The View From Olympus: More Strategic Blindness

The Washington defense and foreign policy Establishment is once again beating the war drums on North Korea.  In doing so, it is showing a strategic blindness that seems to be its foremost characteristic. 

Most analyses of a potential new Korean War focus on the tactical/technical level.  At that level the dangers are many and apparent.  North Korea could dump massive firepower on Seoul with little or no warning, killing thousands of civilians.  It could plaster the area where American military dependents are concentrated with longer-range fire.  It could strike before South Korea could mobilize.  It could make its operational Schwerpunkt a light infantry advance down Korea’s eastern side with a turning movement south of Seoul, which could catch us mal-deployed in anticipation of an armor thrust down the west coast.  In sum, at the tactical/technical and operational levels there are many ways a Korean War could go badly for us.

But what about the strategic level?  Here the picture, which Washington cannot see, is no better, even if we assume (probably rightly) that North Korea would not be able to destroy an American city with a nuclear strike or fry all the electronics in our homeland with a high-altitude EMP blast.

To see the strategic danger, let’s assume that on the tactical and operational levels the war goes well.  With either a pre-emptive strike (Bismarck described preventive war as committing suicide for fear of being killed) or an immediate and overwhelming response to North Korean action we collapse the North Korean regime, destroy its missiles, quickly end the bombardment of Seoul and win.  The South suffers little damage.  We have few casualties.  North and South Korea reunite.  Birds soar, choirs of children sing, and we all dance around the Maypole.  What then?

At that point, I fear the danger of “catastrophic success” on the strategic level is high.  A reunited Korea would be an immense threat to Japan.  That would be true even if it was de-nuclearized.  As long ago as the 1970s, when I was in Korea with a U.S. Senate delegation, South Korean officials told me openly that the South Korean navy and air force are designed for a war with Japan, not North Korea.  The enmity between the two peoples goes back centuries.  Koreans want revenge for Japan’s occupation early in the 20^th century.  They know Japan is militarily weak.  The temptation to attack, or at least dictate to, Japan would be overwhelming.

In response, Japan would have to re-arm.  If a united Korea retained North Korea’s nukes, Japan would have to go nuclear.  If not, she would still have to build up her “self-defense” forces to the point where they became the Imperial Navy and Imperial Army in fact if not in name. 

That in turn would be seen as a major threat by China.  Here too policy is determined at least in part by memory.  China’s nuclear weapons make a Japanese attack on China impossible, even if Japan wanted a war, which it does not.  But Chinese memories of Japanese invasion are recent and vivid.  They are stoked by rising Chinese nationalism.  A Chinese government that did not respond forcefully to Japanese re-armament would lose legitimacy.

Where does all this leave the United States?  We are allied to Japan.  So at the strategic level we would have traded a threat from North Korea brought about by our alliance with South Korea for a threat from China brought about by our alliance with Japan.  China is a far more powerful and potentially dangerous adversary than North Korea.  More, to confront effectively the rising Fourth Generation war threat around the world, we need an alliance with China (and Russia).  So there would be a high strategic opportunity cost.    

This is what catastrophic success looks like.  Even if we win, perhaps especially if we win, we lose.  There can be no greater strategic failure than losing by winning.  It tells us the whole strategy was wrong from the outset.  Which it is.

Interested in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like?  Read Thomas Hobbes’ new future history, Victoria.

A Culture of Cant

“Cant” was one of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s favorite words and least favorite things.  In his usage, “cant” meant the third definition offered by my American Heritage dictionary: “hypocritically pious language”.  Thanks to the cultural Marxists, America is now immersed in a political culture of cant.

President Trump’s comments about some Third World countries recently brought forth a veritable festival of cant.  The President somewhat undiplomatically referred to Haiti, most African countries and El Salvador as “shithole” countries and suggested we would be better off getting immigrants from Norway than from those places.

Well, of course we would.  Immigrants from Norway are far more likely to contribute to our society than immigrants from Haiti.  At the same time, immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and most of Africa are more likely to end up takers, people who cost us more than they contribute.  Their low skills, large families, and propensity to crime (El Salvador is one of the most violent countries on earth) make this almost inevitable.  And yes, these countries are shitholes.  The only way in which President Trump was slightly at error is that in Haiti and most of Africa there usually isn’t a hole.  Even in India, a country far advanced over Haiti and most of Africa, a third of the population craps in the open like dogs.  They don’t call it the Turd World for nothing. 

The cultural Marxists’ response to the President speaking the truth was to howl to the heavens.  They trotted out every “-ism” word they could think of.  They found one Haitian woman who had done well in the U.S. and pointed her out (as a wholly atypical example).  I’m sure they tried to find a Norwegian mugger but quickly found that in Norway the muggers are mostly Somalis whom the Norwegians were dumb enough to import as “refugees”.  Norway had to publish a pamphlet in Somali saying no, it isn’t OK to rape Norwegian women because they were out in public without a male relative.

Here is where the cant comes in.  Everyone in this country, including the most avid cultural Marxists and people from the countries he called shitholes (who left because they are shitholes) knows that what the President said is true.  Their protests are entirely and wholly cant.

The Left has been in love with cant for a long time.  To pretend races and ethnic groups within races are all the same is cant.  To assert that men and women are interchangeable and that women make fine firemen and soldiers is cant.  To say all cultures are of equal value is cant.  Who was the Mozart of the Hottentots or the Palladio of the Apaches?

What makes the Left’s blather cant is that they know what they are saying is lies as they say it.  So deeply are they immersed in cant that their very vocabulary has become it’s language.  “Sexism", “racism” (as they define it), “homophobia”, and above all “hate” are words that canter along at a remarkable pace.  The cultural Marxists are themselves champion haters.  They hate the Christian religion, Western culture, the White race, men (unless they are gay), non and anti-Feminist women (a majority), conservative blacks, Asians (because they are competent and thus not “victims”)— the list goes on forever.  Ultimately, they hate God.  But in their language of cant, none of this counts as hate.  Why?  Because by their definition only the Right can hate.  Again, they know all of this is B.S. as they solemnly pronounce it.  That is the essence of cant.

The rise of populism in the U.S. and in Europe is driven in part because ordinary people are starting to perceive the cant.  They increasingly understand that when the cultural Marxists and Establishment politicians spew the blather the Left demands, they know they are not speaking the truth.  They are speaking entirely in “hypocritically pious language”, i.e. cant.

In contrast, when President Trump and real conservatives in Europe call shithole countries shitholes, the public knows they are not canting.  They may on occasion be wrong (President Trump was not), but they are saying what they genuinely think.  The populist rebellion is in many ways a rebellion against cant.  For both the cultural Marxists and the Establishment, that is very bad news because they have nothing to offer but more cant.

Interested in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like?  Read Thomas Hobbes’ new future history, Victoria.

His Majesty's Birthday

I usually telephone my reporting senior and oberste Feldherr Kaiser Wilhelm II on his birthday, January 27, to offer my best wishes.  But His Majesty is fond of surprises.  This year, he gave me quite a surprise.

A fortnight earlier, on January 8, I received a peremptory telegram from Berlin: “Report to His Majesty January 26 at Nordholz.”  That set off a wild scramble.  I grabbed the first train from Cleveland to New York, where to my great good fortune our Doppelschifffschrauberturbinenschnellpostdampfer (H.L. Mencken’s favorite German word) Kronprinz Wilhelm was sailing for Hamburg that evening.  I informed the captain that I was a General Staff officer traveling on personal orders from His Majesty the Kaiser and he poured on the coal.  We made it into Hamburg with time to spare, and a quick train ride took me to Nordholz.  When the Imperial train pulled in on the 26th, I was on the platform.

Nordholz is the great base of German naval aviation.  Located close to the North Sea (and Britain), its heart is an astounding, vast hanger that holds two Zeppelins and revolves.  To see something that big move is quite astonishing.  The purpose is to enable the navy to launch airships regardless of the direction of the wind.  Getting a Zeppelin out of its shed in a crosswind is not something anyone tries a second time. 

After greeting His Majesty on the railway platform and offering my best felicitations on his coming birthday, I asked where we were off to the next day by Zeppelin.  I expected a raid on London.  We and the Brits still bomb each other in heaven, but the bombs contain food rather than explosives.  Still, a six-hundred pounder filled with with Teewurst makes an impression on Whitewall.

“We are going to Hell,” the Kaiser answered.

“Which Hell does Your Majesty have in mind?” I asked.

“If it’s the one in Washington, I’d just as soon stay here.  I’ve seen enough of that one to last a lifetime.”

“Which Hell?  The real Hell, of course.  I want you to hear what the master strategist Satan is up to, and I want you to hear it direct from him.”

Great, I thought.  From an America going to hell in a hand basket I’ve come to Germany to go to Hell in a Zeppelin.  Max Hoffman to the contrary, life on the General Staff is not all sausages and Champagne.

The next morning the Imperial party boarded L11, with Kaleu Mathy as ship captain, a reassuring choice.  Strasser wanted us to fly with him on L70, but His Majesty wisely declined.  “That didn’t work out too well last time, Peter,” the Kaiser reminded the old jinx.  His Majesty gave the order “Up ship!” And we rose majestically in the cool morning air.  It was nice to be flying as God intended, not in a cigar tube that falls out of the sky if the engines fail.

Out of His Majesty’s hearing, I quietly asked Kaleu Mathy how our hydrogen was likely to react to Hell’s flames.  “You have forgotten your Dante, Herr Oberst,” he replied. “Hell is cold.”

Cold it was, bitter cold, worse than Cleveland in January.  We had picked up our guide, Virgil, in Limbo, and he wisely was wrapped in more than a toga.  Our journey ever downward was swift, far swifter than Dante’s; he was walking and we sailed through the fumes that passed for air.  The engines didn’t like them much but being Maybachs they kept running.

“Won’t Satan and his devils spot us?” I asked Virgil.  “We’re not exactly small.”

“Fear not,” he replied.  “With all the politicians raining on Hell these days, no one will pay attention to one more giant gasbag.”

Even through Hell’s frigidity, as frigid as a female fighter pilot, my first sight of Satan frozen in the ice pierced me like a dagger from Mordor.  Mortals are not meant to see such sights.  We cut the engines and we drifted in close.  “Good timing,” the Kaiser said to me.  “He’s lecturing a group of new Joint Staff officers on Hell’s strategic plan.”  I did know service on the Joint Staff was hell; now I knew why.

“Like all good plans,” the Devil began, “my strategic plan is simple.  No matter what course humans choose, what path they take, what door they open in the world I own, they come to me.  Do they embrace politics on the Left as a way to help the poor?  I have twisted that desire into Marxism, the destroyer of churches.  Do they turn to the Right?  I smeared all that was good there with the mud of fascism and Naziism.  Thank you for your good help Herr Hitler.”  Satan nodded to the Fuhrer, who was sharing an eternal plate of gefiltefisch with Stalin and Roosevelt.  The Fuhrer did not look pleased.

“Perhaps they seek to find the good causes such as environmentalism or ‘animal rights’,” the Devil continued, munching on a PETA member.  “I am twisting environmentalism into the most anti-human ideology yet conceived, and I use pets to absorb the love people should have for their own kind.”

“Of course, most humans, sheep without wool that they are, just follow the herd in seeking pleasure and entertainment.  The sensual pleasures, carried now to such extremes as to know no limits, have always been mine.  In consumerism, I have built a world economy on the sin of covetousness.”

“Even many of the Enemy’s churches are now mine.  Instead of worshipping Him Whom We Name Not, they tell the poor fools who go there, “We’re all about you.  We want to make you feel good about yourself!”  And so instead of the Enemy they worship themselves.

“Even this might not have given me victory.  But Hell Laboratories have in recent years created what philosophers call a meta-level:  the Internet, to give it its true name.  Now, whatever poor mortals seek, they seek through their computers, phones, and the Internet, which is to say me.  So powerful is this tool, whereby the image displaces the Word, there can be no escape.  Conditioning through images and, soon, through HL’s latest brilliant stroke, genetic engineering, will destroy human free will altogether.  And that will be my final victory, for it will mean that when the Enemy returns to Earth, there will be no creatures made in His own image there to meet him, at least not among the living.”

Smirking in self-satisfaction, Satan asked, “Any questions?”

Far in the back, a small claw rose tentatively into the icy miasma.  “Yes?” The Devil indulged.

A very junior imp, probably a National Guardsman, ventured, “Sir, what if people just decided to go back, you know, just dumped all the technology and ideologies and the rest of the modern stuff and returned to the old ways of living?  I think there are some people who do that, called the Amish.  If lots of people started doing it, how would your strategy work?”

With a snarl of rage, Satan lashed out, grabbed the offending imp, and bit his head off.  “Any more questions?” The Devil asked.  Most Joint Staff officers knew never to ask questions.

“That’s it, time to head home,” His Majesty ordered.  Kaleu Mathy dumped water ballast, the engines kicked over, the elevators swung and L11 rose fast, as only a Zeppelin can.  Virgil thanked us for a much easier trip than his last one — the Kaiser graciously offered to send the airship whenever he wanted to travel — and in no time we were dropping the landing lines at Nordholz.

“A most instructive trip,” I said to the Kaiser.  “I can truly say I’ve been to Hell and back.”

“Just wait until next year!” His Majesty replied.  Der Reise Kaiser indeed!

Interested in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like?  Read Thomas Hobbes’ new future history, Victoria.

The View From Olympus: Another Strategic Blunder

Last week Washington committed another strategic blunder.  On Thursday, January 4, President Trump announced a cut-off of almost all military aid to Pakistan.  This was an unfortunate and unwise strategic decision that contradicts three basic realities. 

First, the action was driven by Pakistan’s continued support for the Taliban in Afghanistan.  This is a classic strategic error, putting a lesser goal before a more important one.  Pakistan is far more important strategically than Afghanistan.  Afghanistan is a strategic backwater.  Success or failure of our efforts there means little beyond the borders of that unhappy country (Al Qaeda long ago found better bases elsewhere).  Pakistan is highly important for the whole region.  It is a nuclear power.  It has one of the few competent Islamic state militaries.  The ultimate nightmare scenario is that the already weak Pakistani state disintegrates and 4GW elements grab the nukes.  Cutting off military aid to Pakistan moves us closer to that strategic disaster.

Second, Pakistan cannot do what we want and move against the Taliban so long as the Afghan government remains aligned with India.  As I wrote in an earlier column, we should long ago have given the Afghan government an ultimatum: either de-align with India and become a very loyal ally of Pakistan or we are pulling out.  The Trump administration is correct that Pakistan holds the keys to success in our endless and largely pointless Afghan war.  But the Afghan government holds the keys to Pakistan, in the form of its alignment with India – an alignment we have encouraged, in a strategic blunder so elementary it suggests the inmates are running the asylum.

Third, we cannot support our war in Afghanistan without using logistics lines, air and ground, that run through Pakistan.  Does no one in Washington have a map?  There is an alternate (longer and more expensive) logistics route through Russia, but the same ninnies who want to weaken Pakistan have also led the charge to alienate Russia.  Do we expect to support our forces in Afghanistan from space?  Action by Pakistan, Russia, or both that finally forced us to leave Afghanistan would probably be a favor to us, since we seem unable to face reality (we’ve lost) and get out on our own.  But our troops still need an exit, unless they want to do what the British army did and remain in Afghanistan forever.

The recurrent question is how our foreign policy establishment can be so inept.  It has nothing to do with political parties or who is in the White House, although some of us voted for President Trump in hope that he would not listen to the Establishment.  The problem is that the foreign policy Establishment as a whole acts as if it is made up entirely of children.  It does so because you cannot become a member of that Establishment unless you see the world through a child’s eyes.  Our planet is a playroom in Miss Millicent’s Academy for Especially Annoying Children and Washington’s job is to make sure all the children play nicely.  We are to accomplish that impossible task by forcing democracy, consumerism, and our garbage popular culture down everyone’s throat, using the U.S. military as our long-handled spoon.  When other countries and cultures spit the poisonous mixture back up, we call in the drones and the bombers.

The only solution is to send the whole foreign policy establishment packing.  Give them a big sucker, a beanie with a propeller on top, and a swift kick out the door, with a parting suggestion they go play in the cat’s favorite sandbox.

In their place we need the sort of people we had at the Cold War’s outset, realists like George Kennan and Dean Acheson.  If it were up to me, the Foreign Service exam would consist of one essay question:  Why should every diplomat worship at the feet of Prince Bismarck?  Eating fois gras to the sound of trumpets in heaven, I’m sure the old man is laughing.

Interested in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like?  Read Thomas Hobbes’ new future history, Victoria.

Blaming the Victim

One of the feminists’ favorite bleats is that pointing the finger at the woman in any case of “sexual harassment” is “blaming the victim”.  With a wave of a witch's wand they have done away with all vamps, hussies, floozies, jades, tramps, and sluts.  Every woman is as pure as the driven snow and as innocent as Little Nell.

The game here is obvious: in cultural Marxism, the most exalted title is that of “victim”.  But if we depart from ideology and look instead at reality, we soon see that the real victims of Feminism are non-elite women and men.

Feminism has benefitted a small minority of elite women, who can now live as if they were (very successful) men.  But for the average woman, feminism has been a disaster.  Why?  Because with its promotion of no-fault divorce, it has taken away the main support of ordinary women’s lives: marriage.  Now, as they get old and fat, instead of a comfortable old age surrounded by children and grandchildren, they get dumped.  All the husband has to say is, “I want a divorce.”  The ex-wife is well past her sell-by date and is left alone, poor and miserable.  From what I have seen over a lifetime, men do a great deal better on their own than do women as they age.  I don’t know how many women of my generation have said to me, “If only I could have the life my grandmother had.”  Feminism has made that unlikely.

Men are another victim of Feminism.  The feminists’ game plan never varies.  First, on the basis of “equality” (defined as interchangeability) demanded that women be allowed into every job, including many that only a tiny handful can do such as firemen, sailor, and soldier.  When women cannot perform, the feminists demand that standards be lowered.  Then, they demand that the aggressively male culture organizations that do dangerous jobs require be altered to make it comfortable for women.  That drives the best men out.  Finally, the men who remain are put under a reign of terror where if they so much as ogle a woman they are in serious trouble, usually through a commissar system that deems the woman always innocent regardless of her behavior.  At that point, the institution is wrecked to where it cannot fulfill its purpose and everyone who depends on it becomes a real victim.

Both classical economic Marxism and cultural Marxism engage in loser worship.  “Victim” is simply the fashionable word for loser.  Both varieties of Marxism assume that losers have never become losers by their own fault.  They are losers only because they have been "oppressed" by those who are not losers.  Both Marxisms demand that society reach deep into humanity’s sewer and plop whatever it finds there on the civic altar where all must bow down and worship it.  One might call it a cacastrocracy.

This in turn reveals Marxism’s foundational trick.  It takes praiseworthy aspects of traditional Judeo-Christian societies, in this case charity for the blind, the botched, and the bewildered, carries them to an extreme and turns them into weapons against that society.  This is how the cultural Marxists took over so many universities beginning in the 1960s.  Those universities were run by liberals, but liberals who had not completely lost their grip on reality.  The cultural Marxists took those liberals’ stated values, such as world peace, tolerance, and equality, carried them to extremes, and then turned them back on the liberals.  The liberals could only respond with complete moral collapse.

Fortunately, both in the United States and in Europe, the day of moral collapse are coming to a close.  Reality is returning as a political force.  Reality tells us that if we want to keep men and women from sexually harassing each other (bat your eyelashes, girls), we have to keep them separate.  Reality facilitates doing so, because it recognizes that men and women are not interchangeable.  They are inherently different, their minds work differently and their traditional social roles reflect their inherent differences.  Women make poor firemen and soldiers, while men are lousy homemakers and child-rearers.  As always, there are individual exceptions.  But if societies are to work, they must be based on what is true of people in general.  And what is true is that feminism is a howling lie.

The View From Olympus: Getting Grand Strategy Wrong

One of the iron laws of warfare is that a higher level dominates a lower. You can be brilliant tactically, but if you are defeated operationally, you lose. You can win tactically and operationally, but if you get beaten strategically, you lose. And if you get your grand strategy wrong, you lose no matter how well you did at the lower three levels. The German Army was the best in the world for almost eighty years, but Germany lost both World Wars because its grand strategy was terrible.Having failed to copy tactical and operational excellence, we now appear instead to be imitating Berlin when it comes to grand strategy. The new national security strategy published by the White House on December 18 is a disaster. The strategy it recommends was obsolete before the ink was dry.As the New York Times reported on December 19,

Mr. Trump’s strategy contains more than a few hints of a return to a Cold War view of the world. . . China is a ‘revisionist’ power. . .Russia is also described as revisionist. . .it [the strategy] is animated by a single idea: that the world has been on a three-decade holiday from superpower rivalry and it suggests that the holiday is now over.

What a wonderful Christmas present to “terrorists”, i.e., Fourth Generation war and those who fight it! The White House just told them that instead of creating an alliance of states to fight and defeat them, we are going to put our energy into picking quarrels with the other two great powers, Russia and China – the two countries we need most as allies in defense of the state system. If 4GW were listed on the New York Stock Exchange, I’d sell all my Bitcoins and put everything into Terrorism Consolidated Amalgamated Ltd. (A financial note: critics’ argument that Bitcoins have no intrinsic value is not true. One Bitcoin is worth exactly one tulip bulb.)As I have argued repeatedly and is evident all around us to anyone who has eyes, the world is caught up in a grand strategic paradigm shift. Fourth Generation war, war waged by entities that are not states, means that the grand strategic contest for the 21st century is the fight to preserve the state system itself. To do that, we need an alliance of all states in defense of the state system. Obviously, such an alliance must begin with the two other Great Powers, China and Russia. Only after these three have united in a Triple Alliance will it be possible to bring in everyone else.The greatest hope of those seeking to undermine and destroy the state system is that instead of uniting in self-defense, states will expend their energies fighting other states. Every state vs. state conflict is a gift to the forces of Fourth Generation war, because the losing state will be so weakened that it may collapse and will certainly be more vulnerable. Yet this is exactly what the White House’s new grand strategy calls for. To quote a line from a favorite 17th century tavern song, "Huggle Duggle Duggle, the Devil Laughed Aloud.”The New York Times, whose loathing for President Trump drips from every page, referred to the new grand strategic document as “Mr. Trump’s strategy”. But is it?In his speech accompanying the paper’s release, the president said little about it. Instead of echoing its hostility toward Russia, he thanked President Putin for a call thanking our CIA for information that prevented a terrorist attack in St. Petersburg. The president said, “That’s a great thing. And that is the way it’s supposed to work.” Indeed it is, in an alliance against the forces of 4GW.As was the case with the president’s earlier speech on Afghanistan, I think we are seeing Mr. Trump say, “This isn’t the way I want to go. My instinct is to do the opposite, i.e., get out of Afghanistan and ally with Russia. But this isn’t an area I know much about so I am deferring it to my advisors.”In the early part of the 20th century, we saw another national leader, who is now unfairly looked down upon by too many historians, repeatedly defer to his foreign policy and military advisors even though he disagreed with them. That leader was Kaiser Wilhelm II. Unfortunately for Germany, he was usually right and his advisors were wrong. Had he followed his own instincts, Austria would have taken Belgrade but then stopped after Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination; had war come anyway, Germany would not have resumed unrestricted U-boat warfare in 1917, thereby bringing in the U.S. and guaranteeing Germany’s defeat.The price of Kaiser Wilhelm’s deference to his advisors was the end of his dynasty. The price of Washington intentionally renewing the Cold War instead of accepting the new grand strategic paradigm and building the alliance of all states it requires may be the end of the state system itself.

When Will the World End?

With the commemoration of Christ’s first Advent, the end of the calendar year and a widespread (and justified) sense that we are all walking on the edge of a precipice, an old question pops up again: when will the world end?  Many seers, prophets, and charlatans have predicted a date when the world will end, only to find themselves both relieved and disappointed.  Unlike them, I know with complete certainty when the world will end.  It will end on June 28, 1914.

Had Archduke Franz Ferdinand lived, we would almost certainly inhabit a better world.  There would have been no war; he was the leader of the peace party in Vienna.  Without the vast civilizational catastrophe that was World War I, the West would not have lost faith in itself, its culture, and religion.  Instead of cultural Marxism, we could still have Christian, conservative monarchy as the West’s leading paradigm.  I doubt the House of Hapsburg, which had twice repelled the Moslem hordes from the gates of Vienna, would have opened those gates to more than a million Islamic “refugees” (really migrants).  Interestingly, it is mostly states that were part of the Empire, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, that have the moral courage to say no to the EU’s refugee quotas.  Had the Archduke lived, there would be no Lenin, no Stalin, no Hitler, no Holocaust.  Israel might have been established as a province of the Ottoman Empire, under German and Austro-Hungarian protection; the Zionists were quite influential at the Viennese court and Kaiser Wilhelm II had a number of close Jewish friends.  Russia, which by 1910 had reached the economic takeoff point, would not have lost the 60 million people killed by Soviet Communism, the figure revealed when the Soviet archives were opened in 1989.  Economically, the Russian people might enjoy the same standard of living Americans have today, while still residing under a Christian monarch in an Orthodox country. 

Vienna was not only a political capital, it was a cultural capital as well, the rival of Paris.  While the cultural pessimism that now rules the West was already stirring, without World War I and the fall of the Empire it probably would not have become dominant.  Music, art, and architecture would still strive for beauty, not alienation (thank you Adorno). Nietzsche’s “transvaluation of all values,” where the old sins become virtues and the old virtues sins, would have remained the delusion of a syphilitic philosopher instead of the guiding rule of Western elites.  In the year 2017, a Hapsburg Vienna might well be the source of much of the world’s cultural and intellectual greatness.

Only a handful of people are left who understand how much was lost on that June day in 1914.  With those pistol shots in Sarajevo, the West put a gun to its own head and blew its brains out.  Our history since has been the twitching of a corpse.

In 1971, when doing graduate work in Vienna, I had the good fortune to meet the Empire face-to-face.  My landlady was Frau Baron von Garabedian-Elislago.  Her father was General von Krauss-Elislago, Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s aide-de-camp and favorite soldier.  She knew the Archduke and the last Emperor, Kaiser Karl.  As you entered her apartment, you saw two magnificent Renaissance chests, gifts to her father from the Archduke.  She could remember the picnics on the decks of Austrian battleships in the Adriatic. 

The good Frau Baron was lively, funny, and a window into all that was lost.  She spoke six languages fluently.  She enjoyed high culture as only a truly educated person can.  One night as we were coming out of the Burgtheater she gestured dismissively to two statues and said, "Those are the monkeys who founded the republic.”

Now, we Americans live in a country where the monkeys seem to be running everything.  Our downward spiral accelerates.  Soon, education and cultural levels will be so low that no one will be able to understand the value of a place governed by Christian monarchy and devoted to the life of the mind.  But Hapsburg Vienna was such a place.  Until, on June 28, 1914, the world ended.

The View From Olympus: Yellow Light

Those of us who supported President Trump in last year’s election because he promised a less interventionist foreign policy need to be aware of a rising danger.  Neo-con influence in the Trump administration seems to be on the increase.  Rumored high-level personnel changes could put neo-cons into key foreign policy positions.  Just as their neo-con predecessors led President George W. Bush into the disastrous Iraq war, a gift that keeps on giving, so today’s neo-cons want a war with Iran.

The obvious question is, how could anyone be so stupid?  War with Iran is a lose-lose proposition.  If the Iranians defeat us, we lose.  If we defeat them, we also lose because there is a high probability the Iranian state would disintegrate and Iran would become another stateless region.  That would be a huge victory for our real enemies, Islamic non-state entities such as Al Qaeda and ISIS that wage Fourth Generation war. 

The neo-cons refuse to see this because they are playing another game, a game driven by the misconceived interests of a foreign power.  To put it bluntly, many influential neo-cons are part and parcel of Israel’s Likud party.  Years ago, around the beginning of the George W. Bush administration, they helped Likud devise a strategy for Israel.  That strategy called for the United States to destroy every Middle Eastern state that could be a threat to Israel.  That was why the neo-cons pushed the Bush administration into war with Iraq.

Likud has largely abandoned that strategy since, because Iraq, Libya, and Syria showed them that destroying neighboring states merely creates new basis for far more dangerous enemies, Islamic 4GW forces.  Israel now works quietly with a number of Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, to prevent further state collapses in the region.

But there is one state Likud still seeks to destroy: Iran.  It needs the United states to attack Iran not only because it sees Iran as a deadly threat but because it wants a major Middle East war for cover as it solves the Palestinian problem.

While Likud and the U.S. both pretend to be working for a two-state solution to the problem of Palestine, in reality Likud wants a one-state solution.  The whole of the West Bank is to be annexed.  But unless Israel is then to have a majority Arab population, it must take the land but not the people.  The Palestinians must be pushed into Jordan.

Such an act of ethnic cleansing is impossible in peacetime.  World reaction would be disastrous to Israel.  In fact, population transfers, voluntary or compulsory, are sometimes the only way to solve otherwise intractable problems.  The Greek/Turkish population transfer after World War l is an example.  But left-wing world opinion now categorically rejects population transfers under any circumstances.  If, that is, they are visible.

Just as the Holocaust was only possible because something far larger was going on around it, to the point where it was hardly noticed, so ethnically cleansing the West Bank can only be done in the context of a much larger regional war.  There is only one such war that would be big enough to provide the necessary cover: a war with Iran.

Here is where the neo-cons come in.  Likud does not want to fight that war itself.  Israel can only reach Iran with air and missile attacks.  That kind of war is not sufficient to provide the necessary cover.  Enter the United States: unlike Israel, we could actually invade and attempt to conquer Iran.  The attempt would be folly and the result would be disaster for both us and Iran.  But with all that going on, who would notice some ethnic cleansing in the West Bank (at least until the job was done)?

If all this seems far-fetched, remember this is exactly how and why we invaded Iraq.  American neo-cons created that war in service to Likud and Likud’s strategy at that time.  Now, Likud has a different strategic objective.  But it still requires America to go to war, and some American neo-cons remain Likud’s humble and obedient servants.

President Trump’s supporters need to remind him that “America First” means exactly that.  We go to war only for our own interests, not for the interests of any foreign power or party.  No “America First” president would ever turn this country’s foreign policy over to agents of a foreign power.  He would never send American soldiers to die to provide cover for another country’s actions.  The neo-cons used a Republican president once.  Never again.

The View From Olympus: The OO Loop Problem

One of the more curious aspects of the current U.S. military is its institutionalization of failure.  We have lost four Fourth Generation conflicts: Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq (which is still very far from being a real state), and Afghanistan, where we are fighting but not winning.  In response, we keep doing more of the same, more perfecting of our ability to put firepower on targets.  If war could be reduced to that, we would be the greatest, military on earth.  But it can’t.

The custodians of failure are our generals and admirals.  The problem is not what they do but what they do not do.  They preside blandly over the status quo, terribly busy all the time but changing nothing.  They have half an OODA Loop.  They observe and orient – then observe again.  They make no decisions and take no actions, beyond those necessary to continue business as usual.  Their time is spent receiving contentless briefings and going to meetings where nothing is decided.  As one Marine three-star said to me, “If anyone tells you it’s fun being a general officer, it’s not.”

How did we end up with this equivalent of the Soviet Union during the Brezhnev years?  As with so many of our military problems, it comes back to our personnel system, specifically to the kind of people we promote.  Years ago, one of my students, an Air Force officer, discovered something interesting while researching his dissertation.  He found that the Air Force academy made all its cadets take the Meyer-Briggs Personality Inventory, and, much later in their careers, the National War College did the same.  He looked at the ISTJs, who are the bureaucrats:  data-oriented, risk averse, people who never color outside the lines.  At the Air Force Academy, they were one personality type among many.  By the War College, they were completely dominant.  Why?  Because one of their characteristics is that they only promote other ISTJs.

The result is evident in our general officers’ OO Loop.  ISTJs avoid making decisions and taking responsibility.  By promoting only other ISTJs they ensure our armed services cannot reform themselves.  All they can give us is more of the same, i.e., more of what has not worked.

The hard question is what to do about it.  Giving promotion boards instructions to promote non-ISTJs will do nothing.  They will nod, say “Thank you very much” and go on promoting other ISTJs.  They cannot do anything else.  To them, the whole creative side of war is “bullshit” and officers who are imaginative and take initiatives are threats to the culture of order ISTJs prize above all else. 

Reform must come from outside.  I do not have all the answers for fixing this problem, but I do see a couple starting points.  First, we need Joe Stalin’s “urge to purge”.  We have far more general officers than we need.  Cut their number to about 10% of their current strength and use the opportunity to get rid of lots of ISTJs.  We might have to use the Meyer-Briggs test to identify them, although it is a very imperfect instrument (and ISTJs will try to game the test). 

In the longer term, we need to make the ability to think, decide, and act militarily central to promotion (at present it counts for nothing).  The best way to do that, at least for combat units, was suggested years ago by Chris Bassford in his book The Spit-Shine Syndrome. Every year, every unit goes up against a unit of similar strength in a free play exercise.  The winner gets, say, 50 promotions to divide up within itself, the loser gets five.  This would reward the characteristics we need in field-grade and, later, general officers: an eagerness to decide and act, what the old German army called Verantwortungsfreudigkeit, “joy in taking responsibility”.  It was the characteristic it looked for in officer promotions.

These reforms would not be enough in themselves.  Our armed services need to look deep within and identify other ways to promote warfighters instead of bureaucrats.  Of course, they will not do so under their present leadership.  To them, all this is a threat, not a promise.  Nor can I see a force for serious military reform either in the current Administration or in Congress.

So we will probably continue on with half an OODA Loop until the whole system collapses.  That is coming, and it may be closer than our ISTJ generals and admirals think.

Sexual Harassment

No law is more deeply engraved in human nature than that which leads men to make advances towards women and women to flirt with men.  It was written there long before history began, before time began to be reckoned.  Why?  Because it is necessary for the perpetuation of the human race.

Today, cultural Marxism seeks to overturn this law, or at least half of it.  Women are to be allowed to do whatever they want, befitting their “victim” status in cultural Marxism’s hierarchy of saints and sinners.  But men--should one so much as look at a woman with a gleam in his eye, he is to be damned to eternal shame, cast out of public life, deprived of employment, and ordered to undergo psychological “re-education”, presumably so he can become a better person by turning gay.

All ideologies seek to outlaw one or more aspects of human nature.  Orthodox economic Marxism sought to outlaw the connection between labor and reward; people would work hard simply because they were helping to “build socialism”, not because doing so would gain them more money.  We saw how well that worked out in the Soviet economy.  As the workers and peasants there said, "They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.”

Past societies, including the Victorians whom we should take as our models, also disapproved of advances and flirtations.  But knowing  as they did that they were dealing with a powerful force in human nature, they sought to limit it the only way it can be limited: by keeping men and women separate.  On the occasion when young men and young women mingled, they did so under the watchful eyes of chaperones.  And if Bobby and Betty Sue were left alone for a bit on the back porch, well, it was expected he would soon propose.

Cultural Marxism, in contrast, demands in the name of “equality” that men and women be put in the closest physical proximity, sometimes, as in military situations, literally cheek to jowl.  But if the man shows the slightest awareness he is with a woman, he is condemned for “sexual harassment”. In effect, the man must play the eunuch.  We may find that politically cutting our soldiers’ nuts off is not the very best way to make them fight.  And in the civilian world as well as the armed forces, every man must live in mortal terror of a woman accusing him of the dreaded crime.  The fact that the accusation may be false, that women know they can destroy male coworkers they do not like with a simple charge of “sexual harassment”, is unimportant.  The accused has as much chance of survival as did those in Stalin’s Soviet Union who were charged with being “an enemy of the people”.

Are the cultural Marxists insane to think they can simply outlaw so basic an aspect of human nature?  Not at all.  That is not their real objective.  Unlike the old economic Marxists, who painted a rosy if impossible picture of the Communist paradise they sought to create, the intellectuals of the Frankfurt School who created cultural Marxism offered no positive alternative vision.  Their sole purpose, in their own words, was “negation”, or “negative dialectics” – simply bringing everything down.  They were nihilists.  And if your goal is ripping your society apart, there is no better way to do it than to outlaw basic aspects of human nature and punish anyone who transgresses by acting human.  That is what cultural Marxism does on every aspect of identity; religious, ethnic, sexual, you name it.  Any normal human behavior, and especially any male behavior, is to be punished.

Both here and in Europe, the reaction against cultural Marxism is building.  Goaded beyond endurance, normal men and women are rebelling.  They are rejecting cultural Marxism’s “experiments against reality”, to borrow Roger Kimball’s apt phrase.

The cultural Marxists love denouncing any opponents as “fascists”.  Fascism has been dead for more than 70 years.  But cultural Marxism may well create a groundswell of opposition from the right that will take new and different forms.  If that is the only way to put a stop to the endless war on men, Whites, and Christians, let it come.

Changing the Context

As President Trump knows well, he has not been very successful in getting the measures he wants through Congress.  One way to improve his chances of doing so is to change the context.

Relations with Russia provide an example.  The president knows our hostility towards Russia makes no sense.  Communism has fallen, we have no interests that should lead us to oppose Russia and Russia is resuming her 19^th century role as the most conservative of the great powers.  Russia should be our ally, not our enemy. 

The Washington establishment wants a hostile relationship with Russia because it is still thinking in the context of a world of states in conflict.  Any other powerful state (including China) that does not bow to American hegemony must be seen as an enemy.  The purpose of all the clucking and squawking about the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russia is to scare the administration away from improving relations with Moscow.  Unfortunately, that trick seems to be working. 

But what if the administration responded by changing the context?  President Trump could easily explain to the American people that the real threat we face is not any other state (except perhaps North Korea) but “terrorism” (really 4GW) from non-state entities, of which ISIS is only one.  To beat the terrorists, we need an alliance with Russia and China, because they are the other two great powers.  In fact, that alliance would only be the beginning.  We should work with Moscow and Beijing to create an alliance of all states against violent non-state entities.  If we want a relatively peaceful, ordered, and safe 21^st century, that is what we have to do.    

The public can understand that logic.  And with it, they can see why we need good relations with Russia.  President Putin has suggested several times that Russia and America work together against terrorism.  Once the people see past the obsolete conflict among states and accept the new context created by 4GW, the establishment is left high and dry.  Its desire for a hostile relationship with Russia will be perceived as senseless, as it is.  In the new context, the president’s preferred policy can move forward.

      Another area where the President could change the context to his advantage is the fight against Political Correctness.  Most of the public has come to hate Political Correctness and its attempts to play censor, telling us what words we may or may not use and what thoughts we may and may not think.  Part of the reason Mr. Trump was elected was because he rejected and attacked Political Correctness, as he has continued to do.

But his efforts to combat it would be far more powerful if he explained to the American people that Political Correctness is really Cultural Marxism, Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms.  Once the Left and its endless cries of “racism, sexism, and homophobia” are exposed as a form of Marxism, their legitimacy will crumble.  People know that other varieties of Marxism killed tens of millions in the 20^th century.  They see that “PC,” cultural Marxism, is equally tyrannical on college campuses where it has taken control.  If President Trump changed the context of the cultural debate from “social justice” to “cultural Marxism,” he would sweep the Left from the board.

Every time Trump changes the context of the political debate on an issue, he will open the door to creating the new, enduring coalition of the anti-establishment Right and elements from the antiestablishment Left (i.e., Sanders voters) that should be the conservatives’ goal.  It is difficult or impossible to get voters to change sides in the current political trench warfare.  But if you move the debate out of the trench lines by putting it in a new context, the battlefield becomes much more fluid.  New alignments become possible.  And the agenda President Trump campaigned on can win.

The View From Olympus: The Hezbollah Model Wins

When we think of ISIS’s enemies, we usually list religions other than Islam, Islamics who reject Sunni puritanism, local states, Western states and so on.  But from the perspective of Fourth Generation war theory, ISIS’s most important competition may be with Hezbollah.  These two Islamic Fourth Generation entities represent two different models of 4GW.  Hezbollah’s model hollows out the state where it is based but leaves it standing.  The ISIS model does away with the state and creates a replacement in the form of a caliphate, which is a pre-state type of government.  (Ironically, the ultra-puritan ISIS proclaimed a caliphate that, under Islamic law, is illegitimate, because the legitimate caliph is still the head of the house of Osman; the Ottoman sultan was also a caliph). 

The competition between these two approaches to Fourth Generation war is ending, and the verdict is clear: the Hezbollah model wins.  This does not come as a great surprise, except possibly to ISIS.  By seizing territory and proclaiming a caliphate, ISIS opened itself up to defeat by state militaries.  Those state militaries could fight the way they are trained and equipped to, in a war of firepower and attrition where the goal is to seize and hold ground.  Whenever 4GW forces take on state armed forces in that kind of fight, they are likely to lose.  They are pitting their physical weakness against their opponents’ greatest strength, which lies in the tactical/physical box on the grid.  (For the grid, see the Fourth Generation Warfare Handbook.)

In contrast, the Hezbollah model uses a hollowed-out state to shift the conflict away from the tactical/physical box to 4GW entities’ greatest strength, the box marked strategic/moral (Col. John Boyd argued this is the most powerful box, while the tactical/physical box is the weakest in determining the ultimate outcome.)  The Lebanese state protects Hezbollah strategically and morally because it is impossible to attack Hezbollah’s base without also attacking the nominally sovereign state of Lebanon.  Because the international ruling elite regards attacks on other states, especially weak states that themselves pose no threat, as morally wrong, the attacker quickly finds himself condemned and isolated.  This, more than Hezbollah’s tactical strength, is why ((((((((((Our Greatest Ally))))))))))’s attempts to attack Hezbollah on Lebanese soil have resulted in defeat, although Hezbollah is much better tactically than most other 4GW entities.

ISIS may now attempt to revert to the Hezbollah model, but I think it is unlikely to succeed.  That model requires years of patient development and serving rather than oppressing the local population, and I doubt ISIS is capable of either.  The fall of its illegitimate caliphate will erode its ability to recruit and to secure funding, and like Al Qaeda it will become a wraith of its former self. 

But just at this point of success the West’s inability to understand Fourth Generation war will set it up again for failure.  Western governments fall into the trap of defining their enemies as this or that particular 4GW bogeyman:  al Qaeda or ISIS or Hamas or whatever.  In doing so, they miss the forest for the trees.  4GW entities, Islamic or otherwise, come and go.  Each particular entity matters relatively little.  What matters is that they can generate themselves endlessly so long as we miss the real threat, in the form of the ground from which they all spring.  That ground is the crisis of legitimacy of the state.  As Martin van Creveld said to me many years ago, everyone can see it except the people in the capital cities.

The origin of the crisis of legitimacy, in turn, is the emptying the state of its content, something the Globalist elite demands.  This “internationalist” view has been dominant among the global elite since the end of World War I, and you cannot now dissent from it and remain a member of the elite.    That is why the elite so fears and loathes President Trump, who represents the return of state sovereignty – and with it a resurgent legitimacy of the state.  Such a resurgence is the only thing that can defeat not this or that 4GW entity, but 4GW itself at the decisive strategic/moral level. 

Does this make 4GW and the Globalist elite de facto allies?  Draw your own conclusion.

The View From Olympus: The North Korean Threat to China

America’s fixation on the threat from North Korea’s missiles and nuclear weapons evinces the usual American dive into the weeds.  If we instead stand back a bit and look at the strategic picture, we quickly see that the North Korean threat to China is far greater than its threat to us.

North Korea is unlikely to launch a nuclear attack on the United States.  However, if North Korea retains its nuclear weapons, it is likely to lead South Korea, Japan, and possibly Taiwan, Australia and Vietnam to go nuclear themselves.  From the Chinese perspective, that would be a strategic catastrophe. 

China has never sought world domination, nor is it likely to do so.  Its distaste for barbarians, who include everyone not Chinese, is such that it wants to maintain its distance from them.  However, maintaining that distance requires a buffer zone around China, which historically China has sought and is seeking again now.

At present, the main obstacle to creating that buffer zone of semi-independent client states is the United States.  That is a strategic blunder on our part.  Such a buffer zone is no threat to the U.S. or to its vital interests.

However, China knows American power is waning and the American people are tired of meaningless wars on the other side of the world.  Despite America, China’s influence on the states in her proximity is rising.  She can afford to be patient.

In contrast, if the states on China’s periphery get nuclear weapons, her quest to dominate them is permanently blocked.  An American presence is no longer required to balk her ambitions.  Even weak states such as Vietnam can stop her cold if they have nukes.  Her border states, instead of serving as a buffer, become dangerous threats sitting right on her frontiers.  Even if she should defeat one of them, the damage she would suffer in a nuclear exchange would knock her out of the ranks of the great powers and might cause her to come apart internally, which is the Chinese leadership’s greatest fear because it has so often happened throughout her history. 

President Trump will soon be visiting China.  If he and those around him ask the all-important question, “What would Bismarck do?”, they should be able to motivate China to finally do what is necessary with North Korea, namely give it an offer it cannot refuse.

The script runs roughly like this.  President Trump makes the case about the need to restrain North Korea’s nuclear program.  Instead of threatening trade or other measures if China refuses, he simply says, “If North Korea retains its nukes and delivery systems, we can no longer advise our allies in Asia not to go nuclear.  We will of course regret such nuclear proliferation, but we will also understand why they have to develop their own nuclear weapons.  In some cases, we may find it necessary to assist them with delivery systems such as missile-equipped submarines.  Of course, nuclear weapons in the hands of our allies are not a threat to the United States.”  He need not add that they will be a threat to China.

Nation’s foreign policies are not motivated by other nation’s needs.  Beijing does not care about the threat North Korean nukes pose to the U.S.  But nations are motivated by their own interests, and if we put North Korea’s nukes in this context, the context of the strategic threat reactions to them pose to China, that is a different kettle of fish.

In turn, we need to remember Bismarck’s dictum that politics is the art of the possible.  North Korea is unlikely to give up all its nuclear weapons.  However, at the demand of Beijing, Pyongyang can probably be brought to limiting their number and the range of their delivery systems.  Beijing could also offer to put an anti-missile system such as the Russians' S-400 on North Korea’s border to shoot down any South Korean first strike.  North Korea could still use its few nukes to deter an American first strike, even if they could not reach beyond South Korea.

Are the Pentagon, State Department, and White House capable of Bismarckian Realpolitik? President Trump’s own instincts lead him that way.  Whether his administration can follow is open to doubt.

President Trump's Fateful Choice

President Trump ran as a Republican, but he did not win as a Republican.  He won as a populist.  If he is to be a successful president and win re-election, he needs to make a fateful choice: will he govern as a populist or as a Republican?  If he chooses the latter, he will fail.

Unfortunately, the president seems to be leaning more and more towards governing as a Republican.  The tax reform proposal he recently offered is classic Republican:  it may benefit the middle class indirectly by creating more jobs, but its direct beneficiaries are high-income people.  One simple change would transform it into a populist measure: a high tax rate, say 75%, on earned incomes over $1,000,000 annually (indexed for inflation).  The people who elected Mr. Trump would cheer.

On the vexing problem of health insurance, the president’s latest action, cutting government subsidies to insurance companies to subsidize low income people, may hurt Trump voters.  Many of his supporters have modest incomes. They are not Republicans with money to burn.  The populist answer to health care is Medicare for all, with Medicare’s ability to control prices.  The origin of the health care affordability problem is grossly excessive prices for anything labelled “medical”. Any policy that does not deal with those prices is a band-aid.

In foreign and defense policy, Trump voters do not want more unnecessary wars halfway around the world that kill our kids and waste our money.  That is the populist position: America first.  If we are attacked, we fight, but why should young Americans die in the centuries-old war between Sunni and Shiite Islamics?  Here again, President Trump seems to be governing as a Republican, not a populist.  Continuing the futile war in Afghanistan, re-involving ourselves on the ground in Iraq, putting “advisors” in Syria, spooling up the long-standing and strategically meaningless war of words with North Korea—none of this is populist.  It all comes from the playbook of Republicans such as Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who cannot stand the thought that there is a quarrel somewhere in the world in which the U.S. is not involved.

I suspect President Trump knows the Republicans have taken over his administration and pushed the populism that elected him to the side.  Unfortunately, he seems not to know what to do about it.  There are sources of ideas and people from which he could assemble a different, populist-conservative agenda and set of advisors.  I write for one of them, The American Conservative magazine.

What the Republicans in and around the White House do not understand, in addition to the bankruptcy of the Republican “we serve the rich” agenda, is that populism is the wave of the future, both here and in Europe and on the Left as well as the Right.  Establishment Republicans and Democrats alike fear populism.  But to a president elected because he was seen as a populist, the populist wave of the future is one he should seek to ride.  If not President Trump then someone else will combine the Trump and Sanders voters into a new, enduring political majority that will shape America’s future agenda.  In the end, it is not President Trump or Senator Sanders who is important.  It is the people who voted for both.

The View From Olympus: Korea and Iran

North Korea and Iran now appear to be the two trouble spots most likely to drag the United States into another war.  Seen from the State Department and the Pentagon, both cases seem somewhat alike.  But if we look at them through the lens of Fourth Generation War, they could not be more different.

North Korea offers one of the few situations where we could, at least in theory, win a war.  That is to say, if North Korea were defeated, we would not end up creating another stateless region that would quickly become dominated by Fourth Generation entities.  Why is this the case?  Because a defeat of the current North Korean regime and its subsequent collapse would almost certainly lead to immediate union with South Korea.  That would be an economic disaster for the South, at least in the short term.  But it would not spread the plague of statelessness that is the main threat to the U.S. and every other state in the 21^st century.

That is not to say that war with North Korea is desirable.  No war’s outcome is predictable.  If the North Korean regime collapsed immediately after our first blow, we might well win.  If it did not, then our chances of victory would diminish sharply.  An infantry fight with the North Korean army could easily turn into a disaster, and the longer the war went on, the greater would be the probability of other countries intervening.  As I have argued before, the U.S. has no real strategic interests at stake on the Korean peninsula.  But China, Russia, and Japan do.

The Iranian case is entirely different.  The Iranian state is relatively fragile.  Persians are not an ethnic majority, and Iran has long faced a variety of separatist movements.  A war with Iran, even if the U.S. defeated the current state of Iran, could easily create the same chaos we authored in Iraq, Libya, and (as a bit player) Syria.  The result would be a greater threat to American interests in the region than that now represented by the Iranian state. 

This is the conundrum presented to our foreign and defense policies in most of the world: Fourth Generation war means war with other states offers only a lose-lose proposition.  If the other states defeat us, we lose.  If we defeat the other state we also lose because it disintegrates into stateless disorder.

In general, President Trump’s instincts lead him in the right direction.  But that does not appear to be the case with Iran.  It is important both the President and Congress understand that if we renounce the current agreement with Iran curbing its nuclear program, we are deciding to go to war.  It is possible that Iran would take opportunity to isolate the U.S. diplomatically by upholding the agreement with the other signatories.  But Iran would be more likely to resume its nuclear program and thus dare the U.S. to respond.  Almost any response with a potential to halt Iran’s nuclear program would mean war, with the lose-lose outcome I have already pointed out.

In both cases President Trump would do well to remember Bismarck’s description of preventive war as “committing suicide for fear of being killed.”  The Pentagon can put together a razzle-dazzle first strike plan that seems a sure thing.  But “shock and awe” has been seen before, and in the long run we were the ones who ended up shocked if not awed.  None of the perpetrators of the disastrous invasion of Iraq expected that war to be going on in 2017, with many twists and turns and more yet to come.

The West IS White Supremecist

Anyone who has been following the recent cultural movement by SJWs and People of Colour™ to undermine the last vestiges of traditional Western civilisation in both Europe and in the Anglosphere has seen the attempt to discredit our remaining institutions by declaring them “white supremacist.”  Building upon their efforts to use Charlottesville, Richard Spencer, and “Neo Nazis” as a foil, practically everything related to the history, institutions, traditions, religion, and heroic mythology in the USA and other Western nations has now been morally reprobated by our modern day Puritans on the radical Left.  America’s police and criminal justice system is white supremacist since blacks and browns find themselves disproportionately caught up in its clutches.  America’s educational system is white supremacist for not granting Harriet Tubman equal time with Thomas Jefferson.  Christopher Columbus has been relegated to the status of mass murderer and genocidal Nazi for merely discovering the American continents.  Figures and institutions in European nations are similarly condemned.  Even such abstractions as logic and reason are openly ridiculed and condemned as white supremacist by anti-white PoCs spearheading the cultural marxist movement to destroy Western civilisation.On many levels, one cannot blame the white nationalists for reacting as they do.  When someone is – literally – trying to destroy your culture and civilisation and people, it is natural to want to fight back and to expel the intruders, especially when the intruders have a much greater tendency to be socially dyscivic criminals, rapists, welfare mooches, and general troublemakers.As much as it pains me to agree in any way with the SJWs, however, they are correct in their bare assertions about the white supremacist nature of our institutions.  It is in their reaction to this, in their efforts to undermine and overthrow these institutions, that they are grossly negligent and worthy of our condemnation.  Allow me to explain what I mean.Let me begin by dispensing with the ridiculous civic nationalist notion that the West, while built by white Europeans and their descendants, could have been done by anyone.  This is not at all the case.  Whites – Europeans and their child stocks – are different people from others.  The fundamental reality about human biodiversity as it relates to whites vis-à-vis everyone else is that they are generally higher IQ than most everyone except for the northeast Asians, and they are generally more aggressive and inventive than the northeast Asians.  Whites combined these and other traits – intelligence, aggressiveness, individualism, inventiveness, speculativeness, and others – to develop a unique set of cultures (Western civilisation) which is really quite different from every other civilisation that this world has produced.  Western civilisation, and by derivation the cultures of its various substituent clades and subclades, is the product of this broad genetic group of people whose inborn traits acted in synergy with their religion and culture and languages.  It could only have been created by these unique combinations, and it cannot be maintained without any or all of the components of these same combinations.As such, it IS fair to say that institutions in white countries were built by white people and FOR white people.  Hence, they ARE white supremacist in the sense that they operate on essentially white, European-derived norms and assumptions and were created as a result of centuries, and even millennia, of experiences and the agglutination of successful traditions.  White cultures were made for white people, and as recent history continues to show, they only work for white people.  The SJWs and racial grievance-mongers in the radical progressive movement are not incorrect in recognising these facts.Where they are incorrect is in asserting that there is anything wrong with this.In point of fact, there is absolutely nothing wrong – not a single, solitary, blessed thing – with whites developing institutions that work for them, even if it leaves other peoples (at least those who refuse to assimilate to white standards of behaviour and mindset) at a disadvantage when trying to navigate within white-originated societies.  The same can be said for any other group of people.  It is equally legitimate for east Asian cultures to structure their societies in ways which reflect their traditions, preferences, and assumptions, even if whites or blacks or browns may often find themselves mystified when trying to manoeuvre their way through.  The same goes for the Indians, for the Muslims, for the Africans, for the Latin Americans.  This is why we have different cultures, and (generally speaking) different countries to go with them.  A place for everyone, and everyone in his place, and all that.Not surprisingly, this fact has been recognised widely even within this planet’s long history of imperialism.  While conquerors always assert political dominance over their weaker enemies – assessing tribute or slaves or territorial concessions – it is rather rare for imperialists to actually try to eliminate the cultures of their prey and replace them with their own.  The Romans did not do so.  The British did not do so.  The Romans were content to let the Gauls continue to be Gauls, and to operate under their own laws and mores.  The British generally did the same in India and Africa and any other place where the natives were already thickly settled and displayed native cultures.  Typically, the imperialists did not try to navigate these native cultures, but neither did they try to force those they colonised to adopt their own norms.  Individuals may do so, and advance in the imperialists’ own system, but it was not made obligatory to do so.This is what makes the situation with our modern day SJWs so different.  It can fairly be said that “middle America” and “village Europe” are under occupation by a hostile culture – this being the cosmopolitan, deracinating, post-liberal culture of the transnational élite and their SJW underlings.  SJWism itself seeks to destroy traditional white cultures, those belonging to the “wrong sort of white people.”  I’ve pointed out previously that SJWism is itself a form of cultural imperialism, and it has been elsewhere observed that even the most inane of left-wing causes are really just ways to humiliate and compel submission to SJW culture.However, SJWism is still essentially a white culture.  All of its assumptions – the goodness of democracy, the equality and fungibility of all peoples, the essential materialism of all its social and economic positions – are basically those of white modernism and flow from the direction of historical forces in play for centuries.  As a result, even SJWism is white supremacy – as the ACLU recently found out.  Thus, the racial grievance movements fabricated by the progressive Left, once they began breaking the chains of their alliance with white leftists, have begun to openly demand that even white liberals “shut up and listen” and fall prostrate before Big Black and Aunty Aztlán.The problem for these folks is that they find white civilisation, in its entirety, to be structured against them.  And it really is.  After all, if you’re a black who still carries (however subconsciously) a good deal of West African derived culture, then white institutions like patriarchy (patrilocal marriage, men as the primary providers, etc.), private property, the rule of law, and other European-derived social standards will seem somewhat foreign and rankling to you.  This is doubly the case when your distant native cultures (still passed on to you in diluted form even after centuries of contact with whites) originally worked for a low IQ population with low time preferences and high aggression.  In Africa, men could hunt while the women did the “grunt work,” and could fight to the death if “dissed” by other men.  In a high-IQ, high time preference white rule of law culture, this doesn’t work.  When black drug dealers kill each other over turf or honour, they go to the white man’s jail.  (Most) whites see this as entirely just.  Many blacks see it as an affront.  Whites tend to not be sympathetic to a black thug who robs a liquor store and then tries to take away a police officer’s gun, getting shot in the process.  Whites see it as justice served.  Blacks see it as a swipe at their tribal identity and dignity.And the thing about culture is that it is pervasive.  Despite what many seem to think, culture is not just a matter of  superficialities like “exotic” foods or manners of dress.  Instead, cultures from top to bottom are shot through with interlocking sets of assumptions, mores, traditional modes, and taboos which cannot simply be transferred piecemeal.  In many ways cultures are all or nothing – either you adopt the whole thing or you are left outside.  Cultures are perfectly adapted to sort between the in-group and the Other.This is why the racial grievance quacks in our Western societies know they have to completely undermine Western civilisation in toto if they are to replace whites as the ruling power in our own countries (and make no mistake, that is exactly what the end game is for the transnational élite, because blacks and browns are generally more pliable and easily cowed than whites are).  No vestige of white, European civilisation can remain.  Hence, the laws and morals must be destroyed.   The statues and heroes must be overturned.  Our history, and especially the classics upon which our traditions and assumptions are built, must be erased from knowledge.  Shakespeare must be replaced with Audre Lorde (I’d never heard of her, either).  Whites must be browbeaten into accepting their own evil and the banishment of their civilisation.  When the white nationalists argue that white genocide is planned, the honest and informed person is hard-pressed to counter their assertion.This underlies the related claim made by People of Colour™ that “whites don’t have any culture,” presumably because we didn’t dress up in feathers and eat human hearts at our festivals.  Obviously the assertion is ridiculous on its face.  The professional PoCs know this, which is why they’re spending so much time trying to undermine white cultures by simultaneously flooding us with hostile, inassimilable third worlders while seeing to erase every expression of exactly these cultures.  But they have to make the claim if they are to justify these erasures.The problem isn’t that whites don’t have culture, but that their cultures are too successful, and are practically irresistible when matched against anyone else’s.  Again, whites are different from other peoples, and their cultures will reflect these differences.  Even pre-modern whites, basically everyone from the classical world to medieval Europeans living prior to the Renaissance, thought and acted differently than did other traditional societies.  The Greeks were very different from non-Europeans.  So were the Romans.  So were the Germans who adopted Christian Roman culture.  So were, for that matter, the pagan Vikings.  And so on.  Even the most religiously-minded of Europeans was more rational (though not rationalistic or materialistic) than practically all non-Europeans on Earth during those times.  Whites naturally do philosophy and science and theology and technology, and this is reflected all across their cultures and in Western civilisation.  This is why logic, reason, and even the concept of objective truth itself are now derided as “white supremacist.” These allow whites to do the things that they do. Even when white Europeans were being distempered by modernism, their cultures were still more successful than those they encountered during the march of European imperialism.Thus, when the professional PoCs talk about “fighting white supremacy,” what they really, actually, truly mean is “overturning Western civilisation,” since that civilisation was built by and for white Europeans and their kindred peoples who colonised major portions of the globe.  Objectively speaking, Western civilisation is superior.  Both in its underlying features and in its overt, empirical results, the West is more successful, more “fit” (in the biological sense of the term) and has brought the world a great deal of underappreciated good.  To see this overwhelmed and destroyed by the machinations of the globalists would be a tremendous loss to humanity.  While there are many elements of the West that need to be unpozzed and restored to their traditional goodness, the overarching structure itself must not be allowed to fall.  If the West falls, high civilisation goes with it.  Hence, we need to recognise that white supremacy, in the sense described above, is not only not bad, but is in fact very good, and very necessary if we are to retain Western civilisation in any sort of recognisable form. This article was originally published at Neo-Ciceronian Times.

The View From Olympus: On the Nature of Fleets

Four recent incidents in the Pacific Fleet, including two in which destroyers collided with merchant ships, killing U.S. Navy sailors, have brought a rash of consequences.  Careers have been terminated, the basics of navigation have received new emphasis (including a wise return to pencils and paper instead of electronic devices) and the Navy’s on-watch/off-watch cycle has been altered.  But one of the most basic reasons for our overworked, overstressed Navy has received no attention.  We seem to have forgotten the nature of fleets.

Fleets are mobile.  This is why navies are so important to would-be world powers.  Moving an army to some distant part of the world and supplying it there is a massive and therefore slow operation.  Fleets, in contrast, can move quickly over long distances.

This is not something new, or a consequence of modern technology.  It came in the 16^th century with the displacement of galleys by large sailing ships.  By the time of Sir Frances Drake and the Spanish Armada, ships and fleets could get to any part of the globe accessible by water.  The strategic mobility of fleets was actually undermined by new technology in the form of steam propulsion.  Because steamships had to coal frequently, they were more dependent on the land than were ships driven by the wind.  The replacement of coal by oil for fuel and then of steam by fuel-efficient diesels for propulsion restored most of the strategic mobility ships and fleets had in the day of sail.  Both can now move quickly from home ports to any sea where their presence is required.

What this means, and has meant for centuries, is that most of the time ships and fleets are in their home ports.  Small detachments may be stationed around the world, the gunboats of gunboat diplomacy.  But gunboat diplomacy worked because the gunboat was a reminder of the powerful fleet that could come quickly if the gunboat needed support.  Other than these gunboats and small detached squadrons, the rest of the navy was comfortably at rest in its home harbors.  There was, and is, no need for it to be anywhere else, not only in peacetime but often also in war.  It can go where it needs to when it needs to.

The U.S. Navy seems to have forgotten this central aspect of the nature of fleets – and not only the Navy, but policy-makers who direct the Navy as well.  The incidents in the Pacific Fleet are being ascribed in part to the exhaustion of officers and sailors whose ships are deployed virtually all the time. The Navy claims this shows it needs more ships.  What it actually needs is to remember it is a Navy.  It is by its nature mobile.  Those ships do not need to be deployed, most of them anyway. 

In the past, when navies had to deploy most of their strength over long periods, they had great difficulty sustaining themselves.  The Royal Navy, by the time of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, had developed a unique ability to maintain large fleets on duty blockading French ports for years on end.  Individual ships, not just fleets, found themselves blockading Brest or Toulon for months or sometimes years, touching land only to obtain fresh water and fresh food.  Again, this was easier with sailing ships than with ships powered by engines, and also with crews who had no fixed term of enlistment.

In 1914, when that same Royal Navy had to keep the sea for several months until Scapa Flow could be made into a secure anchorage, the strain on both ships and men was enormous.  That is the same strain now afflicting our Pacific Fleet and perhaps the rest of the Navy as well.  The difference is that it is not necessary.  It is a consequence of forgetting the nature of fleets.

Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, who is very well read in military history, should understand this.  He should not wait for the Navy to remember the nature of fleets.  Nor should he allow the State department or the White House to make demands on the Navy that reflect ignorance of navies’ inherent mobility.  Most of the time, most of the U.S. Navy’s ships should be in home port.  It is Secretary Mattis’s job to put them there.

The View From Olympus: President Trump is Right About Sovereignty

On September 19, President Donald Trump addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations for the first time.  To the horror of the Globalist elite, the focus of his speech was sovereignty.  In a front-page “analysis” the hyperventilating New York Times reported that he used the term 21 times: “But more important than how he defined sovereignty was Mr. Trump’s adoption of the word itself.”                                                     

Mr. Trump . . . used the words sovereign or sovereignty 21 times.  “Our success”, he said, “depends on the coalition of strong, independent nations that embrace their sovereignty to promote security, prosperity, and peace for themselves and for the world.”

Strong, sovereign nations, he said, keep their citizens safe and enable them to prosper economically.  Strong, sovereign nations, he said, can join together to fight common threats and constitute the irreducible building blocks of world institutions like the United Nations.

Mr. Trump is right.  But to understand just how right he is, we need to look at his stress on sovereignty from the perspective of the new realities created by the rise of Fourth Generation War. 

As I have said many times, Fourth Generation war is above all a contest for legitimacy.  On the one side is the state and the international state system.  On the other side is a vast array of alternative primary loyalties ranging from God through gangs to “animal rights”.

Since World War I, global (and now Globalist) elites have sought to transfer people’s primary loyalty away from the state to supra-national entities: The League of Nations, world peace (the Kellog-Briand Treaty), The United Nations, The European Union, world federalism, etc.  The idea was that by replacing nationalism with internationalism, we could put an end to war.  This was of course a utopian quest; as Martin van Creveld has written, war exists because men like to fight and women like fighters.  But global elites’ feet tend to be anchored in the clouds, not on earth.

Globalism has in fact led people to transfer their primary loyalty away from the state.  But they have not transferred it to Globalist institutions.  Instead, they are transferring their primary loyalties to those more focused, more concrete (yes, God is more real than Globalism), and often more local entities, causes, etc.  In other words, Globalism has ended up feeding Fourth Generation war.

President Trump is correct to stress sovereignty because sovereign states are better able to contest 4GW elements for people’s primary loyalty than are Globalist institutions and causes.  It is much easier to get the average American or Briton or (as President Putin understands) Russian to be loyal to his country than the EU or the UN.  States can still compete effectively for popular legitimacy.  Supra-state, bureaucratic entities, especially those that benefit primarily the elites, cannot.

So President Trump is ahead of the New York Times and the rest of the foreign policy elite that so loathes him in facing the 21^st century’s main challenge, uphold the state system in the face of the 4GW challenge.  Does he know that?  Probably not.  His instincts are generally good, and they may give him a valid gut feeling that state sovereignty remains important.  I doubt if he has ever heard of Fourth Generation war, although John Kelly certainly has.  But the unfortunate fact is that almost no one in Washington gets 4GW, in part because it is useless for justifying vast budgets and hi-tech weapons systems.  In Washington, the only war that matters is the budget war.

In the real world, Fourth Generation war changes everything.  The whole foreign policy framework accepted by virtually everyone in D.C. becomes obsolete; the contrasts and conflicts that matter are no longer those between states.  The main threat the United States faces is neither Russia nor China.  It is the spreading collapse of states and the rise among their ruins of an endless variety of 4GW entities and loyalties, some of which easily reach around our vast national security apparatus and establish themselves on our soil, as some have already done.

To confront this threat, we need exactly what President Trump called for: an alliance of sovereign states, ideally of all sovereign states.  Mr. Trump gets it.  Too bad he is the only man in town who does.   

Nazism and Fascism Are Dead

On both sides of the political spectrum the words “Nazi” and “Fascist” have come in common use.  I have bad news for both the nuts carrying swastika flags and the thugs known as the “Antifa” (for the “Anti-fascists”): Nazism and Fascism are dead.

Fascism and its younger, illegitimate brother Nazism were products of specific historical circumstances that bear no resemblance to today’s America.  Both sprang from tremendous anger at the outcome of World War I in two countries that suffered heavily in that conflict, Germany and Italy.  Having agreed to an armistice it thought would lead to a peace based on Wilson’s Fourteen Points, Germany was instead handed the Diktat of Versailles, which both humiliated and impoverished the country.  Thanks to her usual treachery, Italy was on the winning side (she was allied to Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1914), but the other Allied Powers treated her with contempt and she gained little at the Versailles Conference, after suffering a million casualties.  Italy had the outlook of a defeated country.

Fascism and Nazism were responses to defeat.  They worshipped strength, despised weakness, and sought to leave behind the whole Christian component of Western culture and return to the value system of the ancient world where power was the highest good.  Fatally, both turned an instrumental virtue, will, into a substantive virtue; the act of will was good in itself regardless of what was willed.  This led to such disasters as Mussolini’s entry into World War II, Hitler’s offhand declaration of war on the United States, and the Holocaust.  Italian Fascism was not race-based, but Nazism offered an ideology’s usual single-factor explanation of history in the form of Aryan supremacy.  As the joke ran in Germany, the ideal Aryan was blond like Hitler and slim like Goering.

There is nothing visible on the American political landscape that is likely to re-create either Fascism or Nazism.  More, each depend on one man, and both Mussolini and Hitler have been dead for more than 70 years.  Mussolini had one potential successor who could have kept the Fascism movement going, Marshal Italo Balbo, but he was killed at the beginning of the war, perhaps not accidentally (he opposed Italy’s entry and asked if Mussolini had gone mad).  Below Hitler, there was no one in the Nazi hierarchy who could have taken over.  The political emptiness of Nazism without Hitler was illustrated by the choice to succeed him as Fuhrer after his death: Admiral Doenitz.

So why do we now have a violent “Antifa” that pretends to be fighting Fascism while themselves behaving like Brownshirts?  The answer is another of cultural Marxism’s words that lie.  The cultural Marxists have given Fascism a new, code-word definition that is contradictory to its actual meaning.  In their vocabulary, “Fascism” is any defense of traditional society and cultural.

Where does this come from?  Actual Fascism was strongly modernist and future-focused, as opposed to “reactionaries” as the Reds.  As is so often the case, it comes from the Frankfurt School and its most creative mind, Theodor Adorno.  In a series of “Studies in Prejudice” that culminated with his immensely influential book The Authoritarian Personality, Adorno argued that all of society’s traditional institutions, starting with the family, produced “prejudice” that became “Fascism.”  His book, which pretended to be a work of sociology (now completely debunked as such), offered an “F-scale” to measure how “Fascist” a person was by determining their attitudes toward every aspect of normal life.  The more normal the person skewed, the higher was his potential to be a “Fascist.”

When the left now uses the term “Fascist” or, less frequently, “Nazi”, it is Adorno’s definition they are using.  Anyone who lives a normal life, with a married mother and father, children, the father as the breadwinner and the mother as the homemaker, going to church, not caring much about politics, is a “Fascist”.  As such, they are all under threat of physical assault by the “Antifa”.

While Fascism and Nazism are dead ideologies, cultural Marxism is an ideology that is alive, dangerous, and increasingly totalitarian.  As we see on too many university campuses, it does its best to prevent freedom of thought or expression.  Any dissent from it makes you “another Hitler”.  Ironically, the neo-Nazis cannot create another Hitler.  But the cultural Marxists might just pull it off.   

Words That Lie

All ideologies take certain words that have commonly understood definitions and give them new code word definitions with different meanings for those in the know.  When the ideologues speak, ordinary people get one message while followers of the ideology get another.  In effect, the words so disfigured become lies in themselves.

My favorite example comes from a debate held at Dartmouth College (before my years there) between the Socialist leader Norman Thomas and my favorite Dartmouth professor, J.C. Adams of the History Department.  The topic was, “Does the Soviet Union want peace?”  Norman Thomas made a long and eloquent speech arguing that it does, quoting extensively from the statements by the Soviet Union’s leaders.  Professor Adams demolished him in one sentence.  He opened the official Soviet dictionary and read its definition of peace: “The state of affairs prevailing under socialism”. In other words, when the Soviets said “peace”, they meant “conquest”.  In their mouth, the word “peace” was itself a lie.

Today’s cultural Marxists’ equivalent is the word “tolerance”.  Everyone knows “tolerance” means putting up with things you don’t like or don’t agree with.  But in their mouths it has a different meaning – one created by Frankfurt School member Herbert Marcuse in his essay on “liberating tolerance”.  There, he defines “liberating tolerance” as tolerance for all ideas and movements coming from the Left and intolerance for all ideas and movements coming from the Right.  This is why campus cultural Marxists can call for “tolerance” while physically attacking conservative speakers.  In their mouths, the word “tolerance” is itself a lie.

The same is true of their unholy trinity of “racism, sexism, and, homophobia".  The suffix “-ism” is, as the coiners of these words explained, a statement that something is a construct, a mere castle in the air made of cobwebs, the opposite of facts.  But differences between races and ethnic groups taken as wholes are real.  Differences between men and women are real and their traditional social roles reflect their inherent differences.  And moral disapproval is not the same thing as a “phobia”, which means an unreasoning fear.  In the cultural Marxist’s mouths, the words “racism, sexism, and homophobia” are themselves lies.

Now there is a real racism and, to a lesser extent, a real sexism and homophobia.  Real racism is assuming that every member of a race or ethnic group shares all the characteristics of the group; in fact, individual variation is wider than group norms.  There is a small number of women whose wires are crossed at a point where they want to live the lives of men.  And some people who are nasty to gays do have an irrational fear of them.  But in the large majority of cases, what the cultural Marxists call “racism, sexism, and homophobia” are simply recognition of facts, not constructions.  Nothing can be both a fact and a construction; the two are opposed by definition.

Conservatives should respond to the Left’s charges of “racism, sexism, and homophobia” by accusing them in turn of “ismism”.  Ismism is a totemic belief that facts can be nullified by calling them names ending in “-ism”.  It is magical thinking, divorced from reality but enforced by the cultural Marxists where they can, which is mostly on college campuses (under the Trump administration, dare we hope that the federal government will cut off all funding including research grants to colleges and universities that enforce cultural Marxism?). Should the cultural Marxists ever take power nationally, God forbid, they would do what we have seen in Europe and in Canada and make any factual correction of their ideology “hate speech”.  In cultural Marxists’ mouths, “hate” is another word that lies; it means any defiance of cultural Marxism.

The history of the 20^th century is a vast pile of skulls and bones, made up of the victims of ideology.  As Russell Kirk wrote, conservatism is the negation of ideology.  Let us hope the 21^st century sees conservatism vanquish all ideologies and give us peace – real peace, not peace as the Soviets defined it.