem with NATO is that the US is part of it and as Z-man noted backs up a phony alliance of worthless members with pledge of war support and nuclear retaliation should a member state be attacked. This “guarantee” inevitably produces shirkers. US gains nothing—except a screen to claim “global” support for its adventurism overseas and access to military bases within NATO states. But as has been mentioned, no ones buying that BS anymore. We need to get out of NATO and work out any future arrangements on a one to one basis with countries as we… Read more »
The countries of the EU are Britain’s largest export market. If they wish to continue selling in these markets they’ll have to continue manufacturing to EU regulations/standards. I don’t see much changing on that front. The gov’t has already said no annual caps or limits on immigration (which I suspect was a major concern of the people who voted to leave.) So things on that front could potentially get worse, rather than better. Britain never adopted the Euro (unlike Italy) so they don’t have that mess to sort out.
Boris has already said that such restrictions on National Sovereignty as you note above will not be allowed in any trade deal. So there will be no trade deal that allows unregulated migration into the U.K. What you miss here is that the U.K. 1) voted for Brexit (twice) exactly upon such matters and any government acceding to such will collapse immediately—as did the last one, and 2) trade works two ways (or it would be called tribute). The EU has an important an interest in trade with the U.K. as does the U.K. One also fails to note that… Read more »
What does NATO allegedly not being obsolete have to do with third-world invaders?
The Fulda Gap is still there just waiting for someone to use it!
I just peed my pants laughing. Made my day.
“History is full of false starts and false transitions.” The Jews who revolted against Rome in 66-73 AD thought they had a chance in hell because the empire was unstable due to internal competition between ruling elites (crisis of legitimacy). It was widely viewed by regional client aristocracies that the collapse of the empire or at least degraded ability to enforce imperial will on the periphery (where lay Judea) was not inconceivable. Instability in Roman imperial governance culminated in the Year of the Four Emperors which ended with Vespasian in charge. He ruthlessly reorganized the empire putting it on firm… Read more »
My suspicion wrt legionnaires was that, as was usually the case with farming in ancient times, there was always a shortage of land to inherit and farm from generation to generation. The legions were a good way to survive if you were a second or third son—and retire with a promise of land—if you could handle the rigors of the trade. Plus there was a promise of a share of the booty should you be successful. Not entirely different from our 20 year, 50% pension and free medical care for life for GI’s. But I’m not educated in such ancient… Read more »
This era that is ending feels like we are just giving up. The West isn’t being conquered by a technologically or militarily superior foe, it just gave up trying. In Douglas Murray’s excellent book, The Strange Death Of Europe, he writes: “Europe today has little desire to reproduce itself, fight for itself or even take its own side in an argument.” That is largely true of people of European descent in America, aka Americans. I probably won’t live long enough to see an honest epitaph of Western civilization, but on the other hand there might not be anyone left that… Read more »
It ain’t over. Most Americans and Europeans live very comfortable lives as a result of Industrial Revolution affluence. No one is going to rock the boat until things get desperate and people are genuinely hungry and scared. When things get real, the old ways (founded in our DNA) will resurface. May you live in interesting times.
Difficult to see which way the wind is blowing. Dems imploding and the president’s popularity rising is encouraging. Unfortunately gun grabbers in Virginia are unrelenting. Now Rhode Island and even Arizona of all places have introduced draconian gun legislation. And of course the push to a cashless society indicates the globalist are still going full steam ahead with their evil plan. On the bright side well-to-do white’s do seem to be having more children. Sadly the less well-to-do white’s can’t afford children. Their too busy paying taxes for all the filthy savages invading the country. Television is unwatchable as they… Read more »
Arizona may have the biggest elite-prole disconnect in the whole country. I haven’t met too many AZ sh*tlibs so my sample is skewed. Every Zonie I meed is a raging Boomerwaffen anti-Mexican gun owner. I must be missing the college towns, but even the AZ State guys I know tend to be based.
We will know it is truly upon us when times get hungry, violent, and terrifically uncertain. The ruling class will no longer be able to paper over social fractures and pretend we are all just good product consumers under the skin.
“The ruling class will no longer be able to paper over social fractures …”
Fiat currency enabling deficit spending on gibs to mollify diversity keep the globohomo show on the air. It is one node of civilizational control that might be successfully attacked.
Z casts useful light on the question of “post-nationalism.” We’re post-American in the sense that what we thought of as the American nation has turned out very different from the brochure, but nationalism is just the expression of natural human organization and affinity. We can”t be “post-national” any more than we can be “post-human.” But we can tweak a lot of the parameters if we realize the forces at work. This is what Faye was getting at with “archaeo-futurism” – we keep what’s either worth keeping or simply can’t be discarded (e.g. what stems from human nature) and replace what’s… Read more »
This is a staggering fact from that paper: “In Canada, more than 20% of the population is foreign-born, the highest proportion among G8 countries.”
We’re at about 18% in the US, not counting the 50 million illegals.
In the not too distant future, we’ll finally get to see George W. Bush’s statement “America is a nation of ideas.” incinerate into an ash heap. This one statement encapsulates that last 60 years of American life. What if the ideas abruptly change? Suddenly the country vanishes itself, like a thought bubble that bursts. I don’t see a military dictatorship taking over. I do see the country fragmenting into four or five different pieces as we return to ethnic identity, the natural state of humanity.
The U.S. Air Force is mostly out of business without overseas bases, so the Pentagon will forever prop up our involvement in NATO. It is not geopolitical strategy that keeps us there, it’s institutional self interest.