Radix Journal

Radix Journal

A radical journal

Tag: USA

4 min read
America Culture Identity

Why I Can’t Stand St. Patrick’s Day

4 min read
12121 views
44 Comments on Why I Can’t Stand St. Patrick’s Day
4 min read

I’ve always instinctively disliked St. Patrick’s Day. Growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, I was inured to the multicultural calendar of ethnic holidays I didn’t resonate with or understand….

I’ve always instinctively disliked St. Patrick’s Day. Growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, I was inured to the multicultural calendar of ethnic holidays I didn’t resonate with or understand. But no one ever expected me to actually celebrate Rosh Hashanah—or wear T-shirts that read “I’ve got a little Jewish in me” or pinch anyone not donning a yarmulke. At one point, I started wearing Orange on March 17 . . . though the message was seemingly lost on most everyone I encountered.

Continue Reading
44 Comments on Why I Can’t Stand St. Patrick’s Day
Culture Identity Politics

Islam: The Magian Revolution

11 min read
513 views
7 Comments on Islam: The Magian Revolution

Western academics and media-types write a lot of drivel about Islam. Part of the problem is there is a dearth of good information, and a bounty of superficial, politically self-serving…

Western academics and media-types write a lot of drivel about Islam. Part of the problem is there is a dearth of good information, and a bounty of superficial, politically self-serving garbage. But the real problem is misplaced emphasis. Western experts and commenters are used to thinking of history in simplistic terms–as the story of human progress. This model might be a good fit for Euro-American history, it is at least workable. But the progressive model falls apart when applied to the history of Islam. Islam’s heights seem to correspond to the West’s depths, and vice-versa. The “Progress” model causes Westerners to ask the wrong questions about Islamic history. “What went wrong?” “Why has the Middle East been so beset by violence?” “When will Islam adopt modern political and ethical principles?”

This misguided criticism has two faces–liberal and reactionary. Both sides share a simplistic view of history–that millennia-long, worldwide advance of the human spirit. But each side approaches its subject with different motives. Liberals, who dominate public discourse on the subject (surprise), assume the intrinsic goodness of all people. “Islam is peace” (eye roll). They feel good when they can cite examples of seemingly precocious modernism, such as early Muslim rulers’ tolerance (in the strictest sense) for religious minorities. It makes them feel good to contrast these anecdotes with the supposedly unrelenting fanaticism of Euro-Americans throughout the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, the 19th and 20th centuries, up to and including last week. This rosy, Islamophilic picture is not really about Islam. It is just another stick with which to beat guilt into the Euro-American historical conscience.

The liberal position, while dominant, does not go unchallenged. On the other side are the reactionaries. They are “reactionaries” because they have no real position on Islam, they only know that the liberals are wrong, and reflexively counterattack. Theirs is a form of hypercriticism, given to denying long-established facts and trends of Islamic history with little or no justification other than to refute the Islamophiles. Given the current situation in the West, their excesses are understandable. But the reactionaries’ zeal leads them to stake out indefensible positions. Many of them are have ulterior motives–some are pro-Jewish fanatics or apologists for imperialism, others are democratic ideologues. But they share a defect. They lack a healthy, Faustian drive to pursue universal Truth–whether we like its conclusions or not.

Both approaches fail for two reasons. First, neither affords its subject the proper attitude of “sympathetic criticism.” The student must devote himself to understanding a culture on its own terms–learning its languages, reading its history and literature–all the while imagining things from its perspective. Once he has done this, he can render judgment on its ethics, its cultural attainments, and its overall importance to history. This was the approach of the great orientalists of the late 19th and early 20th century. They devoted tremendous intellectual effort to comprehending Islamic civilization, yet they were unafraid to pass judgment on its shortcomings. The liberals have no aptitude for criticism, the reactionaries have none for sympathy.

Second, the liberals and reactionaries neglect the questions of philosophical history. It is from this oversight that they fall into their assumption of perpetual historical progress. But there is a better way. One hundred years ago, Oswald Spengler reframed the discussion of history by tearing down an idea of progress (at least as it is commonly understood). His “Copernican revolution” in historical thought worked wonders for the study of Classical civilization and Europe, but it would prove even more effective for understanding the meaning of Middle Eastern history. Spengler shifted the emphasis away from time and toward Cultures. Following Spengler, we can understand how meaningless most of the questions posed by conventional commenters are, and begin to see Islam for what it really is.

The Magian Reformation

Spengler rejected the conventional historical focus on religions and polities. He saw these as merely superficial expressions of something deeper–the Culture. Cultures, in Spengler’s scheme, are a complex of peoples who share a world-outlook. This outlook–the spirit of a Culture–drives it to produce or adapt a religion. “Religion” is the outward expression of the world-outlook and includes such things as prayer rituals, religious architecture, calligraphy, and sculpture. For example, while Euro-Americans and Korean evangelicals may both be “Christians,” they do not belong to the same Culture, because their world-outlooks differ so drastically, despite their notionally common religion. A present-day American protestant has more in common, spiritually, with a 9th-century Norse pagan than with a modern-day Korean convert, despite professing the same doctrines. Cultures are the basic unit by which to analyze history.

Islam is part of the “Magian” Culture. In his Decline of the West, Spengler defines the Magian Culture as comprising the Muslim Arabs, but also many pre-Islamic Middle Eastern groups such as the Babylonian Jews, the Zoroastrians, the Coptic and Syriac Christians, as well as syncretic/heretical groups like the Manichaeans. It arose around the time of Christ and lasted until the 12th century when the anti-rationalist thinker Al-Ghazali dealt the deathblow to Magian philosophical speculation. All of subsequent Magian history was, in Spengler’s view, “civilization”–grandiose, bombastic, imperial, but sterile. No new philosophical or religious ideas could arise from the Magian world outlook. The culture had run its course.

So the birth of Islam does not represent the foundation of a new religion. It was, rather, a revolution in Magian religious thought. As such, it is analogous to the Reformation in Western history. Like Luther, Muhammad preached a puritanical systematization of earlier currents in the spiritual thought of his Culture. Muhammad and Luther were both anti-clerical, iconoclastic reformers who exhorted their adherents to build a more personal relationship with God. They both made the scripture accessible to the masses–Luther by translating the Bible into the vernacular, Muhammad by “receiving revelations” in easily memorized rhymed prose. After their deaths, their Cultures were unified the culture by marginalizing the earlier creeds and, at the same time, quickly spawning an array of heresies. The puritanical movements unleashed a storm, driving the post-reformation Europeans and post-Islam Magians to conquer half the world in a fanatical outburst of religious fervor–compare that to the religious and colonial wars of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Both movements, to a large degree, cleansed their cultures of foreign influence. Hellenistic influence on the Middle East, while not wiped out, was severely reduced in the first centuries of Islam. The Greek language, long the lingua franca of the Eastern Mediterranean, died out in Egypt and Syria, and later in Anatolia. To use Spengler’s term, Islam ended the Hellenistic pseudomorphosis (false-development) of early Magian Culture, allowing it to come into its own. Likewise after Luther, Northern Europe was free to work out its own cultural development. Free of Rome, the North underwent its own Renaissance. Florence and Rome were replaced by Nuremberg, Rotterdam, and Weimar. The Italian composers of the baroque were, by degrees, superseded by the likes of Bach and Handel. Thus Muhammad is not an Islamic Jesus, but a Luther. His movement, Islam, is a puritanical systematization of earlier currents in the Magian spirit.

Islam needs a Reformation

All this flies in the face of the conventional wisdom. Lacking any deeper insight into the place of Islam in history, the Mass-Media has been promoting a meme, “Islam needs a Reformation” eg: (WSJ and HuffPo). It makes sense superficially. Based on the conventional historical assumptions, one would compare Muhammad to Jesus as founders of world-religions. It follows then that Islam, having gotten a late start, is due for a reformation. After all, it’s been 14 centuries since Muhammad fled to Medina, and about the same duration separates Jesus from Martin Luther. The pre-Reformation Church superficially resembles current-day Islam.

But with a deeper understanding of history, comparing Jesus to Muhammad is preposterous. In contrasting the current state of the West and the Middle East, it would be ridiculous to set the two up as analogs. Jesus no longer matters to Faustian man. When the decadent West looks for myths and heroes, it looks for world-denying saints of Tolerance and Progress. New heroes must spring up or be manufactured–MLK and Gandhi, Anne Frank and Mother Theresa. Jesus would seem to fit the mold, but he is too bound-up in the popular imagination with the distant past. And in the popular imagination, History is Progress, therefore the farther back you go, the more evil everything is. But the West has absolutely no need for heroic men-of-the-world like Luther, so his place in our history is undervalued.

But the reborn Islamic fury, much pondered in the West, is not the necessary outcome of Islam’s doctrines. That the Middle East is still populated by “Muslims” is of less consequence than its stage of historical development. Islam is in winter. For centuries following the Crusades the Arabs and Persians were inactive. Islam’s last great conquests were not carried out by these “core-Magians,” but by the Berbers, Turks, and Mughals. And these imperial peoples could only prolong the agony of Magian decline. After c. 1500, the Magians had no meaningful history. They have endured wars and changes of dynasty, but no revolutions of thought or spirit. Classic histories of Middle East recognized this historical void–in over 750 pages of The History of the Arabs, the Lebanese Christian scholar Philip Hitti devoted less than 100 to anything after the 13th century.

What’s to be done

The liberal and reactionary views of Islam are shallow and polemic. They are worthless as history. Neither framework allows us to understand the relationship between Magian culture and ours because the Magians are actually ahead of us. Their decline did not begin in the 19th century, but in the 11th. Their reformation did not happen in the 16th century, but in the 7th.

Where are we now? Today’s situation resembles the era of the Crusades, with the roles reversed. Like Islam of the 1100s, the West has passed its peak. Our spirit is dying, our philosophy and art have ossified. We find ourselves beset by external enemies, barely able to summon the strength for our own preservation. Like Europe of the 1100s, the Middle East is the matrix of peoples–young, vigorous and aggressive.

What can we look forward to? If the West follows the same trajectory as Islam did after 1100, we are doomed. While Islam expelled the Crusaders and launched counteroffensives on its Eastern and Western frontiers, it only did so because it received infusions of fresh blood semi-civilized converts. These barbarian peoples adopted the outward forms of Magian Culture–Islam–but were unable to revive its spiritual vigor.

So contrary to the common view, the West does not face an ancient religious enemy. Islam died centuries ago–any invocation of its doctrines is now entirely superficial. The Arabs have for centuries wallowed in spiritual decrepitude. The “refugees” are not driven on by religious fervor, but simple greed, lust, and envy. They are not so much religious fanatics as they are zombies. Soulless and decrepit, they swarm to history’s last civilization. Do we still have the spirit to do what needs to be done?

Holland, Tom. In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire. New York: Doubleday, 2012.

Spengler, Oswald, and Charles Francis Atkinson. The Decline of the West: Perspectives of World-history. Vol. 2. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957.

Continue Reading
7 Comments on Islam: The Magian Revolution
America Politics Race

America: Imagine the World Without Her

10 min read
324 views
16 Comments on America: Imagine the World Without Her

With that in mind, we have to ask just how many would-be conservatives became liberals because of the seemingly willed stupidity and dorkiness of Conservatism Inc. Dinesh D’Souza’s latest documentary is another chapter in this sordid tale of political buffoonery.

How can any well-adjusted, thinking person still associate with official conservatism?

People often choose their political affiliation for social, rather than for ideological reasons. They want to align with groups that are smart and successful. With that in mind, we have to ask just how many would-be conservatives became liberals because of the seemingly willed stupidity and dorkiness of Conservatism Inc. Dinesh D’Souza’s latest documentary is another chapter in this sordid tale of political buffoonery.

America: Imagine the World Without Her has the same flavor as the latest batch of evangelical movies, and rivals them in its lack of intellectual cleanliness. It features two squishy songs (here’s one) by acoustic guitar-wielding boy-men that are more fit for a middle school revival than a documentary that attempts gravitas, and D’Souza talks about the American founding as though it were the Immaculate Conception.

But that should come as no surprise when the film sets to perpetuate the myth of America as the glorious proposition nation that has overcome the universal faults of the world. Like the Messiah, America was created to expunge the universal sins of the world and offer man the promise of living in a merchant paradise. D’Souza also promotes the myth that the old-timey America can be restored and the 1950s can be carried on for all of eternity—as long as we vote Republican and live up to the Constitution.

With this in mind, the only people who should enjoy this movie are over the age of 50 or diehard believers in the conservative movement. D’Souza himself compounds this problem by attempting to inject himself into every scene of the movie.

Just as viewers can’t escape seeing Michael Moore’s corpulent figure in his films, D’Souza’s turtle-like resemblance is nearly as aesthetically unpleasing. The close ups of his smarmy face reveal his unbearable narcissism to many viewers.  His sense of victimization and his depiction of himself as some kind of martyr for conservativism widens the problem. But the real D’Souza is just an immigrant plagiarist felon with no original ideas. He even stole the opening credit scene from Conan The Barbarian—paradoxically, as the film’s message denounces the value of conquest.

The film’s subtitle—Imagine the World Without Her—is misleading as the real purpose of the film is to address leftist accusations that America was built on conquest and theft. Except for the introduction, which dramatizes George Washington being gunned down by a British sniper, we never are shown the path of what the world would be like without the United States.

Instead, the film focuses on combating five alleged charges that the left promotes against America. They are: America committed genocide against the Indians and stole their land; America waged an unjust war against Mexico and stole their land; America enslaved millions of blacks and stole their labor; America practices imperialism and has stolen resources from around the globe; and America practices capitalism, which is an unfair economic system that favors the wealthy over the poor and is theft enshrined as economics.

The heroes of the film are George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and (naturally) Martin Luther King Jr. The bogeymen are Howard Zinn, Michael Moore, Hillary Clinton, Saul Alinsky, and, of course, Barack Obama. This is history according to conservatives.

D’Souza response to the charges postulated by Zinn’s A People’s History to the United States is simple—those faults are attributable to the universal conquest ethic which America has overcome by adopting the ethic of the merchant. This is in many ways an inversion of the caricatured leftist thinking D’Souza maligns—the parts of American history which violate his moral sensibilities are attributed to universal failings, while the virtues of America, however, are peculiar only to her. And he answers all charges with this mentality.

The Indians practiced conquest as well and Americans sometimes bought their land legally, thus no harm done. Mexico oppressed Texas, we answered the call to save the Southwest, and we gave back most of the country to Mexico, thus no harm done. Slavery was wrong, but blacks can now be great entrepreneurs and we sacrificed 600,000 lives to end it, thus no harm done. Our foreign wars have been on behalf of freedom and we have never exploited countries for resources, thus no harm done. Finally, capitalism is an amazing system that benefits everyone and depends on hard work, thus no harm done.

Unfortunately for D’Souza, all of his rebuttals the left can easily dismiss and they glaringly overlook facts that Zinn and others use for their critical arguments of American history. But that doesn’t matter since this film is an exercise in mythmaking and anything that would undermine the notion that America offers opportunity to all and was founded by entrepreneurs, rather than conquerors, is not expected to be offered.

For the main argument D’Souza uses to praise America is that it took a different path from that of every other nation in human history—that it did not base itself on the “conquest ethic.” America, according to D’Souza’s, based itself on the merchant ethic instead. This ethic placed profit, security, comfort, and materialism above the martial virtues of conquest. The movie acts as an exposition in the merchant mindset—merchant values above all others. For him, the real heroes of America are its entrepreneurs, not its warriors. To emphasize that America is on a different path, he points out that the entrepreneur was frequently far down in the caste system in every Traditionalist society and cites quotes of Traditionalist thinkers disparaging enterprise as less noble than theft to drive home his thesis. On the other hand, the businessman is the pinnacle of American society and entrepreneurship is treated as sacrosanct.

In many ways, the criticisms that Zinn makes of America as a nation based on conquest is what makes the nation worthy of any respect. A country in order to survive has to emerge out of violence and struggle. You either fight, or you die. The fact that a few frontiersmen from the British Isles were capable of taking over an entire continent is something that should be celebrated, not overlooked in favor of entrepreneurs who pushed hair care products to black women (which is one of America’s heroes). Our side probably agrees more with Zinn’s assessment of America rather than D’Souza’s, as well as the actual facts of history.

Considering D’Souza’s intended audience, he adds that America bases itself on low-church Protestantism and how the only cultural heritage America has is how its population was more likely go to church and provide private charity. Thus, when D’Souza wants to pinpoint the “quintessential American,” he chooses Star Parker. Parker is a Black conservative scammer extraordinaire who racked up multiple abortions early in life while living on welfare. She then found Jesus and has become an entrepreneur in conning White conservatives out of their money by promising to do outreach to the Black community. That’s America folks.

This goes perfectly well with D’Souza’s celebration of America as the only true proposition nation, where even non-White plagiarists like himself can make a buck. For this argument, he doesn’t use his smarmy self to make the point—he uses a speech by U2 singer and perpetual Africa activist Bono to state the thesis instead.

 Here are some “highlights” from Bono’s speech:

  • “America’s an idea, isn’t it? I mean Ireland’s a great country, but it’s not an idea. Great Britain’s a great country; it’s not an idea.”
  • “That’s how we see you around the world—as one of the greatest ideas in human history. Right up there with the renaissance, right up with crop rotation and the Beatles’ White Album.” 
  • “The idea is that you and me are created equal…the idea that life is not meant to be endured, but enjoyed. The idea that if we have dignity, if we have justice, then leave it to us, we’ll do the rest.”
  • “This country was the first to claw its way out of darkness and put that on paper.” 
  • “I know Americans say they have a bit of the world in them, and you do–the family tree has lots of branches. But the thing is, the world has a bit of America in it, too. These truths–your truths–they are self-evident in us.”

Instead of a nation united by blood, culture, and soil, we’re a nation bonded together by abstract principles of commerce and comfort. I can’t imagine a more damning argument against the American idea.

The film concludes by focusing on Saul Alinsky and his acolytes’ nefarious plan to destroy these ideas and turn America into a socialist dystopia that hates the Constitution, and how Obama is now going after dissenters—like convicted campaign fraudster D’Souza. Unfortunately for D’Souza’s intentions, Alinksy comes off as by far the coolest guy in the movie. He has gravitas, he has balls, he has ideals, and he seems to oppose all of the stupidity and childishness promoted for the past two hours. After seeing this movie, I’d rather be an Alinskyite than a conservative.

The stupidity and childishness that underlies this film drives intelligent people into the arms of the Left. The movie made me want to become a liberal. He only has a place for the entrepreneur. The laborer and employee have no significance. Conquest is immoral and consumerism is awesome. Go to a mega church and make a buck off pointless products. That message makes my very being revolt in anger.

From the triumph of merchants over conquerors to the glorification of the proposition nation, Identitiarians have little in common with this film’s ideas. It puts into visual form the vast differences between us and our conservative peers, and dispenses with the illusion that they will ever come to radical thought with their own devices. The state and culture despise the aging Middle Americans who will take to this film, while those same audience members cling to the America that is no longer their
s. These people need to be shocked out of their stupor and wake up to the reality that this is no longer their country and the ideas promoted by schlock like America should be discarded into the dustbin of history.

They need to start imagining the world without America—because their world is about to get worse with her still around.

Continue Reading
16 Comments on America: Imagine the World Without Her
Europe Nationalism Politics

Fallen from the Sky

8 min read
340 views
16 Comments on Fallen from the Sky

Novorossiya has suffered significantly in regards to the destruction of Malaysian Air Flight 17 over Eastern Ukraine.  It appears that in the sense of this tragedy being taken advantage of by the US-EU governing class, it is and will be done in order to justify the strangulation at birth of the new country of Новороссия (Novorossiya). 

 

Novorossiya has suffered significantly in regards to the destruction of Malaysian Air Flight 17 over Eastern Ukraine. It appears that in the sense of this tragedy being taken advantage of by the US-EU governing class, it is and will be done in order to justify the strangulation at birth of the new country of Новороссия (Novorossiya).

The driving force behind the formation of Novorossiya is that a substantial majority of the people in the southern and eastern part of Ukraine do not recognize the new government which came to power in Kiev as the result of the violent overthrow of the previously elected government. The approach of the new Kievian government is not to allow those who disagree with their coup to go their own way, but is instead based on military means to force the capitulation of those who disagree.

It should be recognized that the two sides in this conflict are quite unevenly matched. In particular, the Kievian government has access to much better military equipment and financial resources than the rebels do. Of particular relevance is that the Kievian government possesses complete air-superiority. Furthermore, military action is taking place in the form of assaults by the Kiev government on the homelands of the rebels. Rebel warplanes are not making bombing runs over the Ukrainian capital or Lviv. Their artillery is not surrounding and opening fire on cities and villages in the parts of the Ukraine that support the Kievian government. On the contrary, the rebels are defending their own cities and villages from the assaults of the Kiev and are not advancing into territory inhabited primarily by supporters of the current regime.

Occam’s razor would suggest that the cause of the downed airliner was due to the rebels, who in their attempts to protect their cities, villages, and military units from aerial bombardments, mistook the airliner for a Ukrainian warplane. That such mistakes are not infrequent during the course of military action is evident from even a cursory glance through history.

Currently heard from public figures in the US-EU are statements of the form “if the rebels did this or the Russians are involved through their provision of the antiaircraft system used, then the rebels and/or the Russians should have hell to pay.” That such opinions are based on an antipathy to the rebel/Russian side can be derived from such individuals’ reactions to similar events. Probably the most appropriate one is the shooting down of a Russian passenger airline (Siberia Airlines Flight 1812) in 2001 by the Ukrainian military with an antiaircraft rocket. The repercussions of this downing, which resulted in the deaths of 78 people, were limited to payments by the Ukrainian government to victims’ families and the sacking of a handful of officers and officials. There were no sanctions applied to Ukraine by other countries and no criminal proceedings begun. Assuming that the treatment of the Ukrainians in this matter was appropriate, a neutral observer would likely conclude that the rebels should be treated in a similar manner. Indeed the culpability of the Ukrainian military in shooting down Flight 1812 would appear to be greater, as it occurred during peacetime, as opposed to the rebels who are operating under conditions of daily bombardments of their cities and villages made possible by the complete air-superiority of the Kievian government. In this regard, an appropriate means of preventing such further accidents would be imposition of a no-fly zone over the Ukraine. Other means could involve the provision of more advanced antiaircraft systems, along with appropriate training for the rebels with the aim of avoiding further cases of mistaken identity. It should be reiterated that the reason the rebels are concerning themselves at all with antiaircraft systems is due to the (otherwise unimpeded) aerial bombardment of eastern Ukraine by the Kievian government.

US-EU public officials, more often than not, are heard giving statements to the effect that the means to achieve peace is to cut off all aid to the rebels. However, if peace (as opposed to peace obtained by destruction of Novorossiya by the Kievian government) is indeed the highest priority, then the party that must be pressured is the attacking side, i.e., the Kievian government. Of course, this is the quickest possible means of obtaining peace and will result in victory for Novorossiya, as its goals of independence will be achieved, and hence, would logically be advanced by those whose primary goal is independence for Novorossiya.

The suggestions and insinuations that the only way to bring peace would be for the Russian people and government to stop supplying any aid to the rebels indicate that the sources for such suggestions support the Kievian government. This follows from the near certainty that cessation of all support to the rebels and the cessation of any more chances for future support will result in victory by the Kievian government.

The fact of the matter is that Russian support of the rebels is quite minimal. The author’s first hand experience is that such support is provided primarily on the grass-roots level. In the city that the author lives in, various individuals have formed groups that collect food, medical supplies, clothing, uniforms, boots and other items send it to the eastern parts of the Ukraine. Volunteers have also set out to aid the rebels primarily in the form of joining the armed resistance to the Kievian government. Somewhat surprisingly, there is no support from the city or federal government in this matter in the form of advertising such aid collection centers and/or encouraging people to participate in such aid. At a minimum, the Russian government would be expected to provide humanitarian aid on an official level but this is not observed. The clear evidence that the rebels possess some heavy military equipment (tanks, artillery etc.) is often taken as evidence that such equipment is from Russia. However, it should be kept in mind that the conflict is a civil war—in the course of which significant numbers of the Ukrainian military have defected to the rebels. This issue was particularly acute at the start of the conflict where it was not infrequent that military units sent to suppress the rebels in a particular village/city instead raised the rebel flag and wholeheartedly joined the rebels. The Kievian government has responded to this issue by raising paramilitary formations, such as the National Guard, which are staffed by people loyal to the Kievian government who have joined with the specific purpose of suppressing the rebellion and hence, contain very few individuals from the eastern parts of the Ukraine. Other paramilitary units exist which are funded and controlled by various oligarchs.

Returning to the issue of the downed airline, a glance at the positioning and treatment of the issue in the US-EU media clearly shows usage of the tragedy as a weapon against the rebels. Headlines such as “Armed men restrict access to crash site” or “Standoff with militiamen at crash site” (BBC) are used. Aside from the fact that the crash occurred in a war-zone, the fact of the matter is that any such crash site is typically cordoned off and guarded by armed men in almost any country. In other statements “Local residents have been allowed to wander around the wreckage of the plane” (BBC), however, the lack of a guarded perimeter is used as evidence of deliberate carelessness of the local authorities. Considering the issue, and recognizing the fact that the crash area is in a very rural area subject to military engagements, none of the above necessarily indicates any malign intent on the part of the local authorities. Such issues would be found at a similar crash site in almost any country.

Of some interest is a report from the BBC in which a man guarding the crash scene, after being described as “squat and barrel-chested with poor teeth“ is reported to have stated: “You are only here because foreigners are dead.” For the people of eastern Ukraine, this man’s question has some relevance. In the course of the Kievian government’s military operations, hundreds of people have been killed by artillery and air-strikes carried out against cities and villages. For example, the day after Flight 17 was destroyed, it was reported that 20 civilians died in the course of artillery and/or aerial attacks on the city of Lugansk. These deaths and many others like them have not resulted in visits from OSCE observers and journalists from the US-EU. The fact that their deaths are not widely denounced or mentioned in the US-EU media contains within itself the implication that these deaths, as opposed to those of Malaysian Air Flight 17, are the somewhat unavoidable and deserved result of opposition to the Ukrainian government and its sponsors.

Continue Reading
16 Comments on Fallen from the Sky
America Europe Politics

National Nihilism

7 min read
340 views
5 Comments on National Nihilism

Ever since a US-backed junta seized control of Ukraine in February, the country’s ethnic, cultural and linguistic fault lines have been accentuated to deadly effect. The predominantly russophone south and east have already paid a terrible price for resisting the new liberal-nationalist regime, from a fiery massacre in Odessa to outright war against Donetsk and Lugansk, two regions bordering Russia that have declared their independence.

Originally published at Soul of the East

Strategies for full-spectrum dominance encompass far more than just military means – their entire point is found in politics, the struggle for power. Movements proclaiming themselves the champions of national salvation thus deserve extra scrutiny, since they might serve precisely the opposite end.

 Ever since a US-backed junta seized control of Ukraine in February, the country’s ethnic, cultural and linguistic fault lines have been accentuated to deadly effect. The predominantly russophone south and east have already paid a terrible price for resisting the new liberal-nationalist regime, from a fiery massacre in Odessa to outright war against Donetsk and Lugansk, two regions bordering Russia that have declared their independence. Had Vladimir Putin not moved to secure Crimea, the peninsula today would be suffering an analogous fate. When we consider the atrocities committed against the inhabitants of historical Novorossiya (New Russia), it must be understood that Kiev’s counterinsurgency is far more significant than a local conflict – it is a proxy war the Pax Americana wages against Russia in order to command the Eurasian heartland. 

In the quest to “contain” and destabilize Russia, Washington has found willing and eager proxies in Ukrainian nationalists. Longtime enemies of Moscow, outfits like Stepan Bandera’s Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Rebel Army (UPA) worked in close partnership with Nazi Germany during the Second World War. With the Reichstag still smoldering and the new Cold War underway, the United States would continue where the Abwehr and SS left off, dropping nationalist agents into western Ukraine to conduct sabotage and guerrilla campaigns against the Soviet government until the early 1950s. The Berlin Wall may no longer stand, but US/NATO employment of Ukrainian nationalists in subversion programs continues to this day. Aside from the $5 billion the US has openly spent over twenty years to suborn Ukraine, it stands to reason that substantial clandestine assets were also dedicated to that objective.

Supported by the CIA as well as Polish intelligence, Kiev has attempted for the past two months to bring the east to heel, yet the regime has little to show for the effort other than dead and wounded in the thousands, while towns such as Slavyansk and Kramatorsk are pulverized under sustained bombardment. The regular Ukrainian army, demoralized, underfunded and under-equipped, hasn’t taken to the repression with the revolutionary fervor expected of them by the junta. Rather, Kiev has relied on the newly-instituted National Guard, foreign mercenaries and paramilitaries bankrolled by billionaire oligarchs like Dnepropetrovsk governor Igor “Benya” Kolomoisky, an ardent Zionist with a business empire reportedly built on ruthless criminality. Filling the ranks of these “special battalions” are motivated but often inexperienced thugs from neo-fascist Right Sector, the group that played a pivotal role in the success of February 22nd’s Maidan putsch. The death squads have proven adept at terrorizing civilians, but they haven’t fared so well in combat with local resistance forces.

Possible outcome of the Ukraine crisis: Novorossiya and already Russian Crimea (South/East), Malorossiya-Ukraine and Galicia (North/West).

Underlying the regime’s disastrous attempt to smash the revolt in the east is the utter incoherence of Ukrainian nationalism. Ukraine as a nation-state has all the natural viability of Belgium, for it is an artificial country hopelessly divided within Soviet-era borders. Civil war has erupted because ethnic Russians and culturally Russian Ukrainians, for generations living on traditionally Russian lands, refuse to accede to a poisonous chauvinism demanding the surrender of their religious, cultural and linguistic heritage. The armed ideologues who come to impose “ukrainianization” might as well be foreign invaders seeking to wipe out a subjugated people’s very identity, and this is why bands of rebels in the Donbas are fighting to the knife.

While far from the only case, the fabricated nature of militant Ukrainian nationalism becomes clearer through the lens of great-power competition. The shaping of “Ukraine” (originally Malorossiya – Little Russia – plus Galicia and Volynia) as an entity implacably hostile to “Muscovy” is an ongoing Western geopolitical project launched in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Poland and the Vatican maneuvered to fracture the unity of Orthodox Eastern Slavdom. From that time and in succession, Austria-Hungary, Germany, and now the United States have all found fostering and further inciting this antagonism as an economical means to undermine and even attack Russia itself. Though foolish and extremely dangerous, America’s latest bid to incorporate Ukraine into the “free world” is thus well-founded in historical precedent.

Also set in historical precedent is US collaboration with fascists. Far from limited to sponsorship of Pinochet-style military governments in Latin America, it’s worth recalling that Wall Street actively financed Adolf Hitler’s rise to Weltmacht. And so today the ultra-nationalists of Ukraine enjoy Washington’s tacit support as they drive to ethnically cleanse the country’s south and east of Russians and attain a pyrrhic victory for their ideology. Since Right Sector, Svoboda and other radical parties are enraptured by the legacy of National Socialism, they would do well to remember not only its fate, but also its dialectical function. The wholesale destruction and dehumanization wrought by Nazism merely cleared the way for the triumph of international capital, which from the end of World War II has enforced its dictates through liberal political economy, cultural Marxism and American military power. As US President Barack Obama elaborated in a recent speechin Warsaw:

We have a solemn duty — a binding treaty obligation — to defend your territorial integrity.  And we will.  We stand together — now and forever — for your freedom is ours.

The banksters are at liberty to subvert, invade and expropriate across the world forever. A key condition for the IMF’s extension of its $18 billion loanto Ukraine is “territorial integrity” – in their war on Novorossiya, nationalists act as the foot soldiers of predatory multinationals. They march not for their fatherland, but for the greater glory of Exxon-Mobil, Monsanto, and Lady Gaga; they are expendable, and so is Ukraine. Fantasies of a state from the Carpathians to the Caucasus seem quaint compared to the vision of planetary rule decreed by the masters of the dialectic, and the parochial nihilism of Bandera’s disciples represents only a transitory stage toward universal enslavement and the dissolution of all peoples.

Globalist elites design their policies according to the classical maxim of divide et impera, yet its esoteric corollary is solve et coagula, the alchemical process applied to entire societies. Behind inane sloganeering on freedom, democracy and human rights lies a relentless desire to destroy. Sovereignty must be ended, sex and the family distorted unto grotesquery, and God usurped by Mammon. The nation – the great extended family – must be annihilated. What the Brave New World needs are neither Russians nor Ukrainians, but demographic biomass engineered for exploitation.

Ukraine’s tragedy provides us a ready example of nationalism manipulated for the benefit of internationalist oligarchs. And Russia must meet its own challenge of upholding traditional identity against the onslaught of the West’s postmodern imperium. The organic, tribal nationalism of the blood can be reconciled with the higher demands of the spirit; such has been the mission of the Church and state in forming a wider Russian Orthodox civilization. In the meantime, the mounting outrages and provocations of the Kiev junta are catalogued for the sake of justice – to be meted out at a time of the Kremlin’s choosing.

Continue Reading
5 Comments on National Nihilism
America Culture Identity

A Reflection on Freedom

3 min read
306 views
27 Comments on A Reflection on Freedom

Americans are told that they must forfeit their freedoms, the same ones the terrorists supposedly wish to destroy, in order be kept safe from the terrorists that the U.S. openly funds and arms. This state of affairs is telling both about oligarch-run Washington, which cynically creates both the problem and then offers a “solution”, laughing all the way to the bank, and the American people, who have become the proverbial frog in the slowly boiling pot.

Originally published at Soul of the East

The Fourth of July holiday (decreasingly referred to as Independence Day) is an opportunity for countless Americans to have a day off to gorge themselves on food and beer, watch fireworks, and utter a few superficial platitudes about freedom. Minimal thought is given to these assumed freedoms, and even less to the founding myth that lays behind them. As long as homosexuals can “marry,” everyone can fornicate in the manner of barnyard animals, and Wal-Mart remains stocked with cheap Chinese-made trinkets, the masses are content to believe they are free.

That this Independence Day takes place in the growing shadow of the violently rising “Caliphate” (an offshoot of al-Qaeda) in Syria and Iraq passes without notice by the proletariat, who would rather be entertained with televised sports. One can hardly fault them for this; the intricacies of Middle Eastern sectarian politics are in and of themselves irrelevant to their lives.

What is actually ominous is the genesis of this self-proclaimed Caliphate. The Caliphate and the resurgent jihadist movement that preceded it have been cited by the U.S. government as an immediate terrorist threat to the “Homeland”. Indeed, the “terrorist threat” has been continuously used by the elites to perpetuate and expand the surveillance state and peddle for more war in the Middle East, with the ever-lovable former Vice President Dick Cheney spouting that if America fails to reinvade Iraq, then the United States would suffer an attack at the hands of terrorists to dwarf the 9-11 operation of 2001. Thus our ruling elites assure us that we need more domestic control and more foreign interventions to keep us safe, what the late Gore Vidal termed perpetual war for perpetual peace.

That the same terrorists who now supposedly threaten our lives and our “freedom” have been sponsored and armed by the American government shows the level of willful ignorance that most of our citizenry is happy to live with.

Americans are told that they must forfeit their freedoms, the same ones the terrorists supposedly wish to destroy, in order be kept safe from the terrorists that the U.S. openly funds and arms. This state of affairs is telling both about oligarch-run Washington, which cynically creates both the problem and then offers a “solution”, laughing all the way to the bank, and the American people, who have become the proverbial frog in the slowly boiling pot.

For a people whose common perception of freedom is that it consists of self-gratification, such a program of elite manipulation is not only expected, but perhaps even deserved. But manipulative, technocratic elites and passive, subservient populations are not the final word. And while America’s Independence Day may be more myth than reality, there is indeed a true, spiritual freedom to be sought out and achieved.

The twentieth century Russian philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev proclaimedsuch a freedom. A freedom, in his words, that “presupposes the existence of truth, of meaning, of God.” He knew that “Truth and meaning liberate, and liberation leads to truth and meaning.” And that true freedom “must also be love, and love must be free.”

Unless and until Americans forsake mindless consumerism, nihilistic self-gratification, and allowing the corporate media to do their thinking for them, they will never attain to the true freedom spoken of by Berdyaev. Americans must realize that their true enemies are neither manufactured terrorists nor a revived Russia, but their own amoral, decadent elites, and even more so their own complacency and sloth.

Yet there is always hope that the people will awake from their spiritual slumber. May we lay claim to a true spiritual freedom and nobility that will shake the thrones of the parasitic elites and lead to the creation of a healthy, godly society.

Continue Reading
27 Comments on A Reflection on Freedom
Culture Politics Sex

‘Rape Culture Isn’t About Sex, It’s About Power’

10 min read
372 views
No Comments on ‘Rape Culture Isn’t About Sex, It’s About Power’

Rape culture is a lot like racism. Maybe they should just call it “rapism.” It’s an abstract “evil” that a certain group, in this case women, reserves the right to identify and use to manipulate another group, in this case men, into increasingly defensive and impotent positions. As long as they can keep men apologizing, they can keep controlling them.

Our forefathers understood the truth about women.

The truth is that women actually like sex. Without the coercive discipline of patriarchs, women would have sex all the time–like the frisky matriarchs of the Bonobo world.

Men have always known that women like to feel good, too.

As Nietzsche observed, man is only a means for women and the end is always a child. However, this is an ultimate, often subconscious cause. More proximate causes include pleasure and affirmation.

If females had ever really run things, I’m not sure what their version of female “honor” would be, or if there would even be one. Always and everywhere, female honor has meant chastity–and female chastity was clearly a male invention.

Before modern contraception, the control of female sexuality was necessary to maintain order between men. If men are to be expected to care for children, they want to know which kids are theirs. A woman who cheats on a man undermines him and makes him look like a fool in front of other men. The virtue of female chastity–the ridiculous idea that a woman waits for and only wants intercourse with the man she’s been courted by or assigned to–was essentially constructed to protect the honor of men. The expectation of female chastity probably kept a lot of jealous men from killing other members of their own tribes. Men have always known that they wanted to have sex with many women, but they constructed social and legal institutions that forced them to control their own sexual urges, too. To maintain order and create stability in increasingly complex societies, men around the world dreamed up different versions of monogamous, or occasionally polygamous, marriage.

Women were trained to protect their honor–their chastity–above all things. They were scolded for lustful or adulterous thoughts that, it was rightly feared, might lead to misbehavior. In rigidly religious and socially complex bourgeois societies, they were discouraged from thinking of themselves as sexual creatures at all. Sex was something women were expected to simply “grin and bear” as a punishment for being born female.

Modern contraception, industrialization, globalism, and women’s suffrage changed the whole game. The lie of female chastity was exposed, and the institutions of marriage and the nuclear family collapsed. Male investment in civilization and order continues to decrease, and women–who are far better consumers and sedentary employees–have collectively reached a position which offers them the means to exert their own influence and tell their own lies about sex.

So they tell us about “rape culture.”

The violent rape of a woman is a brutal and visceral image that fills every man who loves his mother or his sisters with vengeful rage. Men may joke darkly about rape in the abstract, just as they may joke about murder or dismemberment in the abstract, but the actuality of violent rape is infuriating and repulsive to the majority of them. Men want to conquer the hearts and minds of women, but raping a woman of your own tribe is the act of a spurned, desperate man. A rapist is something that no right-minded man wants to be.

When anti-rape activists tell men they simply want to “teach men not to rape,” that sounds reasonable enough. When they say that there is a “culture of rape” that perpetuates rape, men are hesitant to disagree because they don’t want to be regarded as forgiving of rape or accessories to rape. It is precisely because most men are already against rape that women are able to use rape as a kind of personal holocaust. Anti-“rape culture” advocates are exploiting male disgust for rape and using it as a tool to silence criticism of women and exert control over men’s sexual behavior and conceptions of their own masculinity.

The women who claim that there is a culture of rape in America, as if there are somehow more rapes and rape is somehow more acceptable today than in the past or elsewhere, are not solely interested in preventing rape.

They surely know that the most brutal rapes–the nasty, violent rapes everyone imagines when they think of rape–are for the most part perpetrated by psychopaths and serial rapists who are immune to the influence of their college campus shaming sessions. Feminists also aren’t going to prevent Steel Reserve and Hot Pocket fueled trailer park rapes or underpass Joose rapes, because they have no more influence in these derelict zones than the mores of Victorian church ladies had in the backalleys of London. Given that the well-behaved college boys who make up their captive audience and potential mate selection are already against brutal rape, the ability of educational and Twitter campaigns aimed at ending “rape culture” to actually prevent violent rape will always be relatively minimal. A few frat boys will wait to make sure they got a clear “yes,” and the smart ones will record it for their own protection. But, for the most part, they weren’t the ones giving nice girls black eyes or broken jaws to begin with.

It is when feminists are asked how to end “rape culture” that they truly tip their hand. In a widely cited article in The Nation, the number one and number two ways to “empower men and women to change the status quo” were more concerned with changing masculinity, male identity and male sexuality than they were with preventing rape.

At the top of the list, the first “real problem” identified was “violent masculinity,” which is also known as “masculinity.” Violence has been a defining part of the male sex role and masculine identity throughout human evolution and for all of recorded history. The idea that violent masculinity is somehow a novel product of American society or even Western Civilization is one of the biggest lies feminists tell. If there truly are or have been cultures–not merely priesthoods or religious sects, but whole cultures–where the majority of men were not considered more violent than women, and I have never seen convincing evidence of this, then they are or have been exceedingly rare and anomalous. Male violence is a human norm and a human universal. Male violence is a central feature of both histories and myths concerning men all around the world, and the forms of entertainment that men and even very young boys choose freely continue to feature violent fantasy or simulated tribal warfare–as with team sports.

Just as men have always known or suspected that women also experienced carnal lust, women have always known or suspected that, for men, sex and violence are linked. The rush of dominating another man, or a beast, or the forces of nature is not so far away in the mind from the rush of sexually dominating a woman. All of our language about sex hints at the connection between sex and violence. There is no escaping the reality that the physical act of intercourse itself, as it is most often performed, involves a man violently pushing himself inside a woman in a wild, heightened, animalistic state of mind he rarely achieves in civilized life.

It’s not too much to ask to require men to make sure they have permission to engage in this ancient, ecstatic power play, since both men and women are having far more casual sex with far more partners than they were 100 years ago. But you don’t have to redefine masculinity to do that, since, as we all know, rape is already taboo.

Women are not stupid. They see this primal violence in male sexuality. They perceive their role it in it and it both excites and terrifies them, because they know that the delicate spirit of “equality” is exorcised in the frenzy of fornication.

Feminists taught the slogan that “rape is not about sex, it’s about power,” but only a few of them were willing to admit that sex is almost always about power, too.

Women are uncomfortable admitting that they enjoy the violent, dominant nature of male sexuality, especially in a political context. That they enjoy being dominated by men–at least in the bedroom, if only in the bedroom–is so politically volatile that it’s become an unspeakably dirty little secret for the new church ladies.

While it is true that women enjoy sex, they are also pragmatic and especially interested in safety and security. If there has been a “war of the sexes” raging throughout human history, men have almost always been the victors, precisely because they are bigger and stronger, more willing to take risks, and more inclined to be violent. Women see the potential for violence in men and they recognize that it is the greatest threat to the new order of society–their order. A majority of women in the developed world now have more political and economic power now than they ever have in human history, and this increase in status is utterly dependent on the continued pacification of men.

So they lie. They lie about male sexuality the way men lied about female sexuality.

They’re willing to trade satisfying sex for quasi-coital man-milking if it means holding on to their newfound political and economic power. They’re willing to use the tragedy of rape as a tool to cow men morally–to make normal, decent men prostrate themselves to prove they are not rapists or enablers of rape. As with “privilege,” men will always be guilty until proven innocent, and no matter what they do, no matter how they dishonor themselves, they will never be innocent enough. To release men from guilt is to relinquish power over them, and this power has already corrupted the hearts of the women who revel in it and gain from it.

Rape culture is a lot like racism. Maybe they should just call it “rapism.” It’s an abstract “evil” that a certain group, in this case women, reserves the right to identify and use to manipulate another group, in this case men, into increasingly defensive and impotent positions. As long as they can keep men apologizing, they can keep controlling them.

The continued success of feminism requires the ongoing construction of guilt cultures designed to mould men into a safer and more passive population. Corporate and banking interests want this, because ornery, violent groups of men unsupervised by women are a threat to established interests, property and supply chains. Pacified men also make better employees and consumers.

Feminists may merely be useful idiots to these bigger interests, but they are getting what they want out of the bargain for the time being. They want, as they have wanted for decades, to eliminate proscribed female gender roles and the ability of men to limit female behavior. They want men to “reimagine” a masculinity without violence or dominance. Masculinity without themes of violence or dominance may have no precedent, no history, and it may be completely at odds with physiology and human evolution, but male pacification is the key to female political and economic power.

These women are willing to do whatever they have to do to retain and gain that power, even if it means exploiting victims of rape to do it.

Continue Reading
No Comments on ‘Rape Culture Isn’t About Sex, It’s About Power’
America Nationalism Politics

The Victims Of American-Backed Revolutions

12 min read
274 views
No Comments on The Victims Of American-Backed Revolutions

The Revolution ends by devouring its own children.

”The Revolution ends by devouring its own children” – Jacques Mallet du Pan, 1793

There might be no truer words ever spoken than that by the French royalist who managed to escape the carnage wrought by the Reign of Terror. Revolutions release an incredible amount of violence and anarchy pent up in a nation and these forces are hard to tame once they are released from their black pit. They linger on after the blood of the old lords have been cleansed from the scaffolds and the bestial lust of the revolution continues to desire for more to die in order to create a new society.

After the initial wave of violence that sweeps away most of the old order, it’s bound to happen that some of the staunchest supporters will eventually find themselves headless after the next rounds of bloodshed. In past revolutions, such as in France and Russia, it was the moderates who found themselves devoured by the violence that was unleashed by the political upheaval. The Girondins were killed off by the Jacobins and the Mensheviks were killed off by the Bolsheviks.

But when the US State Department sponsors your revolution, it seems to be the extremists who get devoured by their creation instead.

Revolutions, state department-sponsored or not, require mass support to succeed and they have to rely on a large swath of interest groups to achieve their goals of overthrowing the previous regime. The ones with the most discipline, the most fervor, and the most fanatical followers typically gain the edge. The moderates attempt to peacefully navigate the treacherous waters of the new realignment, while the extremists offer the masses red meat and radical solutions to the problems besetting their nation.

When you throw in American involvement into the mix though, the moderates are favored with international aid, promises of greater integration into the global economy, and military advisers for the country’s armed forces. That’s also including the fact that the US helped form and support the forces that took part in the initial stages of the unrest.

And they didn’t do that in order to create a fascist order – they did it to spread American economic and cultural power. They are not keen on allowing traditionally-minded radicals to sow the seeds they gave and our state department will do everything they can to further their goals and the original purpose of the revolution they planted.

The two obvious examples that are testing this hypothesis right now are Ukraine and Egypt. While the blood spilled in these two cases haven’t matched the abattoir levels of the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks, they have made it clear that no longer useful extremists will be dumped and removed from avenues of power.

Last week, the interim government in Ukraine demanded that all armed groups disarm immediately and seized Right Sector’s headquarters in Kiev. This development comes after the police killed Oleksandr Muzychko, a notorious leader of the nationalist paramilitary group, and Right Sector stormed Ukriane’s parliament in response to the slaying.

Russian state media has reported that Ukrainian officials are planning on arresting many leaders of the paramilitary groups that popped up all over the country in response to the increasing violence and instability.

And it’s not just Right Sector and other paramilitary groups who are feeling the clampdown. The Svoboda party member who was originally appointed as defense minister stepped down after elements in the government pressured him to do so. Another Svoboda party member and journalist was tortured, murdered and dumped in a forest outside of Kiev by unknown assailants last weekend.

Needless to say, it looks like the new government in Kiev has had their share of the nationalist groups that were at the forefront in toppling Yanukovych and fighting his riot police. With billions of dollars from the US at stake and international disapproval of “neo-fascist” elements in the government, this is an obvious move on the part of Arseniy Yatsenyuk and his cabinet to placate their Western backers.

This is occurring in spite of the major role nationalist groups played in toppling Yanukovych. It was the nationalists who fought the police, took the bullets and baton swings, and occupied government buildings to create the conditions to delegitimize Yanukovych’s rule. The pro-EU crowd, liberals, and other “peaceful” marchers posed no threat to the existing order and were easily smashed by the Berkut. Enter in the right-wing elements to fight back against the state and things quickly change to favor the Euromaidan side.

While the Western media did its best to portray the protests as an outpouring of a desire to be Westernized — with the protestors representing a diverse spectrum of society — the fact is the men in balaclavas were not throwing Molotov cocktails on behalf of same-sex marriage and mass immigration.

But now the US needs fighters in the Ukrainian army and not on the street. They also want politicians who will quickly sign onto integration with the EU and won’t hassle them about the stipulations that comes with accepting a bailout from the IMF. The nationalists are not those people — now they are simply a nuisance to US interests. And with Washington controlling the purse strings, there’s little that the paramilitary groups and right-wing parties can do.

A similar situation has occurred when the “Arab Spring” swept over Egypt. Like the Maidan protests, a diverse spectrum of Egyptian society took to the streets of Cairo in 2011 to protest the corruption and incompetence of the ruling regime. Once again, the police and military attacked the protestors in an attempt to suppress the unrest. That was largely due to the fact that a militant, well-organized, and highly devoted segment within the protests was there and was willing to fight back against both the police and the pro-Mubarak counter-protestors.

That segment was the Muslim Brotherhood and they eventually toppled Mubarak through cutting a deal with the military and was able to assume authority over Egypt.

There was just one problem – this didn’t go according to state department plans. While our media portrayed the protests as composed of brown-skinned hipsters and enthusiastic liberals, the real winners of the revolution were anti-Western Mohammedans who were intent on turning Egypt into a theocratic state. That wasn’t the future that the US had in mind for the Mediterranean land where economic liberalism could swoop in and the leadership would cause no problems for Israel.

As the Arab Spring spread and turned into an embarrassment for American foreign policy by empowering Islamic radicals, Egypt looked like it could be chalked up as another failure of America’s naivety. But since Egypt was heavily dependent on aid provided by the West and the military was growing weary of the new government that imperiled that flow, America saw an opportunity to eliminate the radical element that came to dominate the revolution. Turning a blind eye as the military launched a coup amidst new protests, Egypt’s armed forces swiftly deposed Mohammed Morsi and violently crushed the opposition of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The crackdown in Ukraine looks far tamer when compared with the way Egypt’s new military junta brutally put down the Muslim Brotherhood.

Over 600 people were killed when the military toppled Morsi’s Islamic regime and cracked down on protestors who dispute the takeover in 2013. This was despite the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood, the primary victims of the violence, were largely responsible for the successful revolution in 2011 that overthrew the previous Hosni Mubarak’s government that had fallen out of favor with the West.

Like the right-wing militants in Kiev, the Muslim Brotherhood was the key factor in toppling Mubarak’s government. They were willing to give back the violence that the police and military were giving them in spades and had the discipline and fervor to maintain their opposition through brutal suppression and times of doubt.

Unlike the Ukrainian nationalists, they were able to assume power, for a short time at least, immediately after the downfall of Mubarak. But their policies of implementing Islamic law, cracking down on Western dress and culture, belligerence in the face of international requests, and hostile relations with Israel made them unwanted rulers in the eyes of the State department.

Thus, when mass protests assembled again in Cairo, the US saw a chance to rectify their mistake in letting the Brotherhood attain power and quietly backed the military coup that deposed Morsi and slaughtered hundreds of Brotherhood supporters all across Egypt. The Brotherhood was no longer useful to American interests and were becoming a nuisance. Thus, they were taken down with brute force.

What both of these cases articulate is how the US government uses radical forces to dispose of foreign governments they don’t like – and then later dumps the radicals when they serve no more useful purpose.

The US is capable of keeping the new governments in their pockets with money and promises of assistance and the new holders of power are more than willing to sell out their previous comrades to keep the cash flowing. Ukraine is now dependent on an International Monetary Fund loan to avoid bankruptcy and Egypt was dependent on Western aid to support its population. Having Nationalists and Islamic extremists in charge jeopardizes that stream when both groups want to maintain traditionalism and reject the cultural liberalism that the revolutionary benefactors seek to transmit to their respective country.

Previously, revolutionaries killed their brothers-in-arms over ideological disputes and a desire for purge the state of traces of the ancien regime. Now the stamping out is done simply over American dollars.

This is troubling in Ukraine where individuals with our mindset and with good intentions participated in the Euromaidan protests to free their country of foreign influence and promote identitarian goals. Several of these nationalists were appointed to prominent positions in the government and looked poised to gain even more power. Many within our sphere saw an opportunity in the growing power of far-right, nationalist elements in Ukraine, myself included.

But as the weeks pass by, this promise is beginning to look like a false hope.

If the cases of Egypt and Ukraine can teach us one thing, it is that the rules of revolutions are changing. It is increasingly difficult for countries to make their own path in their world independent of the old powers in their quest to free themselves. When US dollars and intelligence assistance come into play, that possibility becomes impossible. There is no way that America will invest millions of dollars and place a stake in their geopolitical scheme into a country, and then let that country be overtaken by anti-liberal forces.

They will do everything in their power to prevent that occurrence and when they control the money and the military, it becomes easier for them to eliminate nuisances.

The US has a solid footing in Ukraine and it does not want Svoboda or Right Sector taking power. Believing that these groups can take over and forge a “third position” is an unrealistic view of the situation on the ground.

America supports revolutions to further their own interests – not the interests of groups hostile to liberal ideas.

And that is why the new victims of revolution are the hard-line extremists who engineered the revolution’s success. Washington has no problem with manipulating these elements when they are useful for their cause, but once that usefulness is gone, then they are eliminated.

That is why identitarians should always be skeptical of any revolution that Western governments support. We should not be taken in by protestors draped in runes and shouting slogans that appeal to our sensibilities if they are earning the support of the European Union and other bodies we despise.

For the real enemy to identitarianism is American global hegemony. It wants to eliminate tradition and force man into the monoculture. Anything it backs is done to further this agenda and it will crack down on any elements that would hinder that achievement.

If the nationalists in Ukraine accept this fact, they could one day forge a new paradigm for whites to emulate and embrace. But that is unlikely to happen in the short-term with Russia threatening Ukraine’s border and the only ally the country has is America (however piss poor of an ally that is).

For it is now true, to paraphrase du Pan, that the Revolution that’s backed by America ends by devouring its own radicals.

Continue Reading
No Comments on The Victims Of American-Backed Revolutions
Europe Nationalism Politics

Jobbik Makes Gains In 2014 Hungarian Election

9 min read
300 views
No Comments on Jobbik Makes Gains In 2014 Hungarian Election

Yesterday (Sunday, April 6), the national parliamentary elections, which are held every four years, took place in Hungary.

Yesterday (Sunday, April 6), the national parliamentary elections, which are held every four years, took place in Hungary. This election was particularly notable in that it was the first time that those of Hungarian ethnicity who reside in other countries were allowed to participate – a significant change considering how many Hungarians live outside of Hungary’s borders at the present time, most especially in those territories which it lost following its defeat in the First World War.

The Hungarian parliamentary elections work in a somewhat unorthodox manner, with voters having to choose both from a list of candidates from each particular party on the national level, as well as for deputies from those parties for their own specific county or district.

No one seriously expected that the popular Center-Right party Fidesz, which has governed Hungary continuously since 1998, would not be victorious again, and sure enough, Fidesz, in a coalition with the Christian Democratic People’s Party, won over 44% of the vote, giving it 133 out of 199 seats in parliament, and securing a two-thirds supermajority in representatives, which means it can continue to make changes to the national constitution without the consent of the opposition.

Nevertheless, Jobbik, the more radical contender on the Right in Hungary whose success has been inspirational to nationalist movements across Europe, made significant gains. Having been founded just over a decade ago in 2003, Jobbik polled at less than 2% of the total vote when it fought its first election in 2006. It surprised the world by placing third among Hungary’s parties and garnering over 16% of the vote in 2010. Yesterday, Jobbik won over 20% of the vote and 23 parliamentary seats, again placing third, and making gains even in the highly liberal capital city, Budapest. This was quite an extraordinary feat for a party that has been branded as “extremist” and “fascist” both at home and abroad, and whose message reflects an uncompromising commitment to a genuinely Right-wing perspective and traditionalist values. Jobbik is known for its defense of the Hungarian people, both within and outside Hungary, and particularly as against Hungary’s Roma population; opposition to liberalism and globalization; opposition to Zionism; and opposition to the European Union, the United States and NATO (part of its party program is to take Hungary out of the EU), which it says treats smaller countries like Hungary as nothing more than a cheap labor force to be exploited.

I was fortunate enough to watch the election returns as a guest of Jobbik at their campaign headquarters yesterday evening, and I had the opportunity to speak with Márton Gyöngyösi, Jobbik’s International Secretary, about what the party’s hopes had been going into the election and their reaction to the results. He told me that Jobbik’s primary goals in this year’s election were to displace Unity, the Leftist coalition, for the number two spot among the parties; to prevent Fidesz from securing another supermajority; to capture the deputy positions in as many counties and districts as possible; and to increase their general numbers among the national electorate. It was only in the last point that Jobbik was ultimately successful.

Unity is not itself a party, but rather a coalition of five socialist/Leftist parties who joined together simply for the purposes of fighting in the election, given the severe loss in support suffered in the 2010 elections by the previous number-two party in Hungary, the Hungarian Socialist Party (which regards itself as the successor to the Communist party which ruled Hungary between 1956 and 1989). Jobbik does not see Unity as serious political rivals, however, since the parties involved have little history of working together outside of the election campaign. Nevertheless, Unity was successful in securing nearly 26% of the vote and 38 seats in parliament, and won the deputy races in two counties, as well as in the deputy races in many districts of Budapest.

It should be noted that the fourth-place party after Jobbik was the Lehet Más a Politika (“Politics Can Be Different”), a Green party, which garnered less than 6% of the vote, and only 5 parliamentary seats. This was just barely sufficient to enable the party to enter parliament at all (5% being the minimum required). This is a clear indication that Jobbik has handily established itself as one of the only serious contenders for national leadership.

During the early phases of the election returns, it seemed as if Jobbik would win the deputy slot in Miskolc, the fourth-largest city in Hungary and a long-time stronghold of Fidesz, but once all the returns were in Fidesz managed to maintain a razor-thin majority. As a result, Jobbik did not win in any of Hungary’s deputy races.

Despite these setbacks, the fact that Jobbik is an actual party, as opposed to Unity, which is merely an alliance of many parties that are unlikely to work together in parliament, means that Jobbik stands as the second-most powerful political party in the Hungarian parliament today.

Márton Gyöngyösi noted that the balance of power between Hungary’s parties was largely unchanged from the 2010 election, which was disappointing for Jobbik. Nevertheless, he was pleased to see the increase in the number of voters who supported them, indicating that their message is beginning to resonate more and more with Hungarian voters.

When asked what Jobbik needed to do to position itself as a serious challenger to Fidesz’s domination, Gyöngyösi said that the party needs to find a way to appeal to voters in historically liberal Budapest. A look at the numbers shows that Jobbik is already the second-most popular party in many of the rural regions of the country, which are traditionally, and unsurprisingly, the most Right-leaning sector of the nation. While Jobbik increased its numbers in Budapest as well, it still received only slightly more than 10% of the votes there. With a population of two million out of a nation of nearly ten million people, a party’s success in the capital city is crucial to achieving victory. But as of now, Jobbik hasn’t succeeded in finding a way to attract significant support there, which Gyöngyösi said would be a top priority for the party moving forward.

Several Jobbik members also suggested to me that Fidesz’s popularity largely hinges upon that of its charismatic leader, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and that his eventual departure from the party could greatly reduce their appeal. Several Hungarians I have spoken with have also indicated that many voters who once supported Fidesz unconditionally have grown more skeptical about it, and their support for Fidesz was more reserved and hesitant this time around given Hungary’s persistent economic troubles. This is supported by the numbers, as Fidesz, while it remained dominant, saw its numbers drop significantly from what they were in 2010.

Gyöngyösi sees hope for his party’s future in the fact that Jobbik has attracted a great deal of popularity among Hungary’s youth, and most especially among university students. Opinion polls have indicated that Jobbik is the most popular party among approximately one-third of students. If present trends continue, as these young people grow older and become more active, Jobbik could be well-positioned to surpass its rivals in 2018 or 2022, barring any unforeseen changes to Hungary’s political landscape.

Those of a Rightist inclination should not be disappointed that Fidesz remains in power, however. While I find the policies and general political philosophy of Jobbik to be much more compatible with a “true Right” (to use Evola’s term) perspective, it cannot be questioned that Fidesz has done a great deal of good for the country, and would itself be considered “extremist” by Western European or North American standards. (I have been told that articles by the French “New Right” gurus, Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye, have been published in Fidesz’s party newspaper, for example.) Given that Jobbik and Fidesz combined accounted for 65% of the votes cast, this would seem to indicate that Leftist parties simply lack appeal for the vast majority of Hungarians and are unlikely to reestablish themselves in the immediate future. I suppose this is unsurprising in a country that had Communist rule forced upon it for nearly half a century, something that is still fresh in the memories of many Hungarians.

What is certain is that Jobbik is not a passing phenomenon, nor a force that can be ignored, and it is likely to remain a significant factor in Hungarian, and European, politics for years to come. This poses a serious counterargument against those who hold that the only way that Rightist parties can succeed is by moderating, since Jobbik has little history of watering down its messages, which are quite bold, to assuage the complaints of its critics. Given Jobbik’s highly innovative geopolitical stance (which favors an alliance of Hungary with Russia, Turkey and Germany as a bulwark against the EU and the United States), its critique of capitalism, and its adoption of some of the perspectives of traditionalists such as René Guénon and Julius Evola, this also suggests that many people are looking for new and innovative ideas on the Right as opposed to the recycling and repackaging of the same, tired conservative slogans of the past. The Right of the future, if it is to achieve anything, will be a very different Right (and may scarcely be “Right-wing” at all, in conventional terms).

Given the sudden increase in popularity of “radical” Right-wing parties across Europe in recent years, most notably in France, Jobbik seems to be only a part of a growing trend. Europeans, and young people in particular, have awakened to the fact that liberalism has and is continuing to fail to meet the needs and desires of our people. If we want to see where the vigor and innovation lies in the European political scene today, we must look to the Right. Tomorrow belongs to us.

John Morgan is Editor-in-Chief of Arktos Media. He currently resides in Budapest.

Continue Reading
No Comments on Jobbik Makes Gains In 2014 Hungarian Election
Identity Nationalism Politics

Ukraine, Russia, and “Westernia”

4 min read
286 views
No Comments on Ukraine, Russia, and “Westernia”

There are Ukrainians and Western Ukrainians. These are two different social, national, ethnic, and cultural groups. Ukrainians are a West Russian *ethnos* which recognizes its historic unity with Eastern Slavs and *Velikorossy* (a historic term meaning “Great Russes,” often translated as “Great Russians”) as the core of the Eastern Slavs and the creators of an autonomous and powerful Eastern Slavic Orthodox State. Thus, Ukrainians are not simply “our people,” they are a part of us and, ultimately, they are we ourselves. They are not different, they are the same.

// Photo: The Washington Post

There are Ukrainians and Western Ukrainians. These are two different social, national, ethnic, and cultural groups. Ukrainians are a West Russian ethnos which recognizes its historic unity with Eastern Slavs and Velikorossy (a historic term meaning “Great Russes,” often translated as “Great Russians”) as the core of the Eastern Slavs and the creators of an autonomous and powerful Eastern Slavic Orthodox State. Thus, Ukrainians are not simply “our people,” they are a part of us and, ultimately, they are we ourselves. They are not different, they are the same.

Western Ukrainians are a sub-ethnos, which historically separated itself from the Western Russian population, formed in Volhynia and Galicia, having experienced significant Polonization and the influence of Catholicism (in the form of the Uniate—Eastern Catholic—Church). Western Ukrainians consider themselves an autonomous group, opposing themselves to other Eastern Slavs (first and foremost, these are Velikorossy, “moskali” (a derogatory term that means “Russians”)), Orthodox peoples, but also Poles and Austrians. Therefore, they have never had (and will never have) statehood, since it is impossible to build a State on the basis of hatred toward all surrounding peoples.

Modern-day Ukraine houses people with a Ukrainian identity and a Western Ukrainian identity. Making peace between them was the goal of the Ukrainian state that existed between 1991 and 2014. Ukraine’s political elite failed to do so. The Western Ukrainian minority insisted that the entire modern-day Ukraine must possess a single—Western—identity, thereby opposing the rest of the Ukrainians. Thus, it was they who ultimately destroyed contemporary Ukraine. Thanks to them, that Ukraine is already dead. And the more they scream that it has not died, the faster and more irreversibly it continues to die.

Ahead of us is the final schism of the Ukrainian space into two halves: the Western part headed by Kiev (Pravoberezhie, the Right River Bank) and the South-East, which is dominated by the Ukrainian (Orthodox East Slavic) identity. Crimea has been reunited with Russia, so what is left is the appearance of a new essentially Ukrainian (but not Western Ukrainian) State—Novorossiya (literally, “New Russia”). It will both be independent and friendly toward Russia.

This State may, indeed, form, but this is not a guarantee. It is over this area that the real struggle begins.

What is left for Western Ukrainians is the construction of their Galician-Volhynian State, “Westernia,” on the Right River Bank. Most likely, this project is doomed to failure. The reasons are as follows:

First of all, Western Ukrainians will never abandon their claims to control South-Eastern Ukraine (Novorossiya). Therefore, this is where the conflict lines will be drawn.

Second, the Western Ukrainian identity is strictly anti-Polish, whereas Poland considers its former possessions in the Volhynia region to be historically justified, nor have the Poles forgotten about the ethnic cleansing of their ancestors by the so-called Ukrainian Insurgent Army.

Third, “Westernia” is exclusively oriented toward the U.S., not continental Europe, which will create tensions with the European Union.

Fourth, Galician ultra-nationalism will become obvious to the West sooner or later, and it is doubtful that anyone would want to deal with this kind of a regime on serious terms.

And, finally, this kind of ultra-nationalism will create tensions with Rusyns in the South-West (Carpathian Rus), Hungarians, and other ethnic minorities.

Therefore, the Right River Bank State will collapse, proving one truth: that which was never part of history cannot last for long.

It is obvious that there will be no dialogue between Russia and Western Ukrainians. Each time they crawl out, they will strictly and deservingly get “kicked in the teeth.” In contrast, history and fate themselves dictate not only a dialogue but brotherly unity between Ukrainians and Russians. And here we face a very important moment: Russia must act not as an enemy, but as a friend and patron of the Ukrainian identity. The Ukrainian ethnos, language, culture are all part of our spiritual and historic wealth. If Western Ukrainians, with their current negative identity, only deserve a “kick in the jaw” from us, then Ukrainians are worthy of love, friendship, and the most gentle and attentive kind of a relationship. We must not insist on the Russification of Ukrainians, but instead act as the guarantors of safekeeping and developing their culture, language, and identity.

Continue Reading
No Comments on Ukraine, Russia, and “Westernia”

Type on the field below and hit Enter/Return to search