This part of East Asia is characterized by three major powers and three lesser powers. The major ones are the Russian Federation, China, and the United States of America. Each of these nations has enough nuclear weaponry to wipe out the other. The three lesser powers are South Korea, North Korea, and Japan. While South Korea presently lacks a nuclear weapons program the North Korean program has been a major success. The Japanese have a ‘bomb in the basement’ program and stockpile a massive amount of weapons grade plutonium. All of them have large and formidable militaries with the Japanese and Koreans maintaining powerful navies as well.

Today the USA uses Japan and South Korea as a great shield protecting its western flank and hemming in two powerful rivals: China and Russia. Between the three of them China and Russia are thoroughly trapped. By encouraging the development of their collective militaries and maintaining America’s network of bases in the area the Pentagon keeps a close on their Asian neighbors.

Contrary to public thought, North Korea is a distraction. It provides a justification for the mass militarization of the DMZ and Japan’s considerable investment in naval forces, air defense, and fighter jets. But the real prize is the opportunity to station unique American forces so close to the borders of rivals, all the while maintaining a massive reserve in the form of the allied nations military. For the Americans this situation is beautiful; they hold all the cards. And at any moment they are capable of inflicting on China that great nightmare scenario of naval embargo via the massive and powerful Japanese navy.

There are only two chinks in the American strategy here: For one, South Korea is Sinophilic and have few problems with integrating into the Tianxia sphere which they’ve historically been part of. China need only apply a little leverage to cause diplomatic problems between South Korea and the rest of the alliance here.

The second gap is North Korea’s finicky nature. One can’t even trust them to be consistent in their hostility. This unpredictability is a deliberate strength of their foreign policy because it gives them enormous freedom of action. They’ve undertaken countless risky activities and escaped scot-free as a result.

This brings us to Russia’s pivot to Asia. Russia and China are clear allies now, so a Chinese weakness is a Russian weakness. A Chinese weakness is massive embargo and the rapid strangulation of their economy. A Russian weakness is an American dominated East Asia. Both weaknesses converge on an opportunity: Disarm North Korea.

The disarmament of North Korea would be the first step towards unification with the South. The South Koreans have voiced many times their desire to absorb their northern brethren despite historical differences. They certainly have the economic and industrial means to do so. The disarmament of North Korea and the opening of its markets would be a massive carrot for the South Koreans, one for which they’d pay almost any cost, including a turn towards the Russian-Chinese alliance.

America would then be left in a tricky situation: Decades of troops and hardware now stuck in a country amenable to the hegemon’s greatest rival whilst the justification of the presence of these troops would be stripped aside. A disarmed North Korea is not one that requires 30,000 troops armed with the latest in destructive equipment to watch over it.

The justification for the Okinawa and other American bases, notoriously unpopular among the Japanese, would also be stripped away. Japan, regional power of east Asia, would thus be left in a tricky position. It would be friendless in the region, with only a corrupted Taiwan and stubborn Phillipines to count on while America remains across the sea. And America’s bases would present a suddenly enormous PR problem for the state.

All at once the Japanese would have a domestic crisis on their hand while one of the worlds most formidable militaries, that of South Korea, will have turned to join its elder patron’s greatest rivals. A stunning turn around to rival America’s Maidan coup in the Ukraine.

But is this scenario occurring as described? Well yes, and as fast as it can too. The one difficult part for the Russians and the one the Americans love to encourage is the finicky nature of the North Koreans, fearful and concerned of being hung out to dry. Russia has been carefully bolstering ties for the last year to alleviate these fears with 2015 finally resulting in an official visit-to-be from Kim Jong-Un and the establishment of a Russo-Korean Joint Business Council. Both are immensely notable actions and when combined with the prospect of joint military drills we see that all signs are present.

Russia is pivoting towards North Korea as fast as it can, and the Koreans are happy to oblige. By 2020 the Korea that the West has counted among its own may very well be in the camp of its greatest rivals. Time will tell.

The post North Korea is Russia’s Pacific Pivot appeared first on Social Matter.

In theory, 4PT accepts that Western responses to current ideological norms should come from a framework appropriate to Europe and the Anglosphere. In practice, those who believe that Putin’s traditionalist vanguard is the best hope for Western rebirth go far beyond this. Criticism of the Russian government is met with accusations of serving Western liberal oligarchs. Putin’s achievements become lionized, and his failures ignored. RT becomes trusted as a news source. (Before it appears in the comments, yes it is perfectly possible for both Western and Russian channels to be airing propaganda. One doesn’t exclude the other.) Russian media gives voice to radicals from across the political spectrum. The Kremlin itself condemns European right wing ideologies at the same time that it funds European right wing parties. This can be useful when voices marginalized by the ideological conglomerate of media, academia, and government are able to make their ideas heard. But Russia’s aim is not to create a resurgence of traditionalism, rightist ideas, or the values which strengthen civilization. Russia’s interests are its own, and its interest is dischord which will give it the opportunity to re-establish its sphere of influence. Even if one takes the position that re-establishment of Russian influence is a good thing,  it should be obvious that Russia is not here to restore the West, nor should we expect it to be.

The Communist traitor Alger Hiss testifies at the HUAC. Don’t be him.

Russia has always had a talent for weaponizing ideology. This goes back before Putin, even back before the hammer and sickle was ever hoisted on Russian soil. After the defeat of Napoleon, Tsar Alexander I went from being a sympathizer of liberalism and Enlightenment to promoting European unity against the Jacobin tide. When the time of the Tsars did come to an end, the internationalism of communist ideology lent the USSR a great advantage. From Asia to Europe and even America, communist faithful were manipulated into supporting the geopolitical interests of the USSR, the total absence of any workers’ utopia presumably going unmentioned. The NKVD and later KGB were skilled in infiltration and sabotage, but a lot of this depended on finding willing cooperators in the organizations they worked in. From State Department official Alger Hiss to the Cambridge Five spy ring, what makes many Soviet agents remarkable is that they weren’t just motivated by personal gain. Many of these people truly believed that they were serving a higher cause for the good of the world by serving the Soviet Union. They believed that the benefits of the West were outdone by its injustices, and that the injustices of the USSR were necessary for the Revolution. The lesson to be learned is this: when the interests of your ideology so systematically line up with the interests of a foreign power, it might be time to ask yourself whether you’re getting played. If you can’t tell who the useful idiot at the table is, it’s probably you.

But this skill at ideology and propaganda hid some important realities about the Soviet Union itself: chiefly, its stagnation. Soviet rule wrenched the country from an agrarian to an industrial position at stunning speed, at the cost of millions of lives from famine and other causes. Soviet institutions incentivized getting to know the right people rather than innovation and productivity. A socialist economy can function to a certain degree, especially when the state can simply move entire populations. But it could never attain the dynamism of the market economies, from American capitalism to European welfare states. The Official Truths of the USSR made for beautiful propaganda, because this propaganda was necessary to obscure the cold and real truths about how the country was actually being governed.

Many Westerners today have become fascinated with Russia. This time they’re people alienated by weak leadership and cultural masochism rather than by capitalist inequality. They see Western media and academia contesting each other to see who can do away with their heritage and self-respect fastest. It takes an impressive level of cognitive dissonance to apologize for every time the West asserted itself while simultaneously using drones to kill innocents a world away. By way of contrast, Putin has restored national pride to the hearts of many Russians. His cultivated image is one of unapologetic masculinity and forthright leadership. Little wonder that he would capture the imaginations of so many Westerners disgusted with their state of affairs. And so the question arises: how much is advancing 4PT, Eurasianism, and Putin propaganda doing for us and how much is it doing for Russia?

And once again, Official Truth obscures trends which still leave Russia fragile as a country. Of course, this isn’t to say that all Official Truths are created equal. Orthodoxy and cultural pride are nowhere so totalitarian as the Soviet system was. Properly framed, they can even aid in implementing solutions to some of these crises. But Russian expansion in geopolitics won’t protect the state from its failures in providing sound governance.

First, demographics. The reproductive crisis of the Russian population has been well known since the end of the Soviet Union. Despite a recent surge in births, official predictions still envision a decline resulting in significant economic and social stagnation. Ironically, modern Western liberalism managed to out-progress Communism, which meant that social mores in the USSR were more traditional than we are used to today. Today, cohabitation is up 30% for women, but a much lower number of these end up in marriages. At this point, the proportion of Russian women who get and stay married has dropped from 60% in 1990 to 34% just six years later. Today, the UN estimates that half of Russian marriages end in divorce. Mortality rates are higher now than they were during the 50’s – an increase which started around a decade later, in large part due to alcoholism. Russian men have born the brunt of this, facing high rates of chronic disease and a life expectancy of 64 years. That’s lower than their male counterparts in Iraq, who make it to around 70 years despite over a decade of war and a fundamentalist death cult controlling a chunk of their territory. Now as others have pointed out, these obstacles are not insurmountable, and Russia is indeed making progress. But if the result of its ideological shift is that resources are devoted to funding expansion rather than moving forward in its social and economic development, these advances could be undermined. Diplomatic pushes as with Egypt and the Eurasian Economic Union bring more opportunities with less costs.

“Putin is not the future of Russia. The future of Russia is us.” – Khodorkovsky, oligarch and Western liberal favourite. Bad governance is what he will exploit.

This brings us to investment in the population. If your people don’t feel confident enough to invest in the future, your country won’t have much of one. Two big incentives are health and economic opportunity. Tax cuts and benefits won’t encourage people to reproduce if their children are at risk of dying young and becoming caught up in crime or drug use. If Russian families are to keep reversing the demographic decline, they must be able to reverse their educational and medical decline. This requires stable institutions, which give people the confidence to make significant investments. The great failure of Russian governance since the fall of the USSR has been the inability to stem the tide of corruption. Putin’s supporters paint him as having smashed the corrupt oligarchy. In reality, corruption as a business model has grown under Putin’s rule. The Interior Ministry estimates that the average bribe has grown 26 times between 2008 and 2011, much faster than inflation. It’s a consistent issue with states which focus on ideology and personality cult to the exclusion of sound governance. It’s also what allows Western-funded dissidents to appeal to popular discontent. After the flags stop waving and the ruler returns to the capital, the grind of daily life goes on. The inability to build strong, trustworthy institutions makes the state fragile overall. There will come a day when Russia must make do without Putin. Perhaps he will have a successor ready to go. But should the Russian state take this risk? General health and order was much higher when the Soviet Union was dissolving. Not so today. A power struggle in the Russian state could tear the country apart.

And ultimately, the fate of Russia has dire consequences for the West, be it Left, Right, or divided between the two. Chechen fighters have been a core fighting force for Islamic State since its inception. Russia is a major supporter of Central Asian governments which will have to deal with hardened fighters returning from Iraq and Syria. The terrorist group is already leaving its mark in North Africa. A Russian collapse would give ISIS a free reign to increase its demands for loyalty from Islamists in the region seeking to ascend in the new power vacuum, and it has money, weapons, and experience to tempt them with. And whatever criticisms we have of Russia’s governance, the fact is that it remains a voice in opposition to the equally weaponized ideology which our own elites want to see overtake the entire globe. Whatever future the West has depends on having good political and economic relations with the growing powers of the new millennium. If all goes well, we will be one of them.

If pro-Russian Westerners overstate the glories of Putin, my belief is that Western ideologues will keep doing everything they can to damn Russia for rejecting them. There is a dangerous mixture of fatal hubris and existential terror at the heart of how the West today is being governed. We don’t know what the future map of the West will be. We can guess at ethnic and cultural demographics. We might imagine what ideologies will take over. But what we can say for certain is that our coming generations of leaders must find an antidote to this mixture and ingest it. 4PT and similar ideologies born in Russia have been crafted to secure the future of the Russian world. They will not do the same for the heirs of Western Civilization.

The post Russia Is Not Our Saviour appeared first on Social Matter.

Hello. I’m a Russian occupier. It is my profession. Historically, it just happened. I once occupied Siberia… I once occupied the Baltic States … I once occupied Central Asia … I once occupied Ukraine … Yes, I’m an occupier, and I’m tired of apologizing for it! I’m an occupier by birthright, an aggressor and a bloodthirsty monster. Be afraid. … All and sundry came to my house: the Turks, the British, the Poles, the Germans, the French — we’ve got enough land, two and a half meters for each and every one of them! Please, understand. I don’t need your hypocritical “freedom.” I don’t need your rotten “democracy.” Everything that you call “Western values” is alien to me. I have other interests. I politely warn you for the last time: don’t mess with me. I build peace, I love peace, but I know how to fight better than anyone else… Sincerely, your Russian occupier.

You can watch the video for yourself. More than 2.3 million views so far. In Russian. Quite a ride.

Can you imagine the American version?

Hello. I’m an American settler. It is my profession. Historically, it just happened. I once occupied North America… I once occupied Alaska … I once occupied Hawaii … I once occupied Cuba … Yes, I’m an occupier, and I’m tired of apologizing for it! I’m an occupier by birthright, an aggressor and a bloodthirsty monster. Be afraid. … All and sundry came to my house: the Redskins, the British, the Mexicans, the Japanese — we’ve got enough land, two and a half meters for each and every one of them!

Mighty racist, innit?

Hello. I’m a British colonizer. It is my profession. Historically, it just happened. I once occupied India… I once occupied Australia … I once occupied Africa … I once occupied Ireland … Yes, I’m an occupier, and I’m tired of apologizing for it! I’m an occupier by birthright, an aggressor and a bloodthirsty monster. Be afraid. … All and sundry came to my house: the Romans, the Normans, the Vikings, the French, the Germans — we’ve got enough land, two and a half meters for each and every one of them!

I can hear Labour-voters crying in agony.

How did it come to this? Why do Russians celebrate their old conquests and justify them with talk of civilization and glory, but Britons and Americans couldn’t even begin to do the same without being denounced as racists, imperialists, etc.? Come to think of it, why did the latter two stop doing what the first is still doing?

Henry Dampier has commented on the differences between [Novo-] Russian and American propaganda before. Limitless American budgets can nevertheless only focus on the “you-you-you.” Join the American army — you’ll benefit. The closest to an organizing principle they can reach is “diversity.” Token black marine. Token female soldier. Token Asian paratrooper. And so forth. White males with hokey ideas about brothers-in-arms dying for the Honor of the Fatherland need not apply. It’ll be more like gender-non-conforming-individuals-in-arms twisting drone-joysticks for the Justice of the Trayvon. Not so in Russia.

Russian diversity.

Russian propaganda for the fighters in Donbass is focused on Donbass and the people protecting it — grizzly white males who like to shoot, smoke and beseech the Lord Jesus Christ. That typically Western, narcissistic, and solipsistic propaganda trend, where a cast of soft-spoken, diverse characters stand and alternately plead with and browbeat the viewer about this-or-that cause they totally stand united for but are nevertheless hopeless about solving without you, before ending with a hashtag — this particular style of propaganda has been found somewhat wanting by the Russians.

One of these Russian occupiers is worth a hundred thousand teary-eyed liberal actors with hashtags.

It goes without saying that a rejection of narcissistic slave-morality propaganda didn’t arise out of nothing. Judging by the video, the Russian view of the West is markedly dim (and rightly so). Western “democracy” means NATO interventions and Guantanamo Bay. Western “freedom” means rule by the vulgar dykes of Pussy Riot and sermons from the fatuous scatologists of Charlie Hebdo. Western “values” mean “Daddy, Papa, and Me.” Enthusiasm for this societal program is not exactly sky-high. You can tell a lot about a people by their propaganda. Russia and the West may look suspiciously similar at times, were one to take just a surface glance at something like fertility rates. And yet the trend lines couldn’t be farther apart.

It’s worth watching this video about Alexei Mozgovoy, separatist leader in Lugansk, ruling his area like a “fiefdom.” (In the West, apparently, we prefer our lawless chieftains to have titles like “Administrative Chief of the ABCDEFG” instead of “Commander.” So long as it’s a bureaucracy committing the barbarism we can call ourselves civilized, I guess.) Vice is not any less biased than any other Western media outlet, and there is a wrenching juxtaposition between how hard the video-creators want you to hate Mr. Mozgovoy and how much perfect sense he is making. Mozgovoy suggests banning women from nightclubs and cafes, and continues:

Despite their behavior, women remain women and you are not allowed to rape them. At the same time, it’s not a bad idea for a society, and for women in particular, to take some steps to raise their morals.

Simon Ostrovsky asks him what problems they have with morality. The same as you have, he responds.

For instance, those young ladies who are in their childbearing age and need to give birth, so that there is no demographic crisis and so on, instead they are ruining their bodies. What kind of mother can she be after she has ruined her body with alcohol and drugs?

Ostrovsky asks some leading questions, trying to establish Mozgovoy’s “people’s courts” as Medieval barbarisms. Ostrovsky, liberal hipster douche, scarf, glasses and all, apparently doesn’t like democracy when the Russians do it. He apparently also forgot that Mozgovoy’s “people’s courts” are the ones replacing the awful “corrupt Russian courts” Westerners wail about, which Mozgovoy points out immediately. You see, America needs to invade Ukraine (and especially Donbass) to get rid of that corrupt Russian system and replace it with a good American system, for the people! Wait, what’s happening? No, don’t let the people! organize their own courts. Stop it! Democracy is bad! I mean–wait, what?

So did uneducated sexist redneck barbarian bigot on the wrong side of history Mr. Mozgovoy execute the poor man unfairly tried by the Putin’s people’s court? Yes! Bomb Russia now! Nope. What happened to your victim, Mr. Mozgovoy?

Nothing. He is alive, but in prison. […] Even though he was sentenced to death, that does not mean that he will be executed the next day. It’s necessary to allow time for an appeal, isn’t it?

Remember that in the Land of the Free, self-defense against a protected minority will get you publicly tarred and feathered like George Zimmerman or Darren Wilson before a trial has even begun. This will put your family in danger, put a price on your head, alienate you from the ruling powers of your homeland and devastate your livelihood. Even suggesting a protected minority might not be all it’s cracked up to be will turn you into a non-person, everything but flatly murdered. People’s courts come in all shapes and sizes. At least the Russian-run ones are concerned with crime and punishment instead of social justice.

Chalk it up to different mentalities.

The post Different Mentalities appeared first on Social Matter.

For the uninitiated, Dugin calls his theoretical framework the Fourth Political Theory (4PT). Its name hints at its foundations. Dugin holds that since the Enlightenment, three political theories have wrestled for global control. Liberalism came first, and annihilated the old Christian and monarchic order. When it thinks about society, it focuses on the individual person. Communism came second, and rose in reaction to Liberalism. It takes the socio-economic class as its subject. This was because Liberal individualism failed to address the situation of the poor and working classes, now that the bourgeoisie had overthrown their own masters. The third theory is Fascism, and it reacted against both Communism and its Liberal predecessor. It tried to overcome the division of individuals and classes by basing society on a common foundation. In cases like Italy, it took the State as its starting point. In Germany, the racial volk played this role. Communism and Liberalism defeated Fascism, and Liberalism eventually overcame its former ally too, and now stands triumphant. Dugin claims that it can only be challenged by a fourth theory, which learns from the failures of former critiques.

His belief is that the failures of each ideology came from focusing on a single aspect of human existence. In fact, our world is a complex of all these things: we individuals are part of an ethno-cultural whole, a political order, and a particular station in that order. The 4PT claims to take a holistic view of the human being and accepts all these realities. Dasein – real existence in the world – can’t be so slickly reduced to a set of axioms. Humans are different. Ethnicities differ. Cultures and histories differ. Geopolitical realities differ. Because of this, societies develop different ways of existing. Liberalism claims to accept differences, but this is mere shadow play. In reality, it imposes a common value framework on all groups. Religion and culture become ornaments for liberal homogeneity. Neoreaction’s own framework agrees with this analysis. It condemns the idea that society can be constructed from an ideological blueprint. The bigger the plan for society, the more unknowns one faces. In fact, Neoreaction takes this further than 4PT. The Eurasian idea itself, with its vision of a federal union of states and de-Westernized cultures, is more detailed than anything Neoreaction puts forward. The presumption of knowledge is a dangerous thing to contend with. Instead, Neoreaction intends to be a toolbox to be used according to different sets of needs.

There are further comparisons. Western social science distinguishes between theoretical models and the “real world”. Both 4PT and Neoreaction critique this. Dugin talks about “practice as theory”, and believes that one cannot separate lived experience from ideology; Neoreaction discerns the prerequisites to Civilization from the historical record rather than manifestos. Liberalism claimed to leave individuals free to choose their own ways of living; the modern Liberal agrees, provided they make the proper choice. With Dugin, Neoreaction recognizes the slight of hand. All three have come to understand that unrestricted personal freedom is inimical to an enduring social order. The only difference is that the latter two are honest about it. Furthermore, Neoreactionary thought has overcome theological divides in the concept of Gnon – Nature or Nature’s God. Gnon’s laws cannot be suspended by activist judges or deconstructed by university professors. Societies must discover them and structure themselves accordingly. Meanwhile, Dugin has taken inspiration from the German Conservative Revolution and the Traditionalist School. As Dugin says in The Fourth Political Theory:

“Conservative revolutionaries want not only to slow time down, like the liberal conservatives, or return to the past like traditionalists, but to pull out from the structure of the world the roots of evil…and in so doing [fulfil] some kind of secret, parallel, non-evident intention of the Deity itself.”

But Dugin’s response to these ideas also leads us to some of the clashes between Western Rightists and the Fourth Political Theory. Dugin has consistently charged the ideology of progress as racist, and the West as being a “globally deployed model of…ethnocentrism, which is the purest manifestation of racist ideology.” When he so closely echoes the rhetoric of university SJW’s, those otherwise sympathetic become understandably suspicious. There are two things we need to note. The first is that racism isn’t actually the accurate term to describe what Dugin means. In Fourth Political Theory, he states that racism also exists among cultures, classes and even technology. Clearly, “chauvinism” or “supremacy” would be more accurate words than “racism”. Dugin’s supporters explain that the term illustrates that the West uses ideology in the same way it once used race and religion – to justify itself as the standard for Civilization. But it’s worth noting that the word also allows Dugin to attack Western liberalism on its own basis.

Dugin takes as one of his premises that all cultures and peoples – including the European West – must determine for themselves how they choose to exist. In that sense, 4PT undermines modern Progressivism’s condemnation of Western identity and heritage. The 4PT is a weaponized ideology: its stated purpose is to take over from the failures of Liberalism. Western countries have often used liberal ideology to undermine states in opposition to Western interests. From Russia to Egypt, Western NGO’s have funded groups with liberal sympathies, as the ideology is particularly useful in such ventures. Since it focuses on the individual, Liberalism can delegitimize a political order by focusing on select groups who view themselves as being excluded from the political process. Of course, Western countries themselves do this all the time through electoral and speech regulations. Implicit in our laws is the admission that not everyone should have equal involvement in the political process. If the 4PT gains influence, Russia and other countries will have a strong ideological counterweapon to this tactic.

Nevertheless, this is not the only issue on which Dugin seems to compromise with ideologies antithetical to the values of the Right. While an ideological anticommunist, he has defended the Soviet Union as an expression of the Russian worldview.

“Thanks to those who will be engaged in the defense of the Republic of Novorossia and who experience this particular Eurasian Orthodox identity, the rest of the Russian population will learn more about its ideological identity. At the same time, the achievements of the Soviet Union will not be excluded but included in a broader context rid of orthodox Marxism, materialism and atheism. That is the Eurasian ideology: it mainly includes the legacy of orthodoxy of the Byzantine monarchy and Russian nationalism, not to mention the Russian interpretation of Soviet history as briefly expressed in National Bolshevism.”

To understand Dugin’s reasoning, we need to distinguish between ideological communism and the geopolitical entity of the USSR. Communism as an ideology is rejected by Dugin as the failed second political theory. Communism as a system of government was absorbed into a broader Russian culture and worldview. Hence, Stalin is today remembered by many Russians not primarily as a Communist, but as a strong central ruler in the Russian tradition of autocracy. Similarly, the modern Communist Party of the Russian Federation supports cooperation with the Russian Orthodox Church. This is due to the Left-Nationalist faction currently controlling the party. The same pattern is reflected in the Donetsk and Lugansk Peoples’ Republics attempting to secede from Ukraine. Soviet institutions, nationalist rhetoric, and Orthodox religion are woven together by supporters of Russian rule. For Dugin, this is part of an organic process. Under bolshevism, the Russian people suffered mightily. From Stalin on, they were also a superpower. In the post-Soviet age, the Russian mind must reconcile itself to its own historical experience.

Applied metaphysics

Neoreaction’s similarities with 4PT also contain its differences: both seek to deconstruct the liberal ideological premises laid in the Enlightenment. But Dugin is working in a society which holds fundamentally illiberal values, mores, and worldviews. Neoreaction exists in the sanctum of Liberalism, the West itself. If 4PT is a ship to let Russia sail on its own path, Neoreaction is a lifeboat with a map and compass that we hope against hope will get us to shore. Dugin looks at civilizations which must choose whether to follow the West’s path or not. Neoreaction looks at societies which must choose whether to follow Civilization’s path or not – and most seem to have chosen the latter. Moreover, Neoreaction stands firmly in a tradition of empirical analysis which Dugin categorizes as part and parcel of the Western “Atlanticist” thinking Russia rejects. The programmer who built an ideology in his garage stands in stark contrast to the bearded philosopher holding a rocket launcher in South Ossetia. As both ideologies accept differences, this isn’t necessarily a point of conflict. But it’s crucial to understanding the distinctions in methodology.

Both 4PT and Neoreaction are deeply concerned with Civilization. But this may also be the most fundamental point of distinction between the two schools of thought. For 4PT, the main emphasis is on the right to difference. Of course, Neoreaction agrees that different peoples and cultures must find their own particular modes of Civilization. But Dugin goes further, almost into relativism. He proclaims:

“There will be no universal standard, neither in the material nor in the spiritual aspect. Each civilisation will at last receive the right to freely proclaim that which is, according to its wishes, the measure of things. Somewhere that will be man, somewhere religion, somewhere ethics, somewhere materialism.”

This makes the difference clear. Dugin imagines many different civilizations. Civilization is simply a particular people’s mode of being – its culture, self-conception, and so forth. But Neoreaction goes further. Modes of being have consequences. They can make you master of the globe or they can send you to a humiliating historical grave. Beyond the many particular civilizations, there is a common phenomenon of Civilization proper. Violence and force are its foundation, because they are the tools used to create law and order. When people can live in peace and safety, they have the incentive to have families, invent, and improve themselves. When this is reinforced with responsibility to the common good, people invest in the future. The structures may differ, but the effect is the same: society flourishes. But when authority breaks down, families are abandoned, and the common good forgotten, a society will collapse. Sometimes, enough is protected that it can repair and be reborn. More often, it gets overrun and absorbed by healthier rivals. While 4PT focuses on the particular, Neoreaction is more willing to address those universal truths that all civilizations must contend with. And if it has no quarrel with Russia taking its own path, it can also see the omens that point to its incredible fragility at the present time. Any Eurasian future becomes less likely when the future of Russia itself is uncertain. From demographic collapse to economic woe, no stirring promises of a united Russian sphere can mask the problems besetting it. Neoreaction may have some lessons for Mr. Dugin yet, Atlanticist or not.

Next week’s article will be a neoreactionary analysis of Russia itself. It will cover geopolitical and domestic issues, as well as the Russian talent for weaponizing ideology.

The post The Crab and the Bear: On Alexander Dugin appeared first on Social Matter.

“Today, project neurologists confirm this research project’s earlier hypothesis that very early in life perhaps, even in utero, Putin suffered a huge hemispheric event to the left temporal lobe of the prefrontal cortex, which involves both central and peripheral nervous systems, gross motor functioning on his right side (head, rib cage, arm and leg) and his micro facial expression, eye gaze, hearing and voice and general affect,” the report said.

Work by “autism specialists,” apparently, backs up the report’s findings. The news article takes the time to (rightly) dryly note that “researchers can’t prove their theory about Putin and Asperger’s, the report said, because they were not able to perform a brain scan on the Russian president.”

Now, dear readers, I am no psychologist. I am no psychiatrist. I do not fund Pentagon think-tanks, and I can’t say I’ve spent much time studying neurological or developmental disorders, let alone patterns of behavioral tics and their relations to psychological traits. I am, however, a currently still bipedal homo sapiens with an intelligence quotient North of 70 and useful pairs of both functioning hands and functioning testicles, so I think I am qualified to decide whether or not a major world leader who is:

1. “The Most Badass Leader in the World” according to Business Insider.

2. “The World’s Craziest Badass” according to Cracked.com.

3. “Terrific, Triumphant, All Good, Totally Badass” according to Foreign Policy magazine.

4. “The Richest Man On Earth” according to Bloomberg.

5. “The Most Powerful Man in the World” according to Forbes.

…is also in possession of any deep-rooted anti-social mental disorders.

Here are the official United States government National Institutes of Health factsheets on autism and Asperger’s syndrome, which you may peruse to your heart’s content. Let’s take a look at the factsheets and see how they compare to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin’s very public behavior and history.

Autistic children have difficulties with social interaction, display problems with verbal and nonverbal communication, and exhibit repetitive behaviors or narrow, obsessive interests.

Asperger syndrome (AS) is a developmental disorder.  It is an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), one of a distinct group of neurological conditions characterized by a greater or lesser degree of impairment in language and communication skills, as well as repetitive or restrictive patterns of thought and behavior. 

You can click on Link #1 above for 39 photos of Vladimir Putin displaying highly un-obsessive and un-narrow interests, ranging from motorbiking to piano. The same set of pictures makes me doubt whether President Putin has any inherent difficulties with communication or social interaction, considering he can be seen successfully interacting with little boys in martial arts costume, little girls in tea-party costume, other world leaders in very serious grown-up costume, Russian outlaw biker gang leaders, sleeping tigers, horses, baby birds, giant fish and polar bears. In fact, judging by the amount of wild animals Putin is seen hunting, comforting, riding, putting down or knowingly glaring at, it might be inferred that he actually possesses better social skills than the rest of us, confined as we are to mere human-to-human social interactions. By the way, for reference, here’s a picture of the Russian outlaw biker gang leader smiling at Putin like a virginal maiden might smile at her deflowerer:

Wonder what Heartiste would have to say about this.

Speaking of deflowering, Vladimir Putin also happens to be the father of two daughters with his ex-wife, who has by now long ceded the spotlight to Putin’s rumored younger conquests. I will spare the details, since you can easily Google “putin luv life.” Putin also happens to be — as if it actually bears repeating — the three-term President and (by progressive standards) tyrannical dictator of the biggest country and largest nuclear power on the planet. This power, by the way, is currently flouting the established unipolar geopolitical world order with the United States government at the helm, to the great chagrin of pale bespectacled hermaphrodites all over the West. To add insult to injury, this power is succeeding at it too, in no small part thanks to President Putin’s wily statesmanship. I am doubtful that it is possible to reach and maintain this position of Putin’s, especially after surviving a career in the brutal Soviet security services (the KGB), without possessing social skills that are — at a minimum — not fundamentally crippled.

Here’s a video of that old dog Vladimir singing ‘Blueberry Hill’ to a live television audience. I would question deeply how many of the researchers mysteriously discovering new mental disorders in Putin would be able to imitate Putin’s performance, from the singing-in-a-foreign-language part to the singing-publicly-on-television-in-front-of-millions-of-judging-people part.

But of course, the point was never about whether or not Vladimir Putin is actually mentally disordered or not. Taken at face value, it would be a damning fact that the defense apparatus of the United States government doled out money to hucksters claiming that the most ruthless, calculating, successful and powerful men on the planet are in fact secretly shivering nerds incapable of communicating with other human beings. The characterization of President Putin as a sufferer of Asperger’s syndrome is the final proof yours truly needs that the Western government-psychiatric complex — and I include the government- part because the institutions have become practically inseparable at this point — is full of charlatans spewing complete and utter hogwash for easy government grants. If their mad prescriptions will result in a populace addicted to anti-depressant chemicals, blatantly false assessments of dangerous foreign leaders, and self-mutilating leftists standing as examples of health and normalcy to the populace at large — so be it! So much the worse for society: the God of Science(tm) has spoken, through his archangel Psychology(tm). The joke, in the end, is that the real mentally disordered are not in the Kremlin, but in the Pentagon and its think-tanks itself.

Gary Brecher, the War Nerd, writes an excruciating column on the American defense industry’s transparent focus on expensive power fantasies to the detriment of actual national defense. His examples primarily stem from the air defense industry, but the situation in intelligence and psychological warfare is undoubtedly similar. There is little incentive for cosmopolitan psychologists and psychiatrists receiving multi-million dollar grants from cosmopolitan careerists at the Pentagon to study foreign leaders to actually develop truthful and applicable recommendations and conclusions — this would just reduce the need for more “studies,” for more multi-million dollar grants. Because, you see, “…this is all about money, and [has] nothing to do with defense.” To the undoubted eventual horror of the cosmopolitans, the same just might not be true for the Autist in the Kremlin.

The post Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin: Autist appeared first on Social Matter.

Source: Wikipedia.

Huntington himself offered some explanations for why civilizations clash in the typically modern, Harvard style of over-explaining fairly banal concepts, i.e. civilization is profoundly felt, profound differences cause conflict, etc. — not news to anyone who was socialized outside the coddling reach of the American progressive clerisy. More liberal-minded Westerners, especially ones who serve as functionaries of the American Empire overseas (what has been variously labelled the Cathedral, the Blue Empire or USG), tend to be unable to grasp these basic tenets of Homo sapiens, owing to the degree they themselves have actually evolved into another species, Homo economicus. Well-meaning progressive bureaucrats proselytizing on the ancient blood-soaked soil of the Balkans, for example, exit largely unsuccessfully, and with a progressive faith either deeply strengthened or fundamentally shaken. Adored Western celebrities like Benedict Cumberbatch have to apologize profusely for using innocuous and vaguely outdated terms like “colored people,” for fear of offending the omnipresent Other. Elsewhere float around sectarian paeans with tenderhearted, tolerant lyrics such as:

Both women and children / Throw them off a bridge!

Your mosques will pay for each of our churches / … Let them kneel when they see Jesus on the cross

Soup from your blood / Cake from your flesh

And, as if purposely trying to further corroborate Huntington’s outlined clash of civilizations:

Serbia — on your feet, win many battles against …

Modern barbarians from America who nurture degenerates.

Even in the fairly neutered Federal Republic of Germany, an extremely popular rapper like Fler can brag about his “blue eyes, white skin” and proclaim “People say I’m a Nazi / I don’t care, say whatever you want.” Identity is not quite out of fashion yet, even for Europeans, though the thought of similar proclamations happening a little further West is nigh unthinkable. PEGIDA, despite internal drama, is making waves. These contemporary examples from the yet-to-be-enlightened parts of white Europe abound. But I digress — back to the clash of civilizations.

In the years since the early 1990’s, Huntington’s predictions of conflict have not been proven wrong, as a more extreme fan of Francis Fukuyama might have wished. The ‘bloody borders’ of the Islamic civilization have only intensified in violence. Various conflicts — political, military, economic or otherwise — can be identified at essentially all the limits of Huntington’s civilizations. Conflicts can be identified within them too, but the bloodiest and most inflammatory ones inevitably occur at the eternally-disputed boundaries between civilizations. Take another gander at the map above. Between Orthodoxy and Islam we get wars in Bosnia, Kosovo and the Caucuses. Between Islam and Africa we get Boko Haram. Between Islam and the Hindu civilization we get perpetual terrorism. Between Orthodoxy and the West we get wars in Croatia and Slovenia and the current crisis in Ukraine. Between the West and Latin America, we get quiet rumblings of future upheaval. And of course, between the West and Islam, we get Charlie Hebdo. The clashes of civilizations which are revving up between Huntington’s West, Orthodoxy and Islam will be the defining historical movements of this century.

Skeptics of the gravity of the clash of civilizations between the West and Islam ought to consider the fact that in a mere 14 years since the September 11th attacks in 2001, practically every major Western city has suffered some sort of Islamic attack. New York City, Washington, D.C., London, Paris, Madrid, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Brussels, Glasgow, Boston, Ottawa, Sydney, Stockholm — all have tasted the bitter brew of jihad. To that list we can even add smaller locales like Fort Hood, Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Endeavour Hills and the French cities of Toulouse, Montauban, Dijon, Nantes and Joué-lès-Tours. Granted, these attacks vary significantly in form, organization and casualties. The highly-coordinated attacks of 9/11 were not quite the same as the incident involving the fanatic shouting “Allahu akbar!” and mowing down Dijonnais pedestrians in a van. Yet, somehow, I am not comforted knowing that, when strolling through the greatest centers of Western civilization, I can now expect a number greater than zero of Islam-inspired mass shootings, beheadings, bombings (suicide and otherwise), stabbings, hostage-takings, hijackings, assassinations and vehicular manslaughters — all of which, just since the start of the new millennium, have taken place on Western streets where blue-eyed, white-skinned children used to wander and play, at will, carefree.

A bit belatedly, French special police hunt for Islamists with whom to do the ol’ civilization-clashing.

Huntington’s Orthodox civilization has had its fair share of struggles with Islam as well, from Serbia’s tit-for-tat genocidal episodes with neighboring Muslims in the 90’s to Russia’s mindbogglingly violent Chechen saga. Chechens as a group are a bit of a crack team for Islamic civilization. Only Chechens could find time to nearly simultaneously terrorize both America and Russia in their own territory, while also leading the establishment of a brutally sincere Islamic Caliphate in the Middle East. Not bad for an ethnic group barely 2 million strong.

The Great Unspoken Truth in the West, that groups like PEGIDA are attempting to speak, is that the clash of civilizations between Islam and the West is not one that could be traditionally regarded as inevitable. Efforts of Europeans long gone have put firm geographical barriers between the West and Islam. The poorest, most rural, most fundamentalist Muslims find not high walls and sentries at Europe’s proverbial gates, but secular governments welcoming them with patronizing words and generous benefits. These Muslims follow the money, slowly accumulate in urban ghettos, and, sooner or later, the clash of civilizations occurs. A couple of left-wing cartoonists are riddled with bullets. Alternately, Western interference in Muslim countries half-way across the world contributes to increasing proportions of dead, angry, and/or gun-toting Muslims. Sooner or later, some armed and aggrieved (usually by the same Western powers) Mahometans come up with a way to strike back at the Great Satan. A couple of skyscrapers experience — ahem — “controlled demolition.” The West, through a combination of schizophrenic foreign policies and reckless immigration policies, is forcing a clash of civilizations that was last settled at the gates of Vienna in 1683.

The once-imagined “Third Way” of Mitteleuropa was mortally wounded by the Boot of Progress in 1918, and put out of its misery in 1945. Western “Progress” and Eastern “Progress” stared each other down until the East buckled under the weight of its Marxist delusions in 1991. The West, triumphant, sounded its own death knell with talk of the “end of history.” History, the cheeky little scrub that he is, came back as quickly as he disappeared upon hearing victory bells. Now the civilization of the West is contending with an Orthodox jihad and an Islamic one, neither of which it is adequately prepared to face, since it can’t even admit it has any opponents left to face. The Islamic civilization, held at bay for more than 300 years, is invited into a West deeply doped up with an ersatz eschatology. The Orthodox civilization, now a quarter-century after the ignominious death of its own ersatz eschatology, is flexing new muscle. The problem with progressivism is that reality doesn’t progress — only narratives do. From TIME:

“This is not another Cold War that we’re entering into,” [U.S. President Barack Obama] said in his 36-minute address. “After all, unlike the Soviet Union, Russia leads no bloc of nations, no global ideology. The United States and NATO do not seek any conflict with Russia. In fact, for more than 60 years we have come together in NATO not to claim other lands but to keep nations free.”

Any perceptive watcher of the world will notice there are more than a few ideological differences between Russia and America to complement the geopolitical ones. Considering NATO’s aggressive expansion since 1991 into Eastern Europe and the otherwise post-Soviet space that was Russia’s proverbial backyard, the claim that NATO is not about “claiming other lands” seems suspect, to say the least. Every great empire in history has tried to frame its own expansion as anything but temporary naked conquest. The American President’s words are in any case as disingenuous as can be. The ruling class of the United States, the Cathedral, the self-organizing consensus of academia, the media and the state bureaucracy (that, for far more complicated reasons, conveniently organizes around chauvinistic left-wing progressivism), viciously hates President Vladimir Putin, Russia, and the Russian people. The politically correct descendants of America’s Puritans cannot stand the forthright, alcoholic Russians, who refuse to join the “international community” and don’t see why anyone would want to sacralize the act of shoving male penis into male anus. For this transgression against progressivism, Russians deserve to burn alive. Russians, surprisingly, aren’t too fond of the choice the “end of history” has offered them — your ass or your life! — and are rather vehemently organizing, opposing, and combating the West’s latest intrusions into Orthodox civilization.

On the bumpy road towards a clash of civilizations.

John R. Schindler (a.k.a. “The XX Committee”), former U.S. intelligence spook, has more than a few interesting things to say about the Russian perspective of this ongoing confrontation.

If nothing else, the current crisis has demonstrated to Russians, with Kremlin prodding, that the United States remains their Main Enemy that it was for decades, now led by the arrogant and weak Obama, who is hated by the Russian public. [Author’s Note: 76% of Russians “personally hate” Obama.]

[…]

To the shock and dismay of hopeful Westerners, including nearly all NATO leaders, the hard hit of sanctions has caused Russians to hate the West, not Putin. Most Russians view their war in Ukraine as a legitimate defense of Russians and Russian interests, certainly nothing like America’s aggressive wars of choice halfway around the world, and they are backing the Kremlin now.

[…]

The Kremlin now believes they are at war with the United States, an Orthodox Holy War in the eyes of many Russians, and that struggle is defensive and legitimate.

[…]

…what they are battling against is not the Ukrainian government, nor American neoconservatives, rather the Devil himself.

President Putin inaugurated the New Year by signing off on a new military doctrine designating NATO as Russia’s #1 adversary. It emphasized Russia’s right to respond to conventional threats with both nuclear and conventional weapons. Schindler does not see good things in the future of Poroshenko’s Ukraine. Huntington’s Orthodox civilization advances consciously on the West.

Serbia — on your feet, win many battles against …

Modern barbarians from America who nurture degenerates.

The West (and Europe in particular), Russia and Islam form a dueling trio in the 21st century iteration of the clash of civilizations. The problem for the West is that it seems to be the only participant unaware that a contest is underway. The Islamic terrorist attacks in Paris occurred on the very same day rebel French writer Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel Soumission was published — of all things, the novel’s plot concerns a future France ruled by Islamists. God apparently has a sense of humor, if only a sick one. Houellebecq’s fictional (or are they really?) Islamists take power over the nationalist opposition with the crucial support of France’s left-wing establishment, dutifully following its progressive directives all the way to the graveyard of civilizations. Following the non-fictional Paris attacks, Western mainstream media duly warned us that the real danger was not swarthy fanatics from the hostile continent across the Mediterranean, but Islamophobia.

In a sense, they are only rejecting one half of the truth for the more palatable half. If you’re a progressive leftist or liberal, especially one in Europe, you’re going to be targeted by both Islamists and Islamophobes. Anders Behring Breivik, Europe’s only notable right-wing terrorist in recent memory, bombed Norwegian government offices then shot up 69 people at the youth summer camp for Norway’s Labour Party. He did this because the Labour Party was supporting Islamic immigration to Norway, a typically leftist thing to do. Breivik did not bomb a mosque and he did not shoot up a madrasa. The motley Islamists who perpetrated Paris’ most recent attacks targeted Charlie Hebdo, a police officer, some random passersby, and a Jewish grocery store. They did this because Charlie Hebdo was blaspheming (a typical leftist thing to do), because the police officer was French (a typical leftist thing to be), because the Jewish grocery store was Jewish (another typical leftist thing to be) and because the random passersby were French (don’t make me repeat myself). The Islamists did not target: Front National, neo-Nazis, Varg Vikernes, Catholic churches, far-right-wing bloggers. Funny that, innit?

This bizarre convergence of interests among radical rightists in Europe and radical Islamists has hardly escaped notice. None other than Michel Houellebecq examines this increasingly incongruous situation in the novel Soumission. Still only available in French and German (an English translation is scheduled for September 2015), yours truly had to rely on this little compilation of reviews by Steve Sailer for enlightenment (yours truly was not about to spend upwards of 22 EUR on the German version — not with a time preference as aristocratically low as yours’ truly!). I will assume you read the linked compilation of reviews, and I will highlight only the most important parts, which are substantial nonetheless:

The new university President, Muslim convert, and rising political star Robert Rediger is revealed as a former identitarian [Read: nationalist] who has quickly advanced up through the ranks and is becoming one of the ideological leaders of the Islamic movement.

[…]

As the novel goes on, the mystery concerning the identitaire role in the new regime only mounts. There were already questions during the “civil war’ as to the various motivations of the jihadi youth and the identitaires. Since they were almost always hooded, it was hard to tell who exactly was attacking whom and there were debates over which side had more of an interest to disrupt the elections. But slowly it is revealed just how much ideological influence Roger Rediger has on the new Muslim government. The clincher is that next door in Belgium, a new Islamic regime comes to power headed by an ethnic European who has well-known roots in the identitaire movement. In Lenin’s classic Who/Whom framework of power relations, it becomes increasingly clear that far from being the weak and subjective Whom, at least some European far right nativist identitaires are actually on the power-holding Who side of the struggle.

But why would the right-wing nativist identitaires want to help push Muslim overlords into power in their country? Jacques searches the internet and finds a very interesting article written by none other than Roger Rediger:

The whole article was an appeal to his former identitaire and traditionalist comrades. It’s tragic, he pleaded fervently, that irrational hostility towards Islam prevents them from recognizing the obvious: they were for the most part in perfect agreement with the Muslims. On the rejection of atheism and humanism, on the need for the subordination of women, on the return to patriarchy: their struggles from any point of view were exactly the same. But this fight to establish a new and natural phase of civilization could not now be conducted in the name of Christianity. No, it’s only with Christianity’s newer, simpler, and truer sister religion Islam that this battle could be waged.

Therefore it was Islam which now had to carry the torch. Because of all the dainty rhetoric, cajoling, and shameful stroking by progressives, the Catholic Church could no longer resist moral decadence. It was now unable to clearly and vigorously resist gay marriage, abortion rights and women moving into the workforce. We had to face the facts: the church had reached a repugnant degree of decline. Western Europe was no longer in any condition to save itself – just as ancient Rome had not been able to so the 5th century. The influx of massive numbers of immigrants — who were still under the influence of traditional cultures which not only accepted natural hierarchies, but also obliged both the submission of and respect due to women — was an historic opportunity for a moral and familial realignment of Europe. In fact this opened the prospect for a new golden age on the old continent. While these new immigrant populations were sometimes Christian; but we must admit they were mostly Muslim.

Roger Rediger was the first to admit that medieval Christianity was a great civilization whose artistic achievements remain forever alive in the memory of men. But little by little it lost ground, medieval Christianity was forced to compromise with rationalism and submit to secular power, and by degrees, was doomed. And as to why? Basically, according to Rediger, it was a mystery; God had simply decided it would be so.

 

Deus vult?

Houellebecq’s identitarians use the mantle of Islam to finally subvert and defeat the decadent Western order. Western civilization, decrepit but poisonous, is finally replaced by Islamic civilization, with the twist that Islam’s existing adherents from the warmer climes only do half the job of replacement — the other half enthusiastically accomplished by native rightists! Whereas today Leftists use the Muslims to buttress their electoral margins contra the Right, tomorrow the Right will use the Muslims to buttress their cultural margins contra the Left. Instead of fighting the Left head-on as the elitist progressive’s low-status, hated country bumpkin, Houellebecq’s rightist simply converts to Islam and enjoys his role as the left-winger’s minority dominatrix, meting out white guilt and otherwise enjoying traditional life.

As a Eurocentric Catholic chauvinist, I take great issue with this prophecy. I am unwilling to sit idle while Europe turns into Saudi Arabia (or worse, Syria) and the United States turns into Brazil. It is lucky, then, that Houellebecq’s perfect timing less provides an argument for Islamism than it illuminates the clash of civilizations soon coming to a head. For Houellebecq’s insightful prophecy is not that Islam will inevitably replace Western civilization, but that Western civilization will be necessarily replaced soon, by something. Islam provides just one convenient path to explore for a writer of fiction. I will now point out that in the same way that France’s rightists, nationalists and identitarians share some uncomfortably similar interests with jihadists, they — crucially — share just as many, if not more, with the other “jihadists” –Huntington’s Orthodox civilization. “Europe’s Far Right and Putin Get Cozy, With Benefits For Both.”

“In Russia today there is a mix of exalting nationalism, exalting the church and Christian values,” says Lellouche. “They are now replacing the red star with the cross, and they are representing themselves as the ultimate barrier against the Islamization of the continent.”

The Christmas tree outside of Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral is traditionally purchased by French groups and worshippers. This year it was a gift from the Russian government.

Marine Le Pen, head of the National Front, has made no secret of her admiration for Putin and has traveled to Moscow on several occasions. It seems to have paid off. Last month a Russian bank lent the National Front $11 million.

Two more salient points:

1. “Lellouche” is Pierre Lellouche, a “member of a mainstream conservative party.” His dismissive tone of Front National and its Russian orientations tells me all I need to know. You can always be sure a “conservative” is doing the opposite of what he should be doing if he wanted to defeat the Left, and will always be thinking the opposite of what he should be thinking. Don’t be a “conservative”– remember the rules.

2. One of Houellebecq’s details in his story of France’s Islamization is the new role of far-off, foreign, resource-rich Islamic nations like Qatar and Saudi Arabia in providing funding for France’s elite universities (presumably suffering financial difficulties). Am I too optimistic to see the parallel with a far-off, foreign, resource-rich Orthodox nation like Russia providing funding to a French institution like the Front National, or to the Notre Dame Cathedral’s Christmas Tree?

Houellebecq’s prophecy for France’s future under Islam ought to be reconsidered with the three-pronged clash of civilizations in mind. It is not Islamic civilization, but Orthodox, that stands the better chance of rescuing the ruins of the West. The two faces of European civilization — Western and Eastern, Latin and Greek, Roman and Byzantine, Catholic and Orthodox — have shared a fraught, but fraternal, history. The Russians put an end to the madness of Napoleon. They put an end to the madness of Hitler. They may, perhaps, put an end to the madness of Obama. Trapped in the abyss of its own vast wealth, the West lobotomizes itself with mad ideologies that dissolve families and all other organic bonds, replacing them with sub-optimal publicly-produced substitutes. It normalizes insanity and pathologizes health in the quest for eternal equality. Sickness, sterility and death are touted as moral advancements, while all expressions of natural virility are feared, medicated, suppressed, diverted, or finally quashed by the State. The results — such as plunging fertility rates — speak for themselves. I myself hear it now already; but in thirty years, the silence of a missing generation shall be deafening. I can only hope that the silence, once in a while, will be interrupted not by the shrill howls of the muezzin, but by the ringing and chiming of old church bells — and perhaps even the laughter of children playing in the streets, carefree.

The post The Clash of Civilizations in 2015: The West, Russia and Islam appeared first on Social Matter.

Rising #inequality & climate change are defining challenges of our time. You can help: http://t.co/ONSAl4jeRJ #wef15 pic.twitter.com/B4ee6BVYvf

— Oxfam International (@Oxfam) January 16, 2015

Yes, it seems to be true: RT reports that by 2016, the richest 1% of the global human population will control more wealth than the other 99% of the human population combined. Through Oxfam, an “anti-poverty charity,” we learn that:

Last year, Oxfam reported that the world’s 85 richest people have the same wealth as the poorest 50 percent (3.5 billion people). This year, Oxfam said the reality has become more worrisome, with just 80 people owning the same amount of wealth as more than 3.5 billion people.

We are alerted to a “dark portrait” of the state of affairs. This news proves we face “challenges [of] severe wealth concentration.”

However, despite constant warnings that the upward curve in wealth concentration will only lead to disaster, the rich continue to gobble up a bigger and bigger share of the global wealth pie.

“Gobble up.” RT’s gratuitous baiting of low-brow egalitarian Western leftists is transparent, but rather amusing. Right-wing opponents of Putin’s Russia would do well to remember that RT is not aimed at Russians, but at English-speaking Western leftists. RT will run pieces on the evils of rising income inequality more fervently than an Occupy Wall Street hippie (along with pieces on racism in America, the surveillance state, etc.) because the Kremlin implicitly recognizes that egging on these kinds of leftists in the West is beneficial for Russia. Better to keep the non-profit mafia whining about Ferguson than Sochi — if you think Putin is crying into his fair-trade coffee about the treatment of African-American brothas by white 1%ers, you are sorely mistaken. Speaking of the non-profit mafia:

Oxfam executive director Winnie Byanyima, who will co-chair the Davos symposium, said she will draw attention to the grim fact that “one in nine people do not have enough to eat and more than a billion people still live on less than $1.25 a day,” she told The Guardian.

“Do we really want to live in a world where the 1 percent own more than the rest of us combined? The scale of global inequality is quite simply staggering and despite the issues shooting up the global agenda, the gap between the richest and the rest is widening fast.”

A cursory Google search reveals that Mrs. Byanyima is a Ugandan aeronautical engineer, politician and diplomat. Apparently, she was Uganda’s first female aeronautical engineer. Like all heartfelt tinkerers, Mrs. Byanyima quit her engineering job with the now-defunct Uganda Airlines as soon as she got it to help start the Ugandan Bush War. (Mrs. Byanyima, who was born in 1959, and received both a B.Sc. and an M.Sc. from British universities, would have graduated high school in 1977, just four years before the Bush War began in 1981, and would have required between four and eight years to receive her degrees.) Apparently, Mrs. Byanyima found fomenting political unrest to be more conducive to her skillset than engineering, and she later served in various Ugandan governmental posts (under the watch of now long-time Ugandan President/Instigator of Bush Wars Museveni, who she grew up with), and then later United Nations posts (hmm…). As a one-time “Director of the Gender Team in the Bureau for Development Policy” at the UNDP, I am sure Mrs. Byanyima is extremely qualified for her new executive directorship.

To channel Mr. Moldbug, Byanyima’s real education was not in engineering, but in progressive-leftist demotism, and her first big break was not at Uganda Airlines but in an African bush war, and her real career wasn’t in “helping women get a leg up,” but “fomenting political unrest” — only later at the United Nations — all for a good cause, of course! It should go without saying Oxfam believes that “rising inequality and climate change are defining challenges of our time.” Wait, climate change? I thought this was an anti-poverty organization? Silly me, I forgot about the Cathedral again.

The image attached to the Oxfam tweet at the top of this article is emblematic of Western liberal delusions about reality concerning wealth and income. A rough-around-the-edges South Asian man (let’s call him Pakistani Abdul), pushing watermelons hanging off his old bike, presumably to market, with a huge poster of a clean-cut Westerner (read: dirty white devil) sitting in an airplane reading from some new gizmo — the massive hashtag reads “#INEQUALITY.” We are exhorted: “Join the debate!” What do liberals see in this image that we normal people do not? Like all good leftists, they psychologically project. Where we see Pakistani Abdul pushing his wares to the market, presumably pondering this year’s harvest, the leftist liberal sees a potential college student, a potential high-achiever, academician, bureaucrat, hoop-jumper, future lawyer/doctor/consultant (and future progressive) denied a chance for the good and holy life by privileged, rich white racists — if only Abdul could have applied to cawww-lidge! That Abdul couldn’t care less for these bourgeois Western pretensions does not even occur to them. That Abdul is mentally incapable of achieving them is beyond unthinkable.

But no matter — we will continue the “debate” about “income inequality” across “the global community” under the assumption that everyone on the planet has the ability, willpower, desire, necessity and urgency to seek out an upper-middle class Western existence of paper-pushing and platitude-mouthing. It’s a “severe challenge,” after all. Right next to climate change. Hopefully Abdul will get educated and donate some money to those climate change groups. Just check out Oxfam’s seven-point plan to alleviate income inequality:

Oxfam said it was calling on governments to adopt a seven-point plan to alleviate global inequality:

• Clamp down on tax dodging by corporations and rich individuals.

Rebuild that Berlin Wall, boys, these rich nancies aren’t going anywhere until we’ve got their monies!

• Invest in universal, free public services such as health and education.

Spread the wealth around, boys, free stuff for everyone! Paid for with our “clamping down” on “tax dodgers.” Wink wink, elbow elbow.

• Share the tax burden fairly, shifting taxation from labour and consumption towards capital and wealth.

Taxes are only a burden when the State is upwards of 40% of the economy, such as in modern times. This was not the case in the past.

• Introduce minimum wages and move toward a living wage for all workers.

When “minimum wage,” lost its luster, the leftists moved onto “living wage.” Next it’ll be a “happy wage.” Because if gays deserve “gay marriage” because they “love,” each other, why shouldn’t the poor deserve “happy wages” if they want? Don’t they deserve to be happy? Why do you hate poor people maaan?

• Introduce equal pay legislation and promote economic policies to give women a fair deal.

Destroy patriarchy and abolish the family so that the State can step in and expand its power over people’s lives. Because for the leftist, if the solution isn’t the State — is it really a solution? (No! Off with their heads!)

• Ensure adequate safety nets for the poorest, including a minimum income guarantee.

Repetition, because propaganda doesn’t work if it’s only repeated once.

• Agree a global goal to tackle inequality.

Identify the ones who disagree i.e. the ones who won’t let you rent-seek, and immediately begin slandering them as poor-haters, rich gobblers, and what-not. Maybe instigate a class revolution. Bring out the guillotines. You know how it goes with the Left. “Executive” director indeed.

Income inequality is a farce directed by the same leftists responsible for the globe’s social ills, masquerading as righteous crusaders while doing nothing but ruining the value built up by highly non-leftist people. They are rabble-rousers and demagogues of the worst kind. Remember Mrs. Byanyima: the upstart revolutionary guerilla becomes a politically correct United Nations functionary. This is not a coincidence, and it is not an isolated incident. Bernardine Dohrn bombed the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, and just a couple police stations. She is now a professor at Northwestern University School of Law. Her terrorist husband has a dormitory named after him at the same university, and is himself still a “Distinguished Professor” at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

If this article was rambling, it’s because the gravity of the situation confuses the author’s attempts to make sense of a course of action. When did avowed terrorists become mentors of youth? When did jungle guerillas become internationally-approved moral guides? Then again, the most recognizable faces of the previous century all belonged to murderous maniacs and their differently-sizes mustaches. I suppose we’re still defined by murderous maniacs in the 21st century — the mustaches just seem to be missing, replaced with pasty clean-shaven faces or (increasingly) Islamic beards. Such a shame. The mustaches were the only good thing left.

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