I think this article summaries perfectly the anthropological consequences of our (quasi)religious beliefs which serve as our culture’s foundation. As such it also clearly delineates that history, whenever it will reemerge, will come to judge us as the singularly most evil people to ever exist. More so than the Akaddians who dressed their walls with the skins of their enemies, or the Aztecs that created pyramids of skulls to their gods. What we have done to ourselves is the permeation of suicidal nihilism into every fibre of our existence, and there will be an ocean of evidence to show it.
In so many ways we've become abominations. Yet so many of us resist that, and rise above it, because it isn't in our nature to be what They are trying to turn us into it.
Unfortunately the foundational myth causes many good people to accept bad things. It is to society what childhood experiences are to the individual - the base-level driving force of our subcouncious mind.
I just blocked a scumbag, who thought the whole pager explosion thing was funny, even though several children died from it. Many civilians got hurt. People are just trying to live their lives. There is no reason to celebrate what happened. We have a sickness in us.
Really? I’m genuinely interested, if very skeptical. The problem of our society, as Guenon points out, is scale. Can any other culture point to the literal mountain sized pile of bodies that we’ve been able to achieve? And I’m not talking about talking about communism or war, but just us, post-1945. Just in 2022 we had over 200,000 deaths of despair in the USA alone.
We’re also the civilisation which has most developed feminism, which among other things is responsible for development by a rabid, and frankly demonic desire in women to kill their own children. In some circles it is a mark of status.
Another point: child transgenderism. That fact that is tolerated in of self speaks volumes.
Well, if you want scale, absolute numbers, then it's difficult to find a good match, but only because of the population explosion of the last ~150 years. Otherwise, I'll quote Middle East of around 1500 BCE and later, about 700-500 BCE. It is recorded in the Bible that peoples living in those areas ate their children, and sacrificed them to their gods. The Bible records Judean kings did this too, so we can consider the account generally true. Additionally, some of the prophets (Jeremiah, Ezekiel) from the late stage of this period describe a thorougly barbarous society where sin and evil are simply ways of life, with no lived alternative. Related to this were the late bronze age civilizations of the same area (let's say a bit before 1000 BCE). Apparently, they were separated into two classes with the upper class holding the lower class in total subjugation, including regularly taking some of them for ritual sacrifices. When the "Sea Peoples" tore through the rotten civilization around 1000 BCE, the remaining Middle Easterners didn't rebuild their civilization, because why would they?
I'm sorry, but ritual murder and cannibalism, putting aside scale, are fundamentally less evil the what we moderns do daily. Putting aside mass, celebrated child sacrifice in the form of modern abortion, child transgenderism is already a greater evil then any that the ancients inflicted on each other. Parents murdering and eating their own children is just that, murder. Horrifying but final, the child doesn't have to live with the same parents that murdered and ate them. Parents gleefully mutilating their children both physically and mentally, and then expecting their victim to be grateful for the acts, and their continued, torturous existence is far more evil. Death is always a kinder option then permanent mutilation that you aren't even expected to recognize as mutilation. These kids can never recover, not physically nor mentally, what was taken from them. Their only way out is death, yet that too was taken from them unless they are willing to take their own lives, further placing the burden on their own heads. If there is a greater evil then what parents and teachers are doing to these young boys and girls, it has not yet been invented, and I hope it never will.
Please do not project your self-loathing onto others. Since the conversion of Constantine Christianity has been the driver of, and explanation for, the rise and triumph of Western civilization, the greatest civilization in human history. This is true in the areas of rule of law, rights of the individual as opposed to the collective, scientific-technological achievement, medical science, dominance over other cultures albeit misused, material prosperity of its people. With the decline of Christianity, along with the rise of secularism, materialism, hedonism, and neopaganism, the decline and fall of Western civilization is foreordained.
When did Anfas attack the black or Latino churches? Why is Christian Africa not as advanced as godless China despite starting at the same place in 1970?
Rights mean nothing if you can't defend them. Jesus isn't talking about "rights."
He was describing good vs. evil and in no way was he demanding laws to compel people to behave in a particular way. In a word, he wasn't whining or complaining.
Or according to the Torah, criminality must be established by the testimony of two witnesses, not confidential informants, or circumstantial evidence. If a virgin was raped, the perpetrator had to marry her and never divorce her. One guilty of unintentional manslaughter could flee to one of ten cities of refuge for life, and thus escape capital punishment.
Abuse of power is a ubiquitous human failing. Yes, the West has abused its power in a number of ways. The real question is what was the source of the unparalleled power of the West?
Most excellent essay and about time. I know I have said this in comments before, but I was innoculated from the WW2 worship seen among loathsome boomer GOP types (eg, neocon clowns like VD Hanson, Glenn Reynolds and other regime propagandists) by my dad, a veteran of the Italian front (a medic). Around the time of Saving Private Ryan I was sort of obsessive with the war. I mentioned this to my dad. He looked at me with a mixture of sadness and contempt. He told me that I’d never understand the war, he barely did but it wasn’t the “bullshit you’re getting told in school or that Ambrose shit.” He loathed Stephen Ambrose and the band of brothers thing. He did like Bill Mauldin, so Mauldin is one of the few sources on the U.S. experience I trust. And Paul Fussel. The Americans were no more than mercenaries for FDr’s demonic ambition in that war. Ditto the Yanks who died for Lincoln and muh eternal Union.
My father also innoculated me. He had bookshelves full of WWI and II histories, all of which he'd read. Easily had the equivalent of a graduate degree in military history. One day I remarked that our troops must have hated the Germans. No, he said, not at all. They respected them. They fought bravely and they fought very well.
That insight into the warrior’s mind - that one can fight and kill without hating those one fights - put things into perspective for me. And it always sat rather awkwardly with Hollywood portrayals of the war. My father was no fan of Hollywood, either.
You can't hate the enemy because they can kill you. Your life being in the game automatically negates hate. I think you can only passionately hate something when there's nothing else on the line.
This piece covers a vast amount of ground social confine my comments to a few observations.
One, Eliade was the polar opposite of Nietzsche. Nietzsche like all the principal Enlightenment philosohers was suspicious of received opinions and encouraged readers to a similar position. Eliade, in contrast, sought re-enchantment, both politically and academically. I can't imagine a worse (or more squalid) inclination for anyone involved in the pursuit of knowledge.
Two, the Iron Guard's spiritual pretensions notwithstanding their real-world conduct inspired disgust and contempt. Himmler received reports from his officers complaining vigoroudly about the behaviour of the Iron Guard towards civilians in the occupied Ukraine. Enough said.
Three, King Carol was a pragmatist. His kingdom was one of very few places on earth exporting petroleum at the time and the destabilisation of Rumania by Berlin through its proxies was all about resources. The King sought to minimise the risks to his throne and his people. He failed. Most of the blame for this lies with people of Eliade's persuasion. Incidentally, it was the Iron Guard's backers in Berlin who stripped Rumania of territory which puts the nationalism and patriotism of the movement in perspective.
Four, Churchill was chosen for the job because there was a consensus at the top that he was the only man who could lead the empire at war. His rivals served in the cabinet alongside him without complaint. Churchill's only significant error, if it can be called that, was to have underestimated the ambitions of Washington. The US and Germany were the greatest enemies the UK faced in the 20th century. Churchill chose subordination to Washington over subordination to Berlin. In hindsight this was the only path he could gave taken, because Britain's fundamental national interest has always been to disrupt the unification of western Europe by a rival power. Churchill was faithful to this view, a perspective shared by practically every single person of influence in the UK at the time and in every century stretching back to the late middle ages.
Five, Darryl Cooper, like Tucker Carlson, is an American without any demonstrated understanding of the political conditions within late imperial Britain. He imagines that prme ministers were de facto presidents and that geopolitical decisions were made by one man alone. He appeared unaware of the deliberations within Westminster at the time. He never bothered to mention the foreign policy preferences of the British Labour Party, something that Churchill had to take into account because they were a part of the wartime cabinet.
Six, that Operation Barbarossa might have stopped the Soviets advancing towards the Atlantic is impossible to verify or falsify. By the early 30s Moscow had given up on worldwide revolution and was busy repairing relations with several European states (successfully in the case of Czechosolvakia and Yugoslavia, unsuccessfully in the case of the UK and Poland). By the time Hitler came to power the USSR had already assisted Germany in rebuilding it's own armed forces (above all the Luftwaffe). Stalin was many things, many of them unpleasant, but he was not a fool. The Red Army force structure was not geared for a war of conquest at any time in the 30s and as Rapallo showed the Soviets saw their interests best served by cooperation rather than conflict.
Regarding Churchill, well as I was at pains to point out: I don't think he was a villain; and he was certainly constrained by British foreign policy imperatives. Yet at the same time he's hardly above reproach. But then, no one is.
In the end what matters is what is happening now: our countries are being invaded at the hands of a ruling class who justify themselves largely on the basis of the war myth.
The view of Churchill by Americans is always stuck in 1940. If you are Irish though, it's 1919. Indians think about 1943 (the Bengal famine), Israelis about 1944 (the start of the Jewish revolt), Kenyans about 1952. (the Mau Mau rebellion). Churchill had a 50 year political career and did many things. It is unreasonable to judge his whole career by one moment-positive or negative.
Churchill was always a lightning rod for very strong feelings. My maternal grandfather (a keen boxer in his youth) once tokd me that he was frightened for his safety when he told people at his bridge club in London that Churchill was going to lose the election in 1945. His patients had related to him that their sons in the forces were writing home urging them to vote for Attlee. This sounded outrageous, even unbelievable, to Conservative voters who adored Churchill.
A large part of the unionised working classes also hated Churchill because of his support for strike-breaking. Few people today realise how large and how powerful the unions were in pre-Thatcher Britain. Their influence made it impossible for the UK to keep Italy on side in the '30s and played a huge role in political and military calculations in the middle and late '40s.
Ultimately he was a very complex man and his views were evolving even in old age. He was also the embodiment of the old ruling order. The Churchills were at the heart of the regime that established modern Britain in 1688, while his Spencer ancestors were part of the aristocracy centuries before that. Churchill's death in '65 marked a decisive break.
Frankly, I have always been irritated by Churchilians, but the way he is now being used as a straw man for revisionists is imbecilic and deeply unfair. The Buchananite element in the US are never honest about the true role of the US and are not sincere in their concerns for the British people. Very few acknowledge that the Germans had plans for the postwar era that have an eery similarity to those later adopted by the US and its allies in Europe. The counternarratives are way too simplistic.
You are dead right about what matters. The here and now and the future. The past is interesting but it is also, potentially, a trap. Energy needs to go on analysing what is happening, not arguing over who was once wrong about this or that.
To finish, replacement level migration a solution straight out of grossraumwissenschaften. I need to read up more on this.
I suspect a lot of revisionists are mainly looking for a way to kill the myth, since they intuit correctly that it is this which stands in the way of addressing the problems we grapple with. One result of that is an attraction to easy narratives.
Exactly. Easy narratives are best left to those who need them. The foundation of reliable accounts is available in fact. Arranging those facts in a sequence suggests possibilities and correlations, but causation stretches the best of us to our limits. It should hurt. Thinking always does. Sorry for belabouring the obvious, but dissenters have no advantages beyond our ability to grasp the reality of our situation. Enchantment by counter-narrative is a risk that I want no exposure to.
At the moment the victor's of WW2 are jostling to rearrange the pecking order. The losers (Uk, Europe, Japan and various pro-Axis states elsewhere) are responding, not very successfully so far.
USA trying to leverage its weakness (trade and capital deficits) into strengths via the bond market (petrodollar, Basel Accord, SWIFT).
My guess is that the big winner will be those multinationals that have hard currency reserves capable of withstanding the coming crisis. Minor winners will be plutocrats and the drug cartels. The Global South scavenge from the corpse of the West as US and Europe turn into global commons for entrepreneurs and welfare sinks for the planet.
Enchantment by narrative is definitely a pitfall that we need to avoid, yet at the same time the man on the street requires a great myth by means of which to bring order to his world. One of our tasks is to provide that myth; which must also be true, lest we become no better than the (ig)Noble Liars we struggle against.
But providing the myth is not optional. It is a strategic necessity.
Regarding Barbarossa, there's the Suvorov hypothesis - that Stalin was, in fact, preparing an invasion, which German intelligence caught wind of just in time. If true, it would explain the abrupt pivot from the Western to the Eastern front, and the hasty invasion of Russia, without appropriate equipment. That last part always struck me as strange, as Germans are usually quite careful and systematic. The only other explanation is “Hitler was crazy”, and I'm always very suspicious of explanations that take that form.
There are a vast number of unanswered questions over the war. Fully agree with the inadequacy of explaining politics as a function of individual shortcomings. Hitler was charismatic in a weird, very theatrical and vulgar way. This distracts attention from institutional and geopolitical factors, many of which remain supersensitive. He went truly crazy late in the war as Parkinsons and the drugs kicked in, but he was too useful for those around him to just kill him, the smart ones were too busy intriguing with the US on their postwar plans. The lurid and cruel aspects of the regime ensure that people never get around to focussing on the critical stuff: trade, finance, property rights and transnational cooperation. The legacy on these from midcentury remains highly relevant today.
Neither Hitler nor Stalin had any illusions about the other. But Stalin wasn't ready since the Red Army was still reeling from the purges. Turns out that Hitler wasn't ready either but he just didn't know it. For one thing most of the German trucks were stolen from the French and rapidly broke down. Surprise.
Barbarossa was a BRILLIAN operational success. It achieved ALL of it's aims, probably even surpassed them. Gemany was expecting the Soviets would be unable to continue the fight after suffering such a devastating loss. They lost their entire prewar military in a few months, for crying out loud! There's even a recording of Hitler talking with some Finnish (I think) generals where he explains what his General Staff was expecting, how many divisions the Soviets had and how many they would raise. And then he said how many they already destroyed by the time of the conversation.
The problem, though, was that Russia doesn't plan on the operational level. Since the days of Catherine the Great, they plan on the strategic level. The General Staff is an organ of the state which has to figure out the top-level strategic defence of the realm. It has unfettered hands to do this. It has been doing this faithfully for literal centuries. During WW2, by the time Germans were approaching Moscow, and defeating the army defending the approaches to Moscow, their problem was becoming apparent: there wasn't supposed to be an army defending the approaches to Moscow! The Prussian generals did everything right. It's somewhere else in Nazi Germany that the failure happened. Who was running the foreign intel? Why didn't that somebody know who was sitting on the Russian General Staff?
One thing in favour of that hypothesis is the Winter War, the aim of which was to push through Finland to the Baltic Sea, from the Arctic to Poland.
And if possible, to push on through Sweden and Norway to take and hold the Atlantic coast in the North.
For many reasons, this was impossible to carry out.
Counter to this is how woefully unprepared the Red Army invading Finland was, initially. For one, they lacked winter gear or snow-coloured uniforms, because Stalin had been promised a war of a week or two at most, which speaks against there being a plan for capturing Sweden and Norway.
Tangentially:
During the Cold War, the Soviet plan was a rapid push onto the Atlantic in the north, knocking out northern Germany and Denmark and southern Sweden with tactical nuclear strikes. The idea was to cordon off the north Atlantic; imagine a line from Greenland and Iceland down to Denmark, under Soviet control.
And the caveat de jure: no power going to war has /one/ plan. Some american put it correctly: "Planning, not plans".
The Iron Guard were certainly pretty hardcore. I'm very far from an expert on the subject, but I have read that even the Nazis thought they went too far. Beyond that I won't opine on the matter as I simply know too little to have strong opinions on it.
As for Eliade, certainly he did not see the world at all as Nietzsche did. That is neither a bad thing nor a good thing. From what I've read of his work, however, I don't think he simply took people's word for anything. He was a careful scholar first and foremost.
The trouble with the Euro Old Right is that they face so much criticism(a fair bit of which is facile) that people neglect key issues.
For me, these issues are not necessarily about right or wrong but about realism and effectiveness. The reactionaries helped bring about the very conditions that they most feared. A lot of them were fuckwits. Others dupes. The essential lesson IMHO is how we are unconsciously repeating their failures.
Narrative and counternarrative less interesting for me than the mechanisms of function at work and the schematics of geopolitics.
I read somewhere (sorry no cite) that on one occasion the SS actually opened fire on an Iron Guard unit for "unnecessary" cruelty to Jews. A similar story exists about the Ustase so it may be a garble or a complete myth.
"Let’s start with an awkward and contentious statement of what I would nonetheless say is a statement of fact: Adolf Hitler was the scapegoat of the 20th century.
This is not meant to imply that Hitler was innocent. Only that he was turned into a symbol of ultimate evil, independently of any rational or sober understanding of WW2 history or the man himself.1
Since the 20th century was the first period in history in which a communications system engulfed the entire planet, that makes Adolf Hitler the scapegoat of all time.
When God was killed, the Devil’s incarnation became inevitable, and imminent. Nietzsche was both the pallbearer and midwife in this “transference.”2
WWII is the foundational myth of the American Empire, as much as the Punic wars were the foundational myth for the Roman Empire; it both supports it's creation and its continuing existence. As you point out,, as an article of faith it is blasphemy to dispute, and anyone who disputes it is cast out as a heretic and schismatic (Bye, Tucker)
I have argued, and been lambasted on, for insisting that refusing to review history means we can never understand why we are here, and we have to accept other people's interpretations. With false foundations we can never find truth, and never will. Our past is what we guide our aim for the future, and with bad aim we will always miss, even when we hit the target by accident.
to bring it to the personal level, if the familial myth is that you cannot criticize your mom because she gave birth to you, and was a brilliant woman, and her struggle to find sobriety through AA and her church is a testament to how she wanted so deeply to be a better person. Aside from the actual damage she did to everyone around her, it also makes it impossible to understand why she was so angry and self destructive, if it was from trauma, abuse of her own, or was it inheritance? How can you plan the future without that knowledge? Without being able to view these questions we are condemned to the same cycle of negligence and modelling and self doubt.
A final note, all history is revisionist, that is the point of the study of history. without revision, all history can be is a retelling of grandfather tales, and it loses nuance and understanding as it is transmitted.
The replacement of the mythology of Christianity with that of "The Good War" is, and remains, a very purposeful act. This was not done accidentally. It was not born as most myths do- from irrefutable Truths about humanity.
No it was manufactured, from the ground up, by, frankly, those who serve evil entities. There are vicious lies hidden in every aspect of this event. Everything of consequence is misrepresented, and those guilty of the most heinous crimes play the victim of those crimes.
It is the building of a new religion, as you have stated, but a religion founded fundamentally on the inversion of Truth itself.
It is fundamentally evil, and it is why we see so much decay and degeneracy and destruction now. Inverting truth means inverting beauty. It means the inversion of the nature of love, of friendship, of virtue.
It is our biggest enemy. It is the central event that has caused this downward spiral of humanity. Its tendrils run deep.
We will not be free of the lies and the evils thereof until we are free from this Big Lie.
It is, of all ancillary debates, controversies, issues, the albatross hung from our neck, and we will not begin to heal without dispelling it.
it's true that Christ got hit and put on a secondary place in favour of the Jews after ww2
his spiritual role being more one of a generical crime-observer - along with specs that belongs to his specific role that I dont know - got relatively under-considered there...
That's odd
It's as if the General of Earthling's suffering could not assume his role and that the Victims themselves have been carried on to enjoy such position
Hmmm surely as he's the original guy it's just a matter of not yet having his voice done
Man, this was an INCREDIBLE piece! I re-stacked it with a long-ish comment of my own, but just wanted to go out of my way to say how much I appreciate the EFFORT you put into this. As a fellow blogger who also tends to “go long,” and who edits, re-edits, writes and re-writes, I know a fellow hard-working HUMAN writer when I see one. Keep up the thought-provoking and soul-stirring work, my friend!
"The Nazis opposed sexual degeneracy – promiscuity, homosexuality, transgenderism, and so on – from which it follows, naturally enough, that all of these things must be good, celebrated, and encouraged."
I will not argue that this became mythologized by liberalism in the post-War era. That is an important point that has been more than made an adequate case for. What I would like to point out is that these degeneracies existed BEFORE that era and were not called into being by a reaction to the Nazis. All of these things existed copiously in Berlin during the Weimar era; the first transgender surgeries were performed there in the 1920's; Berlin was known as the sin capital of the Western world, where every kind of degeneracy had a nightclub or six where it was on offer, for a price, and the culture positively wallowed in it.
If this degeneracy was not created by liberalism in its reflexive horror to Nazi atrocities, from where did it come from? Warning: cognitive dissonance dead ahead.
Degeneracy was not originally created in reaction to fascism, but its elevation to moral ideal is very much a reaction to fascism shutting down Weimar degeneracy. There was some sick shit happening in Weimar Berlin, but AFAIK they weren't holding pride parades.
Are you familiar with Rene Girard’s reading of the Gospels, viz a viz the scapegoat mechanism & how the NT reveals how murder-sacrifice of an innocent is what all religious myths are created to conceal, making Christianity the final revelation of that murder & cover-up (of which Satan is the founder-father, John 8:44: https://biblehub.com/john/8-44.htm), ergo the end of myth & of sacrifice.
Ergo the apocalypse = revelation, since, once the scapegoat mechanism is revealed, no more mythical cover-ups are possible to prevent all-against-all violence, and only the Jesus solution (love thine enemies, resist not evil) can save us.
It is a shame how WWII has been stripped of its nuance, robbing the people who did die of a chance for their legacies to be remembered and their stories told. As a young child, I--of course--was raised with the notion that ALL "Nazi" soldiers were evil. It wasn't until I was a preteen and read accounts of German soldiers who hated Hitler and everything Nazism stood for that I realized things were far more complicated than the black-and-white picture I'd been presented with until that point. Not all American soldiers were honorable. Not all Russian soldiers were communists. Not all German soldiers were Nazis. Sure, many were. But there were those who who were just victims--once normal boys and young men--who were wrapped up in something far greater than them.
I think this article summaries perfectly the anthropological consequences of our (quasi)religious beliefs which serve as our culture’s foundation. As such it also clearly delineates that history, whenever it will reemerge, will come to judge us as the singularly most evil people to ever exist. More so than the Akaddians who dressed their walls with the skins of their enemies, or the Aztecs that created pyramids of skulls to their gods. What we have done to ourselves is the permeation of suicidal nihilism into every fibre of our existence, and there will be an ocean of evidence to show it.
May God have mercy on us all.
In so many ways we've become abominations. Yet so many of us resist that, and rise above it, because it isn't in our nature to be what They are trying to turn us into it.
Unfortunately the foundational myth causes many good people to accept bad things. It is to society what childhood experiences are to the individual - the base-level driving force of our subcouncious mind.
I just blocked a scumbag, who thought the whole pager explosion thing was funny, even though several children died from it. Many civilians got hurt. People are just trying to live their lives. There is no reason to celebrate what happened. We have a sickness in us.
> singularly most evil people to ever exist
For real? o.O I can probably dig up quite a few examples to the contrary, and I don't mean communists.
Really? I’m genuinely interested, if very skeptical. The problem of our society, as Guenon points out, is scale. Can any other culture point to the literal mountain sized pile of bodies that we’ve been able to achieve? And I’m not talking about talking about communism or war, but just us, post-1945. Just in 2022 we had over 200,000 deaths of despair in the USA alone.
We’re also the civilisation which has most developed feminism, which among other things is responsible for development by a rabid, and frankly demonic desire in women to kill their own children. In some circles it is a mark of status.
Another point: child transgenderism. That fact that is tolerated in of self speaks volumes.
I could go on, but you get my point.
Feminism is a cancer that must be eradicated as soon as possible.
Well, if you want scale, absolute numbers, then it's difficult to find a good match, but only because of the population explosion of the last ~150 years. Otherwise, I'll quote Middle East of around 1500 BCE and later, about 700-500 BCE. It is recorded in the Bible that peoples living in those areas ate their children, and sacrificed them to their gods. The Bible records Judean kings did this too, so we can consider the account generally true. Additionally, some of the prophets (Jeremiah, Ezekiel) from the late stage of this period describe a thorougly barbarous society where sin and evil are simply ways of life, with no lived alternative. Related to this were the late bronze age civilizations of the same area (let's say a bit before 1000 BCE). Apparently, they were separated into two classes with the upper class holding the lower class in total subjugation, including regularly taking some of them for ritual sacrifices. When the "Sea Peoples" tore through the rotten civilization around 1000 BCE, the remaining Middle Easterners didn't rebuild their civilization, because why would they?
I'm sorry, but ritual murder and cannibalism, putting aside scale, are fundamentally less evil the what we moderns do daily. Putting aside mass, celebrated child sacrifice in the form of modern abortion, child transgenderism is already a greater evil then any that the ancients inflicted on each other. Parents murdering and eating their own children is just that, murder. Horrifying but final, the child doesn't have to live with the same parents that murdered and ate them. Parents gleefully mutilating their children both physically and mentally, and then expecting their victim to be grateful for the acts, and their continued, torturous existence is far more evil. Death is always a kinder option then permanent mutilation that you aren't even expected to recognize as mutilation. These kids can never recover, not physically nor mentally, what was taken from them. Their only way out is death, yet that too was taken from them unless they are willing to take their own lives, further placing the burden on their own heads. If there is a greater evil then what parents and teachers are doing to these young boys and girls, it has not yet been invented, and I hope it never will.
Please do not project your self-loathing onto others. Since the conversion of Constantine Christianity has been the driver of, and explanation for, the rise and triumph of Western civilization, the greatest civilization in human history. This is true in the areas of rule of law, rights of the individual as opposed to the collective, scientific-technological achievement, medical science, dominance over other cultures albeit misused, material prosperity of its people. With the decline of Christianity, along with the rise of secularism, materialism, hedonism, and neopaganism, the decline and fall of Western civilization is foreordained.
When did Anfas attack the black or Latino churches? Why is Christian Africa not as advanced as godless China despite starting at the same place in 1970?
"rights of the individual as opposed to the collective"
Where in the Bible does anyone, including Jesus, talk about "rights?"
Bible != Christianity
Rights mean nothing if you can't defend them. Jesus isn't talking about "rights."
He was describing good vs. evil and in no way was he demanding laws to compel people to behave in a particular way. In a word, he wasn't whining or complaining.
Or according to the Torah, criminality must be established by the testimony of two witnesses, not confidential informants, or circumstantial evidence. If a virgin was raped, the perpetrator had to marry her and never divorce her. One guilty of unintentional manslaughter could flee to one of ten cities of refuge for life, and thus escape capital punishment.
Abuse of power is a ubiquitous human failing. Yes, the West has abused its power in a number of ways. The real question is what was the source of the unparalleled power of the West?
Well, I think there was something called Alexander the Great and the Roman Empire.
Discovering the New World before some other civilization did.
Most excellent essay and about time. I know I have said this in comments before, but I was innoculated from the WW2 worship seen among loathsome boomer GOP types (eg, neocon clowns like VD Hanson, Glenn Reynolds and other regime propagandists) by my dad, a veteran of the Italian front (a medic). Around the time of Saving Private Ryan I was sort of obsessive with the war. I mentioned this to my dad. He looked at me with a mixture of sadness and contempt. He told me that I’d never understand the war, he barely did but it wasn’t the “bullshit you’re getting told in school or that Ambrose shit.” He loathed Stephen Ambrose and the band of brothers thing. He did like Bill Mauldin, so Mauldin is one of the few sources on the U.S. experience I trust. And Paul Fussel. The Americans were no more than mercenaries for FDr’s demonic ambition in that war. Ditto the Yanks who died for Lincoln and muh eternal Union.
My father also innoculated me. He had bookshelves full of WWI and II histories, all of which he'd read. Easily had the equivalent of a graduate degree in military history. One day I remarked that our troops must have hated the Germans. No, he said, not at all. They respected them. They fought bravely and they fought very well.
That insight into the warrior’s mind - that one can fight and kill without hating those one fights - put things into perspective for me. And it always sat rather awkwardly with Hollywood portrayals of the war. My father was no fan of Hollywood, either.
Hate is reserved for the propagandists and politicians, to stir up support...
You can't hate the enemy because they can kill you. Your life being in the game automatically negates hate. I think you can only passionately hate something when there's nothing else on the line.
Fussell’s book “The Great War and Modern Memory” is an absolute classic.
This piece covers a vast amount of ground social confine my comments to a few observations.
One, Eliade was the polar opposite of Nietzsche. Nietzsche like all the principal Enlightenment philosohers was suspicious of received opinions and encouraged readers to a similar position. Eliade, in contrast, sought re-enchantment, both politically and academically. I can't imagine a worse (or more squalid) inclination for anyone involved in the pursuit of knowledge.
Two, the Iron Guard's spiritual pretensions notwithstanding their real-world conduct inspired disgust and contempt. Himmler received reports from his officers complaining vigoroudly about the behaviour of the Iron Guard towards civilians in the occupied Ukraine. Enough said.
Three, King Carol was a pragmatist. His kingdom was one of very few places on earth exporting petroleum at the time and the destabilisation of Rumania by Berlin through its proxies was all about resources. The King sought to minimise the risks to his throne and his people. He failed. Most of the blame for this lies with people of Eliade's persuasion. Incidentally, it was the Iron Guard's backers in Berlin who stripped Rumania of territory which puts the nationalism and patriotism of the movement in perspective.
Four, Churchill was chosen for the job because there was a consensus at the top that he was the only man who could lead the empire at war. His rivals served in the cabinet alongside him without complaint. Churchill's only significant error, if it can be called that, was to have underestimated the ambitions of Washington. The US and Germany were the greatest enemies the UK faced in the 20th century. Churchill chose subordination to Washington over subordination to Berlin. In hindsight this was the only path he could gave taken, because Britain's fundamental national interest has always been to disrupt the unification of western Europe by a rival power. Churchill was faithful to this view, a perspective shared by practically every single person of influence in the UK at the time and in every century stretching back to the late middle ages.
Five, Darryl Cooper, like Tucker Carlson, is an American without any demonstrated understanding of the political conditions within late imperial Britain. He imagines that prme ministers were de facto presidents and that geopolitical decisions were made by one man alone. He appeared unaware of the deliberations within Westminster at the time. He never bothered to mention the foreign policy preferences of the British Labour Party, something that Churchill had to take into account because they were a part of the wartime cabinet.
Six, that Operation Barbarossa might have stopped the Soviets advancing towards the Atlantic is impossible to verify or falsify. By the early 30s Moscow had given up on worldwide revolution and was busy repairing relations with several European states (successfully in the case of Czechosolvakia and Yugoslavia, unsuccessfully in the case of the UK and Poland). By the time Hitler came to power the USSR had already assisted Germany in rebuilding it's own armed forces (above all the Luftwaffe). Stalin was many things, many of them unpleasant, but he was not a fool. The Red Army force structure was not geared for a war of conquest at any time in the 30s and as Rapallo showed the Soviets saw their interests best served by cooperation rather than conflict.
Regarding Churchill, well as I was at pains to point out: I don't think he was a villain; and he was certainly constrained by British foreign policy imperatives. Yet at the same time he's hardly above reproach. But then, no one is.
In the end what matters is what is happening now: our countries are being invaded at the hands of a ruling class who justify themselves largely on the basis of the war myth.
The view of Churchill by Americans is always stuck in 1940. If you are Irish though, it's 1919. Indians think about 1943 (the Bengal famine), Israelis about 1944 (the start of the Jewish revolt), Kenyans about 1952. (the Mau Mau rebellion). Churchill had a 50 year political career and did many things. It is unreasonable to judge his whole career by one moment-positive or negative.
Churchill was always a lightning rod for very strong feelings. My maternal grandfather (a keen boxer in his youth) once tokd me that he was frightened for his safety when he told people at his bridge club in London that Churchill was going to lose the election in 1945. His patients had related to him that their sons in the forces were writing home urging them to vote for Attlee. This sounded outrageous, even unbelievable, to Conservative voters who adored Churchill.
A large part of the unionised working classes also hated Churchill because of his support for strike-breaking. Few people today realise how large and how powerful the unions were in pre-Thatcher Britain. Their influence made it impossible for the UK to keep Italy on side in the '30s and played a huge role in political and military calculations in the middle and late '40s.
Ultimately he was a very complex man and his views were evolving even in old age. He was also the embodiment of the old ruling order. The Churchills were at the heart of the regime that established modern Britain in 1688, while his Spencer ancestors were part of the aristocracy centuries before that. Churchill's death in '65 marked a decisive break.
Frankly, I have always been irritated by Churchilians, but the way he is now being used as a straw man for revisionists is imbecilic and deeply unfair. The Buchananite element in the US are never honest about the true role of the US and are not sincere in their concerns for the British people. Very few acknowledge that the Germans had plans for the postwar era that have an eery similarity to those later adopted by the US and its allies in Europe. The counternarratives are way too simplistic.
You are dead right about what matters. The here and now and the future. The past is interesting but it is also, potentially, a trap. Energy needs to go on analysing what is happening, not arguing over who was once wrong about this or that.
To finish, replacement level migration a solution straight out of grossraumwissenschaften. I need to read up more on this.
I suspect a lot of revisionists are mainly looking for a way to kill the myth, since they intuit correctly that it is this which stands in the way of addressing the problems we grapple with. One result of that is an attraction to easy narratives.
Exactly. Easy narratives are best left to those who need them. The foundation of reliable accounts is available in fact. Arranging those facts in a sequence suggests possibilities and correlations, but causation stretches the best of us to our limits. It should hurt. Thinking always does. Sorry for belabouring the obvious, but dissenters have no advantages beyond our ability to grasp the reality of our situation. Enchantment by counter-narrative is a risk that I want no exposure to.
At the moment the victor's of WW2 are jostling to rearrange the pecking order. The losers (Uk, Europe, Japan and various pro-Axis states elsewhere) are responding, not very successfully so far.
USA trying to leverage its weakness (trade and capital deficits) into strengths via the bond market (petrodollar, Basel Accord, SWIFT).
My guess is that the big winner will be those multinationals that have hard currency reserves capable of withstanding the coming crisis. Minor winners will be plutocrats and the drug cartels. The Global South scavenge from the corpse of the West as US and Europe turn into global commons for entrepreneurs and welfare sinks for the planet.
Enchantment by narrative is definitely a pitfall that we need to avoid, yet at the same time the man on the street requires a great myth by means of which to bring order to his world. One of our tasks is to provide that myth; which must also be true, lest we become no better than the (ig)Noble Liars we struggle against.
But providing the myth is not optional. It is a strategic necessity.
An excellent place to start reassessing the global situation is with Powell.
He was a first class strategist, as you'd expect from a former brigadier in military intelligence. And unsentimental about the USA.
https://unherd.com/2020/09/would-enoch-powell-have-supported-brexit/
Regarding Barbarossa, there's the Suvorov hypothesis - that Stalin was, in fact, preparing an invasion, which German intelligence caught wind of just in time. If true, it would explain the abrupt pivot from the Western to the Eastern front, and the hasty invasion of Russia, without appropriate equipment. That last part always struck me as strange, as Germans are usually quite careful and systematic. The only other explanation is “Hitler was crazy”, and I'm always very suspicious of explanations that take that form.
There are a vast number of unanswered questions over the war. Fully agree with the inadequacy of explaining politics as a function of individual shortcomings. Hitler was charismatic in a weird, very theatrical and vulgar way. This distracts attention from institutional and geopolitical factors, many of which remain supersensitive. He went truly crazy late in the war as Parkinsons and the drugs kicked in, but he was too useful for those around him to just kill him, the smart ones were too busy intriguing with the US on their postwar plans. The lurid and cruel aspects of the regime ensure that people never get around to focussing on the critical stuff: trade, finance, property rights and transnational cooperation. The legacy on these from midcentury remains highly relevant today.
Neither Hitler nor Stalin had any illusions about the other. But Stalin wasn't ready since the Red Army was still reeling from the purges. Turns out that Hitler wasn't ready either but he just didn't know it. For one thing most of the German trucks were stolen from the French and rapidly broke down. Surprise.
Barbarossa was a BRILLIAN operational success. It achieved ALL of it's aims, probably even surpassed them. Gemany was expecting the Soviets would be unable to continue the fight after suffering such a devastating loss. They lost their entire prewar military in a few months, for crying out loud! There's even a recording of Hitler talking with some Finnish (I think) generals where he explains what his General Staff was expecting, how many divisions the Soviets had and how many they would raise. And then he said how many they already destroyed by the time of the conversation.
The problem, though, was that Russia doesn't plan on the operational level. Since the days of Catherine the Great, they plan on the strategic level. The General Staff is an organ of the state which has to figure out the top-level strategic defence of the realm. It has unfettered hands to do this. It has been doing this faithfully for literal centuries. During WW2, by the time Germans were approaching Moscow, and defeating the army defending the approaches to Moscow, their problem was becoming apparent: there wasn't supposed to be an army defending the approaches to Moscow! The Prussian generals did everything right. It's somewhere else in Nazi Germany that the failure happened. Who was running the foreign intel? Why didn't that somebody know who was sitting on the Russian General Staff?
Piling on:
One thing in favour of that hypothesis is the Winter War, the aim of which was to push through Finland to the Baltic Sea, from the Arctic to Poland.
And if possible, to push on through Sweden and Norway to take and hold the Atlantic coast in the North.
For many reasons, this was impossible to carry out.
Counter to this is how woefully unprepared the Red Army invading Finland was, initially. For one, they lacked winter gear or snow-coloured uniforms, because Stalin had been promised a war of a week or two at most, which speaks against there being a plan for capturing Sweden and Norway.
Tangentially:
During the Cold War, the Soviet plan was a rapid push onto the Atlantic in the north, knocking out northern Germany and Denmark and southern Sweden with tactical nuclear strikes. The idea was to cordon off the north Atlantic; imagine a line from Greenland and Iceland down to Denmark, under Soviet control.
And the caveat de jure: no power going to war has /one/ plan. Some american put it correctly: "Planning, not plans".
A lot to respond to there.
The Iron Guard were certainly pretty hardcore. I'm very far from an expert on the subject, but I have read that even the Nazis thought they went too far. Beyond that I won't opine on the matter as I simply know too little to have strong opinions on it.
As for Eliade, certainly he did not see the world at all as Nietzsche did. That is neither a bad thing nor a good thing. From what I've read of his work, however, I don't think he simply took people's word for anything. He was a careful scholar first and foremost.
The trouble with the Euro Old Right is that they face so much criticism(a fair bit of which is facile) that people neglect key issues.
For me, these issues are not necessarily about right or wrong but about realism and effectiveness. The reactionaries helped bring about the very conditions that they most feared. A lot of them were fuckwits. Others dupes. The essential lesson IMHO is how we are unconsciously repeating their failures.
Narrative and counternarrative less interesting for me than the mechanisms of function at work and the schematics of geopolitics.
I read somewhere (sorry no cite) that on one occasion the SS actually opened fire on an Iron Guard unit for "unnecessary" cruelty to Jews. A similar story exists about the Ustase so it may be a garble or a complete myth.
"Let’s start with an awkward and contentious statement of what I would nonetheless say is a statement of fact: Adolf Hitler was the scapegoat of the 20th century.
This is not meant to imply that Hitler was innocent. Only that he was turned into a symbol of ultimate evil, independently of any rational or sober understanding of WW2 history or the man himself.1
Since the 20th century was the first period in history in which a communications system engulfed the entire planet, that makes Adolf Hitler the scapegoat of all time.
When God was killed, the Devil’s incarnation became inevitable, and imminent. Nietzsche was both the pallbearer and midwife in this “transference.”2
Enter Adolfus? Ecce homo."
https://childrenofjob.substack.com/p/burdens-of-belief-the-foundational
Well said. That was insightful.
WWII is the foundational myth of the American Empire, as much as the Punic wars were the foundational myth for the Roman Empire; it both supports it's creation and its continuing existence. As you point out,, as an article of faith it is blasphemy to dispute, and anyone who disputes it is cast out as a heretic and schismatic (Bye, Tucker)
I have argued, and been lambasted on, for insisting that refusing to review history means we can never understand why we are here, and we have to accept other people's interpretations. With false foundations we can never find truth, and never will. Our past is what we guide our aim for the future, and with bad aim we will always miss, even when we hit the target by accident.
to bring it to the personal level, if the familial myth is that you cannot criticize your mom because she gave birth to you, and was a brilliant woman, and her struggle to find sobriety through AA and her church is a testament to how she wanted so deeply to be a better person. Aside from the actual damage she did to everyone around her, it also makes it impossible to understand why she was so angry and self destructive, if it was from trauma, abuse of her own, or was it inheritance? How can you plan the future without that knowledge? Without being able to view these questions we are condemned to the same cycle of negligence and modelling and self doubt.
A final note, all history is revisionist, that is the point of the study of history. without revision, all history can be is a retelling of grandfather tales, and it loses nuance and understanding as it is transmitted.
Great post! The academic agent called it the boomer truth regime. “If you oppose degeneracy then you’re a nazi!” 😂
AA’s framing is absolutely cutting.
We 🇺🇸just need to escape WW2 emergency government.
Yes. I will add something.
The replacement of the mythology of Christianity with that of "The Good War" is, and remains, a very purposeful act. This was not done accidentally. It was not born as most myths do- from irrefutable Truths about humanity.
No it was manufactured, from the ground up, by, frankly, those who serve evil entities. There are vicious lies hidden in every aspect of this event. Everything of consequence is misrepresented, and those guilty of the most heinous crimes play the victim of those crimes.
It is the building of a new religion, as you have stated, but a religion founded fundamentally on the inversion of Truth itself.
It is fundamentally evil, and it is why we see so much decay and degeneracy and destruction now. Inverting truth means inverting beauty. It means the inversion of the nature of love, of friendship, of virtue.
It is our biggest enemy. It is the central event that has caused this downward spiral of humanity. Its tendrils run deep.
We will not be free of the lies and the evils thereof until we are free from this Big Lie.
It is, of all ancillary debates, controversies, issues, the albatross hung from our neck, and we will not begin to heal without dispelling it.
Well said.
A rotten tree bares poison fruit.
it's true that Christ got hit and put on a secondary place in favour of the Jews after ww2
his spiritual role being more one of a generical crime-observer - along with specs that belongs to his specific role that I dont know - got relatively under-considered there...
That's odd
It's as if the General of Earthling's suffering could not assume his role and that the Victims themselves have been carried on to enjoy such position
Hmmm surely as he's the original guy it's just a matter of not yet having his voice done
Man, this was an INCREDIBLE piece! I re-stacked it with a long-ish comment of my own, but just wanted to go out of my way to say how much I appreciate the EFFORT you put into this. As a fellow blogger who also tends to “go long,” and who edits, re-edits, writes and re-writes, I know a fellow hard-working HUMAN writer when I see one. Keep up the thought-provoking and soul-stirring work, my friend!
Thank you, my friend. Means a lot.
You’re welcome! You earned it and more. I’m grateful folks like you are around.
One typo: s/Revelations/Revelation/
I don't have an opinion on Churchill, but it's obviously true that WWII has become the unquestionable civic religion in the US.
Good catch!
I didn't want this article to stop.
It could easily have been a lot longer…
"The Nazis opposed sexual degeneracy – promiscuity, homosexuality, transgenderism, and so on – from which it follows, naturally enough, that all of these things must be good, celebrated, and encouraged."
I will not argue that this became mythologized by liberalism in the post-War era. That is an important point that has been more than made an adequate case for. What I would like to point out is that these degeneracies existed BEFORE that era and were not called into being by a reaction to the Nazis. All of these things existed copiously in Berlin during the Weimar era; the first transgender surgeries were performed there in the 1920's; Berlin was known as the sin capital of the Western world, where every kind of degeneracy had a nightclub or six where it was on offer, for a price, and the culture positively wallowed in it.
If this degeneracy was not created by liberalism in its reflexive horror to Nazi atrocities, from where did it come from? Warning: cognitive dissonance dead ahead.
Degeneracy was not originally created in reaction to fascism, but its elevation to moral ideal is very much a reaction to fascism shutting down Weimar degeneracy. There was some sick shit happening in Weimar Berlin, but AFAIK they weren't holding pride parades.
Nor infiltrating schools. They kept their degeneracy in the nightclubs.
You know exactly (((where))) it came from.
Magnus Hirschfeld was not a "German".
Winner winner chicken dinner!
Some people belive it was injected into the German society and psyche by the occupiers, in order to destroy German people forever. Here's a writeup as it relates to Japan: https://thorstenjpattberg.substack.com/p/the-path-to-japans-childlessness
Is a new myth really what we need?
I don't think that's optional; however, a caveat is that the answer may well be an old myth, in renewed form.
But we do need a replacement myth.
Are you familiar with Rene Girard’s reading of the Gospels, viz a viz the scapegoat mechanism & how the NT reveals how murder-sacrifice of an innocent is what all religious myths are created to conceal, making Christianity the final revelation of that murder & cover-up (of which Satan is the founder-father, John 8:44: https://biblehub.com/john/8-44.htm), ergo the end of myth & of sacrifice.
Ergo the apocalypse = revelation, since, once the scapegoat mechanism is revealed, no more mythical cover-ups are possible to prevent all-against-all violence, and only the Jesus solution (love thine enemies, resist not evil) can save us.
Passingly familiar, yes, and it's clearly at play here.
No. We cannot fabricate a new myth. Tolkein came close, but the greatest myths have been written. They tell the Truth.
The future is the past.
I am not saying we have to go back to thatched roofs and horse and buggy, but our ethos and strength must come from tradition.
Because the present is horrifying, ugly, and filled with deception.
Myth rooted in the deep past is absolutely the way; but it also needs to be connected to the present.
Epic essay. But I wouldn’t say that most of the WWII myth is true.
Yeah like I said ... Getting into revisionism would have taken way too much time.
It is a shame how WWII has been stripped of its nuance, robbing the people who did die of a chance for their legacies to be remembered and their stories told. As a young child, I--of course--was raised with the notion that ALL "Nazi" soldiers were evil. It wasn't until I was a preteen and read accounts of German soldiers who hated Hitler and everything Nazism stood for that I realized things were far more complicated than the black-and-white picture I'd been presented with until that point. Not all American soldiers were honorable. Not all Russian soldiers were communists. Not all German soldiers were Nazis. Sure, many were. But there were those who who were just victims--once normal boys and young men--who were wrapped up in something far greater than them.
There were a lot of conscripts who had no choice in the matter, on every side.