Civilizationalism

Note: The Taki post is up. I offer some unsolicited advice to the richest man in the world as he embarks on his Twitter venture. The Sunday Thoughts podcast is up behind the green door for subscribers.


In the eastern part of the European continent, today is Victory Day, which marks the surrender of the Nazis to the Soviet Union. The official surrender was signed on May 8th, 1945, but it was already past midnight in Moscow. It was the biggest public holiday in the old Soviet Union. Now it is celebrated in most of the former republics, with parades and public commemorations. Under Putin, the Moscow military parade was brought back after a hiatus under Boris Yeltsin.

It is hard for Western people, especially Americans, to grasp why Victory Day is so important to the people of the Russian Federation. The events of the war, when remembered at all, are recalled for the purpose of promoting current narratives rather than a sense of national pride. Of course, the memory of the war in Europe is highly stylized and fictionalized. For the people in the East, the war and the triumph over the Nazis is an important part of their national identity.

America lost about 400,000 soldiers in the war. The Brits lost about the same and the French lost close to 600,000. For narrative purposes, the Axis powers are not allowed to talk about their dead. The Soviet Union lost twenty million people. Countries like Poland, Hungary and the Baltic states lost close to ten percent of their population as a result of the Nazi invasion and then the Soviet invasion. This is why the war still looms so large in the consciousness of those people.

The war is why the word “Nazi” resonates much more with the people of eastern Europe than even the nuttiest social justice warrior in America. In America, the cartoon version of the past turns villains like the Nazis into hollow figures who represent whatever the current year harpies fear about themselves. For eastern people, the word conjures memories of an existential threat to their existence. The Great Patriotic War, as the Russians call it, was a war for the survival of their people.

This civilizational angst is what lies at the heart of the war in Ukraine. The Russians see themselves fighting a war for the survival of their civilization. Volunteers from all over the Russian Federation are now fighting in the Ukraine because they see themselves at war with a West that threatens their existence. Washington is not threatening genocide, but something almost as bad, the erasure of their national identity. The Chechens like being Chechen and they will die for it.

This civilizational sensibility is hard for Western people to grasp. America, of course, has no real identity. It is a collection of economic and political slogans that holds together a continent full of strangers. Europe still has some vestiges of national identity, but that has been anathematized by the ruling elite of the continent. Nationalism is now a synonym for fascism. In its place is the concept of European which is even less meaningful than American sloganeering.

Civilizationalism got the people of the East through the war, but it also carried them through communism. Despite the homogenizing ethos of Marxism-Leninism, the national character of the people of the Soviet Union survived. It was this sense of self that has been the basis of revival after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The same sensibility that allowed the people of Eurasia to survive the Mongol invasions has allowed them to survive the invasion of Wall Street bankers in the 1990’s.

Again, this is hard for Western people to fathom. Unlike communism, liberal democracy has been highly effective at reoriented its victims to see themselves in purely economic terms, shedding their cultural identity. Western people are baffled as to why Russians would give up drag queen story hour to seize the Donbas. Western planners even assumed the people of the Russian Federation would rather have McDonalds than a connection with their ancestors.

Washington’s war on Russia brings up two bits of irony. One is the people of the East overcame communism only to find the alternative was worse. The communists promised to steal your labor and the dignity that arises from it. Liberal democracy promises to steal your soul and replace it with consumerism. The communists built monuments to the workers while the liberal democrats destroy the monuments to your ancestors and replace them with planned developments.

The other bit of irony in all of this is that if the West is going to survive it is going to need to embrace civilizationalism as well. The promise of the EU was that it would unite the countries of the Europe for the common good. The trouble is the elites embrace the cancer of multiculturalism. That cancer will have to be removed and replaced with a civilizational sensibility that respects the variations within the culture, traditions and demographics of people with a common history.

This concept is not entirely alien to the West. Europe rallied to defend Christendom against the Muslims. It was not nationalism that led Sobieski to lead his men against the Turks at Battle of Khotyn. It was a civilizational identity that saw the Turks as alien invaders who must be repelled in order to preserve Western civilization. Into the last century, there was an understanding among Western people that despite their differences, there was a West and he had to be defended.

Perhaps the psychosis of liberal democracy will finally be beaten out of the West in what is looking like another futile and pointless war of choice. Despite the disparity in wealth, the Russians merely have to continue to exist in order to win. For the West, liberal democracy requires the unconditional surrender of Eurasian identity to the homogenizing forces of Liberal democracy. History shows that this is every bit as futile as the crusades against Islam.

The big difference between this civilizational war launched by the West and the one launched against Islam is that the East matters. The West has deep economic connections to the East. That means this war will have real costs to the people of the West, in terms of living standards. It is unlikely that the people will be willing to sacrifice the only benefit of liberal democracy for an abstract war against a people who they naturally see as civilizational allies.


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193 thoughts on “Civilizationalism

  1. (outgrowing “good & evil”)

    The difference between political “left & right”:
    – The right’s major aim: to find the right’s virtues (right has poor self-consciousness.)
    – The left’s major aim: to ignore the left’s flaws (left has no self-consciousness.)

    Political “left & right” are so intertwined that its constituents prefer to choke each other and to shoot themselves in the foot continuously rather than grow out of it, because that would mean the end of both.

    God bestowed the universe with Positive & Negative (Yang & Yin, if you’re itchy). “Good & Evil”* – our very human, very flawed take on Positive & Negative – will always be around. This doesn’t mean one can’t stand aloof from it.

    * and all its derivatives, including political “left & right”.

    When you’re part of a group, one essential affair of yours is either to determine, or abide to, the decisions impacting over the well being of the group.
    By tacitly or explicitly allowing for the existence of rulers, the ruled – some consciously, the large majority without acknowledging it – admit their innate ineptitude to rule over the whole of their essential affairs. If they can’t rule over their essential affairs adequately, how are they able to competently discern the quality of the rulers?
    This is what makes democracy so utterly ineffective.
    For God’s sake, don’t start the teeth gnashing: democracy is not a guarantor of prosperity, capitalism is, and in case you forgot it, companies – specially the successful ones – are mainly autocracies and oligarchies, not democracies.
    Is this a defense of capitalism?
    Capitalism is despicable: it turns human beings into cost/benefit units. A sane human being can’t be pro-capitalism any more than he can be pro-democracy or pro-communism.
    No, this is a pre-manifesto towards >em>Perennial Theocracy.

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    • Perennial Theocracy
      Something akin to the Dalai Lama selection, structured by a western approach/frame of mind (tilted towards rationality, without discarding intuition.)

  2. Off-topic, but a fascinating example of how fake news travels. ZeroHedge and others parrot a horribly misleading CNN headline: “FDA Chief: Misinformation the ‘Leading Cause of Death’ in U.S.” The CNN site does indeed have those exact words. And the interviewer starts with nearly the same claim. There’s only one problem: at nowhere in the interview does Director make such a claim. The closest he says is that misinformation may lead some folks to make bad health choices. That’s a rather far cry from “leading cause of death,” methinks.

    I rarely watch CNN. If this is typical for them, well can I understand why they specifically and media in general are held in such contempt these days. 😀

    https://www.cnn.com/videos/health/2022/05/07/fda-robert-califf-intv-misinformation-death-sot-vpx.cnn-

  3. Pingback: DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » Today in War

  4. I have photos my grandpa took of GIs and Soviets partying on VE Day, or soon after. I don’t think I’ve ever seen images of that, not even in movies. Must not’ve been paying attention. Kind of like the Christmas football (sic 🙂 ) match in WWI— surreal.

    • Nothing like the ww1 Christmas truce with the soccer game and the rest. The GIs were allies with the Soviets. They shouldn’t have been, but they were.

  5. Anybody got any views/done any work on what are the most woke averse Web services?
    Browser
    Email
    Search
    Payment service ?

  6. Alright, I can’t resist.

    I made the mistake of masochistically listening to Bongino’s podcast today. Most of you already know about his ass hair burning stunt over Ukraine, but now he’s given new meaning the song lyric “chestnuts burning on a open fire.” Apparently, Putin is now deliberately losing the war in Ukraine as a provocation to entice NATO to enter the war so that he (Putin) can surrender and thereby save face with the Russian people. Does insanity have no limit in our current society? Please God, take the matches away from Bongino before he gets to his back hair and half of Florida is burnt to the ground.

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    • it’s the male equivalent of teen girls cutting themselves. starts with lighting farts, and next thing you know your in a burn ward and your anus is crispy.

    • Your Bongino recon reports are always worth at least a good laugh !!

      VOTE HARDER !!! I mean REAL hard. When you walk into that voting booth yank on the g-damn lever like your life depended on it!! Break the machine if you have to. Let them know we are done taking it !!!!

    • The truth is the complete opposite. Russia is fighting a brutal war of attrition so NATO becomes too scared to intervene. If they had fought a quick and easy blitz war, they might have given the West the idea they could do it too and it might have happened.

      If Ukraine gets gradually ground into dust over the next few years, no one is going to want to sign up for that kind of warfare and the neocons lose in 2024.

      What is up in the air is just what kind of non-puppet faction in Ukraine might overthrow Zelensky and negotiate a reasonable peace with Russia. The nation is so corrupt this might not happen until Kiev gets flattened.

  7. The last paragraph is so true. We’ve been asked, or made, to give up everything in exchange for prosperity and a silly ideology and now we’re being asked, or made, to give up the prosperity in order to keep that silly ideology that they just spent the past two years proving doesn’t really mean anything. No thanks!

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    • Wouldn’t bet on it. If you examine which countries care about Russian resources it’s mostly Italy, Germany, France. Coincidentally these are the countries that are trying to play both sides. Other countries like UK, US, Canada don’t care about resources from the East, Poles are frothing at the mouth regarding this invasion and would happily embrace destitution rather than being under Russias boot again. Same goes for Finland, Romania, Baltic States, Balkans with exception of Serbia.

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      • Well, since Russia has a large chunk of the most important assets for an industrial civilization, including oil and gas, if the US and Canada want to ignore them, they are doomed….

      • The main concern of the Poles, rather than their mouthed bullshit, seems to be how much of the Ukraine they can reabsorb back into Poland when all this is over,

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  8. This article is deluded on a number of points.

    “The Chechens like being Chechen and they will die for it.” Those Cechens died in first Chechen war. The current ones are vassals of Muscovites. How does warring in Ukraine bring any benefit to Chechens in Chechnya? I can ask the same question for Tuvaks, Buryats and all the other fauna that ethnic Russians have swallowed and integrated into their empire.

    These are the people that make the majority of deaths in Ukraine. There’s been almost no dead soldiers from political centers of Russia(St. Petersburg and Moscow). If the middle-class of said places would start losing their sons in this war for “survival” you would see whole land fills of St. George ribbons. It’s a war of conquest, something Russians done before the Soviet Union and as Soviet Union. Calling this land grab a war of “survival” is delusional.

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    • You obviously know nothing about the Global American Empire, and the West’s history of invading Russia.

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      • And, judging from the aggressive “ignorance” on display, cares not a whit. Pitiful specimen. Spamming up the thread, likely for pay.

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    • Splitting the difference, I suspect restoring the glory of the Russian Empire plays a part, but certainly backing NATO off does, too.

      Chalk it up to globalism’s unwilling retreat. The rest of Europe will have to come to terms with defending itself, and if I had to bet, that will look like the old world order and its old dangers, but with new names.

      Crazy, the mischief bankers and merchants can cause.

    • I think what the underlying sentiment is, among many people, is that we just want someone, anyone to win against globohomo. It is not necessarily that anyone is 100% in love with Putin, but we just want him to win. Or for globohomo to get its ass kicked, not unlike people who are sick and tired of seeing Alabama win all the championships and just want to see someone beat them. When people cheered for Clemson when they won — against the odds btw — they loved Clemson for a day. Doesn’t mean they became Clemson super fans or fans at all outside of this one event.

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      • True, we cheer globohomo down. Those Talibans playing around in the gym at the just vacated Bagram US base, that footage was so hilariously fulfilling I had a grin on my face I could not wipe out

    • The delusion is all yours…NATO missiles positioned in the Ukraine, and loss of Russia’s naval base in Crimea, would be catastrophic for Russia…

  9. What you call “civilisationalism”, others call genetic proximity. The latter is a sine qua non for any civilisation. I think Wilmot Robertson went into this in more detail in his book, “The Dispossessed Majority” (which many people here must surely have read). Americans were simply not allowed to develop any civilisation, whose foundations would have had to be on some pan-European genetic proximity. On a side note, I think some Iranian (cleric or general, I don’t remember) in a recent interview contended that a century from now the Iranians would still exist as a people but that those in the West would not.

  10. 10% of Canadians (and more like 15-20% of travelling/fighting age people) can’t even board a plane to leave the country.

    That’s already a large base of people immediately flipping the middle finger when asked to sacrifice for freedom and democracy in Ukraine. Even the Indian supreme court ruled against vax mandates.

    Russia was always known for being “backwards” compared to the West, and probably still is compared to our peak. But we’ve gone so insane that we’re now in a much worse position. As I’ve said before, the West hasn’t launched a full scale war because it can’t. A draft would cause more damage here than it would inflict on Russia.

    The war drums are beating but most people don’t really care.

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    • The old ’60s saying, “What if they threw a war and nobody came?” is more relevant now than ever.

      This is the power of withdrawing consent.

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    • I get the feeling they are just toying with us.

      Like they want us to get all riled up and ready to go die, only to say, oops, we were just kidding. Like Lucy yanking the football from poor old Charlie Brown.

      I just get the feeling they are testing the public and/or larping as tough guy war hawks. They can’t be serious? Right?

      Can’t help but smell an ulterior motive in play, just don’t know what it is. But I am sure it will soon reveal itself.

      • They are looking for those who call bullshit on the whole deception. Those are the people who offer resistance now, and are people who they want to identify, as it is likely that they will offer resistance in the future. That might be a motive, no?

    • But Russia has had superior physical science and engineering for some time, with an un-woke educational system…

  11. One thing I’ve been mesmerized by since Covid started and now going into this Ukraine issue, etc., is that liberal democracy IS a Jonestown. Jonestown was the pure essence of liberal democracy. Do you see any individualism whatsoever…on either side? I don’t. And just like asking who really elected Jim Jones…who really elected these clowns in D.C.? I know they got the most votes, but the system itself selected them. And as they thrash about in their domestic and foreign policy decisions, doesn’t it look like something frightening is about to happen? Just as a shootout of a Congressman at an air strip led to a mass poisoning, what will some ill conceived shootout with Russia bring? We’re entering an era where I literally want to go into the woods in some wilderness area for five years and not come out. Everything about this era says “Run JR! Run!.”

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    • The technocrat elites have those same cultish eyes as the people selling pyramid schemes to teenagers looking for a job.

      These people are nuts.

      They slipped in when no one was looking and have established a cult inside every hall of government in the west. We just wanted to do our own thing and be free but all the while they were planning and scheming. And now the (((usuals))) hold the whip and marshal them around like their little cult army, along with the crazy blacks and whoever has been sucked into the system. Knowing human nature to the extent I do, these people are not equipped to hold onto to power for a long term, they just lack the natural gifts of a true elite.

      And I was reading Unz and his study of how the Ivies massively discriminate against high IQ whites. And they are now basically groups of UNDER-qualified (((Js))) — believe it or not, and Unz was quite surprised to find out — and of course way way way under-qualified POCs. But the Ivies still have the cultural inertia behind them, but because they lack true greatness of people they are going to fail. Meanwhile all of the brilliant white guys have been moved into the better state schools, and it is no wonder why we find more intelligence here on sites like this than you do anywhere where the Ivy league grads congregate, such as on Twitter. They just don’t have it, and we can see it too in government incompetence.

      Strange to say, but the Ivy League is no longer the cream of the crop but a bunch of woke mediocrities and a tribe locking competition out so they can enjoy the spoils. It is just an incestuous mess.

      But how long can such a house built on such a flimsy foundation hold up?

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      • I agree. The only way forward is that they entirely wreck the place on the way out. Nothing left. A brutal change-out in an elite isn’t pretty and will likely leave half the country destitute, or worse. It’ll be with MMT, or from war, or possibly both.

      • The main values, and problems with the current Ivy League (and places like Oxbridge) are the enormous inertia behind their reputation and their deeply entrenched international social networks at the highest levels of power.

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        • Those window stickers on the parents’ cars are like pure heroin to the dopamine addicts, better than a million “likes” on Faceborg.

          Did you ever see the video of the AWFL Karen (and that was her real name) who tried throwing her weight around with two New Jersey State Troopers who had pulled over her daughter and friends for an expired registration? She dropped “New Haven and MIT” repeatedly into the conversation, believing that the two cops would be so awestruck by the presence of greatness that they’d rip up the ticket on the spot. Where did she get that idea?

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      • Well, Yale University is clutching at its pearls because the venerable school is named after generous donor Yale, who “oversaw” local slave trade but, Wikipedia emphatically tells us, never owned nor traded them himself. I’ll admit I don’t know (nor do I want to) the school’s history in depth, it stands to reason that slave trade money must have funded it in its infancy. It was a major industry in Colonial times.

        If they rename the school, it’s like abandoning a super valuable trademark.

        I wonder if other Ivies are in similar straights. “Damn this Progressive disease!” 🙂

        • Ha ha, the guy that built Macy’s Department store in New York City, Isidor Straus, was actually a Jewish Confederate soldier and blockade runner from Georgia, the same guy and his wife that you saw on the movie Titanic that gave up their first class seats on a lifeboat for others. I’m pretty sure if I looked at Wiki they would downplay or ‘fact-check’ the slave runner part away in some manner.

  12. “The Chechens like being Chechen and they will die for it.”

    This is why federalism (local self rule) works and multiculturalism does not. Most Chechens I suspect would rather have their own country, but their inclusion into the Russian Federation also guarantees their cultural continuity. Perfect is enemy to the ‘good enough’ and all that. Subject to the constraint that they don’t challenge the central government, Chechens are free to be Chechens in Chechnya.

    There is a limit to how angry people will get at absentee rulers if they are substantially left alone. It’s why the Roman Empire endured as long as it did. If you paid your taxes (which were negligible by today’s standards) and made perfunctory obeisance to Jupiter, then you were pretty much left alone. The Romanization that occurred was gradual and incidental, not overt and authoritarian. Some of the leadership among the subject peoples knew the gradualism would destroy their old ways eventually, but it is a much harder sell getting the proles to see it as a threat and revolt than if the Romans had been foolish enough to ban local languages and forcibly replace local socioeconomic arrangements.

    I don’t remember all the detail because it was years ago, but I read about some dispute the Chechens were having with some local Russian official who in a bit of corruption was violating the basic tenets of the Russian-Chechen sociopolitical contract. Putin speedily fired the Russian official. They don’t want a 3rd Chechen War. You make a deal and you stick to it, and you smack down anyone on your side who is foolish enough to undermine it. The Chechen role in the Ukraine might have cemented their place in the Russian Federation.

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    • “Some of the leadership among the subject peoples knew the gradualism would destroy their old ways eventually,”

      True enough, but it’s also important to note that even without Romanization, those cultures would change over time anyway. Leaving aside political interventions, major natural catastrophes will alter a people’s composition and habits, so perhaps it Roman occupation wouldn’t have mattered anyway.

  13. Zman keeps mentioning the Chechens, he must be impressed by their antics. I remember him in a podcast not long ago stating about the Chechens that “these people really love war”.
    Their overproduction of infantryman “straight from the battlezone” videofootage is kind of cringe most of the times, what with the obsessive repetition of their slogans “Allah Akbar” invariably preceded or followed by an “Akhmat Silah”. Their meek smiles to signal each one’s conformity to the tribe… but when they zoom in the dead soldiers documenting the aftermath of some skirmish, that’s very crude and really leaves an indelible mark, on me at least it has done so, of how repulsive war really is beyond all romanticizing about the welcoming of war and of “struggle for life” from certain right wing tought circles.
    In one of their latest videos they moved to forested regions near Izium or Popasnaya – relocating once action in Mariupol basically stopped – and they literally show scenes in which corpses are somehow embedded in the muddy trenches, the result of artillery hits one is led to think by the absence of blood and bullet holes. The Chechens probably shoot these videos for bragging and prestige purposes, to show how tough and merciless they are (and perhaps for documentation, as there is an alleged bounty placed by Kadyrov over the heads of Ukrainian nationalists).
    They come across as a mix between contemporary gang exhibitionist lowlifes on one end, and the legendary marauding hill tribesmen of before-Crusades times on the other, coming down bringing death on the plains. After all, these people are the descendants of the Circassians who known as “Mamelukes” have ruled over Egypt and its near Middle East for centuries.
    Kadyrov himself is larger than life and striving to cast a Nietszchian Ubermensch figure. His wikipedia ‘Controversies’ section could easily belong to a Burgundian or Vandal king of the Migration period:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramzan_Kadyrov#Accusations_of_human_rights_abuses
    Reading that page would move Jack Donovan to tears of joy.

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    • A love of fighting is the fighting man’s natural inclination. And triumph over the enemy is to be celebrated, even when the toffs find it uncouth.

      Civilization breeds the fight out of men. The decline in fighting spirit can be seen on a spectrum from game hill people like the Chechens(1), down to men of German and Irish and Scots-Irish extraction in the USA, down to the endless hordes of Asiatic rice-eaters in China and India.

      If you have never been in a fight, informal or a serious sport (wrestling, contact martial arts) you don’t know what I’m writing about and likely will not survive any serious civilization difficulties we’ll have in the near future.

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      • That the Germans embraced this early on is – IMHE – the reason for their prowess @ those things military in nature. The Wehrmacht – circa 1940 – is most likely the finest fighting force that ever took to the field, before it’s overextension & attrition on the Eastern Front.

        In retrospect the Allied nations seemed jealous of this & did whatever they could to pound the Prussian spirit/militarism out of the German character.

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      • Well, in our society making a living is dependent upon utter conformity and obedience to the dominant morals, which currently are the feminine, risk-averse, “custodian” tenets we are all very aware of, that define the civilized at the opposite end of the brute.
        I am sure you are well aware that entertaining thoughts of straying away from those ethics would mean sure ejection from employment and banishment from social circles, in case the thought crime is discovered.
        But anyhow one cannot help to think about it, about rebellion, about being outcast to the Frontier. I guess that’s where also the point of writing and reading this blog lies.
        When in uncomfortable situations, I found out that my limit is the fear of getting the police involved and ending up with a record. The gossipy consequence is that I could be cast as a violent person, imagine what a feast for hostile people in my life that would be. Am I the only one who has to think and thread carefully two or three moves in advance, because normies sense I have this amazing faculty of analyzing things critically and not just follow the herd? They’d be happier if they could stomp the intruder and feel that cozy warmth that goes with their conformism not being challenged anymore, even only at the level of just having a feeling that it is.
        So I guess being a civilian in a combat situation I would end up blended in the muddy ground as the Ukrainian conscript, rather than as the bragging praising-Allah Chechen. And I think so would you.
        The Ukrainian conscript lives in a more or less capitalist, individualist society that bears far more similarities to ours, than the archaic one the Chechen lives into. The latter will probably never have to deal with living outside his enlarged family environment, facing the job market, the postmodern atomization and ennui etc. He would probably not be able to even imagine himself in terms of being a separate entity from his environment. Individualism has its pros and its cons. One of its cons is that in military engagement it’s not as effective as the pack of backward collectivists.

        • To keep my current professional status, I must also guard my words and actions, but not so close as it seems you must. Despite my current professional status, I have some small dispensation given my background, occupation, and industry.

          But I must admit that my professional businesslike behavior is an applique, veneer, or mask. Always has been. I can keep up appearances and I have the esoteric gift of “STFU and smile” when I tire of it. The mildly spergy around me at work are are less violence-prone than I, though more likely to let things slip when it comes down to it. That provides some cover.

          I keep it up because it is currently convenient with a family to support. Convenient, not necessary. I can make a living and support my family even if all my professional credentials, contacts, and benefits dry up and blow away. Not “anti-fragile,” more “I am not a one-trick pony.”

          There are whole sectors of the economy where the current globohomo social mores do not reign and men with more grit and less polish do just fine. BTDT.

          The random 18-24YO Uke conscript is going to be tougher and more readily violent than the equivalent 18-24YO American, given the Ukes, Russians, and Poles I have known. They are only partially globo-homoed. Such a critter’s presence would inspire discomfort in many of my (current) social station and such a Uke conscript would be more survivable than most in the USA given trying circumstances.

          • I let things slip because as far as ideas go I find ridiculous to hold taboos. For instance here we are, essentially arguing about Nietzschean concepts of rights by violence as the natural state of human condition.
            This way of thinking is masterfully exposed in this VertigoPolitix video, especially after the 1:00 minute mark https://odysee.com/@VertigoPolitix:5/What-Freedom-Must-Become-1:d
            I know people attaching links are a drag but you will like the above.
            Another good portrait of this way of thinking is the recent review of “The Northman” by Kevin McDonald. I extrapolate: “Hypermasculinity of Norse Society. Indo-European culture was far from sexually egalitarian—what one might term “hyper-masculine”…. In the extremely competitive and aggressive Scandinavian society in which blood feuds were taking place everywhere, often lasting for many years and several generations …, the concept of honour evolved around reputation, respect and prestige [i.e., not one’s place in a kinship group. as was typically the case in non-individualist cultures]. Social life and reputation were hierarchically organised and arranged according to dominance and submission, powerful and powerless. At the bottom of the social scale, female thralls [slaves] were routinely subjected to rape and traded as sexual subjects… Rape of a free woman, however, was a serious matter … .
            Within this social hierarchy, power was explicitly connected with metaphors for penetration—by the sword, penis, or tongue. Those who penetrated—with words, with weapons, or with the phallus—were the powerful (“males”); those who became penetrated were the powerless (“females”). In a social setting, sexuality provided a symbolic code for dominance and submission, throwing light on power and thus status differences …
            The Northman depicts a society that is quite foreign to contemporary sensibilities. It’s unlikely many of us would want to live in it—unless one was able to be a male in a successful Männerbund. But there’s no denying that the society selected for strong men—something we definitely need now.”
            https://www.unz.com/article/review-the-northman/

            What I am trying to argue is, – and I have thought a lot about it since these graphic accounts of the war started to come out – that adopting this kind of mentality leads to an horrifying end when challenged by reality. Ukrainians conscripts are being shelled to death and their remains plastered inside the mud of the trenches, as seen in this grisly video from 1:25 onward https://odysee.com/@Velyaminov:a/Soldiers-of-the-Akhmat-special-unit,-together-with-the-armed-forces-of-Donbass,-continue-to-successfully-carry-out-combat-missions-in-the-Luhansk-direction.:e but I suggest not to click.
            This won’t happen to the Chechens, they are protected by their special status in Russia, they will never be allowed by their warlord Kadyrov to be used as cannon fodder as in the above, because they are a collective, rather than a bunch of individuals like the more Westernized Ukrainians are. The Ukrainian command does not care enough, and the hypermasculine mentality of the nationalistic wings allowed this messy futile resistance to even be contemplated.

      • Nietzsche would fully endorse your message, sir! 😀

        Alas, I am one of many sheep in sheep’s clothing 🙁

      • We have vanished, but not into night
        Neglecting our chances of fight
        Unfit for the spear and the bow

  14. Pingback: Strange Daze: Let Us Now Praise The Daily Timewaster. Now More Than Ever.

  15. “This concept is not entirely alien to the West. Europe rallied to defend Christendom against the Muslims. It was not nationalism that led Sobieski to lead his men against the Turks at Battle of Khotyn. It was a civilizational identity that saw the Turks as alien invaders who must be repelled in order to preserve Western civilization.”

    This Europe didn’t rally to defend Christendom when Spain was invaded and occupied by Berbers. Instead of aiding the Spaniards, Pope Urban II called for “Crusades” to “liberate” the Holy lands.

    Besides, these “Turks” were/are Greek-speaking Romans belonging to territories once under the Byzantine Empire. They had converted and adopted a Turkish dialect. They would still have been fighting Poles, Hungarians, Romanians, etc. had they remained Christian.

    P.S.: The contemporary “Republic of Turkey” is actually a state of Muslim Greeks.

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    • Europe defended itself from Islamic imperialism as far back as the 7th century, and has been doing so sporadically ever sense.

      And I’m not sure why you put scare quotes around liberate. The Muzz conquered the Christian Holy Lands and their rapacity made pilgrimage there almost impossible. The Crusades were indeed attempts to liberate the Holy Lands from foreign Islamic invaders.

      Your depiction of Turkish demographics is largely nonsense. Yes, there were many whites in the old Byzantine provinces, but early Muhammadan conquests and later Turkish ones drastically reduced the whiteness of those lands. And there is no reason whatsoever to believe Byzantium would have launched an invasion of Eastern and Central Europe had it not fallen to the Muzz and been forcibly converted to Muhammadanism.

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      • “Your depiction of Turkish demographics is largely nonsense. Yes, there were many whites in the old Byzantine provinces, but early Muhammadan conquests and later Turkish ones drastically reduced the whiteness of those lands.”

        Agreed. You are correct. The Turks were not Greeks or Armenians. They came from the Asian steppes.

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        • Even though they say Greeks and Sicilians, and I am 1/4 Sicilian, are like 99% DNA brothers, I can spot a Greek from a mile away. Mainly the eyes are more asiatic looking and sometimes less doe-like for lack of a better word. But they are just more piercing I guess. Italian eyes have a softness to them. Many a greek eyes, if they were stones they could cut glass. Many a Spanish eye has a similar hardness.

          So all of this DNA stuff doesn’t seem to tell the whole story. I also remember reading how a cat was cloned and yet the offspring had a totally different fur pattern and coat despite having the exact same DNA and the mom or whatever you could call her.

          Just an aside and maybe a little interesting history for people. But my “Sicilian” side is through my maternal grandfather, but it turns out they had relocated there from the mainland a few hundred years ago. Basically the government at the time, the details elude me and this was only explained by one of my cousins who did the research, had paid people to go set up shop in Sicily to establish a military camp. My understanding is they were given land in return. The town is Camporeale, which means a military camp of some sort. Then it grew into a little village. Do these DNA tests even consider any of these things? There is always so much migration and movement, and Sicily was a “melting pot” before America was even a gleam in a conquistador’s eye. Which is why you get people from Sicily who look quite Arabic, but they were just immigrants who were eventually “Latinized” through their names. A person who knows Italian names well can point out and pick out who is a “local” and who is a newer arrival, etc. Such as I was told that De Santis, as in Governor De Santis, was a name that means he comes from an orphanage. Not him of course but somewhere along the line, that is where his name comes from.

          But when in Sicily you can tell because there is something of a caste system. The people who are the original locals, the ones dating deeper back to the Romans and Norse, they tend to be whiter and fairer. On the dark end of the spectrum you find people who are essentially the equivalent of mestizos, a mix of some local blood but mostly lower class blood from a people who had migrated there some time ago and never really rose up into the upper echelons. Hence why most of them moved here, and why most people associate Sicilians with darker people. An equivalent would be saying a white guy from North Carolina must have some negro in him since the state is like 40% negro. You can see where this is going, but in Sicily the people in charge even to this day and the people with money look nothing like the typical NYC dago. They are not really the same people. Even my mom’s family who came here through New Orleans and Tampa look little like the people in NYC who must have come from different parts of the island and the boot. When I was in Boston people weren’t even sure I was Italian. They kind of squinted but then said, oh yeah, I can see it. I guess.

          Hope someone finds this interesting.

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          • Lampedusa’s “The Leopard” is world famous in Italy and tells the tale of an ancient Italian family during the founding of modern Italy. Blue eyes, fair skin: definitely not dark haired, shifty eyed types with stilettos.

          • Falcone: Despite recent DNA research, there was so much movement and mixing of people after the fall of the Roman Empire that who knows whether a particular modern ‘Italian’ has Roman or Spanish or German ancestry. My husband’s maternal side is southern Italian (Salerno and Avellino). Skin as White as can be, generally blue/green/hazel eyes, and a lot of childhood blonde and red hair. While I’ve traced both branches of the family back to the late 1600s, who knows where anyone came from before that? While my late mother-in-law’s family name is generally found only in a few southern communes, it is strikingly similar (to me) to a French name.

          • Fascinating as always, Falcone. Each face is a map of history; the Cosa Nostra “Our Thing” speaks directly to civilizational identity.

            People still love it, always will, when you ask them their roots. They just light right up.

        • They were Ottoman Turks, not Arabs or Persians, and they were definitely not Christians. Greek Christians (Orthodox) and Armenians were Eastern Christians, in conflict to this day with the Roman Catholic Church.

    • The cultural Grecization of the Anatolian ethnicities in Asia Minor had certainly progessed over the centuries, but even during Byzantium’s heyday they weren’t exactly Greeks.

      In 1095, the “foreign policy” reason Pope Urban called for the first crusade (likely there was an internal European dynamic as well) because the imperialisst Seljuq Turks had defeated the Byzantines at Malazgirt in 1071, and, as uncouth newcomers, begun to disrupt the modus vivendi between the religious communities in Jerusalem too. But pilgrimage access to Jerusalem was of paramount importance for medieval European Christian, and the Turkish threat was new, so there was hope to stem it (and stemmed it was, for about 150 years — quite a feat, if one thinks about it). By contrast, Muslim rule in Iberia was a given, and still quite stable, in Urban’s time.

  16. “ The communists promised to steal your labor and the dignity that arises from it. Liberal democracy promises to steal your soul and replace it with consumerism.” Z, you’re on a roll of late. Shame on me for letting spring weather tempt me away from my screen.

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  17. Western planners even assumed the people of the Russian Federation would rather have McDonalds than a connection with their ancestors. That’s because western planners WOULD rather have McDonalds than a connection to their ancestors. My over 80 year old retired professional in-laws ( doctors) eat that shit once sometimes twice a day. In California you can buy that crap with food stamps and have it delivered to your f#$&@‘n tent via door dash, just like Fuentes. Couldn’t resist…he was pontificating the other day about having McDonald’s door dashed to his lair. That shit has to stop. Same with Amazon. Great post Zman

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    • Like I always say, if the people in charge really cared about our health and well being then McDonald’s would be illegal. I am fortunate that today I cannot even stomach fast food or even typical restaurant food. All it does it give me zits and a sick feeling of nausea. Might as well take potato chip grease and rub all over my face and live on vitamin-infused chemical slop and Doritos for my sustenance.

      Yes, the millennials have done some very good things, and the whole idea of “farm to table” and the general trend of farmer’s markets has been a very valuable movement, in addition to the original push for organic and natural and fresh ingredients which has now become a scam but was great while it lasted. But of course now these things are manifestations of white supremacy. God forbid people eat well and healthy. That be rayciss !!!

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      • All civilized standards are rayciss because the Hutus cannot or will not meet them. And if the standards of civilization are destroyed in the name of DIE (diversity, inclusivity, equity), civilization itself dies. Gee, how convenient for the AWRs.

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      • I’m shocked by how many suburban kids I knew growing up got into farming, most temporarily, some seriously. More than a few.

  18. The smart phone did to the web what AOL did to the news groups. It flooded the web with too many people. “Progressive Gal” was replaced by “Susan Smith, HR Dept, Soulless Corp” Pre Sail Foam internet was almost entirely anonymous. This is how Musk will kill Twitter. He is going to require full name with photo ID verification. In the current climate, this is just as bad as having the scolds run the show with their report button. I’ve already heard of corp HR types generating dossiers of people’s social media accounts.

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    • “I’ve already heard of corp HR types generating dossiers of people’s social media accounts.”

      This is something that truly amazes me. I have a limited SM presence, mostly for friends and family photos ‘n stuff. I long ago quit posting anything political on FB. One hard and fast rule I have is never “friending” anyone I currently work with. No point in taking a chance of something making it to work that shouldn’t have.

      People who “friend” co-workers and even supervisors probably deserve what they get. But I guess the young folk these days wouldn’t know how to communicate without SM. Oh well, sucks to be them. Also, if I were ever in any job interview where they asked for my SM passwords, I would quickly get up and leave with a hearty “fuck you and your company” to go with it.

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      • I used facebook many years ago under an alias. I made it to friend family members for easy/fast communications. I run into a guy I knew in high school and he gives me his facebook ID and I friend him. Next day, my nieces and nephews blocked me on FB. I ask their mother why and the moron I friended had posted a bunch of pictures of himself smoking pot on his account and so FB figured my 8 year niece should see these pictures because they know me and so might know this guy. I shut the account down and never used it again. That is the main problem I have with FB. They have no respect for privacy and will recommend friend of a friend of a friend kind of deal. Cancer.

        I haven’t switched jobs since the creation of the iPhone and the rise of Twitter etc. I don’t have social media accounts connected with my real life ID. So I’m a weirdo with no SM accounts or I’m a wrong-thinker. If I consider a job hop, I’m going to have to create brand new banal SM accounts and follow a bunch of gamers or something. I’m betting that your non-participation is not an option.

        • You raise a good point. Honestly I don’t know whether you can get a white collar job without a linkedin account. Probably yes if you send a good cv to headhunters they’ll hook you up.
          These accounts are all ridiculously pompous, and unashamedly and sometimes comically self-promoting. In a way you are forced to adopt corporate jargon word salads that mean nothing in order to be credible. The ladies might believe in all this but I’m sure deep down normal males hate the whole charade.
          Even Richard B: Spencer has a linkedin profile: executive director at Washington Summit publishing

        • I’m a proud weirdo with no SM accounts. I also spend cash, so doubly weird. No longer mail checks to pay bills, but maybe I should start doing that again. Used to pay bills 10 days before they were due, kinda miss the discipline.

        • I think the Feds should have to work for a living. Why anybody uses their documentation systems is a mystery to me.

  19. “Western people are baffled as to why Russians would give up drag queen story hour to seize the Donbas.”

    And what Western people would that be? Western drag queens? Western LGBTUVWXYZ allies? Western Karens? Regardless of the small populations that would actually care about drag queen story hour, it would be placed in the category of “choice”. Not a choice about vaccines, or choosing to acknowledge stolen elections. Just the choice to be stupid and perverted, which apparently is the highest form of existence for Western slaves. The world will be perfect once everyone has chosen to be non-binary. OK, not really. The world can never be perfect. Have to keep the idiots agitated with made-up problems and policies to solve them designed to siphon off major grift for TPTB.

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    • Drag queen story time was what finally convinced me that Satan is real.

      The real truth is that none of this crap is really endorsed by normal people. The only reason this continues is because normal people have become lethargic and apathetic in resisting the efforts of the freaks in our midst.

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      • I honestly don’t believe that your average Demonicrat mail-in ballot stuffer wants to be saddled with Drag Queen Story Hour. I mean, they will half-heartedly defend it with, “Their body, their choice” pretzel logic, but even they know that it is a bridge too far. They’ll try to shame someone that doesn’t support it with, “You’re just a nonbinary, heterosexual bigot!”, but they really believe, “Why did those faggots have to do this to me?” But, yeah, Satan is real.

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        • the thing is, there are parents taking their kids to these disgusting events. just as there are parents promoting their “trans” kids getting surgery and puberty blockers.

      • Normal people are afraid. They are morally off balance. They don’t understand how to defend normalcy against charges of ism. They are beaten dogs hiding under the porch.

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        • They do know but are afraid of what they must become.

          They need to be wiling to sacrifice both personal choices and what the group allows, in other words not be Libertarian or Libertine but entirely focused on the health of the community.

          They also have to be utterly ruthless.

          To reuse some of my own work

          In a civil war you might draw the short straw and have execution duty of people that are in reality just in the way, They might be kids for that matter.

          Our side being soft morally can’t do it .Problem is in order to win you have to be able to not only it but go home and sleep well at night after.

          Be this guy

          If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy. Remember, O LORD, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Raze it, raze it, even to the foundation thereof. daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

          The only other alternative is the Heathenish Barbarian way

          “To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women

          Civilization will FOADIAF with the later but its still probably better than the straw death we are facing.

      • To an extent, people are lethargic, but it’s also true that the tranny story hour types get energized from resistance, because it makes them noble victims. Basically, if you kicked the ass of whoever signed off on that decision, not only would he double down, but then he’d start proselytizing because persecution becomes de facto proof of his righteousness. Ignoring them is the most effective tactic because it deprives them of the attention they crave and also deprives them of their, admittedly twisted, validation. The most effective response would be for normies to simply ignore them, then have a couple of anonymous former military guys visit the irritation in the dead of night, strangle it and dismember it, and leave a note saying sic semper trannys or such like. Not sure how feasible the latter half of this tactic is, but at this point grassroots resistance, of the type normies are comfortable with, is useless at best and counterproductive at worst.

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        • We’ve been ignoring them the last 55 years and the horrendous results speak for themselves. It is long past time we do the very opposite, with magnum force.

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      • Here’s my question: why upend all of established civilization for – what? – .002% (transgender) of the population? Change ALL of our norms for a tiny segment of society? Numbers I’ve seen of homosexuals is like 3%.

        I just don’t get it. The Left/Dems think they’re going to win elections on the homosexual vote? Maybe in West Hollywood but where else?

        • Why? Because Leftists hate the white race and the civilization it built. Their only objective is to leave it in smoking rubble, and the various deviant and dysfunctional groups are the perfect weapons to do so.

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        • Degradation and demoralization, corruption and destruction, it’s a jewthang brother, has been for 2000 years. 110 or die.

      • It shocks me that they can actually get anyone to show up for drag queen pedo time. It’s one thing to virtue signal on Twitter, but it is a whole different thing to bring your preschool aged child to a library so a degenerate pedo can read LGBT propaganda to your kid, or get on the floor and roar like a demon. I wouldn’t take my worst enemy’s child to one of these things. It is absolutely evil.

        What are these children going to be like in another 15 years of nonstop degenerate propaganda being pumped into their heads?

        I too came to the conclusion Satan existed or, at a minimum, evil certainly exists. Worse, these people probably believe Satan exists (whether he does exist or not) and have vowed to worship him.

  20. Well, as some sage observed “we’re always three missed meals away from anarchy”. As I’ve said here before, the only laws that really matter are Thermodynamic laws. Everything else is a social/political construct. Not happy with gender or other natural, God-given arrangements, the Progs now shake their fist at Thermodynamics.

    We’re on the verge of a full-blown food/agricultural crisis as a result of this war. Just like the late psycho Madeleine Albright who advocated war but didn’t send tents to Kosovo during wintertime, these Geniuses are ruining the agricultural system of Ukraine in the aftermath of a pandemic and during an energy crisis.

    Millions of third-worlders are going to starve if this keeps up. That’s if the weather is good in US and Europe. If the harvest here is bad, we’re going to have $20/lb chicken and tens of millions starve. Collateral damage, I suppose. The morality, for which they claim to be fighting, escapes me.

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    • Well, Captain Willard their morality escapes you – as it does me – because there is no morality.

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      • Well, yes it does exist, but only in the same sense that numbers, or the “thing in itself” (like, I think, Love, or Truth, etc.) — they are purely mental creations. Unlike race, it really is a “social construct.” Actually that’s not even strictly true. While rules, laws, ethics, morality and such typically work for the benefit of a group, that is not required. Even if there was just one person alive, he would still be guided by these inner values, just as you are when you are alone.

        What all those things share is that they exist only in the mind, being purely ABSTRACT (Plato’s “real”), having no referent in the physical (“apparent”) world.

    • Don’t worry about food inflation. Our rulers will just use price controls and ban “price gouging”.
      Problem solved!

    • The idea that they’ll shut down “fossil” fuel usage in 8 years is a clear statement they want to kill us.

      The water purification stops, the garbage piles up, the hospitals run out of or are raided for supplies.

      But first, they get their infrastructure in place- enough “clean green” energy for the rulers after we’ve fallen. Fuel for their military to stop our desperate smuggling runs.

      As Marx said, kill 80% of the poor, and the remaining proles will happily prune the orchards through which the New Men stroll discussing philosophy.

      Prune their garden, or life in the toxic ruins- which you gonna choose?

  21. Another hard truth topic in today’s post, so I will take us deeper.

    A relatively small cadre of disease cells has taken root in the West (particularly in the USA) and now occupies the highest levels of power in both politics and government. The essence of these pathogens is parasitism (overweaning greed), and like all parasites, they have an incentive to feed as much as possible without going too far and killing the host. Well, Obama blew past that limit and Biden has now set a course for full exsanguination.

    The dirt people sense that this is a bad thing, but as long as Joe Normie can buy his Starbucks latte, he will remain on the couch. The sane fraction of the planet recognizes that the West is engaged in a death spiral and is torn between letting the idiots self-destruct or intervening to restore sanity. The Russians are doing the latter in Ukraine right now.

    But we are not the world’s problem to solve. That obligation belongs to us (US citizens) and no one else. It is our problem and we must solve it. Good people (like Carlson and Bongino) will dance to the tune of preserving the “process” until the collapse begins, which harmfully delays the day of reckoning. But nothing is fixed until the disease cells are gone. This has been basic biology for about a billion years.

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  22. As informative and well-researched as Z’s writings usually are, I still have to chuckle at the occasional goof:

    “…the national character of the people of the Soviet Union survived.” Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the ethnic make-up of the Soviet Union would be amused by this. Their ethnic smorgasbord at that time would make the United States, or most Western European countries seem as “White” as pre-Norman England in comparison.

    Now, perhaps Z intended the Caucasian racial component of the Soviet Union. That makes his phrase much more admissible.

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    • Maybe it was meant to be “peoples”, as there were many different cultures within the USSR. Just guessing…

    • I don’t get the issue here. Sure, the Soviet Union was an ethnic smorgasbord and it remained so despite the best efforts of the Bolsheviks. This diversity of culture and people is a big part of eastern identity.

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      • Look at the Russian who just won the world light-heavyweight title last weekend (despite Wladimir Klitschko’s shameful attempt to bar him from competing for being Russian). Dmitry Bivol’s father is a Romanian who lived in Moldova and his mother is a Korean from Kyrgyzstan. Ask Bivol what he is and he’ll tell you he’s Russian. Kneejerk and nuance don’t go together, which is why hot takes about that big cold transcontinental landmass, from Americans trying to find a “side” between Ukraine and Russia (as if it were a football game) sound so stupid.

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        • Exactly. There is a logic to Eurasia, but it is not the same logic of Western Europe. North America is closer to Eurasia in terms of demographics, so there is something to be learned from Eurasia, but America is too new and too broken to learn anything right now.

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  23. From Taki: “Public discourse needs to be fumigated to remove these vermin from the public square.”

    Absolutely brilliant!

    BTW, ordered a Z-man t-shirt. Took about 2-3 weeks to receive it. It’s a nice, light, comfortable t-shirt that is great for warmer weather. Stylish, too. I’ll be the envy of American youth everywhere.

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  24. “Western people are baffled as to why Russians would give up drag queen story hour to seize the Donbas.” Put that in your Book of Aphorisms.

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    • Forced to choose between a Donbas and a Dumbass, which would one choose? 😀

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  25. “…America, of course, has no real identity. It is a collection of economic and political slogans that holds together a continent full of strangers…”
    And so the AINO melting pot continues to melt down – perhaps what arises from that puddle of ooze will be something better (since I’m feeling unusually optimistic today).

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    • I still remember my Irish boss teaching me, the newcomer, some 40 years ago: “This is a strange place: you make a little place for yourself, build your life and no-one will bother you here”.
      Still grateful to him

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  26. Brings to mind my own experience. I left Florida like 30 years ago and haven’t been back much at all until fairly recently. So I am a specimen removed. So when I go back it is like I have been frozen in time and still bear the features and way of talking and so forth that was commonplace a long time ago but no longer. So I am basically a living and walking talking fossil record. The same sorta applies to New Orleans when I bummed around there when I was like 7 to 12 years old when my grandma still lived there. But it is not nearly as changed when I go back. But I had an interesting conversation with a black young man when I was there a few months ago.

    There is a system of streetlights all down this one road that have been completely changed. I was struck by it because the change was so apparent. I mentioned it to him and boom, yes he remembers the old streetlights too even though he is much younger, and we both got a little misty. At that moment we both realized something a bit profound, that tearing things down affects our history. Not some grande concept of racial or social history but our own small personal existence and history. So then move this idea over to say confederate statues celebrating a “white” guy general, who obviously has no relation to this black kid and fought for a cause probably he didn’t agree with. But there were times in his youth when he may have been walking by the statue and he has general memories of that day and time, maybe he remembers the ice cream he was eating with the statue in the background, or something small and personal. But this statue was in fact part of HIS history. His small personal history. But now it is no longer there, and so some other young black kid growing up will have no memories of it and they won’t have as much to share with each other. A part of one’s peronsal history has been destroyed. What links the two people, what spans their generations, no longer there.

    My point being is that people are not about some great cause and so forth when things get torn down around them. All you do is break the bonds between the generations of people within the same community. Even something as silly a new set of streetlights has an effect on that continuity and surprisingly is one small piece of the larger tapestry all around everyone that has a unifying effect on shared memories.

    Ultimately the American way of tearing stuff down and planned obsolescence and always tearing down its history be it old houses or old statues only seems to break down the society. And now I understand why small town people have always been so big on keeping things put and keeping change slow and gradual. They understood what I am just now learning. And obviously the people in Russia have always known too. I am not sure if America is scared of a lack of change, scared of losing the permanent revolution, but it seems permanent revolution and continual change is a recipe for a deeply fractured society where there is nothing tying people together. There is literally nothing keeping us together. Even the football uniforms always change. The Ford logo seems to have kept the same, but that is a small consolation.

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    • A lovely comment, with which I agree wholeheartedly. A statue, a local pub, a local eccentric, a shop facade passed by every day – all marks on a person’s memory; part of his history.

      I suspect the deeply fractured society you mention is very desirable to The Evil (Globalists), who themselves do have a flock in which they belong – but it’s not ours. These folks fly over those fancy shop facades and have never been to a local boozer.

      This is why it is important to get out and speak to individuals, as you’ve done. Relate your stories. Instead of perusing MSN and it’s latest conveyor belt offerings of Wokeism. I’ve found that in face of The Evil, my faith in God has in fact come back, and that is something to be thankful for – even if few share the same appreciation.

      All this really is why we start with ourselves, extend to our families, and then reach out to the smaller communities. It seems likely that the future in a declining Western country (or maybe I’m being optimistic) is a more clan oriented diaspora of white communities, with stronger ties and traditionally sex-divided duties, but far less materially.

      I can only hope this is so, as London, Washington, Paris and any other Woke capital are visited by desolation.

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    • A building downtown in my childhood village burned down some years ago. Never entered the building, but still always feel an ache when I see the patch of grass where it used to be.

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      • I have the same experience whenever a building with character is torn down and replaced by a generic ‘corporate’ building. We used to frequent a lovely, homestyle restaurant in my youth that is now replaced by a CVS. It’s jarring and soul-crushing in many ways.

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      • Having grown up in a rapidly developing region (metro Imperial Capital) may I register a similar complaint? Many was the time I mourned the passing of what had been a pleasant patch of grass where no building had ever stood, at least in my living memory, or more dramatically perhaps, pleasant wooded or other countryside, bulldozed, paved, turned into office towers, shopping malls or cookie cutter subdivisions, most of those indistinguishable from what one could see in a locale a thousand miles away?

      • Lord, you should see my hometown. In my parents’ youth it contained a decent-sized downtown with department stores, theaters, restaurants, bars and clubs, banks, etc. It’s gone now. Urban Renewal in the 70s tore a majority of it down and what businesses remained moved out near the interstate. An entire city center has been wiped off the map. The only thing left are a few government-run gibs offices and a couple drug store chains. One weeps looking at photos of what was lost. Not just the physical structures, but the institutions that drew communities into a shared experience.

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        • To my mind, the definitive statement on this issue.

          Chryssie Hynde and the Pretenders – My City Was Gone (live performance, an illustration of Shining Arete):

          https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pvAYGz6Iwmc

          Now I have to slip in the earbuds and listen to it before I return to working outside in the breeze on this lovely, sunshiny day.

          • There’s an innate reason why there are songs like that one, “My Hometown” by the execrable Springsteen, “Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields”, and even entire albums like “Village Green Preservation Society” by The Kinks. No one’s writing songs about the glories of brutalist welfare offices and vacant lots, unless their Ministry of Culture is paying them to do so. Humans have evolved, for whatever reason, to put stock in the culture and institutions their forbears bequeathed, and to remember fondly the communities that formed them.

        • It happened in the cities too. Even with retail, all of the locally owned and operated businesses have been replaced by chain big box stores. They made everything in America the same. You go anywhere in America and it looks like any other place in America. They replace the authentic with with the fake and gay or they just burned it down and didn’t replace it with anything.

    • I have very similar feelings about a uniquely sited movie theater in a small city that I used to hang out at in high school.

      Eventually that theater was replaced with the typical generic and sterile shopping mall metroplex for monetary reasons.

      The old theater was supposed to be razed and converted into a 3 or 4 story mixed commercial-residential building.

      Well, the developers the city linked up with turned out to be scammers who took the money and ran after razing the existing building.

      So, the building site became a pit with a chain link fence around it that is a massive sore in this tiny city’s downtown.

      The city won’t even try to turn the space into a covered, underground parking deck or even just a small park for additional green space.

      It’s literally a visual representation of the soul-sucking march of Western progress.

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      • The neighborhood I grew up in lost everything that a young person might want to do. There were small movie theaters, dancing, roller skating, a couple of arcade/fun center type place, a few large bowling alleys and the like. Every last one of them was gone by my mid 20s and replaced with the blandest of bland, Wawas and shopping centers added to an already well serviced by malls area and restaurants long since abandoned. Anything that could be called civic life was razed to the ground too.

        I grew up pretty close to an industrial/residential area. Now it is only a residential area, a slum and all the old factories have all their windows broken out and the doors welded shut. Probably a good 20% of the houses are abandoned.
        The rot is deep.

        20
      • Just like the old “drive in” movie theaters – classic Americana – and all gone now. The real estate was just too valuable, don’t you know…

    • Falcone: Poignant and insightful comment. It’s a smaller reflection of what I experienced when I first lived abroad. After a childhood immersing myself in English history and literature and culture, I found myself in England itself and totally at sea. Not merely the initial visual and linguistic and cuisine differences, but the basic cultural attitudes. I had already found some of my shitlib east coast bias challenged in college by the more perceptive of my professors and fellow students. But this was an entirely different world.

      For the first time I truly began to ponder what made me an ‘American’ and fundamentally different from English flatmates and friends. What a sense of place meant. How much family history and generational culture influenced political and religious and economic beliefs. This only intensified when I lived in the Soviet Union. I had superficial consumer beliefs or cultural touchstones (music, movies, even stupid tv commercials) in common with even the black American marines, but truly learned a respect for trades and the cultural identity of the American south and west via White Americans contractors, and shared insightful conversations with various European nationals.

      My new understanding of “what links two people” and my own “small personal history” fundamentally changed all my beliefs about the world and embarked me on a journey that led to fundamental conservatism, nationalism, race realism, and all sorts of other ‘isms.’ While the past is a different country, one can ‘go home again’ of a sort when the fundamental cultural attitudes and attributes of a people and thus their place remain the same. America has gone about fundamentally destroying that every generation, and thus for everything I now cherish to survive this iteration of America must be destroyed.

      23
    • I tried to explain this to my American friend who claimed that “Europe is pretty, but it’s just a Disneyland”. I think he got it from some moron sociologist. Anyway, I was trying to explain to him that people actually live in the historical towns and cities and that they have real connection to the past, and that this connection is partly facilitated by the old buildings and castles, etc. My friend responded with a blank stare and repeated “Disneyland”.

      14
      • That’s one of the really nice things about many small towns in the states. Since they’re not necessarily population magnets, instead of tearing old buildings down to be replaced with cookie cutter crap, they maintain and refurbish the classic structures. It does a heart good to see that history maintained and celebrated.

      • If your friend means full of magical, fairy tale settings, then I wholeheartedly agree.

    • To echo others, such a beautiful and insightful comment, Falcone. Fracture is a feature and not a bug. Putin’s Russia, like the Amerian South, represents a threat to the GAE’s permanent homogenization project, which has been aimed abroad as much as at home.

      There was an interesting development with the Southern monument situation in Gainesville, of all places, when armed residents prevented the desecration of a statue of some Confederate general. The defenders were not arrested, as best I recall. Whether they prevailed in the end I don’t actually know, but that confrontation showed how cowardly and insecure the GAE truly is. Bloody noses is all bullies understand.

      So much has been lost because insecure, actually evil, people have to hammer in every nail that sticks out. The Empire that proclaims itself the defender of diversity and individualism fears all manifestations of difference. As Z pointed out, once the dopamine hit of consumerism, the system will be difficult in not impossible to defend.

      16
    • “They paved paradise, put in a parking lot” hehe. Nostalgia is my favorite emotion. I agree with your sentiments (Look Homewards Angel!), and I would add one important caveat – the disconnection of family. We lock our children and our elderly away from the business of the world while we make money. Of course people have no appreciation for their connection with history when they have no connection. To lock our elderly in nursing homes severs any connection with the future. To lock our infants in daycare a month after birth in order to make money ensures the cycle will continue. Instead of connecting with the past , we live in the perpetual present where the newest excitement is all that matters. Depth has been replaced with spectacle.
      My grandfathers are dead. I have some tools and a leather jacket from one grandfather (I wasn’t particularly close with him), but I think about him when I put it on and ride or use a tool his hand held. I have some guitars from my other grandfather, whom I was close with, and I sometimes think about when I pick up one I had not played in a while and played. I had another who was simply a great man (step grandfather), and I remember the best piece of advice I ever received from him.
      They are dead, but I appreciate the connection. But how many others see grandpa and grandma as someone who sends a check on birthdays? And, when they get too old, someone you grudgingly visit once a year for 45 minutes in a nursing home. Of course we have no appreciation for the past because we sold it for money and leisure. To quote Wordsworth: “We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon.” Amen.

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      • What few early childhood memories I have were with my mother and siblings and not some “credentialed shrew” at the local “day care” (child destruction) center. I wouldn’t trade them for anything.

        The post day-care generation is absolutely screwed up, even physically. The testosterone of a 30 year old millennial is at the level of a 75 year old Boomer. They are generation self-esteem morphed into generation snowflake. Every interaction they had with other kids was monitored and “managed.” They are ill equipped to deal with bullies and other people who are difficult to get along with. That’s probably why they freak out at anything which makes them uncomfortable (I know NAXLT).

        Every kid had problems at some point in his life and those memories can be tough and they were tough to go through. But we learned how to deal with it and navigate through these things when it really didn’t matter. I’ve seen their inability to deal with this kind of thing up close. I would imagine it is very difficult to learn these basic life skills you should have gotten as a kid, when in your 20s.

        People were conscious of this at the time and we did nothing to stop it.

        • Exactly. This is the problem children who have never faced difficulty have: no self-esteem. A generation was propped up with self importance and became self-centered, but self-esteem is generated when you face tough situations and you realize you can cope with it yourself. Of course, when you consider that the lack of self-esteem leads to a populace that immediately seeks a pa or maternal to intervene and solves ones problems, you realize just how easy it is for the government to become massively powerful.

    • Excellent post. It definitely contributes to the feeling that our country is no longer recognizable to those of us who are old enough to remember more sane times.

    • Yes. In my native European small town, there was a big Christian cross in a centric roundabout. It was not the prettiest of crosses: there were buildings and monuments much more beautiful in my home town. But it has always been there and I have seen it thousands of times while I grew up.

      The leftist mayor broke the law to tear down this cross and replace by a non-binary statue representing music.

      It was as they had torn down a part of me, my memories, my sentimental space.

      Some years have passed and I am not still over it. When I go through the roundabout, I don’t look up and try to imagine the cross is still here.

      There is a Snoopy cartoon where Charlie Brown says “they have built a mall over my childhood”

      “In my life”, the Beatles’ song, captures this feeling of sentimental space

  27. Excellent piece. Certainly helps explain why GAE is so hell-bent on destroying Southern memory. It’s the one part of Muttland populated by an actual people with history and culture.

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    • That is a good example. After the war, Yankee New England was fine with the South memorializing their heroes with statues and and public memorials. The reason was Yankee New England had a positive sense of self. That has been erased the sane way that all other regional identities have been erased in America.

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  28. So what happens after the World Economic Forum satraps lose their war against Russia? The economies of their respective nations will be wrecked, and the lives of their peoples will be highly unstable and in the abyss.

    When will the people rise up and throw off these yokes? I suspect the U.S.A. will undergo its very own Soviet style collapse, and the condition of Americans will be frightful.

    Who knows what this time frame is, but no doubt it will be soon. How nasty and dictatorial will our cloud people become? There will be no more pretense or attempt to conjure up a narrative. They will flatly push that boot sole against your face right into the dirt. They will need a false flag as an excuse, and I suspect it won’t be long. We could be in an outright dictatorship shortly by this time next year.

    It will soon be dangerous to voice our opinions, and people who frequent this blog and others may well receive visits in the middle of the night. That is when the resistance will already be active and spoken of as terrorists, and all citizens will be suspect.

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    1
    • > I suspect the U.S.A. will undergo its very own Soviet style collapse, and the condition of Americans will be frightful.

      Nah, the “fun” will start in the EU/U.K. first. Here in America we at least have tons and tons of undeveloped natural resources, the world’s largest agricultural base, at least something left of our manufacturing base, and centuries of experience in dealing with our, um, “diverse” populations. Europe has none of that.

      • Especially UK. Germany still makes things and France has nuclear power, but the UK is just a cold, wet Cayman Island. Finance and tourism.

          • And they excelled in this. I still possess a number of Harris tweed jackets, overcoats, sweaters, and hats and scarves of their manufacture.

    • Not a Trump fan but if we can make it to 2024 their is no more qualified man to be president over a bankrupt USA. Trump knows bankruptcy inside and out as he executed 6 of his own.

      DJT for Americas bankruptcy in 2024.

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      4
    • I think what is more fearful than the fed acting out against its citizens is the true believers who will do it for them. You already see it now. Antifa and BLM animals are allowed to freely attack normal white people at will with no consequence.

      I would expect more false flags and fake narratives to stir up even more racial hatred to inspire events like Waukesha and the subway shooting. I don’t see the cloud people doing the dirty work themselves. The situation is too good for them. They can have the vibrants do their dirty work without ever having to take responsibility for it.

  29. “The communists built monuments to the workers while the liberal democrats destroy the monuments to your ancestors and replace them with planned developments.”

    Worse, they replace the monuments to your ancestors with monuments to the dude who would rob a pregnant woman at gunpoint (when he wasn’t horizontal off the Chinese fentanyl). Sorry to bring that unpleasantness up again, but the Summer of Floyd (I’m not talking about Roger Waters’ giant inflatable pig at a laser light show) really cleared things up for a lot of people. When I first saw the murals and drawings of the “martyr” I kept asking myself if they were being drawn by trolls. They looked so much like those A. Wyatt Mann cartoons (the boot lips, the incurious scowl) that I was certain the actual George Floyd couldn’t look like that. Then I saw a photo of the actual guy with his orc-like dead stare and realized that the hagiographies were actually softening the ugliness and dumbness.

    The blogger Thrasymachus used to joke that America was the “Seinfeld” of countries. “It’s a country about nothing.” Your griller con neighbor will tell you it’s the best country in the world, but everything that was great about it was replaced in the Second Founding and utterly destroyed in the Third. Audience members selected for demonstrations in magic shows have been treated with more dignity than the American psyche, and shown more resolve in the face of such hypnosis. I’d rather be told to bark like a dog or cluck like a chicken than be told ending racism or the freedom to marry another man or change my sex is the meaning of my existence. And yet Americans proved almost totally malleable and suggestible.

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    • Riffing on the idea that GAE is the Seinfeld of nations, I find it fitting that the GAE leadership void has been filled by a Ukrainian comedian fronting for hidden globalist interests.

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      • And the USA leadership is filled with a comedian mash up of Kramer and Costanza. (A riff too far)?

  30. From your Taki column: I have issue with the upvote/downvote solution. It’s fun to see anon being downvoted, and it will curtail the busybodies, but would it not encourage conformity among the non-busybodies? I have a thick enough skin to endure the occasional unpopular post, but many do not want to bother with being the reasonable contrarian in the room. And I like being accosted by a reasonable take that goes against the mood of the room.

    7
    4
    • but would it not encourage conformity among the non-busybodies?

      Absolutely.

      Anyone who has suffered the reddit hivemind knows the downvote is a weapon against thoughtcrime. The only way it would work is if twitter had it’s own designated spaces with non-pozzed moderators. Sort of like gab groups or the fediverse.

      Really, moderation being curtailed and removing mass reports from the hive is the necessary action. Everything stems from either getting /ourguys/ in moderation to nudge discourse, or severely defanging their power.

    • I’ve held my tongue (well, finger) on the Z board for fear of the downvote. I was in agreement during the Covid thing, so upvotes galore! But the Russia-Ukraine thing happened, and this board is 99% pro-Russian (or at least pro-“the enemy of my enemy is my friend”) because Z is.

      I am sympathetic to the Ukes because of personal reasons. I have some anecdotes about Russians that would rustle the jimmies of this board. But the potential downvotes are not worth the trouble. I don’t think this is a healthy reflex.

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      • Downvoted to help you overcome your fears, and propel yourself into strong, empowered and independent womanhood!

        Although on a serious note, I doubt much of what most people say regarding Russia and Ukraine has much weight. Particularly when it comes to facts on the ground. But then again, I’ve not cared too much to find out.

        All I know is that it is likely another sideshow on Evil’s stage. But I can see how it helps: The Ukraine are Nazis! (Doesn’t notice doubling gas prices); The Russians are Brutes! (Doesn’t notice His church has been raped by Wokeism).

        Question is Marko: How are you preparing you and yours for the decline?

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        • OrangeFrog,

          Empowered and independent womanhood is not forged in the fire of the downvote. It is a birthright! If I am to conquer my fears, then I must not be challenged sir.

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      • I’m not sure anyone is pro-Russian, other than Russians. This is that old binary thinking that is imposed on us by the Left. There are more than two positions on most issues, as well as a range of opinion between extremes.

        Just because I think what Washington is doing in Ukraine is monstrous, it does not follow that I am pro-Russian.

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        • To be fair, Z Man, I feel you’ve been unduly tarnished now by the fact that the letter ‘Z’ appears to be pro-Russian – at least according to the MSM.

          • I’m told that the censures in Europe now have me as The █-Man and The █ Blog.

            20
        • “This is that old binary thinking that is imposed on us by the Left.”

          This^^^. Sooooo much this.

      • I’m even worse off than you. With that war, and many other issues, I am in what is often the tiniest minority: the Neutral. Historically, the uninvolved party is often hated by both sides, simply because he won’t blindly come to the aid of one disputant or the other. Logical argument that he has no reason to choose one side over the other, that the dispute doesn’t involve him in any conceivable way, etc. fall upon deaf ears.

        10
      • My own position is not “pro-Russia” per se as much as “pro-not our problem”, and to a large extent, “we caused it through our own stupidity/perfidity and are only making things worse, so stop.”

        14
      • I laughed seeing your post already being downvoted. I think some things are the cost of doing business. I have an anonymous account in Twitter and it is still taxing to deal with the hivemind replies when some busybody finds your account or you post below a popular thread.

        IDK if there are many pro-Pootin people here, maybe trolling about it. And also Pootin has the virtue of being an anti globalist so this is not about MyKraine at the end. I love Ukraine as a concept and I know personally a few Ukrainian-Americans and they are wonderful Christian people so I have a lot of sympathy.

        But if I have to shitpost a hot take I may take a pro Poopin stance just to get some shitlibs on fire.

        On the other hand I also like Russian stuff a lot, so I prefer not to take sides on this issue so I am not anti Russian either. The reality is that Ukraine’s location is like Cuba’s to the US and political reality is not kind. Best outcome would be a peace where Russia had some assurances of being safe, but Globohomo wants to set an example out of her for vain reasons and apparently no concessions would be made to Putin.

        And at the end we know this is a big money laundering scheme for the military industrial complex and the foreign aid industry. So we are not necessarily Putin fans here, this is just a complex situation where Ukraine is just a tool of GAE.

      • For most of us, it’s complicated. I’d say that most of us are in the “don’t care” category. If the US had just stayed out of this, I wouldn’t have any feelings toward either side, other than I don’t like seeing whites kill each other.

        But, yes, it’s nice to see a country fight back against GAE, so in the economic battle, I’m definitely pro-Russia, or, really, anti-GAE. As to Ukraine, I’m not on the side of the Russians or the Ukrainians.

        I will say that history and realpolitik says that Russia is a regional power and regional powers get to have buffer states. Ukraine is a buffer state. You can like it or not, but it’s reality. Ukraine should have accepted reality.

        If it wanted to break away from Russia, Ukraine should have played a smarter, more long-term game. That doesn’t make me pro-Russia, but I would say that its Ukraine that broke the rules (along, of course, with the Americans), not the Russians.

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        • The Ukraine is no more a legitimate country than a strip club that washes money for drug interests is a legitimate business. It’s just a front for NGO corruption and bilking the foreign aid budget.

          I’ve used the phrase “fake country in a shitty neighborhood” more than once and gotten some hilarious responses.

        • The suffering of the Ukrainians is not without redemption: the evil of our betters is on stage, broadcast to a worldwide audience.

          MyKraine is redpilling Covid Planet.

      • i guess what’s best for America never entered your calculations? downvoted by von Hungus!

      • It’s not that we are “pro-Russia”. In that conflict it can be very difficult to recognize who the good guys are. However, in this case it is very clear that the US and the GAE are the bad guys.

      • I came to my position on the Russian action, with an underlying admiration for Putin as a man who seems to have his countries interests at heart although I disagree with several of his policies by looking at the genesis of the Russian people, back to the 9th Century of the Kiev-Russ. It’s a neck of the woods with a lot of population ebbs and flows but they have evolved into a “people” at least as separate and cohesive as my own people: I’m English. I started looking at border issues starting in 1783 which is the point that Crimea, after centuries of strife between Russia and the Ottoman Empire was finally settled. Going back to when America was a failed state seemed far enough for legitimacy. I looked at the ’17 Revolution and the ’22 Declaration and Treaty on the Creation of the USSR. and Khrushchev’s redrawing of borders in 1953 to get Ukrainian support for his push to be Stalin’s Heir.
        This had no more legitimacy than if the US had decided that Long Island was now a part of Connecticut not New York.
        In the face of the warmongering bastards in DC Putin is righting wrongs and acting to prevent the balkanization of Russia that has been a primary goal of the neocon filth since 1992 at least.

        i support his actions.

    • I see the downvotes like the guys in the British parliament jeering the guy or gal on the floor speaking they don’t agree with. I get a kick out of it. I like it. If someone says something you don’t agree with, let him know it. Why not?

      And brings to mind a simple perhaps inexorable truth about us as a people. We ARE an opinionated AND rebellious breed. Sure, silencing the newly arrived Asians may work, being they are far more conformist, or the Mexicans or whoever else who by nature are not as rebellious. Point being things like freedom of speech are features of a people who like to speak out their opinions. That is never going to change. We will be calling for rights to expression and freedom to do so long and way after this country collapses because that is “who we are” in the words of Paul Ryan. Trying to get us to shop up is like trying to breed the bark out of a dog. Never going to happen. Not saying they will not keep trying, but it just means it is going to be a constant battle, in the same way getting blacks to follow our rules is a plan destined to always lose.

    • If you get nailed with a bunch of down-votes, it’s a good idea to re-think your position. You may not even change your position, but it should give you pause to say “am I wrong?” and to look for flaws. Also, it’s a good reason for handles. Because people usually don’t want to be known as a contrarian. If everyone agrees with you, you should probably also reconsider your position.

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  31. I remember reading an essay that recounted American attempts to recruit a high level Soviet official to defect to the US. The Americans promised him wealth and comfort in his new country.

    The Soviet official replied “You want me to give up Pushkin for a convertible?”

    That about says it all.

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    • Well, Pushkin had a little African heritage. So it’s all coming around………

  32. The big threat to our rulers – to the soulless, deracinated consumerism of liberal democracy – is an alternative. That’s why they hate Russia and China – and any form of white ethnic or cultural identity.

    Anyone who can look at a map knows that China and Russia are zero physical threat to the United States. Russia also was never threatening to Europe since the end of the Cold War. The same holds true to “white nationalism.”

    No, these all threaten liberal democracy far more than any military. They offer an alternative, or, in the case of white ethnic/cultural identity, a potential alternative. And liberal democracy can’t withstand an alternative that offer people something that the latest iPhone can’t – a culture and people of their own where they belong and have a future.

    Alternatives that offer a civilization built around a people and culture are an existential threat to the West’s liberal democracy. The West simply can’t allow them to exist except in a barely functioning form, i.e., the Middle East and Islam, which can’t overcome the material goods offered by our current system. An alternative that offers even marginal material prosperity with a cultural and ethnic identity cannot be tolerated.

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    • The smart move would have been to partner with Russia, possibly even invite them into the EU to secure peace, cheap energy, and keep a lid on China.

      Unfortunately, we’ve been led by dumb move guys for the past 20 or 30 years.

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      • The smart move to co-opt the Russian was what was done: Russian reset under Obama/ Queen Hillary and the Nordstream 2 pipeline was not built in a day.

        Obviously some of the Tubman eunuchs didn’t get the memo or had other plans.

        • Serious upvote for “Tubman eunuchs”!

          If eunuchs of Tubman, Distrito Federale don’t say it all, I don’t know what does. Our “civilization” in a two-word nutshell.

    • I agree in principle and even upvoted you. As the resident Nietzsche shill, I must offer a grey-ish pill:

      [T]he fundamental feature of man’s will, his horror vacui [“horror of nothingness” (?)]: he needs a goal — and he will sooner will nothingness than not will at all.

      — Genealogy of Morality, third essay, section 1.

      Elsewhere he speculates that it was the “will to truth” that eventually led to the demise of Christianity. Modern democracy was the secular replacement for religion. But the “will to truth,” embodied in the scientific method, may eventually lead to the downfall of democracy, science itself and much else. This leads to nihilism, the rejection of all values.

      The West’s effete elite (hey I like that!) has to “do something,” after all, when you’re a ruling class, aren’t you supposed to RULE? Of course! They may not be intentionally “willing” nothing — nihilism, but it’s quite possible that what they push for will bring it about. To “not will” would be to leave well enough alone, which is probably an alien concept to them. Unless I misread him (which is certainly possible) Nietzsche is saying that men’s “horror of nothingness” is more a fear of of loss of agency, of lacking an active role. The human ego, perhaps, would rather pat itself on the back for “willing” (bring into being) a nullity, even if it means destroying what already exists, than to passively enjoy whatever existed.

      I, for one, would be grateful if we could devolve back to something resembling traditional nationalism. Sadly, once the elevator is descending, I don’t think I have the option to specify what floor it’ll stop on. We’re all along for the ride, like it or not.

      🙁

  33. So much good here. particularly:

    “Despite the disparity in wealth, the Russians merely have to continue to exist in order to win. For the West, liberal democracy requires the unconditional surrender of Eurasian identity to the homogenizing forces of Liberal democracy. History shows that this is every bit as futile as the crusades against Islam…
    “That means this war will have real costs to the people of the West, in terms of living standards. It is unlikely that the people will be willing to sacrifice the only benefit of liberal democracy for an abstract war against a people who they naturally see as civilizational allies.”

    The West–the United States and United Kingdom, really, once again have entered a war they cannot win even if they want to do so. Unlike the fiascos of the recent past, the economic damage this military loss will produce will prove an existential crisis for the Ruling Class and the system it runs. There is no popular support for either, and, as you point out, material prosperity is the sole thing that holds it all together. Even more brutal levels of oppression will prove to be little more than bandages. You are spot on that a re-embrace of civilizationalism will be necessary for survival.

    There are parts of the West that can embrace civilizationism once again, but it is doubtful the Empire is among them. The schism between those Westerners that can and those that cannot regain their souls will be far more significant than the cynical proxy war in the Ukraine.

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  34. why did the GAE go apeshit over ukraine being invaded? i mean they are all in on this thing, and way out over their skis. why now? you can even make the case they provoked this war intentionally, over the last 8 years. why not just ignore russia? is this all just an attempt to distract voters from throwing out the dems in the midterms? seems unlikely as the gop won’t change anything or jail anyone if they take congress…

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    • The GAE cynically manipulated the war. It did not go apeshit. This was deliberately planned and in all probability will prove to be a potentially fatal self-inflicted wound.

      Be careful what you wish for and all that.

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    • Because Ukraine was their ideal playground and laboratory for all of their initiatives – the grifting, the trafficking, implementation of their dystopian plans, and dreamcrusher Putin is ruining it all before their slowly dying eyes.

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    • I’m surely no expert, but I can’t think of any coherent reason why we should care about Russia vs. Ukraine. There are, however irrational reasons our betters might.

      I’ve opined earlier that the disproportionate Jewish staffing of our State department (and much other influential areas) might be a factor: “The Cossacks raped my grandmother!” is a recent ancestral memory to many of The Tribe. You can substitute “Nazis” and that also explains much, but not directly relevant to the topic at hand.

      Lots of people suffered in the horror of WW II and Eastern European and Soviet Jews were no exception. Jews were the target of Russian pogroms going back who knows how far back?

      Yet what would seem a weakening counter-argument: Jews are said to have had an outsized influence in the Communist Revolution, the early Soviet Union, etc. Also western financing of the above.

      Submitted for your consideration. Psychological factors are probably operative in what on the surface would appear boring, international statecraft.

      • “Jews are said to have had an outsized influence in the Communist Revolution”

        The usual weasel-wordiness of the hasbara.

  35. Some of the countries in Europe might be able to be saved as they’ve historically had strong national identities as well as languages. Unfortunately, our (former) country is pretty much toast. Sixty or seventy years ago, despite having a varied population from all over Europe, it was mostly White and there was a decent sense of nationalism and civic pride. Now, I just don’t think it’s possible. The (((termites))) gnawing at the foundation of western civilization have nearly collapsed it. It remains to be seen if anything can be salvaged.

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  36. It’s a very different world when you have a conflict in recent memory that brought with it the real risk of military genocide of your entire people. Really clears the mind. People in the Americas have not had anything close to this since King Philip’s war over 300 years ago.

    Liberal democracy promises prosperity now for surrendering your culture and ethnic identity in service of the prosperity machine. Ancient cultures make the opposite promise, cultural and ethnic prosperity later in return for economic hardship now.

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    • “It’s a very different world when you have a conflict in recent memory that brought with it the real risk of military genocide of your entire people.”

      Within a span of less than 150 years Russia was invaded and conquered by:

      – The French under Napoleon
      – The Imperial German Army
      – The Little Austrian Corporal and the Wehrmacht

      I can understand the Russian proclivity to enforce and defend the borders or put plenty of land between themselves and the rest of the world. And a general mistrust of foreigners. Someone running amok in your home is not an academic exercise for Russians.

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    • The South experienced it, and the memory of it tends to remain outside urban areas infested by northerners.

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    • Analogy to religion: Nietzsche (yeah, about him again 😀 ) says (paraphrased): Christianity promises much and delivers nothing. Buddhism promises nothing and delivers.

      Judaism and its derivative (Christianity) are to him “slave moralities.” Inferiority and other ignominious treatment in the present world is softened and even justified as the price for a promised future Heaven. Buddhism similarly calls the present life (indeed, a near-infinite repetition of lives) “suffering” and via various disciplines, promises escape from endless rebirths if one can only reach Nirvana which is loosely defined as the absence of all desire (and suffering.) So Nietzsche would have been more honest if he’d said that the Buddhist may in fact achieve nothing for his efforts, but he has to work at it!

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