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.

American Anarchy Vs. European Anarchy

Most of my day to day focus in terms of politics and writing is on the situation in Western Europe. Ever since traveling there as a teenager and early twenty-something, the existential crisis the continent is facing has been an obsession I can’t get past, and the implications of that crisis seem to clearly denote its significance, and the imperative of attempting to understand it. In this regard my eyes are often turned far afield from the U.S. 

The events of recent weeks, however, have made it equally impossible not to focus on America’s existential dangers. The riots in Charlottesville and Berkeley, and the national "conversation" surrounding them (or "proliferation of fake news and virtue-signaling" if you prefer) has demonstrated that our own nation faces perils just as serious as those facing Sweden or Germany or France, and that a large degree of societal disruption is likely on the horizon. 

However, while the coming turbulence--or what the authors Neil Howe and William Strauss call the coming “Fourth Turning”--looks to be equally intense on both sides of the Atlantic, it is clear that there is a fundamental difference between the two situations.^[1]

This difference has its roots in the varying immigration policies undertaken by each over recent decades, and the respective results of those policies.

In Europe, the half century since WWII has been defined by massive levels of Muslim immigration. Beginning with the working-class male Gastarbeiters of the 1950s, and then segueing to the family-reunification policies that started in the 1970’s, and the so-called “migrant crisis” of today, these policies have resulted in the wholesale transformation of Western Europe in ways that would have once seemed unimaginable.

Today, we see vast “No-Go Zones” ruled by a mix of Middle-Eastern gangs and Muslim religious leaders, where native European paramedics and police can only venture with military-strength escorts. We see increasingly bifurcated politics, where entire political parties are defined by their Muslim voter base, whether in the case of radical leftist parties in unholy alliances with such voters, or, increasingly, in the specter of Muslim-only, Sharia Law-supporting parties in countries like France, that campaign on openly Islamist platforms. Furthermore, we see the radical demographic transformation that has ensued, where the male 18-30 year old demographic in countries like Germany and Sweden already is or will soon be majority-Muslim. ^[2][3]

As a result of all this, we see societies that are effectively split in half between their native citizens and their Muslim immigrant populations (or split into thirds, if you consider their culturally suicidal Left-wing native citizens one group and those opposing cultural suicide as another).

Either way, the landscape for impending anarchy is set, and is defined by the separation between Muslim immigrants on one side and native Europeans on the other.

In America however, we see a different situation. Here, our post-WWII immigration policies have been on a similarly massive scale, but have been defined by widespread immigration from all over the world.

Indeed, our immigrant class comes from a hodgepodge of backgrounds. We have Indians, Pakistanis, Koreans, Vietnamese, Mexicans, Central Americans, Pacific Islanders, and dozens upon dozens of other groups. In many ways these immigrants have "assimilated" far better than Europe’s, if we are looking at "assimilation" as a product of economics and business and geography. Our capitalist system has ensured a "melting pot" geographically, where each immigrant group is spread out across the country, and has ensured that nearly all such immigrants learn English.

In terms of shared unity, and a shared vision of oneself as part of a singular national ‘honor group’ however, we have seen virtually no assimilation.

This is not the fault of the immigrants themselves, but rather the system. The idea that a Vietnamese family in Glendale is going to view themselves part of the same ‘tribe’ as a Pakistani in Maine or a Nigerian in St. Louis is ridiculous. In this regard, mass immigration in America has only made the country more atomized. Nobody feels as though as though they are part of an “us”, and societal trust has gone down dramatically.

This shopping mall multiculturalism can appear to work when the economy is humming and everyone is a well-paid, high-spending economic agent, but the real danger is apparent when one considers any form of economic turnaround or emergency.

When things get bad, as they have over and over throughout human history, will our atomized society really come together as one? History would suggest that anarchy and violence are far more likely.

In this manner, while Western Europe’s impending destabilization is defined by the demographic bifurcation of its population, America’s is defined by the radically-heterogeneous and anarchic nature of its own.

These differing dynamics will likely define how things progress over the coming decade in each region, and how whatever impending turbulence that is in store for us plays out.

While it has often seemed to me that Europe is destined for a far bleaker future than the U.S., I think in some ways the simple duality of the situation there is preferable to the confused, messy landscape of our increasingly "diverse" America. 

In our already complicated 4GW landscape, a battlefield with two sides seems easier to navigate than a battlefield with infinite ones.

Bibliography

Neil and William Strauss. The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy - What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny. Broadway Books. 1997. Print. https://www.amazon.com/Fourth-Turning-American-Prophecy-Rendezvous/dp/0767900464

Black Pigeon Speaks. “Germany Crosses The Demographic RUBICON: 20-35’s a MINORITY by 2020”. Black Pigeon Speaks via Youtube. 18 Mar., 2016. Web. 3 Sep., 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF9V8POmuxg

Langness, Julian. “Just How Bad Are Sweden’s Demographics?”. Europeancivilwar.com. 19 Jan., 2017. Web. 3 Sep., 2017. http://www.europeancivilwar.com/just-how-bad-are-swedens-demographics/

Author Bio

Julian Langness is the editor of Europeancivilwar.com, and the author of Fistfights With Muslims In Europe: One Man’s Journey Through Modernity. He is also the author of the upcoming book Identity Rising: How Nationalist Millennials Will Re-Take Europe, Save America, And Become The New ‘Greatest Generation’, due out later this year.

The View From Olympus: A 4GW Opportunity for the National Guard

We are accustomed to thinking of the reserve and National Guard as back-ups for the regular armed forces.  In Fourth Generation war, those roles reverse: the regulars are back-ups to the home guard.  Why?  Because in a contest for legitimacy on a country's own soil, the home guard is made up of local people, while active duty forces can seem like invaders.  More, the home guard's usual function is to help people in times of disaster, so citizens see the guard through that lens.  Who is not going to welcome a couple of guys in uniform who show up at their flooded house to take them to safety?

We have seen this at play out in the flooding in and around Houston.  But we have also seen something that is in some ways more interesting, and that also offers the National Guard an opportunity to strengthen its legitimacy.  Many of the rescues and resupply missions have been carried out by ordinary citizens.  Some, such as the Cajun Navy of shallow draft boats, had organized and planned beforehand to respond to flooding.  Many other efforts have self-organized, as individuals with useful abilities have reached out to others, come together, and brought what they can do to Houston.

Because these volunteers get no pay, often incur major costs (including time off at work), and sometimes put their own lives on the line, their legitimacy is off the charts.  If the National Guard could tap into that, it would gain legitimacy itself.  In 4GW, legitimacy is the bitcoin of the realm.

How could the Guard do that?  Not by trying to take over the volunteers’ efforts — that would turn many ordinary people against the Guard — but by offering them helpful support.  The Guard could usefully undertake a study of how it could best support volunteer’s efforts in time of emergency.  But it is not difficult to identify some capabilities the Guard could offer.  In return for volunteers simply signing up on some kind of register, either beforehand or when disaster hits, the Guard could give them:

• Legal immunity.  Some states have “Good Samaritan” laws that protect ordinary people who are trying to help in an emergency from being sued for injuring someone in the process. But not all do, and a certain type of lawyer may be following the rescue boat.  People on the Guard register could be protected from that.
• Communications and coordination.  The Guard could put volunteers in touch with others offering similar capabilities, help them coordinate and tell them on a real-time basis where the help is most needed.
• Nationwide notice of need.  While many volunteers will be local, some specialized capabilities could usefully be mobilized on a nationwide basis.  For example, in the Houston flooding, floatplanes could be highly useful.  Given airplanes’ speed, the Guard could notify floatplane owners on the register across the country that they were needed, and even reach overseas (The Japanese Navy still has big flying boats, and Russia has excellent aircraft for fighting forest fires).

As 4GW grows on American soil, which regrettably seems likely, keeping our nation together will require national institutions that still have legitimacy as the Federal government as a whole loses legitimacy.  I cannot think of another institution that could fill that role as well as the National Guard.  In turn, any steps we can take now to further strengthen the Guards legitimacy are of strategic importance (including separating it completely from the regular army, with “National Guard” rather than “Army” on the uniforms, and giving the Guard its own budget).  One such step would be for the Guard to help and support the volunteers who are making so much of a difference in the Texas floods and will in disasters yet to come.

The View From Olympus: A Strategy for Disaster

Last week President Trump laid out his new strategy for Afghanistan.  Actually, it wasn’t his and it wasn’t a strategy.  His strategy, one he talked about numerous times during his campaign, was to get out of what he correctly called a futile war.  The “strategy” he laid out last week was, as his speech made clear, not his but his generals’.  He abandoned his (usually right) instincts and deferred to them.  He might want to ask Kaiser Wilhelm II how that worked out for him.

The generals’ strategy reflected what the Pentagon defines as strategy, which is to do more of the same thing tactically.  This is the classic, Second Generation war “strategy” of accumulating kills in a war of attrition.  We will “take the gloves off”, put more long range, remote firepower on more targets and thereby move more quickly to defeat at the moral level.  There is no surer way to lose a Fourth Generation war.  But it is all the U.S. military knows how to do.  It’s a one-trick pony, and its one trick is to poop on its own head.

If this were all the president had laid out, it would add up to nothing.  Unfortunately, there is more.  And that “more” is a recipe for strategic disaster.

President Trump was correct in saying the key to defeating the Taliban is cutting the cord that links it to Pakistan.  As I have pointed out in previous columns, so long as Afghanistan is allied to India, Pakistan has no choice but to support the Taliban.  A Taliban government will de-allign with India and ally with Pakistan, which is all that can save Pakistan from being caught in a two-front threat.

But instead of calling for Afghanistan to sever its Indian connection, President Trump, acting as the mouthpiece of his generals, said we are going to try harder to engage India in Afghanistan.  Nothing could do more to push Pakistan and the Taliban closer together.  Our new Afghan “strategy”directly contradicts itself.

If the only result of that contradiction were to make our Afghan war even more futile, that would be bad but not catastrophic.  Regrettably, it points to an American defeat far worse than anything that can happen in Afghanistan.  It promises further pressure on an already-fragile Pakistani state, with the potential of causing that state to collapse and turn Pakistan into another happy hunting ground for Fourth Generation entities — a happy hunting ground where the game is nuclear warheads.

All that currently holds Pakistan together is its military.  If, as President Trump suggested, we are going to ramp up pressure on Pakistan to do what it cannot and renounce the Taliban, that pressure is likely to include cutting off money and weapons we now provide to Pakistan’s armed forces.  Unless someone else steps in to fill the gap (perhaps China), that will weaken the only glue holding Pakistan together.

We have seen the disaster that results when we help destroy a state in Iraq, in Libya, in Syria, and in Afghanistan itself, where before 9/11 the Taliban had proved the only effective government since the monarchy fell.  But the collapse of the Pakistani state would be far worse.  In addition to loose nukes, we would face tens of millions of refugees, competent soldiers now for hire, mass murder on a vast scale (with Pakistan’s Christians first on the list) and God knows what else.  As they saw their state disintegrating, Pakistan’s generals might decide to take out their old enemy India with them and nuke every Indian city.  I am told the Indian military realizes that a failed state in Pakistan would be much more dangerous to them than is the Pakistani state, and for that reason have opposed a conventional war with Pakistan they know they would win.

      But our generals do not seem to be as smart as Indian generals.  The “strategy” they have foisted on a reluctant president is self-contradictory, potentially disastrous and just plain stupid.  The president would have done better to take strategic advice from the good ladies who clean the White House, the nut cases in Lafayette Park, or the cabbages in Mrs. Obama’s White House garden.  Or, better yet, listen to his own instincts.  Had Kaiser Wilhelm II done that, the House of Hohenzollern would still be on the throne in Berlin, just as God intended.

The White Right Rises

One reason Donald Trump won last year’s election was that he was widely perceived as the white candidate.  This marked something more important than his election: the rise of white political consciousness.  As other racial and ethnic groups have done for some time (“La Raza” means “The Race”), whites are increasingly defining themselves by race rather than class.  Like other groups, they perceive they have group interests as whites and they are willing to work and vote for those interests.  This is entirely legitimate. 

But why are whites seeing their interests best served by the right rather than the left?  Because the left is now dominated by cultural Marxists, and cultural Marxism defines all whites as evil “oppressors.”  Just as classical economic Marxism labelled all capitalists and landlords as evil, regardless of what individuals did (many cared about and for their employees), so cultural Marxism considers all whites bad to the bone (unless, maybe, they are gay).  Whites are supposed to do nothing but grovel endlessly in the dirt before “people of color”, apologizing for being white. 

Not surprisingly, a growing number of whites aren’t buying it.  It is not conservatives but cultural Marxists who have created the rise of white political consciousness.  If you keep kicking a dog for being a dog, eventually it does what dogs do and bites you.  Cultural Marxists would do well to remember that when whites get mad enough to bite, the bite is often fatal.

That brings us to recent events in Charlottesville, Virginia.  Lost in all the howling and weeping about “hate” (in cultural Marxism’s lexicon, “hate” is any defiance of cultural Marxism) is what sparked white outrage in the first place: an ideologically-driven, ahistorical decision by the town government to remove a statue of General Robert E. Lee from the city park.

It is understandable why many white Southerners were angered.  Lee was no fire-eating pro-slavery agitator.  He opposed Virginia’s secession.  Lincoln offered him command of the Union armies.  But when Virginia did secede, Lee felt he had no choice but to go with his state.  Like many people of his time, his primary identification was with his state, not the United States.

Lee contributed greatly to the nation’s healing after the Civil War by refusing to endorse plans to continue the fight with guerrilla warfare.  That could have given the country another decade or more of war.  After the conflict was over, Lee was respected in the North as well as the South.  Who do the cultural Marxists on the Charlottesville city council think they are to attempt now to turn Lee into “another Hitler”?

In this and other instances of assaults on statues and markers commemorating the Confederacy, Southern whites are right to organize, protest, and demonstrate.  However, unlike in Charlottesville, they should never initiate or escalate violence.  Doing so will almost always work against them and their cause.

Understanding why this is so requires knowing how Marxism (both versions) works.  Marxism takes certain Christian virtues, such as concern for the poor, carries them to extremes and then turns them back on traditional society as weapons.  Until there is no poverty, no misery, no unhappiness even, the fight for “social justice” must go on.  Since perfection is impossible, the assault must continue forever.  In cultural Marxism, these attacks fall under the label “critical theory”.

One outgrowth of “critical theory” is that there can be no higher moral category than “victim”.  When whites initiate or escalate violence, they give “victim” status to anyone on the other side that gets hurt.  Since many Americans have been psychologically conditioned by cultural Marxism, they identify with these “victims” — and cultural Marxism wins another round at whites’ expense.  This is why, as one of the founders of cultural Marxism, Antonio Gramsci, said, it cannot be defeated by violence.

Whites who rally against cultural Marxism, in defense of Confederate history or anything else from America’s past, must be prepared for violence.  As we have seen on too many campuses, elements of the left will physically attack conservatives if they think they won’t get their backsides kicked.  If the left starts the violence, it forfeits “victim” status and we can win (unless we escalate).  If Southern whites want to win our second civil war, the war against cultural Marxism, they have to know their enemy and fight smart.  The South cannot afford a second defeat.