Monthly Archives: March 2022

Guinness Hates Democracy

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One of the interesting things about politics is that people suspend their normal understanding of the world when the topic shifts to politics. It is as if we have a separate brain that is only used for discussing current events. In our daily lives, our normal brain does the thinking and evaluating for us. It assesses people and decisions by weighing the facts against past practice. When the topic shifts to politics, the normal brain shuts down and the political brain fires up.

The easy example is the people in politics. Normal brain would never take advice from a stranger with no qualifications. If someone you do not know knocks on your door offering advice, you close the door, maybe call the cops. On the other hand, if that guy says he is running for office and wants to tell you what is best for your community, you take the time to listen. The guy could be naked, but if he is clearly talking politics, well, let us hear what naked guy has to say.

Few people in office are qualified for any job in the real world. The closest any of them come to real work is the law. More often than not, their legal experience was brief, just enough to get them some connections so they could run for office or maybe catch on at a government agency to network. There are a few flim-flam men from Wall Street who end up in politics, but banking is to work what tarot card reading is to science. For most, the only thing they have done is politics.

Political brain finds this perfectly normal. Normal brain, however, would pop out of our skull and run away before allowing the crazy guy in shipping to tell the accounting department how to close the month. Normal brain would never allow the guys in sales to tell production what to make next month. Normal brain expects the decisions to be made by people who are experienced and qualified. Even then, normal brain likes to see some proof before making a decision.

This is most obvious in the consensus building. In every meeting in our work life, normal brain is there reminding us that most of the people in the room are morons whose opinion should be ignored. Most of the room is people who are just going to say something so the boss notices them and thinks they are participating. Normal brain knows that most decisions, thankfully, are not made by committee, because normal brain knows all of us are dumber than most of us.

Political brain, on the other hand, takes the opposite view. Political brains says that we have to all come together and reach a consensus. We have to have long debates where everyone gets to make their voice heard. You cannot leave decisions to just one person as that is not how democracy works. No matter how many times the search for consensus results in the wrong answer, political brain insists that a room full of stupid people will find the right answer.

There is very little about politics, especially democratic politics, which makes any sense to our normal brain. In any other context, normal brain would recoil in horror at what political brain considers rational. It is, however, our political brain that tells us to trust unqualified and unscrupulous strangers. It is our political brain that tells us to give that weirdo a chance to speak. On the other hand, it is our normal brain that has to live with the consequences of what political brain has done.

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Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

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The False Society

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Imagine you are the head of a grocery chain and one of your executives comes to you with a plan to boost sales of over-the-counter remedies. These are the things you buy for a sore throat or an upset stomach. His plan involves subtly infecting the customers with a mild virus. They will get sick and then come back to buy something to remedy the symptoms of the virus. The virus will be mild, but enough to cause most people some symptoms in the week after having been infected.

Unless you are a sociopath, you will think the guy is nuts. Odds are you will think it is some sort of elaborate gag. If he is serious, then you will call security to have the guy removed from the building. The reason is not just the ghoulish plan to poison people, but the fact that he could think of such a thing. You would quickly start to wonder what else this guy is capable of doing. If he is willing to poison thousands of people to boost sales, he is capable of anything.

The truth is though, companies are full of people who think like the ghoulish executive in that short example. For example, there was someone at the multinational that owns the Häagen-Dazs brand who decided to start shrinking the pint. It used to be that a pint is a pound the world around, but no more. A pint of ice cream in the United States has shrunk down to 14-ounces. The container has been subtly changed so the shrinkage is not as obvious to the consumer.

Shrinkflation has been a thing for a couple of decades now. Bottles of beer have started to shrink as well. Many are 11-ounces now. They changed the shape of the bottle to trick the consumer. This was a trick they started at ballgames. They made cups taller, but narrower, so they could call the regular sized beverage a large, when it was the same amount of fluid as the smaller size. Packaging science is now mostly about tricking the consumer into thinking less is more.

The marketplace has always been about deception. The seller is motivated to lie about his product and the consumer is motivated to lie about his interest. Since the dawn of the marketplace, authorities have promulgated rules in an effort to keep the lying to a minimum and therefore maintain a peaceful market. Those rules have fallen away in the modern age, where deception has now become a virtue. In this age, only suckers are honest in their dealings.

Mass media is the prime example. The big media operations publish stories that they know are false when they post them. They are not simply wrong about a few facts, but deliberately designed by a staff of people to tell a false story. We saw that with the Russian collusion hoax in the Trump years. The Post and Times had teams whose job was to make up fake stories, with the help of friends in government. Everyone involved volunteered for the job of deceiving the public.

We see this with the war coverage. This story is being pushed by the Drudge alternative called Revolver News. It looks very official, but a quick search of the three authors reveals they are Ukrainian activists sponsored by the usual suspects. All three are children, fresh from school, with no experience in this area. The people behind that institute had them do the copy editing and let them put their name on it in order to add to their resume. It is a common fraud in Washington.

That is the thing though. It is a swindle and a well-known one. Operations like “Institute for the Study of War” are just lie machines. Their task is to pump out regime friendly information that will get circulated by the media. The media, of course, knows this better than anyone, but they choose to pass it along anyway. Given what we saw in the Trump years, it is possible that the Washington Post put out an RFP for a fake study to fit the latest narrative on the war.

Joseph de Maistre famously said, “False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing.” This is true, in that the authorities in this age pump out false opinion in immeasurable volume. Normal people inevitably believe some of it and pass it onto friends. That gives it authority and before long a third of the public wants nuclear war over Ukraine.

Of course, that survey could be entirely fake. That is something else that has changed over the last several decades. It used to be that polling firms guarded their reputations by avoiding sensationalism. Now they only care about getting noticed, so we have polling firms publishing complete nonsense. Many are happy to give the customer what they want and those customers are sociopaths in the media. Polling is just a corrupt as everything else now.

If we return to our grocery store CEO and his psychopathic executive, the issue is not the scheme, but the person behind it. The sort of person who thinks it is normal to poison people is not going to think twice about poisoning his boss. Similarly, the sorts of people who think it is normal to fabricate studies, stories and so on in order to fool the general public is no different from the psychopathic executive. These are people who lack the ability to tell right from wrong.

It is tempting to think this is just the way the world is and we just see it more clearly now thanks to the mass media age. Some of that is true, but we also know that this sort of behavior was a primary concern in the past. Medieval governments passed rules to limit deception in the law and the marketplace. The ancients had draconian punishments for those who deceived the public. The ancient Persians treated deception more harshly than murder. People used to worry about this problem.

In this age, we have turned this on its head. Deception is a valued skill. The media selects for sociopathy. Our political parties admire those with a natural skill to deceive and quickly raise them to national status. That grocery store CEO would not exist as described, because he would have hand-picked that executive and probably gave him the idea for the mass poisoning campaign. The lie is the coin of the realm and the liars are the new aristocracy.

America is often called a great experiment and that is true. This is the first society to exist with nothing holding it together but impersonal economic relations. We are reaching the point where there are no rules, just who can get over on whom. It is the anarcho-capitalist society in which no one can trust anyone or anything. Instead, a war of all against all, it is an endless series of confidence games. Everyone has an angle and is trying to get over on someone else.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

Future Shock

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Way back in the last century, futurism was a thing that serious people followed because America was still an optimistic country. The 1970’s promised to end that but the revival in the 1980’s brought it back in vogue. The microprocessor revolution was mostly responsible, but the subsequent end to the Cold War also helped. One of the chief gurus of futurism in the last three decades of the 20th century was a man named Alvin Toffler, who wrote a number of bestselling books.

Alvin Toffler has mostly been forgotten now, but he was a big deal from the 1970’s into the new century. His two big books were Future Shock and Third Wave, in which he described how the world was changing due to a number of forces, one of which was the technological revolution that was in its infancy at the time. Toffler wound up consulting with global leaders like Chinese premiere Zhao Ziyang, Michael Gorbachev, Newt Gingrich and various corporate leaders.

Toffler was credited with an idea that the next phase of civilization would be characterized by the pace of change. That is, the people would not only have to adapt to a changing society, but also adapt to a society that was under constant change at a rate that may exceed our ability to keep pace. Technology would advance so quickly that we would not have time to create new habits for the new rules. Instead, we would become corks on a raging river of change.

One of the keys to futurism is to never get too specific about the future, especially the future you expect to see. That way, no one can compare your prediction with what actually happened. Toffler was careful to not get too specific as to what life would be like in a world where the rules changed too quickly for people to adapt. Instead, he imagined a world where some people would be better at coping with constant change and others would struggle, thus creating a new status system.

To some degree this has proven to be true. You see this in the work place where the people rising to the top give off the aura of being infinitely flexible and adaptive, while the people lagging behind end up in accounting. Whether the “highly adaptive” are really adapting to change or striking the needed pose is debatable, but it is something that has become a thing in the corporate world. The highly adaptive are always wise to never ask why something is changing. They just accept it.

In society as a whole, the jury is out. The last decade has been a good test of this new reality and the results are mixed. Obama unleashed a race war in the last two years of his administration that no one saw coming. Then we had the drama of both party primaries in the 2016 elections. No one saw that coming. Trump winning the nomination and then the presidency was a total shock. Then it was four years of chaos and the insane response to the Covid pandemic.

Trump seems like a lifetime ago, yet it has only been a little over a year since he was deposed and replaced with Joe Biden. Five years ago, no sane person thought Joe Biden would ever be president. No one saw the economic chaos that is now starting to define our lives either. We are just scratching the surface on the economic front, as there are a lot of chickens coming home to roost. We are seeing things that not so long ago were declared impossible by the smart set.

There are two conclusions that you can draw from the last decade. One is the public has been remarkably resilient. The middle-class has taken one body blow after another, but has staggered on, not doing much to update its view of society or the people who run the country. This fall, they will dutifully vote for the B-team, who promise to do more of the same, just with better looking performers. The Middle American Radicals remain safely in their pods, munching on their bugs.

The other conclusion is we cannot predict what is coming next. Most people wisely assumed that tomorrow will look like today, with more of the stuff that is popular and less of the stuff that is not so popular. Now, the wise people have to assume that whatever comes next is not being discussed today. If you want to know the future, find a fringe weirdo making crazy claims. Every notable thing that has happened over the last decade was considered aluminum foil hat stuff.

This may be why the Middle American Radicals have been so docile. People need to time to get angry at their rulers and they need something onto which to focus their attention as the main issue. By the time the rulers were willing to tackle inflation in the 1970’s, the people had suffered with it for years. They had time to digest it, understand it and make specific demands about the economy. Reagan won in 1980 largely due to his ability to repeat those demands.

In this age, no one has time to focus on anything very long. We just spent two years having our rights trampled with Covid and it is now on its way to being a conspiracy theory because the new issue is Ukraine. The rage heads on the Left are still struggling to figure out why no one cares about the study of extremism, but that issue was replaced with Covid, which is now being replaced with Putin. Things change so quickly that even the rage heads have no time to get angry.

Of course, the people behind the constant change are living the life of momentary advantage, where they profit from every turn of the wheel. The great transfer of wealth from the middle-class to the over-class is one result. The consolidation of power into the hands of a narrowing elite is another. The new world of constant change is one where the elite can front-run what comes next because they are driving it. Everyone else is left to guess, which means a life of perpetual chaos.

The question no one asks is whether this is sustainable. The consolidation of power may not be by design, but a necessity. At least it is an evolutionary reaction to the accelerating pace of change and uncertainty. Logically, what comes next is some sort of administrative coup where Biden is replaced by the managerial elite. Will that cause a revolt or will it be welcomed? Probably the latter, given what is happening, but maybe that is the point at which the dam breaks.

That is the thing about the world of constant change. No one has time to plan as the rules keep changing. This is especially true of that narrowing ruling elite. They need to keep flipping the pages faster in order to maintain their status, so they can do no long-term planning. Rule by expediency has a history and it is not a promising one, which means it does not have a promising future. The disaster in Ukraine is one example of living in the moment can end in disaster.

What the futurist always get right is that the present modes are running their course and new modes are on the horizon. What they get wrong is that those new modes also come with an expiry date. We may be seeing that with the world Toffler imagined back in the last century. The accelerating pace of change is reaching an end, because mankind can only tolerate so much change. The question is whether it ends in fire or ice, which the poet said would both suffice.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

The Test Of Reality

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Last week, the current president of Ukraine thanked Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg for his role in helping him win the propaganda war. Facebook lifted its ban on praising the various neo-Nazi militias in Ukraine. Then it announced it would allow calls for violence against individual Russians. In the world of infinitely malleable ethics, this is what Silicon Valley now calls a principled stand. Ukraine supporters are proud of their work on social media wining the meme war with Russia.

In the real world, the Russian army is slowly turning Ukraine into the world’s largest mound of rubble. In the Donbass, they have the Ukrainian army and the tens of thousands of militia members surrounded. It is not easy to get reliable information about what is happening on the ground, but reliable estimates say fifty thousand pro-Ukrainian fighters are now trapped in the Donbass “cauldron.” Barring a peace deal, they will be vaporized over the next couple of weeks.

In the south, the Russian army has created a corridor to the Crimea. This was a primary objective of the invasion. Mariupol, a city in southeastern Ukraine, lies along the estuary of the Kalmius and Kalchik rivers near the Sea of Azov. This city has been surrounded and cutoff by the Russian army. The Ukrainian army based there has been given the chance to surrender, but the irregulars will be given no quarter. It is a preview of what will happen in the Donbass over the next month.

The point here is that despite losing the social media war, the Russians are winning the actual war in Ukraine. It has been slow going as the Russians do not wage television friendly wars, so no cool video. Ukraine was slowly being turned into a fortified outpost by Washington, so the Ukrainian army is well trained and supplied. Digging them out of those fortification will not be easy, but it is inevitable. The Russians will turn Ukraine into rubble if that is what it takes to achieve their objective.

What this war has revealed is a clash of realties. On the Washington side, reality is played out on TV chat shows, office politics and the internet. They really think winning the public relations campaign matters. In the reality in which Western leaders live, words count for everything. Facts are just tools to be used to decorate a clever argument or a novel public relations campaign. From the perspective of the West, the war has been a disaster for Russia.

On the other side, the Russians operate in a different reality. They are focused on securing their border, which means neutralizing Ukraine. They have prepared for the economic consequences. They have prepared their people, who seem to be overwhelming supportive of the effort. Westerners have described Putin as having a medieval mindset, which may be true, but he is dealing with a people and a reality that still thinks the old way about the world.

Ukraine is now caught between two realities. The one reality is what Samuel Huntington labeled the Orthodox civilization. This is Eurasia. On the other side is what he called the Western civilization. According to Huntington, the future will be shaped by the clash of the civilizations he outlined in his book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. What we are seeing in Ukraine is a collision between these great tectonic plates that define conflicting realities.

Of course, the quarter century crusade against Islam by the Global American Empire was a similar clash of civilizations. Huntington called that area the Islamic civilization for obvious reasons. It is what is commonly referred to as MENA, which stands for Middle East and North Africa. America tried to impose its reality on the Islamic world and the result was chaos. Every country in the region, except Israel and Iran, is in worse shape now than when the crusade was launched.

In many respects, what we are witnessing is the test of two competing post-Cold War theories of the future. One is the Huntington theory and the other is the Francis Fukuyama theory, laid out in his book The End of History and the Last Man. In it he argued that mankind had reached the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the triumph of Western liberal democracy. There was nothing left to discuss, as liberal democracy was the winner of the ideological contest.

By any measure, Fukuyama’s theory is proving to be all wrong, while Huntington’s theory is looking prophetic. We are now in the midst of a second great civilizational conflict where the reality of the West is crashing onto the reality of another civilization, in this case Eurasia. The reality of the West, social media campaigns and glib responses at press conferences, is proving no match for artillery and armor, at least not in the part of the world controlled by the Orthodox civilization.

On the horizon is the certain collision between what Huntington called the Sinic civilization (China) and the West. East Asia is a bit more complicated as there are a many old rivalries in that region. Huntington diced the region into various subgroups like Buddhists, Hindus and the Japanese. Even so, China will make a play to recover what she considers to be her lost province, Taiwan. As we see in Ukraine, this will be a clash between the reality of the West and the reality of China.

Lost in all of this is whether the reality of the Global American Empire can survive these clashes with alternative realities. Prudence said that the empire should respect the perspective of Russian with regards to these areas along her border. Prudence said that the Muslim world should be left to sort itself. Western liberal democracy was incompatible with Islamic culture. Despite all of this, Washington continues to operate in its own reality where words can conquer culture.

What we may be seeing is not only the clash of civilizations, but the great test of the underlying sense of reality that animates Western elites. Can they survive in a world in which they need to impose their reality on the rest of the world, but the rest of the world will not accept it? Either the West comes to terms with the fact that the rest of the world will continue to operate by its own logic or it will destroy itself in civilizational wars to impose its reality on the reality of alien civilizations.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

Spartan Thoughts

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Note: The Monday Taki post is up. I take up the same theme in the post today, but from a slightly different angle.  Sunday Thoughts is up behind the green door and it is all about the big story.

Early in the Ukraine war, there were reports about the death of Vladimir Zhoga, a Russian commander in the Donbass. Later they reported that Ukrainian defense forces killed Russian Maj. Gen. Andrei Sukhovetsky in combat. In both cases, it was widely reported that these men led units called “Spartan” divisions. Another high profile Russian commander was killed later in the week and he was also linked to the mysterious “Spartan” division.

Typical of the American media, the reports were mostly copy supplied by the State Department, filled in with fantasy from the media. Zhoga was a separatist leader, not a member of the Russian military. His unit was called the Sparta battalion. The others were Russian military, but they were not Spartans. What is interesting about this is the fact that the State Department focused on the word “Sparta” in their copy. Oddly, Sparta looms large in the imagination of the foreign policy elite.

It is a weird aspect of the present age that a society that fashions itself as the new Athens has a Sparta complex. College sports teams have long used the Spartan image and the name itself. Fantasy writers and video game creators like the image of the heroic and stoic Spartans. There have been books and movies about Thermopylae, all focused on what is considered the greatest last stand in history. There is something compelling about Sparta for modern Americans.

The fact is though, America is modeled on Athens, the great antagonist of the Spartans and the loser of the Peloponnesian War. In the mythology of America, the Spartan side is wearing the black hat. They are the great danger, the thing against which democracy organizes against. Modern politicians do not go around talking about the things we associate with Sparta, but rather the things we associate with Athens. They are fixated on our democracy and our freedom.

Despite this, Hollywood has not seen fit to product movies that celebrate Pericles or even Marathon. The reason we know about Thermopylae is it makes for a compelling story, but it was not particularly significant militarily. The truth is it was Athenian tactical brilliance and determination that beat back the Persian hordes. The Spartans never showed up for the battle of Marathon, where the heavily outnumbered Athenians defeated the Persians in 490 BC.

The closest we get in popular culture to celebrating Athens over Sparta is in the old Westerns from the golden age of Hollywood. A regular feature of these films was the conflict between civilization and the frontier culture. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, we get the relationship between Wayne, the Spartan man of honor, and Stewart, the Athenian man of words. The two men are locked in a fight with a violent criminal who represents the disorder of the frontier.

Even in the Westerns, it is never clear who is the good side of the relationship and who is the bad side of it. Back then the audience was more sophisticated so they could appreciate the ambiguity. There was an understanding that it took a combination of those two sides of man in order to make society possible. You needed the stoic warrior who lived by a code. You also needed the man of rules and words to supply the structure of a society so people can live.

In those old Westerns, it is not an accident that the big star, often John Wayne, would be given the role as the stoic gunfighter. The filmmakers knew that deep in the soul of every man is the desire to be the stoic man of honor, the guy who uses force to impose order on the world. Even if the task required the sacrifice of the man himself, the clarity was superior to a life of ambiguity. At the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Jimmy Stewart seems to acknowledge this truth.

This is why the Ukrainians have been cast as brave and honorable defenders of their country and culture. The fact that the people writing this narrative have spent the last generation telling us that there is no such thing as countries or cultures speaks to the power of this old Spartan image. The honor of the Russians is never mentioned, because in this story they are the Persians. They are an alien, inhuman force that exists to test the resolve of humanity and society.

Of course, in the larger narrative that animates the Global American Empire, the Russians are the Spartans, the bad guys in the drama. America is the new Athens, the city on the hill, a light to all nations. The State Department is now flooding Europe with weapons in order to defend civilization from the barbarian horde. They hope to turn the Ukraine into Afghanistan. They will make those people pay any price, bear any burden, in order to play out this fantasy.

You cannot help but wonder if what drives the neoconservatives who run the foreign policy of the Global American Empire is envy. Violence is completely alien to them, as they have spent their lives in the academy. They have never even been in a confrontation in which something they value is on the line. From a distance, they admire the people who they relentlessly attack. Perhaps under it all is the insecurity of men who have never tried to live as men.

Regardless, it is one of the least appreciated aspects of the current age. The long shadow of the Peloponnesian War is still with us. The world now stands closer to nuclear annihilation than it has since the Cuban missile crisis and it is because the people running the Global American Empire are haunted by a conflict within the soul of the West that dates to the birth of the West. The inability to square these two aspects of Western man is what could destroy him.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

The Winter Of Empire

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Way back when the tech oligarchs began to censure people, the primary reaction was that this was not allowed. Americans had been operating under the assumption that we had the right to speak freely about politics and we had the right to hear others speak freely about politics. That was the rule. What these tech companies were doing was un-American and immoral. In other words, they were breaking the rules.

It did not take long before people started losing respect for the rules, since they were no longer being applied fairly. Working around the arbitrary enforcement of ever-changing rules is now a primary enterprise. The new normal is that the people with power exercise it arbitrarily and capriciously. As a result, the people who prided themselves on obeying the rules now have no respect for the rules.

That has been the biggest change in the last half dozen years. It used to be that a room full of dissidents would be talking about how we can get the state to do a better job enforcing the rules. Now, the room is full of people who laugh at the rules and talk about ways to get around the latest schemes by the rule makers to benefit themselves and their allies at the expense of the decent people.

All of sudden, billions of people around the world are having the same sort of conversion in their minds. The Global American Empire is literally trying to de-platform an entire country. They are threatening to do the same to anyone who helps the Russians evade the effort. The rest of the world is about to learn something American dissidents have learned. You cannot trust the rule makers.

This was madness when inflicted on citizens, but it is suicidal when scaled up to the world as a whole. Does Washington really think they can send the world a notice that they have changed the terms of service? That is what we are seeing. We are seeing Western governments seize Russian property, for no other reason that the terms of service have been changed and property rights no longer exist.

What the Russo-Ukrainian war is testing is whether Karen culture can become a ruling ideology of the Global American Empire. Russia is unhappy with NATO and Ukraine, so Washington demanded to speak to Russia’s manager. When that failed, they launched a de-platforming campaign on social media. Millions of American zombies have joined in on the campaign to destroy Russia.

The madness of this is that the Global American Empire has rested on the fact that America could be trusted to enforce and abide by the rules. Sure, with power comes privilege and one of the benefits for America has been flexibility on the rules, like we saw with the Iraq invasion. In general, the empire was built on a set of rules that were promoted by and defended by the American empire.

Now the rules no longer matter. Where does that leave the moral authority of the Global American Empire? It is too soon to know, but we see Russia, China and now India adjusting to this reality. That means developing a parallel set of systems and institutions, something we have seen in America. Soon, most of the world’s people will live outside and opposed to the American rules

In the end, that means death to the Global American Empire. Just as we see domestically, the collapse of moral authority means the only way to maintain power is through force. Washington can bully Americans around, but she cannot expect to bully the world around for very long. The cost becomes prohibitive. What this war has done is bring us to the winter phase of the Global American Empire.

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Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • The Nuremberg Trials
  • Lucius Junius Brutus
  • America as Brutus
  • Russia & Ukraine
  • The Reckless Giant
  • The Loss of Virtue

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A Lesson From Ukraine

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One of the underlying plot lines of the conflict in Ukraine is the role nationalism has played and in playing in the conflict. Fundamentally, the West, especially the United States, is responding to the purest of nationalist calls. The response to Ukrainian patriotism is an endorsement of the basic tenets of nationalism. The Ukrainians are a unique people with a common language, culture and territory. Therefore, they have a right to their own nation.

Conveniently left out of American coverage is the fact that ultra-nationalists have been playing a key role in the drama. These are the militia groups that have a fondness for fascist ideas and iconography. The most famous example is the Azov Battalion, but they are just one of many operating in Ukraine. These groups have been doing the fighting in the breakaway republics. This was true when the Ukrainians were assaulting the areas and now that the Russians have invaded.

Of course, the West is now organized around opposition to nationalism, especially the form expressed by the Ukrainian ultra-nationalists. In every country in Europe, nationalist groups have top meet in secret to avoid the wrath of state sponsored terrorist groups like Antifa. In Germany, nationalism is illegal as a practical matter. A party that sounds too nationalistic, like the AfD, will be crushed by the state. In theory, Ukraine is what the rest of Europe opposes.

Then there is the reality of Russian nationalism. The Western media is painting it as the new fascism, but this is another example of the antifascist legacy. Russian nationalism is now a mirror of Europeanism. Listen to Putin and what you hear is a call for pan-Slavism or Eurasianism, to use a Dugan term. Instead of a unified Western Europe it is federation of Eurasian people with the Russians leading the way. It is the EU for people with no natural place in the EU.

There is another aspect to the Russian side that the nationalists have thus far struggled to accept or even understand. What Russia is arguing for is an older, more realistic form of nationalism that is based on blood and history. Putin talks about the long history and shared suffering of the Russian and Ukrainian people. It is a call to solidarity that transcends the whims of map makers. The modern dissident nationalist is mainly focused on maps and objections to globalism.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has put the dissident nationalists in a crisis, because it is placing them on the wrong side of history and the wrong side of the present. All of a sudden, nationalists are standing shoulder to shoulder with the people they know are the enemies of nationalism. It is turning out that modern nationalism is more of a pose than a well-considered political morality. They have been left with the same silly flag waving that we see from actors in the news media.

It is not an accident that many of the people who fly the nationalist flag were all wrong about the Covid response. Nationalism, in the modern sense, is nothing more than warmed over cartoon fascism. The modern nationalist dreams of wearing snappy uniforms and being at the top of the status hierarchy. He is fully engaged in opposition to the prevailing cosmopolitan globalism, but he has no agenda of his own, other than opposition to the polices of globalism.

This is not to say that nationalism is a bad thing, especially in the way the modern ruling elite describes it. Nor does it mean that the nation state is a failed idea. What the crisis in Ukraine reveals is that modern nationalism is simply not ready to be anything more than a holding pen for the disaffected. Nationalists in Europe need to understand that no one in the European elite is shedding any tears for what is now happening to the ultra-nationalist at the hands of the Russian military.

What the Ukrainian disaster provides is an opportunity for nationalists to regroup and plot a course that acknowledges present and future reality. The Global American Empire is fading and we see that in Europe now. What comes next is open for debate and if nationalists are to be a part of that debate, they have to have a positive agenda, rather than a list of complaints about American globalism. Nationalism needs to offer a way forward in the post-America Europe.

The place for them to start is Ukraine. Nationalism needs to explain why the Zelensky government violated its duty to the people by picking a fight with Russia. It also has to explain why Ukrainian patriots are right to defend their country, even if their government is a corrupt puppet regime of another power. In other words, nationalist need to fuse their theory with practical politics. Political theory is a fine thing but it is worthless if it cannot solve the practical problems of human organization.

The Ukraine disaster should be a lesson to American nationalists, especially the pro-white variety. The cultural, biological and linguistic differences between Russians and Ukrainians are small, certainly not worth fighting over. That is the theory, but the reality is the bombed out schools and dead soldiers. America is a big diverse place with differences that dwarf the differences between Russians and Ukrainians. Uniting any group in America is a gargantuan task.

For any form of nationalism to work in America, as it descends into majority-minority demographics, it must respect the vast regional differences. Simplistic calls to demographic reality will work no better than the simplistic calls to nationalism have worked in Ukraine. Laundry lists of complaints about the present or the past are not a viable agenda. Whatever comes next for America will have to be rooted in a positive agenda that promotes a future that inspires the target population.

Finally, what the Ukraine disaster shows is that the old categories and the old ways of speaking of politics no longer work. The ultranationalist are not Nazis, despite their adoption of some Nazi iconography. Putin is certainly not Hitler. There are no white hats and no black hats. The simplistic world of the past where everyone had a convenient role to play is over. In the post-American Empire, we will need not only new labels, but a new political morality to go with it.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

Stupid & Crazy

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Far-left talking head Michael Kinsley once said that a gaffe is when a politician accidently blurts out the truth. It was a funny line that has been popular in Washington for a long time, because everyone in Washington knows it is true. It is not just politicians who lie to their voters. Everyone in Washington lies. In fact, the semi-permanent ruling class lies more than the elected class. As a result, they are less prone to gaffes, but every once in a while, one of them blurts out the truth.

Yesterday we had one such example. Victoria Nuland, the moral nullity responsible for the disaster in Ukraine, was called up for a very friendly chat about Ukraine with fellow warmonger Marco Rubio. This was supposed to be part of the highly choreographed public relations campaign in favor of starting war with Russia. Instead, Nuland blurted out what should never have been said. That is, the United States has been running biological weapons labs in Ukraine.

The reason for Rubio’s question about the bio-labs is this has been circulating on-line since last week. The Russian Ministry of Defense posted documents they said were found at a biological lab in Ukraine. This was ignored by Western media, but then the Chinese government made a statement about it. This is harder to ignore and it started to get traction on-line. Rubio assumed Nuland would dismiss it as disinformation, which was in his copy of the script.

Rubio is not a smart man, but like all politicians he has the vermin like rapaciousness that has come to define the political class. When Nuland confessed that the US was operating biological labs in Ukraine and they were worried that the Russians would find out about it, so they instructed the Ukrainians to destroy the evidence, Rubio’s lizard brain kicked into action. He quickly got her to employ the Opposite Rule of Liberalism, which is now the Opposite Rule of Liberal Democracy.

Briefly stated, the Opposite Rule of Liberal Democracy says that you should take whatever they say, start with the opposite, and you are close to the truth. In this case, she hilariously rolled out a version of “they cry out it pain as they strike you.” This was one of those moments people used to call a Freudian slip. She blamed the Russians for doing what she was doing at that very moment. Her entire life is based on blaming others for what she herself is actually doing.

Another interesting aspect of this gaffe is that the foreign policy establishment heard about the bio-lab documents last week. They probably knew about this from Ukrainian sources prior to the Russians posting the documents. After all, the State Department was running the labs, so they knew they existed and they knew the Russians would capture them at some point. Again, no one in charge has any doubts about the results of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

This is why they planted a story in Foreign Policy claiming this is the work of the QAnon shaman, the guy dressed like a bear who entered the Capitol on January 6th and who is currently rotting in prison. This is a classic political tactic. You not only get your version of the lie in circulation first, but you also tie the truth to conspiracy theorists and crazy people in order to anathematize it. This has been the go-to move of Washington since the Clinton crime family blew into town.

That is what makes the Nuland-Rubio exchange amusing. Marco Rubio is as dumb as a goldfish but he knows how to read his lines and follow direction. If politics did not pay so well for so little work, he could have made a career in movies. He read his line expecting Nuland to repeat the QAnon stuff. Instead, she blurted out the truth and he had to try and save the scene. It was one of those moments when you see just how dumb the people are behind the Ukraine fiasco.

Putting the performance issues aside, the question that should be on everyone’s mind is just how crazy are these people? We know that America had a hand in the Covid lab leak that set off the Covid pandemic. The media is back-paging this story now, but the evidence is clear that the virus came from a lab and it was most likely the lab in Wuhan, which was supported by the American government. We will never get the full truth, but we know the basic outline now.

China is a serious modern country with a serious government, so maybe this collaboration made sense in some way. Ukraine is not a serious country and it certainly does not have a serious government. Its government is literally run by a television comedian, the local version of Mr. Bean. Even if there is some reason to justify this, the time to close it down was months ago when the Russians started building up forces for what the American government said was an invasion.

There is a recklessness here that should be terrifying to serious people. Victoria Nuland is a stumble-bum with a long history of screwups. She was caught on tape during the American overthrow of the Ukrainian government in 2014. In tradecraft for beginners, they teach students to assume all electronic communication is being monitored by people with hostile interests. Cubicle jockeys at Langley get fired for making this sort of error, but Nuland just keeps getting promoted.

It is no wonder the world is rocketing toward disaster. It is not just that Victoria Nuland has a job, but that the people around her think she is highly qualified. In other words, this stupid woman is the part of the iceberg we can see. These are the same people now responsible for avoiding a global calamity over the war in Ukraine. Even more frightening is the fact that not a single politician in either party is pointing out what should be obvious even to Marco Rubio now.

This will not end well.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

The Great Divide

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If you are one of the tens of millions who voted for Trump in two elections, you are probably a bit puzzled by what is happening in “right-wing” media. If you have made the journey to this side of the great divide over the last decade, the distance between where you are now and those old voices on the Right seems much greater. It is one of those undiscussed aspects of the war in Europe. The great divide between the Cloud People and Dirt People has grown wider.

Right-wing talk radio which largely serves the over-sixty crowd now sounds a lot like it did in the 1990’s during the Balkan conflict. Back then they were demanding troops on the ground rather than the limited use of air power by Clinton. He was Neville Chamberlain and Slobodan Milošević was the new Hitler. Today the Sean Hannity types are demanding an invasion of Russia because this time Joe Biden is Chamberlain and Vladimir Putin is Hitler.

It is not just mainstream conservatism that has pulled out the old outfits from yesterday in order to indulge in nostalgia. Populist Inc., which formed up during the Trump presidency, suddenly sounds like every neocon nutter, demanding no-fly zones and full-scale economic war. In many cases, they are racing to out-crazy the neocon crazies on this issue. It turns out that the America first rhetoric was just a public relations campaign for the same old conservative grift.

What this reveals is that the people inside the political bubble never learned anything from the last decade. It brings to mind the famous quip misattributed to Talleyrand but written by a French naval officer. “Nobody has been corrected; no one has known to forget, nor yet to learn anything.” A little more than a year after the great danger was purged from their ranks, the Cloud People are carrying on as if the world is right back to where they left it in the fall of 2016.

One of the things forgotten is that people care about practical things like the condition of their roads, their living standards and the safety of their communities. They will respond to abstract concepts like patriotism, for sure, but only if the call to act is in defense of where they live and how they live. The reason a TV pitchman won the 2016 election was that he spoke about the things that mattered, while his opponents blathered on about “who we are.”

It seems that the disconnect between the Cloud People and the Dirt People has managed to grow during the last decade of troubles. This post by one of the zombies of Conservative Inc. is illustrative. Even though he uses a profile picture from thirty years ago, Kyle Smith is a middle-aged man. He should be aware that all around him is raging a weird 1980’s nostalgia. He should also be aware that there has always been a strong isolationist strain in American politics.

In fact, the default American position until the 20th century was to not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. America was the well-wisher of those seeking their freedom, however they defined it, but otherwise, the American creed said that the goal of foreign policy was to avoid getting involved in the affairs of other nations. To go around trying to set the world right would mean the “fundamental maxims” of our policy would “insensibly change from liberty to force.”

Put another way, Kyle Smith does not seem to know much about the country or the American Right, of which he claims to be a part. He is not alone. The flagship site of Buckley-style conservatism is equally ridiculous. Jim Geraghty is their main guy now and he seems to get all of his information from far-left news sites. This post reads like some sort of weird Ukrainian fan fiction. For him and his fellow travelers, the whole “fake news” thing is long forgotten.

It is not just the right-side of the political class that has learned nothing from the last decade of populist tumult. Progressive Inc. is now willing to tolerate ten dollar gasoline and bread lines just so they can show their solidarity with Ukraine. They have suddenly got over their fear of fascism in order to support actual fascist like the Azov Battalion fighting in Ukraine. Maybe they will start offering amnesty to J6 prisoners if they agree to wear a Ukrainian lapel pin on TV.

Again, you see people who have learned nothing from the past. In 2016 the people voted for the ultimate protest candidate. Donald Trump was the anti-candidate who crudely mocked Cloud People values. That was when gas was under three dollars, the grocery shelves were stuffed with cheap food and no one had the sniffles. Will the people be more willing to go along with this lunacy when they now have to worry about paying their bills every month?

Again, from this side of the great divide, the madness now gripping the beautiful people with regards to the war seems so alien and strange. Many can remember getting emotionally drawn into the war fever of the Bush years only to learn that it was all a big lie perpetrated by people who were never on your side. To see the same people selling the same lies from media platforms is confirmation that there is no bridging the gap that lies between the two sides of the great divide.

The war in Europe and the reaction to it is revealing a truth about the great divide that is the final step for the dissident. There is no bridging the gap because there is no reforming the Cloud People. All that can be done is prepare for the point when reality finally comes calling for the ruling class. That moment may be upon as prices soar due to the gears of the New World Order grinding to a halt. Soon, rule by expert is not going to sound very appealing.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

The Haunting

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Note: The Monday Taki post is up. I was not sure about this one, but sometimes you just have to go where the original thought takes you. Sunday Thoughts is up behind the green door and it is all about the big story.

General Hastings Ismay famously said that the point of NATO was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” Since the 1950’s this has been the commonly accepted view of the alliance. After the war this made perfect sense as the Western nations faced off with the Soviets. There was also the well-understood fear of German nationalism. Britain and America had just gone through a terrible war in order to defeat the Nazis.

This sentiment carried on through the Cold War, even though it should have become obvious that German nationalism was no longer a real fear. The generation that fought the Cold War, however, was haunted by the past. NATO was just one example of an institution that evolved around the fear of nationalism in general, but that special nationalism in particular. The added threat of communism, which was often described in the same terms as fascism, only added to the fear.

This fear was obvious after the collapse the Soviet Union. The reunification of Germany was the central concern, as Europe reorganized. Margaret Thatcher was opposed to German reunification on the grounds that she was still not sure the Germans had been cured of their desire to conquer the world. The Russians, of course, had other reasons, in addition to her ancient fear of German nationalism. The post-Cold War period would also be haunted by those old fears.

This specter continues to haunt the minds of American foreign policy elites, who have transferred old fears of German nationalism onto Russia. NATO probably should have been dissolved or replaced after the Cold War. As a practical matter, it existed to check the Warsaw Pact, which no longer exists. Russia was flat on her back after the collapse of communism and the rest of Europe was rushing to embrace liberal democracy and American consumerist economics.

Most important, it was obvious to anyone engaged with reality that Germany was long past nationalism, especially that special form of nationalism. In fact, fascism in general existed only in the fevered minds of oddballs out on the fringes and the professional antifascist on the Left. As a political force, political fascism was less relevant than monarchism in Europe. The only role left for NATO was to keep America engaged in Europe, which could be done economically.

Of course, those old fears have proven to be far more important than observable reality among American elites. Since the 1990’s it has been a relentless drive to expand NATO to the edge of the Russian frontier. First it was the old members of the Warsaw Pact then it was Balkan nations. Then it was the scheme to add the former Soviet republic of Georgia, a nation thousands of miles from the Atlantic. Then, of course, it was the scheme to add Ukraine to NATO.

It is assumed that the sole reason to keep adding nations to NATO is to contain the Russians, but that old fear of German nationalism is still there. Germany is now the dominant economy of Europe and the leader of the European Union. It is the German relationship with both Russia and Ukraine that is at the heart of the current crisis that had led to war in Europe. Germany has been developing stronger ties to Russia, especially economic ties, and Washington hates it.

This is why Washington has refused to even consider peaceful solutions to the crisis in Ukraine over the last ten years. Those disputed eastern provinces have been racked by a civil war for close to a decade. Estimates vary, but the consensus is that twenty thousand people have died there since 2014. The Ukrainian government has been supplying those militias with weapons, which come from the United States through the Ukrainian military or various NGO’s.

Obviously, one driver in all of this is corruption. War is good for the war business, so the usual suspects have been happy to provoke all sides in this conflict. Zelensky has been for sale since day one, so he has been easy to manipulate. The greater issue has been the number of important Americans on the payroll of the Ukrainians. Hunter Biden is just one example. Many others have been taking bribes from Ukrainian interests seeking to profit from the turmoil.

None of this would be possible, however, if Washington were not haunted by the shadow of long gone figures. The old joke was that the foreign policy establishment wakes up most nights to the sound of hoofbeats. While certainly true in many cases, it is also true that they live in the shadow of antifascism, which has become something of a cult among the American ruling class. Who they are now is defined by the fear of and opposition to that long gone political movement.

This strikes the practical minded as implausible, but people are not willing to sacrifice for practical things. That should be obvious now. The Russians are risking economic isolation in order to restore their pride and sense of identity. This war will cost them economically, but it will all be worth it to feel that ancient pride again. The Ukrainian soldiers who know they are fighting a hopeless battle, will fight to the end because there are things more important than stuff.

The crisis in Europe that promises to plunge the world into depression, revolt and possibly nuclear war is not about stuff. It is about that old specter that should have been consigned to the history books long ago. It is the apparition of fascism that has driven Western elites to the brink of madness. Their desire to free themselves of this haunting is driving them to try and reorganize the world in opposition to it. Instead, they are driving the world to organize against the madness of the West.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.