This Is The World You Chose: Episode 3

Most or all of these are not new, but TITWYC is about collecting evidence of all liberal lunacy, not necessarily the most recent happenings. Let's go.It's not too late at this point. You can still back out:Trans-normalization is arguably the next SJW crusade, but incest is not far behind. I'm surprised these two aren't nominated for president with the amount of victim boxes they check:Because this is what you want your kids to see when they flick on the TV:Parents that choose not to vaccinate their children because they worry about the side effects are harangued while this boy's parents and his "doctor" are applauded for ruining his life, all in the name of "progress". Heartbreaking:Nothing is immune:I found these on Twitter. Everyone should stay off Twitter.

A Social Justice Warrior Story With a Happy Ending – and an Important Lesson

In modern America, we face an enemy which is implacable in its desire to subvert, overthrow, and destroy our traditional American way of life. This enemy goes by many names – the Left-wing, progressives, political correctness, cultural Marxists – but one name which they have applied to themselves seems to best sum up what their intentions are: “social justice warriors.” These people refer to themselves this way because they believe it is their purpose in life to crusade against the “evils” that they think pervade America – “racism, sexism, homophobia, intolerance” and all the rest. The practical effect of all of this is that they end up harassing, assaulting, and otherwise trying to make life miserable for millions of normal, everyday Americans who simply want nothing more than to live how they want to live without some overweening, pencil-necked ninnies intruding and to trying to coerce them into certain behaviors and opinions.This is why it is so delicious when one of these intrusive, self-appointed guardians of social justice finds herself receiving a richly deserved comeuppance for her efforts.The instance to which I am referring can be read about here, you will need to scroll down about two-thirds of the way to the portion about “Hank” and Adria Richards. To briefly sum it up, “Hank” (not his real name) is a computer technology developer, and Adria is (theoretically, at least) one as well. They met, to the extent to which this term can be used, at a conference in California in 2013. “Hank” and a friend, apparently bored by the proceedings, because to crack wise with each other, making jokes about big “dongles” and “forking repos.” Adria, sitting in front of them, chose to become offended by these jokes, took their picture, and then publicized it on her Twitter account. Except she didn’t talk about a couple of guys making juvenile jokes – she chose to cast it as two evil white men presenting a clear and present danger of raping her, right there in the middle of the conference. Hence, she chose to turn it into a classic “social justice warrior” scenario – she, a self-described Jewish black woman, chose to try to create an incident in which she could initiate a social justice conflict between herself and two individuals ranking lower in the sociopolitical hierarchy. In other words, she was simply being an old fashioned bully of the kind that populates the “social justice warrior” circles.Her own statements in the interviews serve to show what a soulless sociopath this woman really is.She sought to publicly humiliate a man she had never met before, and who wasn’t even talking to her, and who likely didn’t even know she existed until he noticed her taking his picture. She sought to have this man punished for essentially saying things she didn’t like. She believes to this day that she was fully justified in getting a man with a family to support fired from his job for saying those things she didn’t like. When asked if she felt bad about getting him fired from his job, she said,

“He’s a white male. I’m a black Jewish female. He was saying things that could be inferred as offensive to me, sitting in front of him. I do have empathy for him, but it only goes so far. If he had Down’s syndrome and he accidently pushed someone off a subway, that would be different…I’ve seen things where people are like, ‘Adria didn’t know what she was doing by tweeting it.’ Yes, I did.”

She continues to assert the ridiculously laughable claim that she felt she was in “danger,” and that she feared that “Hank” and his friend might rape and/or kill her right there in the middle of a technology conference, and that nobody would have done a thing about it, since they were all white guys who presumably approve of that sort of thing.That sort of thinking, this sort of a response, indicates that Adria Richards is a sociopath, someone so divorced from reality that she cannot even function in normal civil society. She can’t interact with other people in normal and reasonable ways that don’t involve her being the center of all attention. She seems not only unwilling, but unable to take responsibility for her own actions, or to even understand that such responsibility should be taken. She lives in a bizarro world where she is the one who has “compassion, empathy, morals, and ethics” to guide her daily life choices, even as she invents rape fantasies to justify destroying the life of another human being.Which it is why it is so eminently satisfying to see her lose the conflict. As you will note from the article, “Hank” was hired by another technology company almost immediately afterward. Adria, on the other hand, remains bitter and unemployed, at least so far as the time the article was written. To top it off, she became the target of a rather nasty campaign of internet hatred for several months on end.Normally, I would feel at least a twinge of compassion for someone facing such a circumstance in her life, even if it was her own fault. But in this case, I can’t help but feel that she deserves everything she got, even if some of the pushback was distasteful.See, what we need to understand about “social justice conflicts” of the sort initiated by Adria Richards is that they are all about power. What Adria Richards did to “Hank” was to try to assert the power of her “preferred status” as a minority female over “Hank,” a dreaded and despised white male. “Hank” and his friend were having a private conversation, one which she was not a part of. Perhaps it was a bit tasteless, but it was their conversation, not hers and theirs together. She chose to force herself into the situation. She chose to make a nuisance of herself, and did so specifically so she could exercise her “black Jewish female “ power of getting white men fired whenever she jolly well chooses to do so.Sorry lady, but my sympathy bucket has all run dry.But we should note the salient fact of this matter – “Hank” won the conflict, at least in the long run. That is something with very little precedent in recent years. Or, perhaps to be more specific, the conflict was won FOR “Hank,” since he himself made the cardinal error of apologizing for something for which he was not really at fault. It was won by thousands of people who finally decided they were going to oppose a social justice warrior trying to ply her trade. The exertion of pressure worked in the opposite direction this time around – and it was because a bunch of people finally decided they were going to stand up and be counted. And yes, maybe the way some of them went about this doesn’t suit our refined sensibilities, but it nevertheless shows that when the mass of regular, everyday people choose to stand up against the SJWs, we win, and they lose.That is the fundamental lesson to be drawn from this story with a happy ending. This is why GamerGate is one of the few targets of SJW aggression that has successfully and consistently pushed back against the attacks. The GamerGaters fight back. They don’t hunker down and hope to ride out the storm without taking too much damage. They got vocal all across the internet. They exerted reverse pressure on the trade magazines that formed much of the zone of conflict. They resisted the efforts by posers like Anita Sarkeesian and her flunkies to impose themselves into their cherished realm.In short, they refused to yield the moral high ground to the SJWs – and thereby gained a 4GW victory. They did not allow the social justice warriors to control the field – they refuted decisively the false narrative that the SJWs attempted to create that said that gaming is hopelessly “sexist” and needs to be “restructured” to suit the sensibilities of radical feminists, and that everybody thinks so. Everybody doesn’t think so. In fact, very few think so. Most people just want the Fembots to leave them alone. No moral high ground for you, Anita.And this should raise the question in the rest of our minds – what would happen if the rest of us decided to refuse to grant the SJWs the perceived moral high ground of public opinion elsewhere? What effect would this have on the trend of opinion among the great unwashed masses of low information voters who generally make their political and social decisions on the basis of the majority of what they see online (which may or may not actually be what the majority of people really think)? What would happen if we did something as simple as flooded the comments sections on news articles on hot button issues with our opinions, instead of just saying, “Why bother?” Demotically speaking, those and venues like them online are the battlefield. Considering such activities to be “beneath us” is to yield the ground to the SJWs – because we know that they are out in full force, every time an article about gay marriage or some other SJW cause appears on the web. And that is how the opinions of the great unwashed masses get molded. And that’s how these masses begin to tip the wrong way. And that’s how we end up with a burnt out husk of a nation that used to be the epitome of greatness.Or put another way, you’d be amazed at how differently the direction of discussion in the comments section of an article about an SJW hot button issue can change, when even a dozen dedicated anti-SJWers jump in and spend an hour subverting the narrative and altering the flow of the conversation.When SJWers are faced with determined pushback – when the moral weapons of “racism, sexist, homophobia, and intolerance” are blunted by firmly standing on principle – they typically crumble. Knowing this, why aren’t more of us on the traditional Right finding out backbones and push back against them? Does it really work?Just ask “Hank” and Adria.

tradLIFE: Breadlines

Every time I see the “Breadlines” meme, the comment section is always flooded with reactive support for capitalism, usually from Tea Party types. Typically it is something akin to “I support Traditionalism and capitalism!” Anyone that says this is missing the point of the meme and they also have not given capitalism enough thought.Socialism (at least universalist socialism) is obviously crazy. Taking money and/or goods from society's producers and handing them to society's takers for no reason other than that they happen to exist serves only to bring the entire society down to its lowest common denominator.Capitalism, on the other hand, seems to be something entirely different. On the surface, it appears to be a system where anyone in society—not just the best and brightest—can become as wealthy as their abilities will allow. Producers compete to provide the best product or service for the lowest price, all to the benefit of society's consumers.The problem is that it does not actually work out like that. Big corporations compete only when they have to. They actually hate competition and do everything they can to eliminate it. More often than not, the best products are left behind for the cheapest junk. As if sacrificing quality for profits were not enough, labor is outsourced to the other side of the world (with the final product being wastefully shipped back to its destination market) in order to squeeze out a few more percentage points for the board of directors. Big impersonal corporations with no loyalty to place or folk that push out the artisans and creators are no friends of Tradition.Traditionalism is not an “-ism” in the usual ideological sense, but more of a world view. Rather than deciding what system is best for the economy, Tradition asks how communities can best be served economically. It firstly abhors a culture of consumerism and urges a reevaluation of needs versus wants. Capitalism has told us that we will be happy if we buy stuff—stuff we pay for by working in dimly-lit boxes all day doing the same robotic task until the day we die—but Traditionalism responds that the things that yield a good life are almost always intangible. Traditionalism means preferring the rituals and connections with one's environment rather than treating everyone and everything as commodities.To bring this full-circle, we make our bread because it offers us a chance to find reward in working to create something ourselves. It is even better if we work together with family or friends to do it. Sharing your bread means so much more (to say nothing of the quality) when it emerges from your oven and not a plastic sleeve.And I get it. Not everyone wants to spend time in the kitchen making bread every time a sandwich is made. But that is why Tradition requires a cultural shift. Previous generations made do by staying well-connected with their extended family and by building and maintaining strong communities. If you don't have bread, your cousin or grandmother may have made some. If you really must buy it, support your community and buy a fresh baked loaf from your baker. He and his family will appreciate it.If a label is needed, this is called Distributism. The means of production are decentralized, or “distributed”, as much as possible. None of this happens by state action either. It happens by making a conscious cultural shift in favor of family, community, and Tradition and moving away from grotesque international systems of economics.

The Paleo Diet as a Revolt Against the Modern World

What makes the Paleo diet different is that it isn't just a diet -- it’s part of a lifestyle, and a revolutionary one at that. The Paleo rallying cry is that the artificial, top-down, and shrink-wrapped environment we’ve been conned into accepting is killing us. The good news is that we can free ourselves and live healthier, longer lives by taking responsibility for our health and survival.However, judging from discussions and articles I’ve seen on pro-Paleo sites, many who think they’re living the Paleo life don’t understand the vital importance of physical fitness. And many more still depend exclusively on technology -- firearms -- for self-defense. I’d like to propose a pro-Paleo regimen that fills in these gaps.When I first read about the Paleo lifestyle, I was already exercising, and thought I was eating properly. However, what I learned about Paleo turned my world upside down. I’d been starving myself trying to lose stubborn inches around my belly, and was failing miserably. But only six months after I started the Paleo diet, I dropped from 195 to 165 pounds, and shrank my waistline from 40 to 34 inches. And I’ve kept it off.What really struck me about the Paleo revolution was how it dovetailed into a way of living that promoted personal liberty. Paleo’s basic message is that we have adapted a lifestyle that’s counter to our hunter-gatherer nature. A sedentary lifestyle plus a diet of over-processed, high-carb, sugary food has all but crippled us, as the increase of obesity, heart disease, various cancers, gluten intolerance, and depression indicates.Worse, this counter-productive lifestyle has the blessing and backing of both the FDA and the Department of Agriculture, as well as their corporate kin Big Pharma and Big Agra. Meanwhile, Madison Avenue portrays this toxic way of life as not only fun, but glamorous. “Consume mass quantities” of the stuff touted in ads and in TV sit-coms, and you, too, can be cool and popular.The Paleo diet is a revolt from the fare prescribed for us by government nutritionists. In fact, the Paleo diet recommends the very foods our dietary overseers condemn, such as meats and eggs. Add tree-borne nuts, fruits, fish, and poultry, and you’re approximating what our Paleolithic ancestors ate.But the diet is just part of the Paleo lifestyle, which stresses giving the body everything it needs, including the activities it was designed for, such as lifting, running, and throwing. It also makes us confront the forces that have herded us into our modern, unhealthy lifestyles. Those forces are aligned with Big Government and Big Business, which want you to be dependent on them for everything, including your diet and personal safety. The Paleo lifestyle encourages breaking away and relying on your own resources.Keeping in shape is a vital part of living Paleo, and fitness is vital to self-defense. There are a number of reasons we shouldn’t rely exclusively on firearms for defending ourselves and loved ones. Guns may not be readily available when you need them. Guns may be more than what you need in a given situation. And guns, even when properly maintained, can fail. So it’s nice to have other options.Strength training is the most effective means of boosting your self-defense capabilities. Not only have weight lifting programs been proven to increase testosterone levels, which are very handy in a fight, they also improve cognitive abilities, including selective attention and conflict resolution skills. (I fully subscribe to the philosophy that avoiding a fight is the best way to win one.)While we’re talking about basics, there’s nothing more basic to self-defense than the art of knowing how to make and use your fists. A recent article in the Journal of Experimental Biology argues that human fists evolved for punching. A daily workout with a punching bag will teach you a great deal about how to throw a hard, fast punch. If you’re unsure about your form, take a quick course in boxing and basic self-defense. Should you be even more ambitious, learn martial arts. For the older set, I suggest those forms that emphasize low kicks, such as Ishin-ryu, rather than Muay Tai and Taekwondo.If you want to really go Paleo in your fitness and self-defense training, learn how to use primitive weapons. If you take oriental martial arts, you’ll be introduced to the bo (fighting staff), the nunchaku, and the tonfa (T-baton). These are very practical weapons, and learning how to use them will teach you how to improvise weapons from available resources.And there’s nothing more Paleo than such primitive weapons as the sling or atl-atl (dart-thrower). They’re easy to make, and are deadly long-distance weapons. There are a number of online resources that will show you how to make and use them. I thoroughly enjoy target practice with the sling. It’s something you can do in a municipal park -- just find a deserted soccer of baseball field. Tennis and golf balls make effective substitutes for stone and lead projectiles.To paraphrase Paleo guru Mark Sisson, if you really want to challenge the status quo and try something old, work out and learn the ancient arts of self-defense. Even if you never have to use these skills, the confidence you’ll build and the sense of accomplishment you’ll gain will make the effort well worth the investment. M. C. Tuggle is a writer in Charlotte, North Carolina. An avid weightlifter, outdoorsman, collector of American Indian relics, and student of martial arts, he is also a student of military history, and has given presentations on Stonewall Jackson’s Valley Campaign to several historical societies. His novella Aztec Midnight has just been published by The Novel Fox.

This Is The World You Chose: Episode 2

As the dying brontosaurus we call liberal civilization rapidly moves toward extinction we can take note of the carnival of fools we live in. Looking for bizarre and absurd stories is about as easy as buying groceries at the store. Let's see what we have this week:

1. While feminazis and fembot retards are complaining about exploitation, gamer-gate, and the male gaze the most popular reading material for women is Fifty-Shades of Grey which was just released as a movie Feb 13, 2015. This soft-porn novel is about a rich and wealthy sugar daddy taking advantage of a woman and forcing her to sign non-disclosure agreements to keep her quiet. Why would women want to read about one of their own being taken advantage of, while at the same time complaining about sexual objectification of women in video games and TV? If anything shows us that modern women are schizophrenic and sadomasochistic it is this piece of trash. For a real romance read about Aragorn and Arwen and Faramir and Eowyn. No sadomasochistic women there.
2. We see at the Huffington Post here that a woman might get life in prison for sexually assaulting her child and committing acts of bestiality with a dog. Really, raping your own child and screwing a dog?! Well this is the world you chose! Such activity in a just world would deprive her of the right to deny the state from removing her uniquely feminine organs.
3. Going to The Blaze we see that spraying obscenities about Allah is hate speech. While of course "Piss Christ" is art and banning public expression of the Nativity and Ten Commandments is an atheist/liberal sacrament. Needless to say this just proves that our political leaders are the proverbial geldings and the terrorists are stallions.
4. You know the world is broken when the so called conservatives are more liberal than Joe Stalin. According to PEW Research 60% of young Republicans support gay marriage. Not much more to say if Stalin was more conservative than the young Republicans. I never thought I’d have nostalgia for the USSR. Heaven help me.

The View From Olympus: What Are They Thinking?

On February 5, the New York Times reported that “the White House is rethinking its opposition to arming Ukraine in what is turning into a proxy war with Russia.” A proxy war with Russia? Are these people out of their minds?Unfortunately, President Obama's request to Congress for new war powers to fight ISIS has crowded the Ukrainian situation off the front page. But in terms of America and its interests, Ukraine is more important. Since we have not cared about four defeats by Fourth Generation entities in the Middle East, a fifth defeat will presumably not matter much either.In contrast, getting into a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine could matter a great deal. Wars have the unfortunate habit of not remaining within their initial confines. Should Russia find itself on the losing end of such a war, it could remember that it is a major nuclear power—the only other country that is roughly equal to the United States in nuclear weapons. Do we really want to find ourselves in a Cold War-style eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with Russia, with the possibility of escalation very real? The fact that we must ask the question shows the utter folly of current American foreign policy.Given Russia's geographic advantage in Ukraine, a more likely outcome is that we will find ourselves on the losing end of a proxy war. For every anti-tank weapon we send the Ukrainians—that is not sold by corrupt Ukrainian officials to Russia, ISIS, or whomever—Russia can easily send ten tanks. If there is one thing Russia has lots of, it's tanks. She is not likely to run out.Should Russia tire of the proxy war, she can end it easily and quickly. As President Putin has said, the Russian Army can be in Kiev in two weeks. America has no such option, nor any conceivable military response. Drop in the 82^nd Airborne? To a Russian tank army, it would not amount to more than a speed bump. Again, the very thought that we must consider a ground war with Russia deep in the Russian heartland shows that our foreign policy is made by imbeciles.In case no one has noticed, the “sanctions” answer has already failed. The rapid fall in the value of the ruble, in part a function of sanctions, has worked to Russia's advantage. Russians are turning to Russian products in place of imports, a fundamental economic change Russia has long needed.On balance, the sanctions have helped Russia more than hurt her. The people who have gotten hurt are our European allies, whose economies are less robust than Russia's. If Russia wants to push Europe back into economic crisis, all she has to do is say she will not repay loans to countries that are participating in the sanctions.The fact is, we are entering a proxy war with Russia where Moscow holds aces and kings and our hand is twos and threes. This represents policy failure of impressive proportions.America's foreign policy now lies in the hands of women, children, escapees from the asylum at Charenton, Pee Wee Herman, Mr. Ed the talking horse, Methodist Sunday school teachers, and the Hare Krishnas; in short, with people who haven't a clue what they are doing. Detached from reality, driven by hubris, ignorant of history, and blinded by a Pollyanna ideology of “human rights,” they have given us a series of disasters that should have gotten them exiled to Siberia, or worse, Nevada. Because Americans don't care about foreign policy, the flight school rejects have been left at the controls. At some point, they will create a policy failure so magnificent everyone has to notice, possibly because Chicago or Seattle is a glowing cinder.ISIS can't do that. But Russia can.

Old Fashioned the Movie: an Intriguing Attempt at Counter-Marketing

A movie entitled Old Fashioned hits theaters this weekend. It is a romantic movie about an old fashioned (go figure) courtship. It is produced in part by the same company that produced God’s Not Dead, although judging by their website they don't exclusively produce "faith based" films. An interesting aspect of the marketing of this film is that it was released on Feb 13 precisely to serve as the anti-Fifty Shades of Grey, which was released the same day. This is not even a cryptic marketing strategy. It's quite overt. References to Fifty Shades are a significant part of the trailer which can be viewed at the link above.A common theme among a certain type of culturally focused conservative, is the admonition that conservatives and Christians should become more involved in the arts and entertainment industry instead of abandoning them entirely to secularist liberals. But how to go about this is the rub.For the purposes of this article I'll focus on film, since that is the topic at hand, but much the same conversation can be had about music, fiction, etc. What we have long had and look to get more of, based on relative box office success, is explicitly faith based films that are essentially marketed to, by design or default, faith communities.So we get releases like God's Not Dead that, for better or for worse, is essentially an exercise in preaching to the choir. In the same vein, the last several years have brought us the Sherwood Baptist/Alex Kendrick productions such as Facing the Giants, Fireproof, and Courageous.Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking these films or this strategy per se. My boys and I loved Facing the Giants, and I thought that the overall emotional impact of God's Not Dead was profound although the movie was not without some significant flaws. There is obviously a niche here that these movies appeal to, and since they are often relatively inexpensive to create, a lot of potential for profit. Plus, Christian families who restrict their movie going to edifying fare, as they should, need movies to go to the theater to see the same as secular families.That said, the curmudgeonly conservatives I mentioned who grouse about needing more conservatives and Christians in the entertainment industry generally do not have in mind more or less explicitly faith based films for the faith community. A distinction that is often made is that we need films that have broad appeal that happen to be conservative and/or Christian, not conservative or Christian films that appeal to a limited audience, if you understand the difference.Interestingly and as an aside, there may be a bit of a theological issue at play here, as well. Christians in the Reformed tradition often speak of the need to capture or Christianize the culture. Traditional Catholics, who have an era in history to recall when Christian themes dominated art and literature, often display this same dynamic. As opposed to Fundamentalists and Evangelicals who often see the culture (the world) as implacably hostile and something that Christians need to withdraw from and create their own counter-culture, hence Christian music and Christian films, which is the model that dominates today.Unfortunately, how to get to films of broad popular appeal that happen to be conservative and/or Christian from the current state of affairs is no small task. You have to develop and nurture talent. You need wealthy patrons who are willing to finance it. And quite frankly, you need Christian talent that won't be corrupted by Hollywood. For the sake of propriety I won't name names, but you don't have to think too hard to come up with examples of purported Christians or at least down home types who entered the entertainment industry with these backgrounds and ended up going down the wrong path, often rather quickly. The examples of people who have remained faithful, such as Kirk Cameron or Mandisa, are often people who migrated to Christian niches once they arrive.Quite frankly, I'm not sure it can be done absent Divine Intervention. Music and fiction seem more attainable than Hollywood, which is such a cesspool. I can conceive of a fiction writer who remains somewhat insulated from the fiction scene, such as it is. It is hard to conceive of a successful actor who remains insulted from the Hollywood scene. As well, current cultural trends do not bode well for the mass appeal of any Christianity that is not PC neutered.So this brings us back to the movie Old Fashioned. It clearly seems to fall into the latter category of faith based film marketed to the faith community, but I think the clever tactic of deliberately marketing it as the anti-Fifty Shades potentially opens it up to a market it might not otherwise appeal to.I detect a bit of Fifty Shades over-saturation culture-wide. Plus, there is a backlash from the culturally conservative right as well as the feminist/PC left. I have always been skeptical of the big box office potential of a movie that is going to be so exclusively focused on the female audience. The audience seems likely to be primarily women who go with other women or women who drag their unfortunate boyfriend or husband along kicking and screaming. I can't imagine a guy who would go see it of his own accord. Judging by the comments already on Internet Movie Database, it is getting hammered by reviewers.Given this dynamic, there is a potential for Old Fashioned to reach an audience it might not otherwise reach. I am very curious to see the box office numbers for how both films did over the weekend. Let's hope, for the sake of our collective cultural soul, that Old Fashioned over performs and Fifty Shades under performs.

The Conservative vs. The Universe

As a counterpunch to left-wing science fiction writer China Miéville’s list of Sci-Fi/Fantasy novels for socialists, Samuel Goldman of the American Conservative penned “10 Sci Fi and Fantasy Works Every Conservative Should Read.” As Goldman explained, “I’m not suggesting that these books express conservative views as such. But they do raise questions for conservatives or develop ideas from which conservatives can learn.”

Goldman listed Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories as number seven. Following close behind was H.P. Lovecraft, particularly the "Cthulhu cycle" of stories. Lovecraft, as Goldman reminded us in his article, was Howard’s friend and mentor “who believed society had to be defended from the eternal danger of barbarism.”

The questions these writers raised have never been more urgent for conservatives. Both Howard and Lovecraft saw civilization and order as not only fragile but necessarily short-lived. In the fictional worlds these imaginative writers created, the values and beliefs that made life possible had to be defended against forces of chaos that inevitably had the upper hand. What counted was the protagonist’s resolve and dedication.

Lovecraft was a literary and financial failure in life, though in the 1960s and 70s, both conservative and counter-culture fans rediscovered him. Jorge Luis Borges, Umberto Eco, Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, and French novelist Michel Houellebecq have all credited Lovecraft as a decisive thematic and stylistic (if not philosophical) influence.

A bright and sensitive child whose parents died in the same insane asylum, Howard Lovecraft early on came to see the civilization around him as decadent and fated to give way to the forces of chaos. He agreed with Oswald Spengler that Western civilization was declining. On page 228 of Lovecraft’s Selected Letters he admitted:

It would be better if we could still be naive, beauty-loving, and ignorant — yet we cannot turn the clock back. Memphis and Nineveh, Babylon and Persepolis, Carthage and Ctesiphon, Athens and Lacedaemon, Rome and Alexandria, Antioch and Tyre — all these have had their day and their sunset; their grandeur and their fall. In the face of such a pageant of history it would be folly to expect anything else of the existing civilisation. This age in America corresponds quite startlingly to the luxurious and disillusioned age of Antonines in the Roman Empire — when Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, Athens and New Carthage blazed in the sunset that was to mark the death of the ancient world.

Like Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard acquired his fatalistic view of the universe and civilization as a youngster. Howard's Conan the Barbarian was a fierce but somewhat naive, and stubbornly principled outsider who had little patience with the soft and decadent city dwellers he often had to rescue. Conan’s attitude toward “civilization” and “progress” reflected Howard’s own views, formed by Howard’s childhood travels in the oil boomtowns his father served as a doctor in the half-wild Texas backcountry of the early 1900s. The saloons, oil wildcatters, and unscrupulous businessmen the young Howard encountered instilled in him the image of the city as a breeding ground of enervating luxury, corruption, and degeneracy.

Despite Lovecraft’s and Howard’s pessimism, both upheld personal codes of conduct they clearly believed as essential for their personal honor and sanity, as well as for the good of those they cared about. Conan was always quick to take up the cause of the weak and the unfortunate. A lady in distress would find not just a champion in the rough barbarian, but a hot-headed and passionate lover as well. To his comrades, Conan would remain fiercely loyal despite the perils. In Queen of the Black Coast, Conan lost his patience with a judge who demanded Conan testify against a comrade in arms:

Well, last night in a tavern, a captain in the king's guard offered violence to the sweetheart of a young soldier, who naturally ran him through. But it seems there is some cursed law against killing guardsmen, and the boy and his girl fled away. It was bruited about that I was seen with them, and so today I was haled into court, and a judge asked me where the lad had gone. I replied that since he was a friend of mine, I could not betray him. Then the court waxed wrath, and the judge talked a great deal about my duty to the state, and society, and other things I did not understand, and bade me tell where my friend had flown. By this time I was becoming wrathful myself, for I had explained my position.

But I choked my ire and held my peace, and the judge squalled that I had shown contempt for the court, and that I should be hurled into a dungeon to rot until I betrayed my friend. So then, seeing they were all mad, I drew my sword and cleft the judge's skull; then I cut my way out of the court, and seeing the high constable's stallion tied near by, I rode for the wharfs, where I thought to find a ship bound for foreign parts.

And thus began yet another adventure.

Similarly, Lovecraft’s protagonists confronted madness and evil as a result of what often began as misguided friendship, idle curiosity, or even scholarly pursuit. Their struggles, however, were always doomed from the start. In one of Lovecraft’s best tales, The Shadow over Innsmouth, the intrepid and resourceful protagonist managed to evade an entire town of half-amphibian, half-human monsters, only to discover at the end of the tale that he was one of them. Again, the forces of darkness and chaos proved inescapable.

Despite his fatalistic view of life, Lovecraft, like Howard, believed that a man must uphold certain standards, for his own sake and for others. On page 111 of his Letters, Howard made this explicit:

Surely it is well that the happiness of the unfortunate be made as great as possible; and he who is kind, helpful, and patient, with his fellow-sufferers, adds as truly to the world’s combined fund of tranquillity as he who, with greater endowments, promotes the birth of empires, or advances the knowledge and civilisation of mankind. Thus no man of philosophical cast, however circumscribed by poverty or retarded by ailment, need feel himself superfluous so long as he holds the power to improve the spirits of others.

As Samuel Goldman cautioned in his list for conservatives, Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft may not have imparted conservative views in their highly readable and often disturbing fiction, but certainly raised issues every modern-day conservative must confront. 

M. C. Tuggle is a writer in Charlotte, North Carolina. His fantasy, sci-fi, and literary stories have been featured in Kzine, Bewildering Stories, Mystic Signals, Fabula Argentea, and Fiction 365. He has also published articles and opinion pieces in American Spectator, Taki's Magazine, and Lew Rockwell. His latest novella, Aztec Midnight, has just been published by The Novel Fox.

Aviation, Geography, and Race

Note: Not long ago, the views expressed on traditionalRIGHT were considered commonplace, taken for granted as true. In fact, this is the case for all of human history until Western civilization went out the window in the 20th century. The following is an article featured in the November 1939 Reader's Digest written by America First Committee spokesman, aviation pioneer, and American hero, Charles Lindbergh. -Ed.Aviation has struck a delicately balanced world, a world where stability was already giving way to the pressure of new dynamic forces, a world dominated by a mechanical, materialist, Western European civilization. Aviation is a product of that civilization, borne on the crest of its outlook. Typical also of its strength and its weakness, its vanity and its self-destruction--men flung upward in the face of God, another Icarus to dominate the sky, and in turn, to be dominated by it; for eventually the laws of nature determine the success of human effort and measure the value of human inventions in that divinely complicated, mathematically unpredictable, development of life at which Science has given the name of Evolution.Aviation seems almost a gift from heaven to those Western nations who were already the leaders of their era, strengthening their leadership, their confidence, their dominance over other peoples. It is a tool specially shaped for Western hands, a scientific art which others only copy in a mediocre fashion, another barrier between the teeming millions of Asia and the Grecian inheritance of Europe - one of those pricelesspossessions which permit the White race to live at all in a pressing sea of Yellow, Black, and Brown. But aviation, using it symbolically as well as in its own right, brings two great dangers, one peculiar to our modern civilization, the other older than history. Since aviation is dependent on the intricate organization of life and industry, it carries with it the environmental danger of a people too far separated from the soil and from the sea - the danger of that physical decline which so often goes with a high intellectual development, of that spiritual decline which seems invariably to accompany an industrial life, of that racial decline which follows physical and spiritual mediocrity.A great industrial nation may conquer the world in the span of a single life, but its Achilles' heel is time. Its children, what of them? The second and third generations, of what numbers and stuff will they be? How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life. This is our modern danger--one of the waxen wings of flight. It may cause our civilization to fall unless we act quickly to counteract it, unless we realize that human character is more important than efficiency, that education consists of more than the mere accumulation of knowledge.But the other great danger is more easily recognized, because it has occurred again and again through history. It is the ember of war, fanned by every new military weapon, flaming today as it has never flamed before. It is the old internal struggle among a dominant people for power; blind, insatiable, suicidal. Western nations are again at war, a war likely to be more prostrating than any in the past, a war in which the White race is bound to lose, and the others bound to gain, a war which may easily lead our civilization through more Dark Ages if it survives at all. In this war, aviation is as important a factor as it has been a cause--a cause due to its effect on the balance of strength between nations, a factor because of the destruction and death it hurls on earth and sea. Air power is new to all our countries. It brings advantages to some and weakens others; it calls for readjustment everywhere.If only there were some way to measure the changing character of men, some yardstick to reapportion influence among the nations, some way to demonstrate in peace the strength of arms in war. But with all of its dimensions, its clocks, and weights, and figures, science fails us when we ask a measure for the rights of men. They cannot be judged by numbers, by distance, weight, or time; or by counting heads without a thought of what may lie within. Those intangible qualities of character, such as courage, faith, and skill, evade all systems, slip through the bars of every cage. They can be recognized, but not measured. They lie more in a glance between two men than in any formula or mathematics. They form the unseen strength of an army, the genius of a people.Likewise, in judging aviation, in its effect on modern nations, no satisfactory measurement of strength exists. It is bound to geography, environment, and racial character so closely that an attempt to judge by numbers would be like counting Greeks at Marathon. What advantages will they gain? What new influence can they exert? To judge this, one must look not only at their aviation but at them, at the geography of their country, at their problems of existence, at their habits of life.Mountains, coastlines, great distances, ground fortifications, all those safeguards of past generations, lose their old significance as man takes to his wings. The English Channel, the snow-capped Alps, the expanses of Russia, are now looked on from a different height. The forces of Hannibal, Drake and Napoleon moved at best with the horses' gallop or the speed of wind on sail. Now, aviation brings a new concept of time and distance to the affairs of men. It demands adaptability to change, places a premium on quickness of thought and speed of action.Military strength has become more dynamic and less tangible. A new alignment of power has taken place, and there is no adequate peacetime measure for its effect on the influence of nations. There seems no way to agree on the rights it brings to some and takes from others. The rights of men within a nation are readjusted in each generation by laws of inheritance - land changes hands as decades pass, fortunes are taxed from one generation to the next; ownership is no more permanent than life. But among nations themselves there is no similar provision to reward virility and penalize decay, no way to reapportion the world's wealth as tides of human character ebb and flow--except by the strength of armies. In the last analysis, military strength is measurable only by its own expenditure, by the prostration of one contender while the other can still stagger on the field--and all about the wolves of lesser stature abide their time to spring on both the warriors.We, the heirs of European culture, are on the verge of a disastrous war, a war within our own family of nations, a war which will reduce the strength and destroy the treasures of the White race, a war which may even lead to the end of our civilization. And while we stand poised for battle, Oriental guns are turning westward, Asia presses towards us on the Russian border, all foreign races stir restlessly. It is time to turn from our quarrels and to build our White ramparts again. This alliance with foreign races means nothing but death to us. It is our turn to guard our heritage from Mongol and Persian and Moor, before we become engulfed in a limitless foreign sea. Our civilization depends on a united strength among ourselves; on strength too great for foreign armies to challenge; on a Western Wall of race and arms which can hold back either a Genghis Khan or the infiltration of inferior blood; on an English fleet, a German air force, a French army, an American nation, standing together as guardians of our common heritage, sharing strength, dividing influence.Our civilization depends on peace among Western nations, and therefore on united strength, for Peace is a virgin who dare not show her face without Strength, her father, for protection. We can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races.We need peace to let our best men live to work out those more subtle, but equally dangerous, problems brought by this new environment in which we dwell, to give us time to turn this materialistic trend, to stop prostrating ourselves before this modern idol of mechanical efficiency, to find means of combining freedom, spirit, and beauty with industrial life--a peace which will bring character, strength, and security back to Western peoples.With all the world around our borders, let us not commit racial suicide by internal conflict. We must learn from Athens, and Sparta before all of Greece is lost. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAlCDMp-Y3c&index=96&list=FLIkWpWi50f-LAj_6E_tIljw

The View From Olympus: Will Hitler Again Destroy Germany?

When Adolf Hitler's victims are listed, the one he injured most is usually left out. Who is that? Germany.Hitler left Germany a smoking ruin, her cities bombed into rubble, a third of her territory lost, a third of what remained occupied by the Red Army. Millions of Germans were dead and more than ten million were driven out of lands where they had lived for millenia. Perhaps worst of all, Germans could no longer believe in Germany. The Third Reich cast a deep shadow on centuries of German achievements and delegitimized the good Germany that had existed up to 1918.Now, it appears that Hitler may again destroy Germany, in league this time not with the Right but with the Left.Germany, along with most of the rest of Europe, is inundated by an ever-growing flood of immigrants and refugees. Native Europeans who for decades had lived in countries that had little or no crime must now think constantly about their personal safety. Billions of Euros are being spent to provide for people who will never contribute anything to their new counties of residence. All they want to bring them is an alien and hostile religion and the tyranny of Sharia Law.While European elites throw themselves down to serve as a doormat to these invaders, a growing number of ordinary Europeans are beginning to fight back. In France, Sweden, Britain, and elsewhere the resistors have parties that genuinely represent them for which they can vote. In Germany the situation is different. There, with no genuine conservative party on the ballot, Germans who want to preserve a recognizable country have instead formed a movement, Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West, PEGIDA. Centered on Dresden, PEGIDA's weekly marches have steadily drawn larger crowds.The German political establishment has united in opposition to PEGIDA and to any attempt to uphold German identity. In this, they have an important ally. Who? Adolf Hitler.In Germany, any real conservatism is quickly labeled "Nazi" by the Left, and by faux conservatives such as Chancellor Merkel. Several weeks ago, the founder of PEGIDA, Lutz Bachmann, attempted to satirize this argumentum ad Hitlerum by showing himself made up to look like the Führer. The establishment intentionally overlooked the attempt at satire (of itself) and howled that it proved PEGIDA (and any other attempt to save Germany) was Nazism. Chancellor Merkel's deputy was quoted in the January 22 New York Times saying, "Hitler photos, racist slogans, now we see what is really behind PEGIDA's middle-class facade."Every attempt to defend Germany will receive the same treatment: it will be called Nazi and its leader labeled "another Hitler." This is of course standard Frankfurt School cultural Marxism, going back directly to Adorno's book The Authoritarian Personality. But in Germany, because the Third Reich was so catastrophic, it usually works. The effect is to make it almost impossible for Germans to defend themselves against what may be the most dangerous type of Fourth Generation war invasion, not invasion by terrorists but invasion by masses of alien settlers.So Hitler, having destroyed Germany once, may do so a second time. This time, recovery will be impossible, because Germans and other Europeans will be on their way to minority status in their own countries. The Islamics, and most of the invaders are Islamic, will follow their usual script: first pleas for "tolerance," then demands that they be governed by Sharia, and finally Sharia forced on everyone by endless violence and murder.Dare one say "Deutschland Erwach?"

This Is The World You Chose: Episode 1

"This is the world you chose" is an excellent rhetorical device used to point out the madness of the post-Enlightenment, liberal order. All you need to do when debating is point to the disgusting state of society, which was all enabled by their poisonous ideology.In this column we will point out recent insanities from the world of Progress!, and generally point and laugh. Remember: if you are a Liberal--classical or modern--this is the world you chose.Jack Donovan posted this on his Facebook page on Thursday. What's sad is how un-shocking this really is. Of course there are now lacy bras made just for men.If there was any doubt that Western culture was truly dead and it is time to start anew, wait a week or two and look for a new bit of legislated cultural Marxism from either Britain or Sweden. Any time I think we have it bad in the U.S., I look to Europe and realize how much worse it can be. Labour politicians want to teach your five-year-old what a certain group of perverts like to do with their genitals.I take it back. We really are insane. Think about how much you pay in taxes. If you are an average working American, you give up one-third to one-half of your earnings to the government. All that time and effort is confiscated. And what do they do with that money they pillaged? They spend it on hormone treatments for dirty, confused people that don't even live here.I didn't want this. This is the world you chose.

tradLIFE: Trads and Tech

Somewhere between ten and twenty years ago, humanity crossed a point of no return. Technology—specifically telecommunications—has dominated the world and utterly transformed how society functions. The implications are vast; the Internet influences geopolitics all the way down to how people buy clothes and groceries. What often gets overlooked, though, is how digital communications have revolutionized how we relate to one another and go about our lives.Traditionalism starts with personal relationships and communing with the natural world. The obsession modernity has with smartphones, the Internet, and all manner of other video screens ruins both of those things. How much of the outside world is missed by sitting inside on a computer after work instead of taking an evening stroll with a sweetheart? How many men take part in vicarious tribalism in the form of televised sports rather than starting a bonfire and sharing stories with other real-life men? How many precious moments with one's children are passed up because, “one more minute, I need to finish reading this article on my phone and then check Facebook”? How many urban farms could be started or skills learned or mountains climbed if the 4-to-5 hours outside of work the average Westerner spends per day in front of a screen were traded for time spent living life?Consider too the health consequences of our technology habits. It almost goes without saying that television and computers introduced sedentary lifestyles and made nearly everyone fat. Now we have “text neck,” a real condition recognized by medical professionals. The radiation from cells phones is linked various kinds of cancers. Attention spans are virtually non-existent. The blue light emitted by every single electronic device with a screen disrupts circadian rhythms, making full, restful sleep impossible if they are used even a few hours before going to bed. That light is also especially harmful to babies and children, whose eyes are still developing and calibrating to the world around them. The technology is killing us.It must be said that radical Traditionalism and Identitarianism would be nowhere without the Internet. That doesn't mean we have to spend our whole lives in front of electronic devices though. Allow yourself an hour after work to go online and check the news and read a few articles. But then stop. Build something. Create something. Grow something. Play music. Read, talk, pray, hunt. You have a life—live it! http://vimeo.com/105686970Men doing things, not talking about doing things on a computer

vs.

Man misses out on real life because he can't get off his phone

The Future of God on the Traditional Right

The future of God I will briefly discuss is that of Christianity and its place in the future of Western Civilization. Christianity was obviously foundational in the rise of the West by uniting the European tribes under Christendom, but the Enlightenment and development of forensic science in archeology, natural history, linguistics, and philology have led to Christianity becoming attenuated today and something of an endangered species as the cult underlying our culture.There are many millions of sincere believers in the risen Jesus of Nazareth in the West but none command the kind of respect among our intelligentsia and bien-pensant as theologians, clerics, prelates, popes did in ages past. At best, the pope today may not even be accorded the amount of respect as the current Dalai Lama, the exiled leader of a very small and obscure Buddhist sect.Among most leaders and leading thinkers of the traditional Right, Christianity is not always regarded highly or as helpful. While they acknowledge a debt to Christendom and its leading role in the rise of our civilization and defense against Islam; it is important to also acknowledge that Christianity is the real engine of science and intellectual inquiry into the nature of Man, God, and the Universe.To put it as simply and brusquely as possible (I'm able to offer a longer defense of my propositions if engaged) here are four things a rational and faith filled Christian can or need no longer believe:1) God writes books. ('Inspired' being an undefined circumlocution.)2) God organizes people into religions.3) God chooses a people to be special to Him.4) God assigns missions to prophets and individuals.Here are things that God does do:1) God reveals himself directly to people as one of three People or manifests Himself in less obvious ways through grace, apparition, or miracle.2) God guides the prayerful to knowledge and wisdom. Only the Truth can impart truth.3) God works through Creation in any manner he chooses with a purpose.Stripped of unnecessary man-made appurtenances, accretions, aggregations, and strained pieties, Christianity may once again fully inspire and undergird the West if Christianity can reform its theology and jettison claims that no longer persuade rational men.Christianity is in need of conversion, a change of heart, if it is to survive as the only viable explanation of the meaning of life (and death) that sustains, drives, and inheres for human life to thrive and prosper as moral beings with supernatural being and destiny.When Christians embrace this simpler, truer, and reborn faith, then they will stand and defend that faith tooth and nail (as they once did against Islam and paganism), rejecting the depravities and corruption of materialism, hedonism, secularism, Marxism, and false religions, especially Islam.Of course, most people, ruling elites and the masses, will be nominal in their practice of Christianity as they always have been, but the formation of belief, inculcating children with proper morals and mechanics of belief, the possibility of genuine spiritual relief and guidance, will animate civilization and give it backbone, certainty, optimism, and energy. It will renew the arts and sciences.The defense of the West cannot succeed without a revival of faith, but that old time religion will never suffice against the irrefutable criticism that has accrued over the last few hundred years as science and scholarship eviscerate so many doctrines and assumptions. Studies in historicity of the Old and New Testaments have demonstrated enormous fictions in the Old (Solomon never was, Jericho never fell to Joshua, Sennacherib's army wasn't destroyed by plague, etc), and textual problems for the New making attribution to eyewitnesses problematic when a Medieval scribe puts words in Jesus' mouth.Human beings can never leave well enough alone. The Resurrection wasn't enough as the simple basis of faith, i.e. death is not death, love is greater than death, God cares and saves.Humans had to make salvation more, and explain it with elaborate metaphors and analogies, attaching further supernatural claims, and injecting pious romantic notions onto creeds. They took a simple Cross and remade it into an enormously contrived work of filigree, enamel, jewels, precious metals, icons, saints, canons, webs of theology, and centralized power.God is the ultimate in simplicity. He is Truth, Love, Beauty, Goodness. What's simpler than that? Hydrogen is the simplest element, but it leads to a vast complexity of matter and energy. Water is simple, and leads to a stunning variety of life as do four simple nucleic acids. In the Church, people become enamored of elaborate theology and doctrines, pure trivia, rather than submitting to the simple and living God. Men prefer to talk, write, argue, concern themselves with legalisms, create elaborate canons, or build systems than pray their way to communion with the actual living God, distracting themselves with contrived miscellany.The Church, even the Protestant evangelical ones, is overwhelmed with atavisms, mutations, and corruptions that present sensible men, who sincerely desire salvation and wisdom, with insurmountable burdens in many cases, or imposes on intelligent adherents suspension of reason upon a great many essentially meaningless matters rather than simply following the risen God who has revealed Himself to them. Thus making smart believers into unconvincing apologists having to defend the indefensible, refute the irrefutable, and assert the nonfactual.Is Darwinism false? Yes, but not because the Bible says so, but because scientifically, natural selection can never account for the development and variety of life. Other mechanisms must be at work, and are gradually being discovered, but rational men must acknowledge that life cannot come from non-life.It took me around ten years from my conversion to Christianity to carve away all the unessential elements of faith. The first great departure came when I was trying to explain to a friend why Mary needed to be a virgin according to Church teachings and pious ruminations. He wondered what difference it would make and why would God necessarily have to operate differently in the making of Jesus than people being created otherwise. God can create a Jesus, virgin mother or not. It wouldn't matter to God. He doesn't complicate things, He simplifies them. He doesn't do two absurd things when one will do. He is the ultimate Occam's Razor.The second major awakening occurred when I was reading an interview with Raymond Brown, the Catholic scholar, who simply stated when asked about how the Bible came to be written, "God doesn't write books. People write books."As an author familiar with every kind of writing and sense of writing, I was struck to the core. Knowing God as I did, I understood that God does not condescend in such a manner as to dictate or 'inspire' by some sort of whispering susurrus of feeling and approval.Writing the Truth is a matter of knowing the Truth and finding a way of expressing it that makes sense, is effective, and beautiful. That is why Islam and Mormonism (Joseph Smith based it on Islam, that is, as a fiction he might pull off like Mohammed did, and gull a bunch of people into following him and fulfilling his sexually incontinent desires and will to power) are so obviously phony and evil. They have no beauty and do not correspond to wisdom and sense. Whereas Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, even pagan philosophies have a great deal of wisdom, and beauty but fail to make sense entirely.Christianity only makes sense, of course, if Jesus is risen and is God, but the primal beauty of this absurdity is that it can be tested. Not through Pascal's Wager, although that probably works, but in the simple expedient of asking (and you shall receive). If anyone wants to know if Jesus is alive, available, and divine, he only need ask Jesus to reveal himself to him in a way that's convincing. The catch being a man must be sincere, willing to wait for the response, and serious about following Him once he sees the Truth, since any other response would be folly. If a man asks for the most direct path to the grocery store, and then drives off in every direction but towards the store, who would waste his time advising the man once he knew that about him? God is responsive on His terms. If that's unacceptable to a man, he gets no response because he is worth none.Anyway, for the traditional man on the Right, he knows that for the West to survive it must have a cultus, a common mythos of belief in order to survive and prevail. He knows that no kind of paganism will satisfy his soul since Christianity effectively destroyed paganism with its accessible Trinity, the personal triune God. But it is one thing to submit to Jesus, another to have to submit to a host of other enormous and supernatural claims that don't really have anything to do with salvation. A man wants to know if Jesus really does exist, not if his mother was this or that or if the pope is infallible or if the Bible is perfect. He wants God unfiltered and unfettered. That is why Christianity must grow up and put away the childish things, and become a faith every man can, if not embrace and believe, tip his hat to in respect. In effect, that Christ could be the answer to the question he's not ready to ask because it's not as ridiculous as in former times.A risen dead guy? Yeah, that's crazy, but if that's all I have to ponder, think about, ask, and submit myself to, I might do it someday if desperate enough or all out of other answers.AA is a twelve-step conversion process (very much like the Church's initiation process) and has its Big Book, but what people are told is to "take what you need and leave the rest." That's exactly what most Christians do as they go along. They use what helps them and ignore what they don't like. I propose that the West, in order to be saved must look at Christianity and take what it needs (the mythos/truth of Christ risen) and leave the rest of what attached itself to Him and hinders Western man from synchronous psychological unity with his fellows and a fruitful life.  Postscript:There are a number of aspects of Christianity or faith in Christ that will always remain complex in their explication, such as Natural Law. Even as the reformed faith sets aside many doctrines, moral issues remain that the Church was able to previously defend by arguing from authority and tradition such as birth control. Apologetics will often require a shift in the future from proof texting and praxis to different, perhaps less convincing arguments.For example, the injunction against female priests, bishops, pastors and such is scriptural and traditional. How to justify it further when scripture and tradition carry much less weight? Natural Law, human experience, and the ever-present reality of patriarchy combined with scripture, tradition, and the way of prayer that always leads to conformity in knowledge of God's will help to stem the perverse spirit of many who always seek their own way regardless of their affronting Wisdom.Many women, children, the spoiled, or resentful will always claim some rule is unfair and must be altered to suit them or they will huff and puff and scream bloody murder. They must be shown the door as they were in the past. Overweening selfishness is corrupting and should never be countenanced.

Conservative Non-Interventionism 101

Like almost all modern conservatives, I started my political life as an interventionist, but I made the transition to conservative non-interventionism fairly early on. How I arrived where I am today is a subject for another essay, but to establish my bona fides as something other than a Johnny-come-lately to non-interventionism, I often tell people that I was a non-interventionist before Ron Paul made it cool. I opposed US involvement in the first Gulf War and publicly cast my lot with the non-interventionist crowd when I supported Pat Buchanan’s 1992 primary challenge to George H. W. Bush.As a long-time conservative non-interventionist, I have obviously been swimming upstream against my fellow self-identified conservatives. Therefore, I am a veteran of many battles with interventionists, both in the virtual world of the Internet and the real world of political activism. During these battles I have frequently lamented that I have essentially the same arguments with people over and over again. It occurred to me that since I am always having the same debates, that it would save me time and effort to summarize some of these common arguments in the form of individual essays so that I could link back to them or cut and paste them rather than bang out the same arguments again for the umpteenth time.During my years as a partisan in these battles, I have also recognized that the interventionist true-believer foot soldiers come armed with a series of boilerplate arguments. These arguments quickly fall apart under scrutiny, in my opinion, but they serve as rationalizations for those who make them and advance the cause of the elite interventionist opinion makers who are invested in maintaining the current interventionist status quo.Admittedly pointy headed individuals such as me are sometimes loath to concede the effectiveness of simplistic boilerplate arguments, because we want to believe that everyone is as rationalistic as we are and can be won over by thoughtful debate. This, unfortunately, does not accord with reality. In the real world, easy to articulate boilerplate serves to support the position it is designed to advance, and likely as importantly serves to cut those who repeat it off from seriously considering alternatives. So I’m conceiving of this project as an exercise in “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” and “two can play at that game.”What follows is my first foray into this endeavor. In this essay I will attempt to present a brief overview of a basic underlying premise of conservative non-interventionism, that it is the authentically conservative position. In future essays I will elaborate at greater length on this premise and describe the foreign policy positions that flow from it. If this project is well received, it is my intent to compile all these essays into an easy to access book and e-book so that advocates of non-interventionism can come well-armed to the intra-conservative foreign policy debate. Consider this an effort to create a basic textbook of Conservative Non-interventionism 101 apologia.Modern conservatism is often conceptualized as a stool having three legs to greater or lesser degrees--Laissez-faire economics, social conservatism, and “strong” national defense. How this conceptualization came to characterize modern conservatism will be the subject of one of my future elaborating essays, but for now let’s just accept that it is what it is.So the modern self-identifying conservative who watches FOX NEWS, listens to Rush, and reflexively votes GOP sees these all as part of a whole package. There has always been some pushback within the coalition on certain issues, such as more libertarian-oriented types who might balk at aspects of the social conservative agenda or more populist types who aren’t as ideologically invested in the free-market, but until fairly recently there has generally been a pretty uniform consensus on a “strong” national defense and foreign policy interventionism among all involved, although factions have differed somewhat on its priority in the issue hierarchy and the degree of intervention they advocate.In my experience in the intra-conservative foreign policy debate trenches, one of the first barriers that the non-interventionist encounters is the assertion that what he is arguing is not conservative. In fact, it is often suggested, it is obviously the liberal position. In the mind of the conservative interventionist, supporting foreign policy interventionism is just what “conservatives” do, and opposing it is what liberals do. They viscerally identify opposition to foreign intervention with long-haired, unwashed, free-loving, hippie, anti-Vietnam War protesters from the 1960s, not conservatives. In their minds, Obama, for example, gets foreign policy wrong because he isn’t resolute or tough enough. What they propose instead is often vague and inchoate, and this is a weakness I plan to point out, but the sense is more in their gut than in their head.That Obama is a liberal internationalist which is not very far removed policy-wise from neoconservative internationalism does not occur to them. The similarity is their shared globalist assumptions. That non-interventionism, which rejects many reigning globalist assumptions, represents the actual opposition to their shared globalism is very far off their radar screen, and likewise does not generally occur to them.This is why the reaction of many self-identified conservatives to Ron Paul’s two Presidential campaigns was often confusion and visceral outrage, rather than rational disagreement. They couldn’t conceptualize that Paul wasn’t just a conservative who happened to have a really liberal position on foreign policy. They saw commonality between Paul and the slightly less hawkish rhetoric of Obama, rather than seeing the commonality between their default globalism and Obama’s perhaps slightly less rhetorically hawkish default globalism.Because of this unfortunate dynamic, my first strike in many battles with interventionists is often to just counter-assert that non-interventionism is the authentically conservative position. My argument usually goes something like this:

There is nothing conservative about presuming it is America’s role to police the world or mitigate every conflict wherever one may arise. This assumption is inherently hubristic and globalist. The neocon manifestation of this presumption is downright Jacobin. When did conservatives become shills for globalism? Non-interventionism, not interventionism, is the policy that naturally flows from a conservative mindset, properly understood.

This is what I mean by developing a counter boilerplate of our own. Feel free to copy and paste it with or without attribution, in whole or in part. Tweak it as appropriate to the situation. Change it up, and make it your own.Do you see what I’m doing here? I’m claiming the conservative ground as rightfully mine. I am asserting that I am the one articulating a truly conservative foreign policy, which also has the virtue of being true. Don’t allow them to get away with blowing you off as just a liberal or non-interventionism as the liberal position. I find a statement like this is particularly helpful when I happen to come into the middle of some conservative debate where the need for the US to “do something” about some particular foreign conflict such as the Ukraine had heretofore been taken for granted.In my experience, a statement of this kind tends to catch my adversaries off guard. Many of the interventionists advocates you will encounter are emotionally invested in their conservative Red Team identities. They don’t like having their identity or basic assumptions challenged. It changes the debate from “You’re a liberal” to who is the authentic conservative. It also establishes your credentials as a conservative who is legitimately engaged in the argument rather than some liberal troll.This is especially true now that two Ron Paul presidential campaigns have established the non-interventionist conservative as a recognizable type to most. Prior to this, I often found myself dropping Pat Buchanan’s name as a reference point for people who had trouble figuring out where I was coming from, and referencing Buchanan is still very useful at times because no one can brush him off as just some interloping liberal.One thing I observed when I was dealing with fellow Ron Paul supporters is they had a tendency to have a chip on their shoulder and went into situations such as Republican county conventions with the expectation that they were going to be treated as outsiders. In many cases these concerns were justified and in the case of some of the more doctrinaire libertarian types, they were outsiders to a degree. But as someone who supported Ron Paul from a paleoconservative and Constitutionalist perspective, I refused to concede that I was the outlier and made sure I acted like I belonged. I made it clear that I support non-interventionism because I am a conservative and that it is the authentic conservative position. Again, this changes the debate favorably in our direction away from the charge that you are a liberal or an eccentric outlier to who is the real conservative.“Who is the real conservative?” and “What is the authentic conservative foreign policy?” is a debate that is desperately needed and one our side should relish because the facts and philosophy are on our side. Stay tuned for more entries as this project develops.

Good Fences Make Good Neighbors: A Defense of Nationalism

The other night, I made the mistake, while cycling through the stations on my car’s radio, of listening to a few moments of an interview on the local public radio station. I don’t even remember the name of the interviewee, and really only remember about him that he was your typical left-wing whiner, in this case complaining that he had not been given a chance to write an op-ed for the New York Times. What really had his knickers in a knot was that Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s National Front party, had been given op-ed space by the Times in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris.According to our misremembered would-be author, this was simply a horrible, horrible thing for the Times to have done. The interviewer, admitting that he did not know who Marine Le Pen was, asked why. It was because, as we were told by Nameless Whiner, Marine Le Pen is a “fascist.” He then proceeded to expound upon this point, demonstrating in the process that he had no idea what “fascism” really is; explaining that, among other things, Marine Le Pen is against multiculturalism and open immigration into France from the Muslim world.In other words, Marine Le Pen is a “fascist” because she believes that France should be for French people.What a radical concept.Yet, this sort of sentiment is common among those on the Left. According to the tenets of political correctness, a nation can only be happy and prosperous when it contains the largest possible number of culturally, linguistically, and socially disparate elements. The fact that history shows the exact opposite every single time is irrelevant. Yet, this is why the American Left continues to purvey the falsehood that open borders are good for us, that we need millions of unassimilated foreigners “doing jobs that Americans won’t do” (for $2.50 an hour with no benefits, that is), that it’s a wonderful thing for us to have neighborhoods and entire cities that are basically portions of Mexico scooped up and dropped onto American soil. It’s why the European Left, even in the face of deadly attacks from Islamic extremists in the heart of Europe, can’t find it within themselves to do more than wring their hands about the possibility that such attacks might generate evil, mean, racist hatred against those poor little lambs, the Muslims.Multiculturalism is idiocy. Plain and simple. It is the province of shallow minds that have no understanding of human nature or how the world really works. Its enforcement upon populations will do nothing more than agitate the saner elements of those populations and eventually bring about societal breakdown that will most likely be accompanied by bloodshed to a greater or lesser degree. Multiculturalism is the creed of those who want to tear down, rather than build up, the good and right and admirable works of a civilization.What this world needs is more genuine nationalism. What is nationalism? In a nutshell, it is the belief that nations (more on what this word means below) should be separate from each other. Nations should have their own borders, should be able to pursue their own policies, free from the interference of others. In other words, France should be for the French, Germany for the Germans, Romania for the Romanians, and the United States of America for Americans.Obviously, like pretty much anything else out there, nationalism can be abused, can be used as an excuse for excesses. Yes, nationalism can become a justification for chauvinism. It can be used to pursue revanchist policies. It can even become a rationalization for expansionary warfare.But it’s not like other, more “good and pure” concepts have never been abused, right? Surely nobody has ever thought to use “democracy” to justify making war on other nations. How about “social justice” or “worker’s rights” or “economic interest”? Yet, nobody on the politically correct Left seems to be in a rush to condemn democracy or labor unions or economic growth as engines of warfare. No, the opposition to nationalism on the grounds of its excesses is simply an artifice of the Left that is designed to advance their globalist agenda, an agenda which nationalism would destroy were it to regain a footing in the hearts and minds of people all over the world.So, what is a “nation”? I believe that the best and most rational definition of what a nation is happens to be the one provided by Holy Scripture. In the New Testament, the term that is most often translated as both “Gentiles” and “nation” is the Greek term ethnos. This word derives from a root verb etho, which has the sense of “acting by customary usage, to do that which one is wont to do by habit.” Ethnos, then, describes a group of people who are bound together by “customary usage,” what we would call “culture” in its sociological sense. A “nation” is made up of people who share a common culture, which necessarily implies that they share a common language, a common history, a common set of values, similar social and spiritual ideas, and so forth. The Old Testament Hebrew term goyiim also has this same general meaning.Nationalism is the natural order of things. The Apostle Paul preached to the Athenians,

“And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us.” (Acts 17:26-27)

What this means is that, contrary to what many partisans of Churchianity in the Western world believe, God does not want all the peoples of the world to be united into a one-world government and all having the same culture. Instead, God separated the various nations of men so that they would overspread the face of the whole earth, fulfilling His command to “be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth” (Genesis 9:1). Indeed, the point to the division of languages in the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 was to enforce this command; the rebels against God feared lest they should be “scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth” (Genesis 11:4), and desired to instead build a polity bound together by one language and speech, an early effort at what we would now term “one-world government.” God divided them by languages (a process which still continues to this day as languages continue to evolve and divide).In Paul’s exposition in Acts, we see that God acts in history to appoint to the various nations at various times to dwell within the bounds of their habitation. God defines where and when a nation will live as a distinct cultural and social entity. He did this so that man would not trust in his own ability to unite and “solve his own problems,” but would instead seek after God. Both one-worldism and multiculturalism are defiance of God’s establishment of these boundaries, as is offensive war-making designed to take away another nation’s land.Now, nations do change throughout history. It is simply impossible to maintain that one nation will always and at all times throughout history maintain a pure genetic lineage. Indeed, genetics are largely unnecessary to the scriptural and natural concept of a “nation.” Don’t believe me? Then show me where the English nation was 2000 years ago. You can’t. The English are an amalgam of Briton, Angle, Saxon, and Jute, with a little Dane thrown in for cultural measure, and then some Norman overlaid on top. Same with the French, who are the joining of Frank and Gaul. Or what of the Italians, who are Lombards and Ostrogoths mixed with the old Italic stock? Yet, each of these is now a distinct nation with a distinct language, culture, and traditions. They exist because God worked in history to make them what they are, for His inestimable purposes. Nations make change, but nations as the concept of distinct cultural entities that have a right to their own lands haven’t gone away.A “nation,” as history abundantly testifies, does not always coincide with political boundaries. Nations may find themselves sharing a political entity with other nations, sometimes peacefully and profitably, but more often parasitically--a nation may be the parasite, or it may be the host, the oppressor or the oppressed. The nationalism of the 19th century strove to set about a natural order for nations, bring together people of the same nation into union with each other, while freeing those of one nation held in political bondage to another. Nationalism was essentially the assertion of the principle that nations should define borders, rather than borders defining nations.Despite the widespread erroneous perception that “nationalism causes war,” it’s actually the opposite. Genuine nationalism in which nations of people don’t impose themselves on others and essentially “mind their own business,” actually works to create more peace and amity between them. Indeed, the cause of much strife in our world has been through forces that work AGAINST real nationalism – when one nation seeks to impose its values or political control over another, when nations are forced against their will to coexist within the same political unit, in which case they will nearly always seek to gain the advantage over each other.Multinationalism almost always eventually fails every time it is tried. The Austrian Empire was already falling apart along ethnic lines even before World War I sealed its fate. Once the dictators of Yugoslavia went away, Serbs and Croats and Bosnians fell apart into squabbling ethnic conflict, seeking to gather the largest pieces for themselves. Tutsis and Hutus killed each other in the artificially defined state of Rwanda. Much of the warfare and strife in the post-Cold War world has been at the instigation of the United Nations and other internationalist, globalist elements seeking to advance that agenda. The list goes on.Genuine nationalism does not have to be the enemy of international cooperation. Peace and amity can and will exist when nations are free to interact without coercion. Nations can trade with each other, enter into alliances and pacts, and all the rest freely and peaceably. The failure of the recent Scottish vote for disunion from the United Kingdom suggests that the majority of the Scottish nation is not altogether unhappy in their political union with the English nation. That’s fine, that’s their choice.Nor does it have to be the enemy of rational emigration and immigration. A nation should be free to set the limits and conditions under which foreigners can live within the borders occupied by their own people. If the foreigners are willing to abide by those stipulations and are willing to assimilate themselves to the nation among whom they are living, then all is well and good.This point is quite salient when we question the presence of large numbers of Muslim immigrants in Europe, and increasingly in the USA as well. The fact is that the Muslims, by and large, do not do this. Even though they may (sometimes) learn the languages of their host nations so that they can interact with the welfare offices and other edifices of government, one cannot say that Muslim populations from the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, and North Africa make any significant effort to assimilate themselves to the cultures, mores, values, and societies of their host nations. Instead, they actively segregate themselves into banlieus and ghettos of their own design. After the Charlie Hebdo attacks, I saw many stories (designed to create sympathy, but which only generated nausea) about young Muslims living in France who complained about not being accepted by French society. But they have no one to blame but themselves. They (or their parents, many of these were second, or even third-generation residents) came to France but never made any effort to conform to French culture. They came, got on public assistance, and then lived their entire lives in self-segregated communities in which they purposefully protected themselves from anything that was not North African in culture and Islamic in religion.When you come to Europe and then march against democracy while proclaiming that you want to assassinate anyone who “insults Islam,” you are by no means assimilated. You are, instead, an indigestible lump creating an ulcer in the bowels of your host society. France, Germany, Italy, and the rest should have the right to send you home. It’s a positive sign that more and more people in these nations are beginning to wake up to this fact.Genuine nationalism says this: if Muslims want to do their thing, if they want to live in barbaric, 7th century degradation, then let them. Let them do so in their own countries across the Muslim world. But don’t do it in our countries. The only thing difficult to understand is why that is such a hard concept for many to accept.As Traditionalists, we must continue to assert the benefits of genuine nationalism as a force for good in this world. As the saying goes, good fences make for good neighbors, and we would see a lot more peace and quiet in the world if people would take that principle to heart. The strife and problems arise when we defy the natural order of nationalism--when nations covet the lands of other nations, when nations seek to enter en masse into another nation’s society and refuse to assimilate, when wrongheaded internationalists seek to impose one society’s values onto other nations against their will. It’s perfectly fine to think your ways are better than someone else’s. Perhaps you’re even right in that belief. But peace only comes when you mind your own business and leave other nations to their own ways.

The View from Olympus: His Majesty's Birthday

Every year, I telephone my sovereign lord and reporting senior, Kaiser Wilhelm II, on his birthday to offer my best wishes. He likes to surprise me--some fool of a historian recently wrote that he had no sense of humor--and this year he did. The night before, he paid me a visit.Like my old friend Mr. Scrooge, I first thought a bit of undigested cheese might be giving me a strange dream. Then I wondered if the figure in my bedchamber were the ghost of Imperial birthdays past, present, or to come. It turned out to be a bit of all three, but His Majesty was no ghost. Neither was the person he had with him.I stretched to attention and quickly recognized my other visitor's Austro-Hungarian uniform, decorated with the Golden Fleece. Before I could say "Happy Birthday" to His Majesty, he introduced his companion: Kaiser Karl. He was clearly a Hapsburg, but not the last Kaiser of Austria-Hungary, at least from the photographs I had seen (my landlady in Vienna in the '70s had known him well)."May I present my friend Kaiser Karl of the Holy Roman Empire?" said my Kaiser. "Get dressed. We're going to visit his domain."Curiouser and curiouser, I thought, as I threw on knee breeches, green Jäger jacket and a Feldmütze. My usual cuirassier's uniform takes an hour to get into, and a valet.Out front, a zeppelin awaited, stretching the length of my block. We boarded the control car, the commander (Mathy, no less) set the engine telegraph to "Future," and with the "Up ship!" we were off. I asked Kaiser Karl, "So I take it the Holy Roman Empire has made a comeback?""It has," he replied, smiling."And the House of Hapsburg again rules Austria?""The House of Hapsburg has always ruled Austria," he responded. "In the divine Economy, an Austrian republic is an impossibility."Our tour of the restored Holy Roman Empire took us first over northern Italy, where the double eagle black-and-yellow flag flew proudly from Milan to Venice. "The northern Italians were so glad to come home, "Kaiser Karl said. "They have as much in common with southern Italians as a horse has with an aardvark. Northern Italy knew it was part of Mittleuropa.""And the south?" I enquired."Again the Kingdom of the the Two Sicilies," answered Kaiser Karl. "Naples is once more one of the most beautiful cities in Europe."We flew quickly over Vienna (a return for tea at Schönbrunn was planned for the afternoon) and landed in Berlin. The Imperial Tram was waiting to give us a quick tour of the city. The first surprise was that, in addition to the Prussian eagle, the double eagle was also on all the important buildings. "My house now rules Germany in fief from the Holy Roman Emperor," Kaiser Wilhelm said smiling."And what had Bismarck to say to that?" I asked."Oh, you know Bismarck," answered Kaiser Wilhelm. "He grumbled, but a goodly present of fois gras settled him down.""So there is fois gras in Heaven?" I asked hopefully."Don't you read Chesterton? Heaven is eating fois gras to the sound of trumpets."Our quick tour of Berlin brought other, perhaps more important surprises. There were children everywhere, most of them blond, blue-eyed German children. People were again well-dressed, with coats, hats, and gloves. Most men were smoking a pipe or cigar. Strikingly, not a mosque or a Islamic head scarf was to be seen, and no shop sign was in a language other than German."What happened to all the Islamics?" I asked."Most converted, and the others went back to their part of the world," Kaiser Karl answered. "The official religion of the Holy Roman Empire is Christianity. Otherwise it could not be holy. We tolerate some other religions, but not all. Violent religions are outlawed. As was already clear by your time, Islam is violent, because it consider forced conversion or adherence legitimate. Our choices were either outlaw Islam or suffer an endless war on our own soil.""So all of Europe has done this?" I questioned."Some countries, including Sweden and Britain, allow Sufis, who are the only non-violent Islamic sect," answered Kaiser Wilhelm."But even the Swedes eventually had to face reality. And all the nations of Europe now require immigrants, regardless of where they come from to acculturate. There are no more foreign enclaves on Europe's soil.""And all the nations of Europe are real nations once again," added Kaiser Karl. "We have reversed the globalist process of homogenization. The British wear bowler hats and take afternoon tea. The French have dinner mid-day and allow two hours to enjoy it. A movement called Retroculture has spread across Europe. Those who join pledge to restore the old ways of their land, their people, in their own lives. Retroculture's motto is, 'What worked before can work again.' And it does."One big question had been bubbling up inside me through our tour. Finally I let it out. "In my time, Europe was finished, a dying theme park governed by a bad copy of the Soviet Union called the EU. Between the tyranny of the globalist market and the nihilism of the culturally Marxist European elite, it had no future. How did it turn itself around?"The two Emperors looked at each other and smiled. "That is a surprise we won't spoil for you, replied Kaiser Wilhelm. "Let's just say that for the secularists, it was a real jaw-dropper.""Can't you give me a hint?" I begged."Remember what Pope John Paul II said toward the end of his life, answered Kaiser Karl. "'Things will continue bad for a little while longer, then they will get better.'"And with that, our zeppelin deposited us at Schönbrunn for a good, English cup of tea (and pastries from Demels).

The View From Olympus: A Black Awakening?

A friend of mine is a Cleveland cop. He's white, and the area he serves is black. Judging from what you hear on the news, you might expect he now faces a hostile population.But exactly the opposite is the case. The blacks in his patrol area have responded to recent attacks on the police for shootings of young black males not with "rage", but with an outpouring of support for the cops. My friend told me that he and his colleagues get smiles, waves, people stopping to thank them for being there, even offers of bottles of water and invitations to come in the house on cold nights for some coffee. He said he has never seen any of this before. Some blacks have even said to him, "We know the problems isn't you, it's us."A couple dozen blacks from Ferguson, Missouri, came to Cleveland to demonstrate, march, and try to stir up the kind of violence that has burned down much of their own town. They were not well received here. When they marched through the housing projects, Cleveland blacks came out to curse them and told them to go home. The fact that some of the "peaceful" demonstrators were using bullhorns to call for killing cops may have had something to do with their reception.Seen rationally, none of this should be a surprise. Most victims of black crime are black. The honest blacks who live in the inner city need police protection more than most whites do. It's logical they should support the cops. Demonstrators from Ferguson represent violence that loots and burns black communities, not the white ones. Many of the destroyed businesses are minority owned; in Ferguson they even torched a black church. The people who live in black neighborhoods need those shops and stores. Who wants to burn down his own place?But when we look at these responses from blacks in the context of present-day politics, they are remarkable. Ordinary people have seen through the endless culturally Marxist propaganda that always portrays blacks as helpless victims and whites, especially white cops, as oppressors. What politicians and the press recognize as blacks' leaders live off this game, some quite richly. Ordinary blacks are supposed to reflect their leaders' carefully cultivated "rage." Over and over they are told that cops, especially white cops, are their enemies.In Cleveland at least, reality in beginning to defeat ideology. People are seeing through the con game. Blacks are just as capable of perceiving their interests as anyone else. The highest of all interests is safety. In Cleveland's inner city as elsewhere, safety comes from the police. They can protect honest people, black and white, more effectively when they are welcomed and supported by the community. So here at least, the black community is welcoming and supporting them.This is an awakening of potentially vast importance. It could lead to a new black politics wherein blacks themselves clean up their own communities, in cooperation with the police and whoever else is willing to help. Instead of playing the "civil rights" game where blacks' message is always the same -- "We're victims who demand you to solve our problems" -- blacks would instead turn to the message of Booker T. Washington, who called for American blacks to show that they can perform at the same level as whites and take care of themselves.The outpouring of support for our cops from Cleveland's blacks show that the base for change is there. But if it is to happen, it requires a new and very different black leadership. The new leadership must be about reality, not ideology. Its goal must be a safe and prosperous blacks community, not personal power and enrichment of the leaders. It will be difficult for such new leadership to emerge, because the white culturally Marxist Establishment will try to stop it. It is quite happy with the present situation, where blacks are a club to be used to beat whites with endless charges of "racism." But if new, realistic leadership can emerge, we might see a black awakening that would bring vast benefits to American blacks and whites alike. 

Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day as a Successful Political 4GW Operation

By now, the reader is aware of the concerted efforts being made (and unfortunately quite successfully) by the cultural Marxists and “social justice warriors” to force their particular ideology off onto the rest of the country. This effort certainly alarms a good many people in our nation, I tend to think many more than will let on publicly, due to the mau-mauing that is received by any who cross the subverters of our culture and nation. Yet, most people feel powerless to do anything about it. It seems that the cultural Marxists – the radical feminists, the race-baiters, the Gaystapo, and the rest – have complete freedom to harass and destroy whomever they choose in the pursuit of their goals.However, there are some who are beginning to explore the use of fourth generation warfare (4GW) tactics against the cultural Marxists who almost completely dominate our political system and much of the culture. A brief overview of 4GW by William Lind, one of the primary thinkers who introduced the concept, is found here. As well, Lind’s pseudonymous novel, Victoria, provides some practical examples of how 4GW might be carried out, both before and after the shooting starts. Essentially, 4GW argues that as modern states begin to lose legitimacy (for a variety of reasons), non-state actors will begin to reassert themselves politically and militarily. 4GW further raises a set of propositions about the warfare that will be fulfilled that enable the non-state actors to be successful against larger, more powerful, and better equipped enemies.There is certainly a political application of 4GW that can be made here, casting liberty lovers and traditionalists in the role of the non-state actors (i.e. the outsiders), and the cultural-political hegemony of the cultural Marxists as the state whose legitimacy can (and in this case, ought) to be questioned.There have been sporadic moves in this direction, mostly arising demotically and probably not even realizing they were engaging in political 4GW. One of the most successful examples of this was the so-called “Chick-Fil-A appreciation day” which occurred a couple of years ago. If you will recall, Chick-Fil-A’s President, Dan Cathy, had made a statement of support for marriage, over and against the travesty known as gay "marriage.” Because of this, the usual crowd of gay mafia ruffians rose up in arms, attacking him, attacking his faith, attacking his business, and generally trying to punish him severely for his deviation from cultural Marxist norms. However, the move completely backfired on the cultural Marxists and Chick-Fil-A ended up receiving a tremendous amount of support, both moral and financial, from customers who mobbed every Chick-Fil-A restaurant in the country and provided the chain with stratospheric sales. Chick-Fil-A has continued to receive residual kudos and sales from this as a result of their stand.What made “Chick-Fil-A appreciation day” such a resounding success? I believe we can see in it some successfully applied principles of 4GW.First, those who were pushing for the appreciation day managed to obtain and then keep the moral high ground, both for their own efforts, and for the image of Chick-Fil-A as a company.While the homosexualists attempted to demonize Chick-Fil-A and Dan Cathy as “haters,” “homophobes,” and all the rest of the tired old panoply of name-calling, those supporting Chick-Fil-A succeeded in gaining control of the narrative and were able to cast the homosexualists and their allies as the bad guys. The gays were the ones who were attempting to stifle free speech, who were attacking someone for merely voicing his deeply-held personal moral conviction. The homosexualists were robbed of the moral high ground and came off looking like the buffoons and bullies that they really were, while Chick-Fil-A and its defenders were cast as the paladins of individual liberty.Second, and the reason why this narrative capture took place, is that the efforts to defend Chick-Fil-A were decentralized, instead of being directed by one or a few big-name political organizations. The effort to organize the appreciation day moved quickly--social media was used to great effect in this--and simply ran an end run around the homosexualist effort to organize boycotts and protests via their own well-financed yet sclerotic and centralized “gay rights” organizations. They got beat to the punch in the same way a swarm of hornets would be able to get the jump on and outlast a wolf.Further, because the appreciation day efforts were so decentralized, there was no single “head” that the homosexualists could strike back against. Granted, a few conservative organizations tried to jump on the bandwagon, but they were Johnny-come-latelies who had almost no effect and received almost no attention. Yet, there was no one that the gays could Alinskyize by “picking a target, freezing it, personalizing it, and polarizing it.” The gays had no target that they could hold up as “the big bad anti-gay hatemonger” behind the organization of opposition to them. They simply could not pin down and personalize a million people on Twitter, Facebook, and email, no matter how hard they tried.Third, Chick-Fil-A's supporters were able to successfully apply pressure to and exploit a fracture point. One key to successful 4GW is to find ways to keep groups from supporting each other (divide and conquer) or to keep them from supporting the central government. In this case, the fracture point was between the gays and their allies on the one hand, and the large but nebulous body of apolitical, moderate, and low-information people on the other.Because the supporters of Chick-Fil-A obtained the moral high ground and were able to cast it as a freedom of speech issue, many of these “mushy middle” types who might otherwise have supported the gays because “I don't think people should hate other people” (or some variant) suddenly took the position that people shouldn't be hounded and punished for simply speaking freely. Numerous times in the lead-up to the appreciation day, I would see people on various forums make comments along the line of “Well, I support gay rights, but I don't think they should be attacking Chick-Fil-A's freedom of speech, so I'm going to Chick-Fil-A.” Nominal supporters of the gays were successfully turned into firmer supporters of Chick-Fil-A.Fourth, and lastly, the Chick-Fil-A appreciation day was successfully 4GW because it managed to appeal to the larger body of “civilians” in a way that didn't harm or inconvenience them. A cardinal rule in 4GW is that you try not to harm civilians and other innocents, thus turning them and their families, friends, and tribes against you. Instead, you gain their support by aiding them and seeking to convince them that you're on their side.To illustrate this case here, allow me to first illustrate the opposite principle – which is that boycotts so often fail in their intended purposes. As a case in point, look at the boycott of Disney that the Southern Baptist convention attempted to carry out in response to Disney's “gay day” promotion of the homosexualist agenda. On paper, this boycott should have been a powerful deterrent. The Southern Baptists are one of the largest denominations in America; they are also one of the most conservative, and Southern Baptists tend to have many more children per family than the typical childless Episcopalian lesbian couple.Yet, the boycott was a complete and utter flop. Why? Well, while most Southern Baptists probably agreed with the boycott in principle, each family was also thinking, “Yeah, but my kids really want to go to Disney World. It'll be okay if we go, since everyone else is boycotting.” And everyone was thinking the same thing, so the boycott failed.Let's face it – Americans are a soft and pampered people. They don't like to give things up. To get them to act on something that is seemingly unimportant in the grand scheme of things (compared to, I guess, a government rounding people up and putting them in concentration camps), you have to make it benefit them. That's what Chick-Fil-A appreciation day did when it BUYcotted, rather than boycotted. People got to go and enjoy the camaraderie of being with like-minded believers. There was a sense of community. People got to treat themselves to tasty chicken sandwiches and waffle fries. People wanted to get caught up in the excitement. In short, it gained support because it was able to positively appeal to the “civilian” population of non-activists who personally gained both tangibly and intangibly from it. Compared to that, hanging out in front of a Chick-Fil-A with the other five sodomites and screeching obscenities at people just didn't have the same appeal, which is why the homosexualist counter-boycotts failed miserably.There are many lessons to be learned from analyzing what took place on August 1, 2012. While the homosexualist agenda has advanced largely because of judicial imposition, large numbers of normal Americans took the opportunity to strike back against the gay lobby, and the gays took a huge black eye that day. That, of course, was merely one battle in a long string of them. But, if we systematically began to apply 4GW principles to dealing with the homosexualist lobby when they attempt to browbeat folks and enforce their cultural delusions on the rest of us, we might see more, and more consistent, victories over them, as well as the other cultural Marxists.

Rand Paul Gets Cuba Right

Above photo: Evil commies reigning terror on all who stand in their way.President Obama’s decision to move toward normalized relations with Cuba has caused an array of responses, most of them pretty predictable. As a conservative non-interventionist, I support Obama’s decision. I support normal relations with Cuba and have since I moved to the position of non-interventionism many years ago. Our embargo of Cuba, ostensibly to promote “regime change” and democratization in Cuba, has been an utter failure in this regard and has deprived Americans of good cigars and a nice vacation destination to boot. Our Cuba policy has long been a relic of our Cold War past, and it makes no sense to continue it.While I believe our standard Cold War history could use some revisionism, I won’t go there in this essay. If you accept the Cold War narrative at face value, it makes sense that the US did not want a hostile pawn of the Soviet Union 90 miles from our mainland. In lieu of an invasion, an embargo aimed at toppling our enemy’s puppet regime arguably made sense in that context. But it certainly ceased to make sense once the Soviet Union dissolved and Cuba became just another country whose form of government we don’t like. We don’t like Saudi Arabia’s form of government, but we aren’t embargoing them. Our Cuba policy remained in place clearly because of inertia and a lack of political will to upset the powerful Cuban voting block and the knee-jerk hawk crowd.Predictably, as I stated above, the hawkish interventionist chorus has responded with outrage, particularly our two Republican Senators of Cuban descent, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. (As an aside, this should put to rest any lingering doubts conservative and libertarian non-interventionists might have had that Cruz is somehow different on foreign policy because he is supposedly anti-establishment and a Tea Party favorite.) The move was decried by the fear-ridden hawkish bed-wetters for all the clichéd reasons. It gives the Castros “international legitimacy.” It “undermines America’s credibility.” It leaves a “rogue,” “totalitarian” regime in place. Blah, blah, blah…Louisiana Governor Jindal whined that the “President has no strategy for leading on an international stage." Perhaps Governor Jindal can show me in the job description of the U.S. President that we call the U.S. Constitution where it says it is the responsibility of our Chief Executive to “lead” on the “world stage.” Such unabashedly globalist rhetoric is fit only for the one world crowd that thinks a New World Order is fine and dandy. Any self-respecting authentic conservative would be ashamed to have such a blatant call for globalism escape from his lips. The only stage on which an American President should concern himself with leading, within Constitutional bounds, is the 50 states that make up the United States of America.The non-interventionist position on Cuba is simple. Is Cuba the 51^st state? No. Then what form of government they have is outside our realm. While we would, of course, prefer that Cuba adopt a freer form of government, and we are free to work toward that end in a normal diplomatic manner, it is not our place to use hostile means, and an embargo is hostile, to attempt to actively bring this about.On the other end of the array of responses, the soft non-interventionist Sen. Rand Paul is to be commended for coming out in favor of lifting the embargo. While Rand Paul is not where his father is or where I would like him to be on foreign policy, this issue does demonstrate that Rand Paul is at least quantifiably different from the reflexive hawks in his party, despite his history of disappointing many of us non-interventionists. This statement was posted on Rand’s Facebook page:

Senator Marco Rubio believes the embargo against Cuba has been ineffective, yet he wants to continue perpetuating failed policies. After 50 years of conflict, why not try a new approach? The United States trades and engages with other communist nations, such as China and Vietnam. Why not Cuba? I am a proponent of peace through commerce, and I believe engaging Cuba can lead to positive change.

I concur. File this under giving-credit-where-credit-is-due, and allow it to serve as evidence that I’m not implacably hostile to the younger Paul, as I am sometimes accused. I just want him to be more like his dad.

The View From Olympus: The S Weapon

Just as Germany had its V weapons, the V-1 and V-2, so Washington now has its S weapon. If another country does something we don't like, Washington hits it with economic sanctions.As Iran's economy shows, sanctions can do a country quite a bit of damage. The burden falls mainly on the middle class; just as in Washington, the elites know how to protect themselves. From Washington's perspective, sanctions are an ideal weapon, in that they seem to cost us little or nothing.In fact, they may end up costing us a great deal. All around the world, a state's legitimacy now depends in no small part on ensuring a growing economy. A state that cannot do that may fail. Because Washington has no understanding of Fourth Generation war, it thinks the result will be merely a new government, one that will bend to Washington's (and Globalism's) will. In reality, in a 4GW world, the consequence may be another failed state and the effective conquest of another region by non-state elements.More, whenever a state thinks it has discovered a new weapon to which there is no reply, its opponents surprise it by coming up with one or several. Other countries are growing tired of Washington dictating to them and threatening sanctions if they do not obey. At least two are not little countries Washington can easily step on. I refer to China and, especially, Russia.Following its now-usual pattern when Russia recovered the Crimea and moved to protect ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine from a hostile government in Kiev, the U.S. put economic sanctions on Russia. Reluctantly, the EU went along, partly because its elites share the Globalist ideology and partly because it is afraid to act independently of Washington. Russia hit back with sanctions of its own, which did no harm to the U.S. but did brake an already slow-moving EU economy.Washington continues to threaten Russia with further sanctions. But if I read the tea leaves correctly, Russia is preparing some counter-moves that could inflict serious pain on both the EU and the U.S.Russia currently owes foreign institutions about $800 billion in debt. The fall in the price of oil, engineered by the Saudis to put the frackers out of business, has undermined Russia's earnings of foreign exchange. Russia has a large foreign currency reserve, but not large enough to cover the $800 billion. Washington is smirking, saying to Moscow, "OK, let's see you get out of this one."Moscow has what I see as an obvious answer. Normally, it would roll the debt over. Sanctions now prevent that, because any EU financial institution that lends to Russia will be prosecuted by Washington. So why does not Moscow merely announce that it is suspending payment to institutions in any country that is participating in sanctions? It would still pay whatever is due to institutions in countries not taking part in the sanctions, so that while it would be in technical default, it would not be in what I would call policy default. It could pay; it was merely, in some cases, choosing not to as a matter of policy, a policy of replying to the S weapon.As an old saying goes, if you owe your banker $100,000, you have a problem. If you owe him $100 million, he has a problem. The EU's share of that $800 billion is large enough that Moscow would immediately hand Europe a new and massive banking crisis.Washington won't much care, because it regards Europe with the contempt satellites usually receive. But both Russia and China recently bought large amounts of gold to add to their already considerable reserves.This points to a possibility that would hurt Washington: a joint Russian-Chinese move to put some international trade back on a gold basis. That would bypass sanctions because it could bypass banks. Iran has already done this to some extent, but Iran is not big enough to make much difference. Russia and China are.The lesson here is one war has long taught: every move has countermoves. There ain't no such thing as a free MRE. One-way war, war where only one side gets hurt (unless it is over quickly), turns into two-way war. That was the real lesson of 9/11, although Washington has refused to learn it. The S weapon, used often enough and casually enough, will elicit replies that will hurt us. Russia and China, especially if they act together, can give Washington and the EU both a good birching.