2013 In Retrospect, And My Predictions For 2014

All clichés aside, the world has become too unstable to make precise predictions for a whole year. Looking back at the one that has just finished, it seems that at any point of it, it was close to impossible to foresee what would happen a month or sometimes even a week from then.

Not only because history is, by essence, the realm of the unexpected— Edward Snowden’s confessions were sudden and unforeseen, but they nevertheless strongly affected the relations between the United States, its European satrapies, and the other world’s powers, chiefly Russia and China.

But even for phenomena that had begun much before, 2013 has been full of surprises. Take Syria. Western chancellories had been pushing since 2011 for a war on Damascus’s legitimate government, and 2013 looked like the “right time” for yet another war in the Middle East.

Bashar al Assad was promised to a fate similar to those of Saddam or Gaddafi, but Syria’s strongest ally, Moscow, managed to overturn the moral advantage in favour of the opponents of a war. The official —Western — narrative was that a brutal, oppressive Syrian military junta was massacring innocent “freedom fighters” by the thousands along with their wives and children. The truth — that if there had to be a “good side,” it was al Assad’s government and not the cannibal, Christian-slaughtering terrorists fighting on behalf of foreign governments — played a role in Putin’s moral victory against the pro-war coalition.

By the time when Putin published his decisive letter in the New York Times, the knowledge of the atrocities committed by the so-called “Free Syrian Army” was too widespread in the West for Western governments to gain wide enough support for a new Near Eastern entanglement. In that propagation of the truth, the Internet’s role was important, though not predominant.

Still, what a difference it made with much more evident manipulations that have occurred since the end of the Second World War. While the Western media and political elite were praising Mao when he died in 1976, those in the West who were questioning the official narrative were inevitably depicted as “conspiracy theorists.” Though the mainstream media keeps being dominant, its hegemony has begun eroding somehow.

Which brings me to the rough predictions I would like to make for 2014. If political repression against dissidents — even benign ones — is an indication, we will likely witness a worsening of the situation in the West. 2013 was an instructive year in that respect. In America, two important political purges occurred on the mainstream Right. Jason Richwine’s firing from the Heritage Foundation for daring to discuss the cognitive level of Hispanic immigrants to the United States proved to those who were still deluded about the Republican establishment that “Conservatism” will be of no help against the subversion operated by the egalitarian Left.

Jack Hunter’s resignation and vain apology after a media campaign revealing his “racist” past also proved that “Libertarianism” will, likewise, align itself with the Left on the selective “freedoms” it advocates: issues like gay marriage, cannabis legalization, mass abortion and euthanasia will be fine, but the disturbing questions raised by Murray Rothbard on the banking system or Hans-Hermann Hoppe on state-enforced third-world immigration and integration will somehow remain unanswered. For good.

As grim as these developments are, they offer an opportunity to our movement. The utter inability of mainstream “conservatism” to challenge the liberal Left’s intellectual and cultural domination means that increasingly, the only force standing in the way of the egalitarians will be us, and only us. Hence the growing interest of the mass media for White nationalism and traditionalism, as was illustrated last year by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow’s report on the National Policy Institute and Richard Spencer.

What we will likely see in 2014 will be an even more complete alignment of the mainstream Right on the Left, which will leave a bigger and bigger space for us. As I had noted in an article entitled “Rearguard Action and Vanguard Politics” last year, which was dealing with the anti-gay marriage demonstrations in France, these obviously history-losing events led to the creation of more radical movements, especially since the more mainstream personalities dropped out as soon as they were attacked. Eventually, only the more radical were standing.

Here at RadixJournal.com, we’ll ensure that those right-wingers who have become uninterested in tepid publications like the National Review will find a new voice, eager to really deal with the issues of our age.