The View From Olympus: The Summer of '14

Events in Ukraine are sendingi a slight shudder down the spine of those who reflect on the summer of 1914. We appear to be a long way from war. Yet the New York Times reports the White House is considering providing targeting data to the Ukrainian armed forces.President Obama does not want war, nor does Chancellor Merkel. The Kaiser did not want war in 1914 either, but he got it anyway. Part of the reason for the catastrophe of summer l9l4 was that no party made much effort to see the situation from their competitor's viewpoint.If we look at the present situation in Ukraine from Russia's perspective, we see that Russia is on the strategic defensive. Her primary objective is to keep Ukraine out of NATO. NATO stupidly has made itself into a threat to Russia. When the Soviet Union was dissolving, Washington promised Gorbachev that if he dissolved the Warsaw Pact; NATO would not expand into central and eastern Europe. That proved to be a lie. NATO has pushed its boundary steadily eastward. It waged an aggressive and unprovoked war on Russia's historic ally, Serbia. NATO continues to present itself to countries such as Poland as directed against Russia.Quite reasonably, Russia sees now sees NATO as a danger and Ukrainian membership in NATO as a direct threat. American combat aircraft stationed in Ukraine would be uncomfortably close to Moscow--as they are now five minutes flying time from St. Petersburg  from airfields in the Baltics. The equivalent would be if Pennsylvania withdrew from the union, allied with Russia and invited Russia to station combat aircraft in Philadelphia. It is safe to say we would not take such a development lying down. Neither is Russia.Operationally, Russia is on the offensive in Ukraine, using (unreliable) proxies to create strategic depth by detaching eastern Ukraine from Kiev. So long as the West refuses to take account of Russia's interests, it is what she must do. I doubt the Kremlin considers it an optimal course, but at the moment it is all that is on offer.Tactically Russia is on the defensive, trying to keep her irregular allies in eastern Ukraine from being overrun. Ukraine, not the pro-Russian fighters, ended the cease-fire, and Kiev's suddenly invigorated forces (dbwtedskyktheir new (their new competence probably came from outside help) are on the offensive, attempting to re-take all of eastern Ukraine. This is a flash point, because Russia cannot allow that to happen so long as there is a danger of Ukraine joining NATO. However reluctantly, Russia will have to do whatever is necessary to keep Kiev from reasserting control.Were Washington and the E.U. to do what statesmen in 1914 refused to do and take account of the other side's interests, a settlement of the Ukrainian crisis would not be difficult. The basic shape of an agreement would cover four points:

1. NATO will not invite Ukraine to join.
2. Ukraine agrees not to seek NATO membership.
3. Following a cease-fire and a general pardon, Russian-speakers in Ukraine will have their rights guaranteed by all parties, those rights being similar to what Francophones have in Canada.
4. Economically, Ukraine will belong to both east and west, serving as a bridge between the two, which could be a highly profitable role.

At present, it does not appear that events this summer will follow the course of those in l9l4. But they are moving in that direction. All parties need to communicate and cooperate to ensure that movement is stopped. The capital best placed to send events on a different course is Berlin. Kaiser Wilhelm II tried, desperately, in 1914, but he was too late. Berlin needs to act now.

Efficiency Is Not A Conservative Virtue

The word "conservative" has been warped and twisted into so many new meanings contrary to what it once meant that one can only pity it. Some attach it to the belief that any "market outcome" is for the best in this best of all possible (i.e. capitalist) worlds. That is the belief of Dr. Pangloss and his heirs, the libertarians (sorry, Herr Leibnitz), not conservatives. Others attach it to the endless quest for efficiency and efficiency's close cousin, cheapness, that now disfigures the “Globalist” economy. Such "conservatism" elevates as its First Commandment the iron law of wages, with the ironic result that it becomes an argument for Marxism.But efficiency has never been a conservative virtue. Conservatives' respect for traditions, customs, and habits and their understanding of society as an organic creation of many generations mean they value and protect lots of things that are inefficient, from the tripartite division of the American government through small family farms and local businesses to Flanders & Swan's slow trains. We recognize that a modicum of efficiency is desirable lest institutions cease to produce anything. But to us, it is markedly less important than age, beauty, and having and helping others to have an enjoyable life. Our utopia is The Shire, not the World of Our Ford.As usual the best corrective to any notion that conservatives are Taylorists pursuing an eternal quest for the cheapest price comes from Russell Kirk. In The Politics of Prudence, the best one-volume introduction to a truly conservative politics, Dr. Kirk wrote:

An economy obsessed by an alleged Gross National Product--no matter what is produced, or how--becomes inhumane. A society that thinks only of alleged Efficiency, regardless the consequences to human beings, works its own ruin. . . In his book The Economic Role of the State, (W.A.) Orton ironically describes the cult of Efficiency:"Let us therefore praise the great god Efficiency," Orton writes. "All he demands is that we make straight his path through the desert and purge the opposition . . . How much more mastery is evident in the controls of a supersonic plane than in the clumsy splendor of some medieval shrine! How much higher a peak of human achievement! Human? Let us not be too particular about that . . .

Later in the same volume, Dr. Kirk personifies the quest for cheapness as Cyrus P. Whittle, a Yankee schoolmaster in George Santayana's novel The Last Puritan. He writes,

So America's contribution to the universal "democratic capitalism" of the future . . . will be just this: cheapness, the cheapest music and the cheapest comic books and the cheapest morality that can be provided. This indeed would be the revolution of revolutions, the Gehenna of universal monotony and mediocrity. This is Cyrus P. Whittle, telling himself that not only is America the biggest thing on earth, but America is soon going to wipe out everything else;...

Substitute "Globalism" for America (though with America's elite Globalism's greatest proponent) and you have something pretty near our situation. What brings Dr. Kirk's denunciations of cheapness and efficiency to mind is the current quest of the conservative movement for a new agenda, one that speaks to the problems of today and tomorrow, not yesterday. My modest proposal is that opposition to efficiency, the quest for ever-greater cheapness and the resulting destruction of the American middle class, should be part of that new agenda.All of us who live in the nation's heartland know the real story. There has been no economic recovery. Why? Because the number of good jobs, jobs that pay a man enough to give his family a middle-class standard of living, continues to shrink. Young people entering the labor market find nothing but minimum-wage jobs that offer only 28 hours a week (more and the employer is into Obamacare). They cannot make enough to leave home and begin an adult life, much less start a family.The quest for efficiency not only lowers wages and hours, it increasingly turns the lucky person who gets a job into a wage-slave. All his time, 24/7, belongs to his employer, who demands it through the incessant ringing or beeping of some hellish electronic device, a human leash. Any failure to respond risks a return to joblessness. The iron law of wages, indeed.Conservatives should be in the lead in demanding government regulation of employers' demands on employee's time, the bleats of the libertarians be damned. Such a movement is underway. The July 16 New York Times reported it in a front-page story:

As more workers find their lives upended and their paychecks reduced by ever-changing, on-call schedules, government officials are trying to put limits on the harshest of those scheduling practices.The actions reflect a growing national movement--fueled by women's and labor groups--to curb practices that affect millions of families, like assigning just one or two days of work a week or requiring employees to work unpredictable hours that wreak havoc with everyday routines...

Women's and labor groups, very well, but where are conservatives? In Washington, no doubt licking the boots of their Wall Street donors, who endlessly chant "efficiency, efficiency." But efficiency is not a conservative virtue.Ironically, treating workers so badly they hate their jobs and their employers is not even very efficient. Another New York Times piece, from the July 5 "Business Day" section of the newspaper, "Paying Employees to Stay, Not to Go," relates how some fast-food chains have improved their bottom line by paying their workers decent wages. One of those chains, the quality of whose burgers I can personally attest to, is In-N-Out Burger, based in California. Their hamburgers are competitively priced, but they pay all their employees a minimum of $10.50 an hour. A nascent chain in Michigan, Moo Cluck Moo Burger, starts everyone at $15. The Times reports that, the iron law of wages to the contrary, these restaurants find paying decent wages benefits them because their employees remain with them, saving on training costs, and they provide much better customer service. Any businessman will tell you it is far more efficient to keep a customer than to try to attract a new one.Not only should conservatives be in the lead of movements to pay living wages and respect employees' right to private time, we have something unique to contribute. What? When Big Business (conservatives are suspicious of anything big) replies, “We won't be competitive internationally unless we continually cut wages and (to avoid benefits) hours,” conservatives have an answer: bring back tariffsThe destruction of the American middle class can be explained in two words: free trade. Free trade averaged our wages with those of countries such as China and Korea. They went up, but we came down. Wall Street didn't, of course; it profited vastly from free trade, by moving jobs overseas. That too can be subject to tariff, in the form of an export duty of, say, 300% of the wage paid to the worker in India who replaced an American. The Establishment has made the word “tariff” unacceptable in polite society, but conservatives are in a position to change that. If we pronounce tariffs acceptable again, to whom will Wall Street turnAmerica built its industry and its comfortable middle class under tariff protection. Now, we need tariff protection to rebuild both. As a 19th century Republican might have said, "Here's to the tariff, the gold standard, and prosperity! Huzzah!”

Victoria: Chapter 20

Book 2: War

On July 27, 2027, the blacks of Newark, New Jersey rose against their oppressors and took over the city.The rising itself was hardly unusual. For years now, urban blacks had regularly celebrated the coming of summer by rioting. It followed a standard pattern. After about a week of hot weather, the Boyz of the F Street Crew would drop in on their G Street opposite numbers and toss a Molotov cocktail into an abandoned building. Since most buildings in  American cities had been abandoned, this was no big deal. To keep face, the G Street Roaches would return the favor. Then, honor assuaged, the two Crews would band together and visit another neighborhood, where a few more buildings would be set ablaze. By this time, others were getting the message, and the gangs began to move out beyond their usual turf. A general Pax Diaboli prevailed when it was time to riot, and the borders were relaxed so everyone could join in.The real sport was not the rioting and burning, but the looting. In effect, the whole city had a blue light special going. The merchants were cleaned out, but unless they were Koreans or Jews they usually weren't burnt out; the gangs wanted them around next year so the street fair could continue. The merchants still made money, thanks to the hundreds of percent markups on the stuff they sold the rest of the year.Where were the police and the government? The police, like most else, had long since divided along white/black lines, and white cops no longer went into black sections of town, for the good reason that they might be shot if they did. Many black cops and local black politicians were in bed with the gangs, who really ran the place because they controlled the streets. All the politicos wanted was a portion of the take, which they got. In return, they did the "Oppressed Victims’ Boogie" anytime higher authority threatened to mess with the gangs. One hand washed the other.The real losers in all this were the honest, working blacks, still a majority, who lived in a state of perpetual terror. They hid during the riots, swept up afterwards and otherwise kept their mouths shut. Until that 27th of July.The rioting started in the usual way. It had been blazing hot in Newark for more than a week, with nighttime temperatures staying in the 90s. On the 25th, a few fires were set. The tomtoms beat through the night, and on the 26th the looting began. But that evening, outside the Mt. Zion A.M.E. church, the script changed.The congregation had gathered at about 5 PM, more for safety than worship; black rioters usually didn't fire-bomb black churches. The preacher, one Rev. Ebenezer Smith, delivered an unusual sermon:

For more than a century and a half, black people in this country have been battling their oppressors. But we have forgotten something important. We have been so busy fighting oppression that we have forgotten to ask just who our oppressors are.Maybe at one time our oppressors were white people. But that is not true any more. I have never seen a slave owner, or a slave dealer, or even a slave. They were all dead long before I was born, before my father and his father were born.I have never met a member of the Ku Klux Klan. There may still be a few of those somewhere, but I doubt if there are any within a hundred miles of Newark. If I did meet a Klansman in his white sheet, I would laugh.I have never been oppressed by a white person. But I have been oppressed by other black folks almost every day of my life. So has everyone in this church.We are oppressed when we fear to walk home from the bus stop, because another black man may rob us. We are oppressed when our schools are wrecked by black hoodlums. We are oppressed when our children are shot by another black child for their jacket or shoes. We are oppressed when our sons are turned into crack addicts or crack dealers by other blacks, or our daughters are raped by other blacks, or taken into prostitution by other blacks.We Christian black people are oppressed today worse than we have ever been in our history. Our lives are worse than they were in the deep South under segregation. They are probably worse than they were when we were slaves, because then we were at least a valuable piece of property. The black toughs with guns who terrorize this city and every black city in this country do not value us at all. They shoot us down for any reason, or no reason at all.It is time for us to fight our real oppressors, the drug dealers, the whore-mongers, the gang members. The fact that they are black makes no difference. They are our black oppressors. They are not our brothers. They are worse enemies than whites ever were. It is time for us to battle them, and to take our city back from them.

He then equipped his congregation with baseball bats and led them out into the street.Singing "Onward Christian Soldiers," they proceeded to beat the crap out of any gang member they caught. Other honest blacks, seeing what was happening, came out and joined in. Some had guns, others had ropes, kitchen knives or tires and gasoline cans.When they turned the corner onto Newark's main street, a bunch of gang members opened fire on them. A few fell, but the rest came on. They mobbed the gang members, hanged a few from the nearest lamppost and "necklaced" the rest, stuffing a gasoline soaked tire around their necks and setting it on fire.The Internet was the command and control system. Video of burning Boyz soon filled the cell phone screens, and more decent blacks poured into the streets. By midnight, it was full-scale war, blacks against orcs. It turned out there were still a lot more blacks. The gangsters, pimps, whores, drug-dealers, and drug-users ended up lumenaria, in such numbers that the street lights went out, their sensors telling them that it was dawn. It was.The next day, for the first time in decades, Newark knew peace. The citizens had taken back their city. The corrupt mayor and his cronies fled, and the Rev. Ebenezer Smith was the city's new "Protector." He appointed a "Council of Elders" to help him run the place, and ordered armed church ushers and vestrymen to patrol the streets.Across America, people of every race cheered. When the good Reverend Smith appealed for help restoring his city, it came. Every part of the country sent shovels, bricks, mortar and money. Construction workers, white and black, came with bulldozers, trucks, and cranes. The NRA offered a thousand pistols to help arm the new City Watch, and the Carpenters' Union built gratis a handsome gallows on the town square – with three traps, no waiting. The Council of Elders voted to make car theft, drug and handgun possession, and prostitution hanging offenses.

***

It took a while for the politically correct establishment to react. But they did, because they had to. One of their most useful lies was that they represented the "oppressed." Now, their own slaves had rebelled and taken over the plantation.On August 3, 2027, as Newark was beginning to pick itself up off its knees, the Establishment tried to kick it in the head. The governor of New Jersey, a Republican woman, with the former mayor of Newark standing beside her, announced that "the rule of law and due legal process must be restored in Newark" (a place where for decades all the law and due process had protected was crime and criminals). To that end, she was ordering the New Jersey National Guard to occupy the city, restore the mayor to office and arrest Rev. Smith, his Council of Elders, and his City Watch. They would be charged with “hate crimes.”The next day, the lead elements of the New Jersey Guard, with the mayor hunkered down in a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, entered the city. They were met by a vast crowd of Newark's citizens, carrying Bibles and hymnals, led by their clergymen. They laid down in the street before and behind the convoy to block it, then approached the Guardsmen, not to threaten them but to plead for their help.The moral level of war triumphed. Faced not with rioters but with crying, begging women and children quoting Scripture to them, the Guard fell apart. The Guardsmen were ordinary citizens themselves, and like most normal people, they thought what had happened in Newark was great. The black Guardsmen took their weapons and went over to their own people, and the whites and Hispanics went home, with the sincere thanks of Newark's citizens. The mayor was dragged out of his Bradley, marched by Newark's new soldiers to the town gallows, and hanged.In Washington, the Establishment sensed that if they lost this one, it was over (they were right about that). So on August 5, President Sam Warner, a "moderate" Republican who had won with 19% of the vote in a 13-way race, announced he was sending the 82nd Airborne to take Newark back for the government. In a move so politically stupid only a Republican could have made it, he waved around a Bible and said, "The United States Government will not allow this book to become the law of the land."That was the final straw. All across the country, Christians held rallies for Newark. Bus loads of militiamen, mostly white, headed for New Jersey to help the city defend itself. Military garrisons mutinied, with the 2nd Marine Division at Camp Lejeune moving on Ft. Bragg, the base of the 82nd Airborne. That didn't come to a fight, because the Christians in the 82nd took over the post and said they would not obey orders. In New York State, the Air National Guard painted Pine Tree insignia on their aircraft and said they would bomb any federal troops approaching Newark.Here in New England, our friends in Vermont beat us to the punch. On August 8, Governor Ephraim Logan of the Vermont First Party addressed an emergency session of the State Legislature. In Vermont fashion, his words were few but to the point:

Vermont was once an independent republic. We joined the new United States because they represented what most Vermonters believed in: limited government, serving the people, guided by virtue.The government now in Washington represents none of these things. It seeks to run and regulate every aspect of every person's life. It lords over the people, far worse than King George ever did, and it regards citizens as nothing but cows to be milked for money. It lives and breathes vice of very kind, and holds virtue in contempt.The federal government no longer represents the will of the people of Vermont or the United States. I do not know what other Americans will do, but I know what Vermont should do. It is time for us to resume the independence we won and voluntarily surrendered. I ask you for a vote of secession from the United States and the restoration of the sovereign Republic of Vermont.

The Vermont First Party held a large majority of the seats in the legislature, so the outcome was foreordained. It was the moment they had long been waiting for. Most of the legislators from other parties joined in too. On August 9, 2027, Vermont became a republic again.In Maine, we moved swiftly to follow Vermont. Our Resolution of Secession was passed on August 22, by a referendum, with 87% of the voters saying "Yes." New Hampshire's legislature had already voted secession on August 14.We knew we were all in this together, so when the governors of the three states met in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on October 12, Columbus Day, and recommended we join together as the Northern Confederation, it was accepted by our people. Our flag was the old Pine Tree flag of America's first revolutionaries, with its motto, “An Appeal to Heaven.”The Confederation would be a loose one, like the original American Confederation; we had all had enough of strong central governments. We would have a common defense, foreign policy, and currency, and no internal tariffs, but otherwise each state would continue to handle its own affairs. The three governors would make up a Council of State to handle common problems; that would be the only federal government, and the capital would rotate every six months among the states so no federal bureaucracy could grow.Elsewhere in the old United states, South Carolina seceded on August 24, followed quickly by North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Kentucky. Their representatives met in Montgomery, Alabama in early September and formed a new Confederate States of America. Virginia, dominated politically by the non-Southerners in northern Virginia, held back this time, as did Florida and Texas; the latter two feared the reaction of their large Hispanic populations if they left the Union, and for good reason. As it turned out, the Union wasn't much help.The Rocky Mountain states pulled out too, and established a new nation named Libertas. Oregon, Washington and British Columbia had long been calling themselves Cascadia; they had had their own flag since the 1990s. They quickly made it official. A few more states set up independent republics, while the rest waited to see what would happen.At General Staff Headquarters in Augusta – now the General Staff of the Northern Confederation – we knew what was going to happen; war. We also knew it wasn't going to be a War Between the States, not this time. That would be part of it, but probably just the beginning. The deep divisions that ran through America's "multicultural" society in the early 21st century did not follow state boundaries. Yet those divisions would be the most important ones in the war that was to come.As Chief of the General Staff, I faced two main responsibilities: getting the Northern Confederation's forces ready for war, and developing contingency plans. To that end, I called a conference of our principal officers, including the Guard leaders from Vermont and New Hampshire, in Augusta on October 30, 2027.

The View From Olympus: Two Wars

The crisis over the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine continues to escalate in ways that suggest part of the Western reaction is agenda-driven. While it appears the airliner was shot down by a Russian-made SA-11, no other Russian involvement has been yet been found. The July 23 Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that senior U.S. intelligence officials "offered no evidence of direct Russian government involvement." The officials said

they did not know who fired the missile or whether any Russian operatives were present at the missile launch. They were not certain that the missile crew was trained in Russia... In terms of who fired the missile, "we don't  know a name, we don't know a rank, and we're not even 100 percent sure of a nationality."

Despite all these uncertainties, voices in the West howling for a confrontation with Russia grow louder, with both neo-libs and neo-cons heading the pack. At the same time, the most interesting question hanging over the shoot-down continues to be ignored: did the Ukrainian government have foreknowledge of  the event?As I pointed out in an earlier column, the speed and choreography of Kiev's reaction suggests prior preparation. That in turn suggests foreknowledge. While it is unlikely Ukraine itself shot the plane down, if it knew the shoot-down was coming and did nothing to stop it, it shares responsibility with those who fired the missile.Ukrainian foreknowledge of the event could have taken many forms. Kiev may simply have known that the pro-Russian forces had SA-11s and calculated that if it kept the airspace open, an airliner was likely to get hit. Ukraine may have had agents on the scene. Those agents could have acted as agents provocateur, encouraging the SA-11 operators to shoot at anything flying.The most likely way Kiev may have set up the incident, from what we know now, was to fly a Ukrainian military aircraft near the Malaysian airliner. The July 23 New York Times, reporting on the same conference with U.S. intelligence officials noted in the Plain Dealer, reported that

The officials added that the current American assessment was that the separatists had mistaken the civilian plane for a Ukrainian military jet. The most plausible explanation to me is a mistake," said one of the intelligence officials . . .

According to the previous day's Times, during a briefing by two senior Russian military officers,

the Russians said a Ukrainian Sukhoi-25 fighter jet that was airborne at the time briefly approached the same 33,000-feet altitude as the Boeing 777 and was within range to bring it down with an air—to-air missile.

The Sukhoi-25 is a ground attack aircraft, not a fighter, and the only air—to-air missile it would carry would be short range. If the Russian statement is correct, the Sukhoi would have been close enough to the airliner to make misidentification easy.Why aren't we hearing more about Kiev's possible role while demands for “getting tough with Russia reverberate? Because Russia is re-emerging as the most conservative great power, in defense of Christian culture and against political correctness. Both neo-libs and neo-cons accept the cultural revolution of the 1960s, so they see Russia's role under President Putin as defender of the Faith as a threat. There is an agenda here, and it is one conservatives should oppose. As they used to say on Dragnet, "Just the facts, ma'am."The other war of note is that in Gaza. Despite its far higher casualties, Hamas is currently in the stronger position strategically. Israel can only meet its stated war goal if it completely stops the rocket fire from Gaza. That is almost physically impossible, even if Israel occupies the whole place--at a high cost in IDF casualties that will continue so long as they stay there. Hamas wanted an Israeli ground invasion, because that allows them to get at the IDF. The only way Israel can achieve its war aim is with a negotiated agreement, and Hamas is so far sticking to its war aim of lifting the blockade of Gaza. In that sense, this war is aimed as much at Egypt as Israel, since the blockade is enforced by both countries. Unless Hamas relents and agrees to a cease-fire with the blockade still in place or is overthrown and replaced by a different regime, it is likely to get what it went to war for. As usual, comparative attrition is a poor way to judge who is winning. At the moment, it's Hamas.

Rand Paul's Reading List

The neocons and other assorted interventionists clearly have Rand Paul in their cross hairs. Paul is currently leading GOP presidential primary polls, and he apparently has the interventionists spooked.

I have been critical of Paul on immigration and foreign policy from the paleo-Right, but he has the right enemies, so I find myself in the difficult position of frequently desiring to defend him against the attacks of his enemies without endorsing his approach in total.

The first volley in this latest battle was fired by Texas Governor Rick Perry in a Washington Post editorial accusing Senator Paul of “isolationism.” Paul fired back with a reply in Politico.

Now comes round two. The Weekly Standard published an article criticizing Senator Paul’s suggested reading list for the thoughtcrime of including books that don’t conform to neocon standards of acceptable opinion. Paul quickly removed the list which was a mistake, because it gives the appearance that there really was something to be ashamed of, as this gloating column from the same Weekly Standard author shows. It would have been better for Paul to defend the list and attack his enemies for thought-policing. Then perhaps the list could have been taken down later if Paul and his team judged it to be more trouble than it’s worth, but taking it down right away empowers his interventionist critics.

Now The Washington Free Beacon has jumped into the fray with a typical “point and sputter” hit piece. The Free Beacon appears to specialize in enforcing neocon hive mind Right-think. Tom Woods calls it, in his wonderfully sarcastic way, a “thought-monitoring website in the mold of ThinkProgress on the left.” You may recall that it was the Free Beacon, and this same author, Alana Goodman, that “broke” the story that Jack Hunter/The Southern Avenger had once written and said things that neocons found objectionable.

Someone needs to inform Ms. Goodman that the “point and sputter” hit piece is an increasingly tired cliché. The “point and sputter” is characterized by its practice of simply dropping statements and quotes in an article, often short and without context, as if they are self-condemning. If someone says, for example, that we are controlled by reptilian aliens that reside inside the spaceship Moon, then I’ll accept that as self-condemning and we can move on. But if someone suggests, for example, that our interventionist foreign policy plays a role in Muslim hostility to America, then you have to be living in some sort of neocon Beltway bubble to think that is self-condemning. In fact, that our foreign policy plays a role in Muslim hostility is not really a debatable assertion, as that expert in Muslim hostility, Osama Bin Laden, made clear following 9/11. It clearly does, and I dare any interventionists to forever sacrifice their intellectual credibility and say it doesn’t. So what is at issue here is not the truth of the statement but what to do with the information. Keep doing what we are doing despite the costs because it is necessary and proper or stop doing it because it does us more harm than good. Implications that such a statement of obvious fact is instead “blaming the victim” or “moral equivalence” are shameless and unworthy of anyone claiming to be a serious commentator.

I don’t have the word limit to refute Ms. Goodman’s hit piece point by point, but I’ll point to a few examples of the “point and sputter” technique to demonstrate the intellectual bankruptcy of this lazy slur tactic.

First, note the title of the hit piece, “Rand Paul Scrubs Anti-Israel Reading List from Website.” The reading list was not “non-interventionist.” It wasn’t even “isolationist.” It wasn’t “dangerous” or “naïve,” also favorite interventionist charges. It certainly wasn’t “radical” or “liberal.” It was “anti-Israel.” Really Alana?

Then there’s this beauty: “One of the recommended titles, Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency by Patrick Buchanan, has been criticized by the Anti-Defamation League for containing ‘anti-Semitic rhetoric.’” Oh well then, if the Anti-Defamation League says it’s anti-Semitic, then I guess that settles it. It must be anti-Semitic. Again, what kind of neoconservative bubble do you have to live in to believe that the ADL deserves to be the final authority of what is anti-Semitic and to accept such an accusation at face value? The ADL supports gun control. Does that settle the issue for Ms. Goodman? The similar “hate” watchdog group, the Southern Poverty Law Center, designates the Constitution Party and the Family Research Council as hate groups? Does she accept those designations at face value?

And what is some of the evidence presented that Buchanan’s book is anti-Semitic? “In the book, Buchanan accused ‘the Beltway Likud’ of plotting the war in Iraq ‘long before 9/11.’” The phrase “Beltway Likud” was unhelpfully provocative, but that neocon hawks were itching for military intervention in Iraq before 9/11 is a matter of undisputed fact. Is Ms. Goodman not familiar with the “Clean Break” report? Is she not familiar with the Project for a New American Century? This is not obscure stuff. If Ms. Goodman is unaware of them, then perhaps she shouldn’t be writing about foreign policy.

I could go on, but here is the point. For thoughtful, reasonable, well intentioned people, it is not enough to just scatter shot a bunch of short quotes without context in an article and pretend they are self-condemning. It’s a cheap shot, it’s PC grandstanding, and it’s intellectually lazy and dishonest. It’s not how civilized ladies and gentlemen conduct a debate. If you are going to make an assertion, you have to back it up. Responsible journalists and commentators who cover foreign policy should not act like agents of Madison Avenue and make cheap appeals to emotions. They should engage in an honest intellectual debate. Articles in the Free Beacon about “anti-Israel” reading lists are not up to that standard, and discredit both the author and the website.

Dan E. Phillips, MD is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Mercer University School of Medicine in Macon, Georgia. His work has been published at Lew Rockwell, Chronicles Magazine, Intellectual Conservative, the Abbeville Institute blog, and several other places. He can be contacted at danphillipsmd@gmail.com.

The View From Olympus: South Wind

Photo credit: David Boté EstradaAs I have written many times, Fourth Generation war is such a vast phenomenon that it will take a century for it to reveal itself fully. A new and surprising manifestation is the flood of unaccompanied children across our southern border, a surprise that uncomfortably suggests The Camp of the Saints. The children are fleeing gang violence. A story in the July 10 New York Times reported that

"While many children and parents say the rush of new migrants stems from a belief that United States immigration policy offers preferential treatment to minors, studies of Border Patrol statistics show a strong correlation between cities . . . with high homicide rates and swarms of youngsters taking off for the United States."

Children are given two choices by the gangs: join or die. However, joining also probably means dying at an early age. Because children mimic what they see elders doing, they are not only joining gangs but copying their behavior. The Times reported that "Last week, in . . . Santa Barbara (Honduras), an 11-year old boy had his throat slit by other children, because he did not pay a 50-cent extortion fee.”Welcome to the world without the state. Life is, as Thomas Hobbes put it, nasty, brutish, and short. Gangs are a common element in 4GW, which is what these children find themselves caught up in. Childhood as we know it, which is a Victorian creation, vanishes. Child fighters were common before the Victorian period; 18th century Royal Navy warships often had 12-year old midshipmen and children as young as eight serving as powder monkeys. In other parts of today's world where the state has broken down, child soldiers are normal.Gangs are inherent enemies of the state. Where the state still functions, gang membership itself should be illegal and possibly a capital crime. But in places such as Honduras, the gangs are more powerful than the state. The state cannot outlaw them; indeed, they are in effect outlawing the state. The police themselves have become just another gang.What can the United States do about it? In other countries, nothing. In theory, we could invade and occupy places such as Honduras. But once we had done that, we would quickly find that eliminating the gangs requires summary execution of most males between the ages of ten and thirty. We don't have the stomach for that.On our own soil, we need to take the gang threat much more seriously. It is time and probably past time to make gang membership itself illegal. Since we also lack the fortitude to make it a capital crime, it needs to be punished by sentences to hard labor. Contracting the job out to Russia would add a further deterrent; few gang members fancy Siberia. First sentence should be ten days, second sentence ten years.The more immediate question is what to do about the flood of children across our southern border. The numbers are such that they cannot be ignored. The lead article in the July 13 New York Times Sunday Review section, by Sonia Nazario, stated that

"Three years ago, about 6,800 children were detained by United States immigration authorities and placed in federal custody; this year, as many as 90,000 children are expected to be picked up."

What should we do? Mrs. Nazario, with many on the left, argue that these children are not immigrants but refugees:

"we must recognize this as a refugee crisis, as the United Nations just recommended . . . Many Americans, myself included, believe in deporting unlawful immigrants, but see a different imperative with refugees."

As refugees, Mrs. Nazario, citing an organization called Kids in Need of Defense, estimates 40 to 60 percent of the children qualify to stay in the U.S.Here is where a correct understanding of Fourth Generation war is necessary. Mrs. Nazario is right: these children are refugees. As the number of failed states grows and disorder spreads, we will see vast floods of refugees, millions and tens of millions, all trying to get into one of the ever-smaller number of places that remain orderly. Those states, including our own, dare not admit them. Why? Because they will bring the behaviors they are fleeing with them. It was just this sort of immigration that brought down the Roman Empire. The barbarians (except perhaps the Vandals) were not invading Rome to destroy it; they were moving in, during the same sort of movement of whole peoples, Volkerwanderung, we now face, seeking the order Rome offered. But their numbers were so great they overwhelmed Rome. The Dark Ages began as a refugee crisis.So what is to be done with all these children? In his novel South Wind, Norman Douglas offered an answer. Once a year, the Good Duke Alfred put out a flag that signaled the Turks to come in and pick up all the children who had been bad. Were the children now coming en masse across our southern border promptly sold in the slave markets of Khartoum, the refugee flow would stop.Since we cannot do that, the next best option is to send the children home, volens nolens, as quickly as possible after their arrival. Is that harsh? Undoubtedly. Does it doom most of them to become fodder for the gangs? Probably, although most of them will probably end up in gangs anyway if they are allowed to stay here because that is the culture they know.Harsh, cruel measures, especially in blocking the flow of refugees, are what survival as a state will require in a 4GW world. We need to send the kids home. The Italian Navy needs to be sinking the boats refugees are using to cross the Med, not helping them make it to Italian ports. Norway needs to send its Somalis back to Somalia (the Norwegian government had to print a brochure in Somali saying, "No, it's not OK to rape Norwegian women who are out in public without a male relative.). To be or not to be, that is the question facing the state.

The View From Olympus: A Quick Look At The MH17 Shoot-Down

A quick look at the shooting down of a Malaysian airliner over eastern Ukraine raises some interesting questions. On the surface, it appears most likely that Russian separatists shot the plane down after mistaking it for a Ukranian military transport. But if we dig a bit, a different picture starts to emerge.Of course, it is entirely possible the separatists did it. It makes no strategic sense, but if we understand 4GW we also realize that the separatists are not an army. Even the term "militia" may overstate their degree of organization. By this point, much of what is left of the separatist movement is just gangs. Their discipline is poor if it exists at all. Being Russians, they are also drunk most of the time. Could some inebriajed gang members amuse themselves by taking potshots with SAMs at anything that flies? Easily.But there is another layer to this incident. Ukraine will benefit strategically from it if it gets blamed on the separatists. That means a pseudo-op makes sense. Would the Ukranian government shoot down a civilian airliner if it were convinced it could blame it on the separatists and thereby increase international pressure on Russia to pull the plug on its Ukranian allies (who are now operating out of control)? Very possibly.One piece of the puzzle says this may be the case. The speed of Ukraine's reaction and its highly organized nature suggests foreknowledge. Within less than twenty-four hours, Ukraine had not only blamed the separatists but provided "evidence" they did it. According to the New York Times

"Ukraine's intelligence service . . . known as the S.B.U., released what it said was audio from intercepted phone calls between separatist rebels and Russian military intelligence officers on Thursday. In the audio, the separatists appeared to acknowlege shooting down a civilian plane.The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry sent reporters a link to the edited audio [that word "edited" is important] of the calls, with English subtitles, posted on YouTube by the S.B.U."

What speed! What efficiency! In just a few hours, all this was put together in a neat and tidy package, despite the fact that the event was totally unexpected.This smells. The Ukrainian government is not noted for its efficiency. In any government, all these actions, statements etc. have to be approved by many layers of authority. How did all this happen so fast? Perhaps because the event was not unexpected.Both the E.U. and the U.S. government are likely to get involved in the investigation of this incident. Remember that neither is a disinterested party. Both are strongly pro-Ukrainian government and anti-Russian. They have large axes to grind.As newspapermen say, this story is likely to have legs.

Victoria: Chapter 19

The next two years, 2026 to 2027, were the last of the American Republic. In Maine, we were effectively running our own show. We still sent tax money to Washington, but those taxes were paid in U.S. dollars, not Pine Tree Dollars, so they didn't mean much to us. In effect, we just shipped some green paper south for recycling.In Augusta, Governor Adams and the Maine First Party put through a change to our state constitution. It required that every major issue be put to the people of Maine in a referendum, and it also allowed Maine citizens to put on the ballot any issue for which they could get 5000 signatures. That gave the government back to the people, where it had originally come from. It also meant that whenever government did something, it had a majority of Maine folk with it.The Maine First Party in addition set a rule that it would only consider an issue in the legislature if a majority of Maine towns said they couldn't deal with it in town meetings. That moved most decisions back to the local level, where they belonged.We were all poor, but thanks to the Pine Tree Dollar, we weren't getting poorer. We ate a lot of cabbage and potatoes – the Eastern European diet – and we huddled around the wood stove in winter, but we didn't starve or freeze. As we had hoped, Asian firms lined up to bid for leases on what had been the national parks in Maine, and the foreign tourists came – and spent. Our economy began to revive.We knew we had one serious, long-term problem: energy. The only oil in Maine is that left over from frying fish, and our gas was a product of Boston baked beans. Bio-diesel or ethanol wasn't a solution, given our poor soil, which we needed for potatoes anyway. But electricity was.In a referendum on March 11, 2026, 83% of the people of Maine voted to open negotiations with the independent Crown provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia on damming the Bay of Fundy. With the strongest tides in the world, the Bay of Fundy offered a vast reservoir of power which could turn electric turbines. Both of the former Canadian provinces were agreeable; they were also desperately short of energy, along with almost everything else, now that the rest of Canada was no longer there to subsidize them.Of course, none of us could afford to build such a vast engineering work. But private industry could. We offered the concession on a build-and-operate basis, with a 99-year monopoly on selling the power. On February 28, 2027, the State of Maine, with New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, signed an agreement with the Great Wall Construction and Power Company, a Chinese consortium. Work began that Spring, on a project that would take thirteen years before the first electricity flowed. In the meantime, we would continue to burn wood in our stoves and locomotives (we started building steam locomotives again, at the old Boston & Maine Railroad shops in Waterville) and see our way around the barn with a tin lantern, as our ancestors had.We even told a good New England joke on ourselves. What did Yankees use for light before they had candles? Electricity.Thanks in part to our poverty, we began to rediscover real life. Family took on renewed importance. If people were to survive, they had to look after each other, and the family is where that starts. Family members still on the farm sent food to those in town. The kids working in the Asian-owned resorts sent money back to the old folks on the farm. Families set up new businesses to make the basic tools we needed again; plows and buggies proved more useful than computers.Real life has always meant working, not waiting to be entertained, and there wasn't much time for entertainment when fields were waiting to be cleared, plowed, sown, and reaped. That was healthy and good. So was the kind of work we did as we returned to the soil and the sea. Dirt is what used to flow from the video screen, not what you run through your fingers as you decide when to plant or water. Maine's cold sea was cleansing to her sons who turned to it again, in wooden boats propelled by sails or oars, seeking the cod that were once again essential to our survival.With automobiles stopped for lack of gas, the people who lived nearby took on new importance. What had been mere places again became communities. Families helped other families, trading skills; one could farm, another could teach, a third could saw and hammer. As in the Great Depression of the 1930s, the local doctor took his fee in vegetables and eggs.Life had gotten harder, but somehow also cleaner. We didn't know it then, but this was the beginning of the Recovery.Up in Hartland, still at the Old Place, I worked the farm. Now, there was no EPA to tell me I couldn't plant, and the town needed whatever I could grow. A neighbor was breeding work horses, solid, gentle Belgians, and I got a team from him. I built a wagon, and, with the help of our local blacksmith, a plow, and went to work clearing stones and planting. It was nothing fancy, just corn, potatoes, and cabbage, but it fed the folks working in the tannery, who in turn made leather we could sell overseas.

***

To my regret, it proved too soon for me to play Cincinnatus. In October, 2026, after the harvesting was done, Governor Adams called. Would I venture the trip to Augusta again? He and a few other folks needed some help thinking about Maine's future, and felt the Christian Marines had a role to play in that. Of course, I said I'd go. At least this time I could drive a wagon to the train in Pittsfield instead of walking.We met on October 28, in the governor's living room. He understood that informal meetings usually get more done than formal ones. Besides the governor and myself, the gathering included General Sam Corcoran, who was the Adjutant General of the Maine Guard, a few of his unit commanders, and some leaders from the various militias around the state.Governor Adams made sure we each had a bottle of hard cider lying easy to hand, to lubricate the flow of ideas. Then, his back to the fire and his meerschaum pipe in his hand, he explained why he had called us together.“Gentlemen,” he said, “I do not know what the future has in hold for the United States of America, but I cannot believe it is happy. We have already seen things that, merely twenty years ago, would have been unimaginable to most citizens. Through our own efforts, we in Maine have escaped the worst of it, so far.”“But we have already had to defend ourselves with force," he continued. “We must presume we shall have to do so again. As I see it, that means Maine needs an army. I have asked you here today to begin the process of creating one.”“Of course, I realize we have some military units,” the Governor went on. “We have the Guard and Reserve units of the U.S. armed forces. We have our militias. And, not least, we have the Christian Marine Corps. But I wonder if these separate units constitute a real military – the kind Maine will need if she has to fight a war?”General Corcoran replied first. “Governor, as you know, the Guard’s first loyalty is to Maine, now. We swore an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution, but Washington abandoned that Constitution long ago. It abandoned it when the Supreme Court began finding things in it that just aren't there, like a “right” to an abortion. It abandoned it when Congressmen became professional politicians instead of the citizen legislators the Founders envisioned. It abandoned it when the Executive branch bent the powers of government to force political correctness down everyone's throat.”“Above all, the government in Washington abandoned the Constitution when it deliberately misread it to rule God out of public life. The Founding Fathers committed the nation's future to God. I have no doubt that if those men could come back now and see what the federal government has become, they would say it is the very opposite of everything they intended.”“I think there is an easy solution to your problem,” he continued. “Just turn the Maine Guard into our army. Let us take over these militias and other groups here. We'll teach them how to be real soldiers – to salute, march and drill, to wear the uniform right. I'll give you a better-looking army than anybody else has got, I promise you that.”At this point I realized we were on the verge of making a big mistake. It was time to speak up. “General,” I said, “I appreciate your loyalty to Maine and to what we all believe in. But quite frankly, Maine needs a fighting army for what is coming, not a parade-ground army. Remember the Sukhomlinov Effect: the army with the best looking uniforms always loses.”“What would you recommend?” Governor Adams asked.“I agree we should bring all our units together – militias, Guard, Christian Marines, whoever is willing to fight for Maine,” I replied. “But forget about uniforms and drills. The first thing we need is training. Real training is free-play training, where you go against someone who can do whatever he wants to defeat you. That's the only way to train for real war. Do it with paint guns, BB guns, and eventually live fire.”“Live fire force-on-force training? You're nuts,” the AG replied.“Other countries have done it, and do it today,” I shot back. “Go train with the Chileans some time. They do it. They learned it from the Germans. The rule is, ‘Offset your aim.’ It works, if you trust your troops. And if we want an army for modern war, the first rule has to be, trust your troops.”“That's only the beginning,” I continued. “We need all promotions to flow from exercise results: winners get promoted, losers don't. Otherwise we'll end up with leaders whose best ability is kissing ass. I saw enough of that in the Corps to last me a lifetime.”“We need to reward initiative, not obedience: everyone, at every rank, must be expected to take initiative to get the result the situation demands. Discipline is key, but the modern battlefield requires self discipline, not imposed discipline. Armies of automatons lose.”“We need soldiers who love their weapons, not soldiers who are afraid of their weapons, like those in most U.S. units. We need leaders who love making decisions and taking responsibility. We need to reward people who take initiative, even when it doesn't work, instead of those who do nothing in order to avoid mistakes. We need units that can move, shoot and fight fast – faster than any enemy, because in war, speed and time are everything.”“Pardon me, but just where did you learn all this stuff?” the AG asked. “I know you were a Marine captain, but I can tell you Army captains don't think this way. Frankly, it's new to me too.”“There were a bunch of us pushing this way of thinking and fighting in the Marine Corps,” I replied. “We called it ‘maneuver warfare’ or Third Generation war. Historically, it is the German way of war – or the Israeli way, if you prefer. The Israelis got it from the Germans, though they don't like to talk about that.”“What you and your men learned in the U.S. Army, general, is the French way of war, Second Generation: focused inward on process instead of outward on results, prizing obedience over initiative, centralizing decision-making, and seeking strength through brute force instead of through speed and tempo. When the French and German styles of war clashed in 1940, the French army went down to defeat in just 43 days. It had more tanks than the Germans, so the cause wasn't equipment. The reason was doctrine: the way each side thought about war.”“It seems to me you have a point," Governor Adams said. “What you are describing as the German army is also the way the most successful corporations have learned to do business: lots of initiative at every level, always trying something new, moving fast and focusing on the customer. Are you saying that Maine's army needs to be like silicon valley instead of General Motors?”“That's right,” I responded. “The American armed services follow the old industrial model: Henry Ford's production line. Instead, we need to be military entrepreneurs. The tie-in with military doctrine is direct. Around 1990, the Marine Corps put out a field manual on maneuver warfare called FMFM-1, Warfighting. Somebody else slapped a new cover on it and put it out as a guide for businessmen – without changing a word in the text.”“Well, before I became Governor of this state, I was in the business of making paper,” Adams said. “We learned to run the paper mill just the way you describe running a military, and we beat the pants off our competition. I think if a small state like Maine is to have an army that can win, it needs to go at it the same way.”“As I said, it's all new to me,” the AG allowed. “But I do know that Maine cannot afford the equipment or the logistics I was taught to depend on. So I guess we have to do something different. Captain, can you show us how?”“Sir, it isn't just me,” I replied. “All Christian Marines understand maneuver warfare. Plus, the Jaeger or ‘Hunter’ tactics infantrymen use in maneuver warfare will be natural to most of your Guardsmen. After all, most of them are hunters. I'm sure some of your officers and NCOs have studied the Germans on their own. I can't do it for you, but together, I know we can make this work with Maine soldiers.”“Captain, it seems to me the man who understands this new way of war best ought to lead us into it,” Governor Adams said. “I am prepared to offer you the command of Maine's forces if you will accept it.”“Thank you, Governor, I am honored," I replied. “But I think General Corcoran should be the commander. I would suggest that I serve instead as Chief of the Maine General Staff. In that role, I would advise General Corcoran, as other members of the General Staff would advise commanders of other Maine units. We would also establish a central office of the General Staff here in Augusta to do contingency planning. But we would not replace the commanders the units now have – that goes for leaders of our Maine militia units as well.”“Is that agreeable to everyone?” the Governor asked.It was. I knew the militia leaders would appreciate not being bumped downward in units they had created. And the AG’s dignity was intact. The meeting had shown he was open to new ideas, though he wasn't likely to come up with them himself. That's OK, I thought: I can play Max Hoffman to his Hindenburg.“That settles it, then,” Governor Adams said. “That's the kind of meeting I like, short and decisive. I trust you'll also be available to advise me, Captain Rumford – or should we make you a general now?”“Captain is enough for me, Governor,” I replied. “In the German Army, authority went with position, not with rank. I think that's a good way to do it. It keeps people from thinking too much about getting promoted.”“Fine. General Corcoran, I trust you will be accepting of the captain's advice?”“Yes, sir. It's clear he knows a lot of stuff I don't. I just want to serve Maine as best I can,” the AG replied.“Was er rath, musst du tuun.” Where had I heard that before? Oh yes, it was what the Kaiser had said in August of 1914 when he introduced the Crown Prince to his General Staff officer. “What he advises, you must do.”The next day, I traded my hotel room for a boarding house in Augusta. It was clear I'd be spending the winter there, working with the Guard to integrate the militia units into our new armed forces and getting the training program going. Of course, we already had our Maine General Staff: the Christian Marines.We didn't announce any of this, not yet. No reason to give Washington something else to howl about. By the time they found out, we'd be more than ready for them – or anything else that might come our way as the old U.S.A. dissolved.For the melting pot had become the refinery. The United States boiled and bubbled and flared with fear and loathing: black against Hispanic against white, woman against man, gay against straight, neo-pagan against Christian, enviro-freak against corporation, worker against boss, west against east. It cracked and separated along every line imaginable, and some not.Ex uno, Plura. Thank you, multiculturalism. See you in Hell.

Victoria: Chapter 18

In September of 2025, little Suzy La Montaigne, age seven, came home from her elementary school in New Orleans, Louisiana, with a headache and sniffles. Three days later she was dead. Ten days later, so were all but three of her classmates and her teacher. A week after that, only a handful of the students in her school were still alive, and people of all ages were dropping dead on the streets of the community her school served.When scientists first began fooling around with genetic engineering in their labs, real conservatives warned there would be consequences. When man plays God, bad things happen. But companies perceived that money could be made, so genetic engineering took off. It quickly permeated the food supply. As the technology continued to be developed, word of how to do it spread. Unlike nuclear weapons, genetically engineered diseases did not require much in the way of facilities to develop. Kids could do it in the basement – and soon some were.No one ever figured out whether N'Orleans flu, as it came to be known, happened as an accident of genetic engineering or was deliberately created as a weapon of war. If it were the latter, we never determined who used it on the American South, or why.People did figure out, fast, that N'Orleans flu spread easily, like other flu, but it had a mortality rate of about 80%.The Plague was back. Contrary to what Americans had been taught, the Middle Ages were a highly successful society. What brought them down was disease. Ring around the rosy, pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall down. Dead. It's an old rhyme about the Plague. You still hear children sing it, not knowing what it means. When N'Orleans flu hit, they found out. In response, people did the only thing they could. They panicked.

***

To understand the Great Panic of 2025, you have to realize that by that time, no one trusted any American institution. The hyper-inflation had destroyed what little remained of the federal government's legitimacy. The media was equally mistrusted. People had figured out what it called “news” had been reduced to another form of entertainment. The culturally Marxist academics and mainstream clergy were taken seriously only by each other.The average American's life was dominated by one emotion: fear. He feared crime, he feared for his job, he feared the government, he feared for his children, and, most of all, he feared the future. His fears were realistic. They reflected the reality that pressed in on him from every side.So when this new fear arose, the fear of plague, of a new Black Death lurking in every bus and elevator, shopping mall and office building, he panicked. The Establishment tried to reassure him, to deny the evidence, to damn those who had warned about genetic engineering as “Luddites.” But it was all lies and he knew it. He knew the Establishment lied about everything.People simply fled. They gathered up their children and ran for the country. It was the only reasonable response, the only possible response. It didn't work, because the country soon filled up with people, which is what other people were trying to avoid. So they fled further. Woods and fields became gypsy camps. Like the gypsies, when they needed food or clothing or weapons, they stole them. Their money wasn't worth anything anyway.The woods were pretty in autumn that year; the East had one of its most spectacular seasons for color, the maples decked in brilliant oranges and scarlets. Soon, there were less attractive sights under the trees.At first, the country people welcomed and helped the refugees. Rural areas were still largely Christian. People there helped each other, and felt it their duty to do the same for the newcomers. But too often, the city people brought their ways with them – crime, drugs, noise, and dirt – as well as N'Orleans flu. The rural folk caught the scent of fear, and feared themselves. Soon, militias were being organized in church basements, and bends in country roads became the settings for ambushes. The red and yellow leaves, dying, offered themselves as cheerful shrouds for human dead; no one would bury the bodies for fear of contamination. The carrion-eaters had a feast that winter.The panic was finally suppressed in 2026 by two old Russian generals, General January and General February. The winter was a harsh one almost everywhere. Just another sign of climate change, the experts said. As the snow fell and the mercury plunged, people started walking home. The risk of a rapid death by disease seemed preferable to a slow and agonizing death by starving and freezing, or murder. By Spring, the country people had their woods and fields to themselves again. However, they did not disband their militias.Citizens demanded that the government do something, now that they couldn't run away. And government did. It got a ruling from the Supreme Court that said people with disease were “disabled,” so that any preventive measures like a quarantine would be illegal discrimination. No one was surprised. And they all knew there was nothing they could do about it.

***

In Maine, of course, things were different. The government in Washington was merely a polite fiction for us, and we paid as little attention to its Supreme Court as to a headline in a supermarket tabloid. We moved promptly to protect public health.Anyone who showed early symptoms of N'Orleans flu was quarantined, along with all other members of their household. We had very few cases because we also put controls on entry into Maine. The lack of motor traffic due to the price of gas meant most people coming in came by train, and there weren't many of them; the American tourist was an extinct animal. All trains had to stop while passengers got a quick blood test; those who didn't pass were put on the next train back. The airports and the Interstates had a similar rule; the rest of the roads we closed. Washington squawked, of course, but we didn't bother to reply. Vermont and New Hampshire soon joined us, which reopened the border roads. The deep South states also adopted a policy of quarantine; they too were starting to act in concert.The fact that we learned early how to control our borders and who and what crossed them was central to our survival. As the 21st century moved on and the world was engulfed by wars, every surviving state had to shut their borders down tight. Anyone who had the slightest laxness in border controls was quickly hit by a genetically engineered disease. Those growing parts of the world where the state had disintegrated were depopulated.It's funny how all the “experts” in the early 21st century were predicting a future of “globalism” and “international economy,” where people and goods moved freely throughout the world. The reality is, it now takes two years to get a European visa, and when you get there, you face two weeks of medical tests at your own expense followed by six weeks of quarantine even if you pass. And that's if you're coming from another state. If you're from someplace where the state has disappeared, you can't go there. Illegal immigrants are shot on site.

The View From Olympus: A Useful Airplane and a Useless Airplane

Guess which one the Air Force is buying.A bitter joke going around the military says, "ISIS is doomed because it now has American equipment." The Iraqi military, in contrast, in its moment of need has turned to Russia for aircraft. Why? Because Russia can provide a useful aircraft, and it can provide it quickly, pilots included.The Airplane in question is the SU-25, the Russian equivalent of the American A-10. The American aircraft is a better design, but both aircraft are useful because their designs are focused on a task that can make a real difference in combat, namely supporting troops on the ground. Though often thought of as close air support (CAS), that mission is somewhat broader. I would argue that armed reconnaissance in support of the Schwerpunkt can contribute more to the ground war than CAS, which for the most part should be an emergency action.But all air support of ground troops requires aircraft specifically designed for that mission. Such aircraft must fly low and slow, because that is the only way the pilot can find and identify targets (identification is the harder task). It must be built around a powerful cannon, because strafing is usually more desirable than bombing. It must be able to take lots of hits and survive, and it must have excellent maneuverability because jinking is also critical to survival. The airplane itself must be cheap, because numbers count and because if something is too expensive to lose it is also too expensive to use. While the plane is disposable, pilots are not, so it must be disigned to keep the pilot alive even at the expense of the aircraft. Both the A-10 and the SU-25 meet most of these criteria, although the A-10 meets them better. Hence, both are useful airplanes.It has been many years since the U.S. Air Force bought the A-10, and now it is trying to junk the ones it has. The House has voted to block that move, and everyone who cares about the infantryman hopes the Senate will do the same. What the Air Force should be doing is designing a replacement for the A-10 that reflects the same design philosophy.Instead, the Air Force is buying a useless airplane, the F-35. What is wrong with the F-35? For starters, any airplane that will cost the taxpayers one trillion dollars, the expected life-cycle cost of the F-35, is an absurdity. No aircraft is worth that much money. Then, the whole fleet was recently grounded because an F-35 caught fire, fortunately not in the air. Its design is so poor as a fighter that, with a wing loading higher than that of the infamous F-105 and a less than 1:1 thrust to weight ratio, it is a flying piano.But most importantly, the F-35 has no mission. Even if it were the most brilliant fighter/bomber design of all time, it is a useless airplane. For Fourth Generation war, the F-35 is useless as a fighter because 4GW forces have no aircraft, and it is useless as a bomber because airstrikes, no matter how successful technically and tactically, defeat the power carrying them out at the moral level. Bombing homes at night from 20,000 feet recruits more enemies than it kills.For wars between states, the F-35 is useless not only because it is a turkey but because we should not be planning to fight more wars with other states. The losing state will tend to disintegrate into another stateless region, which is a greater danger to us and to all other states than was the state we were fighting. In other words, the F-35 and every other aircraft like it is useless because war has changed in ways that make fighter/bombers irrelevant.Ground support aircraft, in contrast, remain relevant, because highly accurate strafing by pilots who can see and identify what they are shooting at can be useful in 4GW. Strafing runs don't blow up wedding parties and, because the aircraft is at risk, they to some degree even up the moral balance. Neither A-10s nor SU-25s try to strafe from 20,000 feetSo the Air Force (with the Navy and the Marines) wants to spend a trillion dollars for a useless airplane, while retiring our single most useful combat aircraft. Is anyone in OSD, the White House, or Congress awake? Hello?

Victoria: Chapter 17

The crisis that occupied the feds' attention while Maine reestablished the doctrine of Nullification was one that usually comes in the last days of ancien regimes. The currency was collapsing.In October of 2018, a Big Mac cost $5.95. By October of 2023, it cost $99. For $150, you also got a small order of fries and a Coke.The warning signs had been flashing for many years, but everyone in Washington ignored them. As late as the year 2000, the federal government had showed it could balance the budget. But for politicians, doing so had no payoff. The Republicans wanted tax cuts and the Democrats wanted more spending. So they cut a deal where each party would get what it wanted, and we would just borrow the money to pay for it all.Through the 2000s and 2010s, the deficits soared, as did the national debt and the international trade deficit. Washington ignored all three. Then, in response to the financial panic of 2008, the Federal Reserve bank began printing money. Actually, it no longer had to print it. It could just enter a few keystrokes on a computer and presto!, trillions of dollars came into being. No one considered that something created so easily couldn't be worth much.Wall Street got even richer from all the phony money, but the real economy, where real people had to try to get jobs, remained in the tank. That kept down inflation, for a while.The first people to realize that dollars had become green confetti were foreigners. Starting in the mid-teens, the dollar began to lose its position as the world's reserve currency. Gold came back into its own as the only real money, at least internationally. The dollar's role as reserve currency had given the American economy a huge subsidy. When it lost that subsidy, it tanked.The Federal Reserve responded by creating dollars even faster, by the tens of trillions. All they knew how to do, when a bubble burst, was generate more liquidity to create yet another bubble.But this time, the bubble was the dollar itself. When that bubble burst, beginning here at home in 2019, creating more dollars made the problem worse. But since that is all the Fed knew how to do, that is what it did.By 2023, the Fed was creating dollars by the quadrillions. By March of 2024, that Big Mac cost $500,000. By July, it cost $50 million. Financial Weimar had followed cultural Weimar. The middle class was wiped out.

***

In Washington, Republicans and Democrats pointed fingers at each other, each hoping to ride the wave of middle class fury into long-term power. The public remembered that both parties had voted for the policies that brought the dollar down to where it took ten million to buy a single Mexican peso. That meant the political system offered no hope of a solution.Revolutions and civil wars are the suicide of states. Men and women commit suicide when they are convinced their problems are overwhelming and there is no other way out. Nations rise in revolution or divide in civil war in response to the same conviction: continuation of the status quo is intolerable, and nothing but the death of the state offers any hope of escape from it.The Federal government's destruction of the dollar, and with it every American’s way of life, solidified the public against it. Not only solidified – radicalized. Afterwards, most Americans felt continued rule by such a government was unbearable. They did not yet know how to escape from under it. But they were ready to embrace any possibility. Including suicide.

***

The government's response to the economic catastrophe it had created only deepened the public’s alienation. First, Congress indexed its own salaries and those of government employees. That meant their salaries went up week-by-week to keep up with the inflation. The rest of us were left to live as best we could on incomes that fell steadily, in terms of what they would buy.We weren't the first country to experience hyperinflation, and while everybody's savings were gone for good, it was possible to stabilize the currency by the usual tough measures: stop printing more money, drastically cut government spending, run a budget surplus, and so on. The Feds refused to do any of it. It would have meant cutting off the parasites, the welfare queens, Wall Street bankers, government contractors, and all the rest. Those folks were the politicians’ base. The Fed kept on inventing money.People tried to cope in the usual ways, by buying gold, hoarding foreign currencies, bartering, etc.The government's next response was to make ownership of gold illegal. If you already owned some, you had to sell it to the government at a fixed price – for paper dollars that in one day were worth half as much as when you got them, a day later a fourth as much, and so on. By this time, people were using $100 bills for toilet paper. It was cheaper than buying the real thing. Maybe that's what economists mean by a “soft currency.”Then, the feds ordered everyone to turn in all their foreign money as well. Banks were commanded to convert all foreign currency into dollars and send the renminbi and yen and pesos to Washington. By a secret government order, on December 7, 2024, the banks opened all safety deposit boxes and confiscated any precious metals and foreign money found in them. The rightful owners were not compensated, but fined.Finally, Washington tried to outlaw barter as well. That was hopeless, but they tried. President Cisneros proposed and Congress (with a Republican majority, but in times of crisis the Establishment knows how to stick together) passed a law requiring all citizens to show receipts for any new goods in their possession. Failure to do so resulted in immediate confiscation, plus fines. Enforcement was given over to the IRS, on the reasonable grounds that it had always presumed guilt unless innocence could be proven by documentation. Armed teams of IRS agents would burst into a home, demanding receipts for anything they thought looked new. They still went through the motions of getting a warrant, but “probable cause” included the fact that the family was not starving. If they had food, they were presumed to have bought it. If they had no receipts for it, the food was confiscated too. And they were fined for having it.Down east, we suffered along with the rest as our money turned into litter. But the Christian Marines’ notion that most crises were also opportunities had caught on. Just before Christmas, 2024, I got a letter from Bill Kraft asking if I would join him and a few others in a meeting with Governor Adams on December 27.I went, though going wasn't easy. Like most people in Maine, I had food and wood for heat, but gasoline was $1.5 billion a gallon by December, so my truck was up on blocks in the barn. I hiked down to Pittsfield, where I got a train for Augusta. We'd gotten passenger trains running again and, like most retro things, found we liked them. The one I rode was pulled by a steam engine converted to burn wood, of which we had plenty, so the fares were affordable.There were about twenty people at the meeting, most of whom I more or less knew. They were the folks, up from the grass roots, who had put the Maine First Party together. I wasn’t sure what I would have to add to a political gathering, but I knew I'd learn a few things.The governor began by saying something a lot of Mainiacs had been thinking. “Gentlemen, we've let this whole thing go too far already. Maine has shown it can act independently of Washington. The inflation problem has stymied us, because the currency is controlled from Washington. But we have to be able to think our way around that – and then do something. We cannot get peoples’ savings back, but there must be a way we can give them a currency that doesn't lose value faster than it can be printed. I called you here to get your ideas on how we might do that.”“Why don't we just print our own money?” asked a fellow from Skowhegan.“We've thought of that,” the governor replied. “We're willing to do it; I don't care whether Washington likes it or not. The problem is, what do we back it with? The 'full faith and credit' of a government, even our government, doesn't mean anything any more. Our economists tell me any paper currency we issue will quickly lose value, the same as the dollar has.”Bill Kraft spoke up. “As usual, history shows us the way to handle this. In the 1980s and 1990s, a number of other countries, faced the same problem. They solved it, and we can solve it by doing what they did.”“What did they do?" Governor Adams asked.“They established a new currency,” Kraft replied. “But to maintain its value, they only issued as much of it as they could back with foreign currency or gold. To guarantee that, they gave all authority to issue the new money to an independent Currency Board. The government could not give an order to run the presses. Once people understood that, they came to trust the new money. And it held its value.”“Where do we get the gold or foreign currency to back our new money?” the Governor responded.“We seize and sell or lease abroad all the federal assets in Maine that might be worth something,” said a fellow I didn't know. He turned out to be Steve Ducen, an economist who had worked in Washington as long as he could take it, then fled up here. He had a prosperous apple farm near Lewiston now. “Start with the national parks; Japanese hotels will lease them in a heartbeat and put in golf courses. They'll bring in Japanese tourists by the planeload, and we'll feed 'em all the raw lobster they can eat.”“Asia is booming, and we can cash in on that,” he continued. “American antiques are all the rage among wealthy Chinese. Maine has plenty, and we can make more. I'm already selling more than half my apples in Japan, Korea, and Singapore. With some clever marketing, we could sell potatoes, maple syrup, you name it. People who eat dogs and sea cucumbers will eat anything.”“We don't need to look just to Maine folks for foreign currency,” added John Rushton, President of the First Bank of Portland. “We can allow any American citizen to set up a gold or foreign currency account in a Maine bank. They bring their dollars up here, sell them for whatever they'll bring in foreign currency, and set up an account. And, if they export, instead of having the feds turn the payments they get from abroad into worthless dollars, they can have them paid right into one of our banks. They can withdraw either the foreign money, or ours, as they choose."This sounded good to me, but I saw one question no one had addressed. So I asked it. “How do you keep the feds from getting into these accounts electronically and sucking the foreign money out?”Bill Kraft had the answer – a perfect Retroculture answer. “There won't be any electronic records,” he said. “Remember, we had banks long before we had computers. We just go back to doing it manually, with passbooks and account ledgers and the like. We run these accounts just the way they would have been handled in 1950 – or 1850, for that matter. In effect, we just pull the plug."I had to admit that was the ultimate electronic security system.

***

We did it. Maine began issuing Pine Tree Dollars in March, 2025. We soon got the kind of prices people remembered from before the U.S. dollar began its long slide. A loaf of bread again cost 15 cents. A pound of hamburger cost 20 cents. Gas stayed expensive at over $50 per gallon; we had no Maine oil. But horse feed was cheap because we grew our own.Within six months, Pine Tree Dollars were in demand throughout the United States. Foreign currency flooded into Maine from the rest of the country, most of which was exchanged for Pine Tree Dollars. Within Maine, prices were stable, for the first time anyone could remember.Washington was unhappy, of course, but it was now too weakened morally to dare any serious countermoves. Beyond denouncing us all once again as “racists, sexists, and classists,” the only action the Feds took was to order the U.S. Customs Service on Maine's borders with Quebec and New Brunswick (both now independent) to seize all Pine Tree Dollars as well as gold and foreign currency held by people trying to cross.Bill Kraft asked me if the Christian Marines could help out on this one. I said I thought we could. I had preached all along that we had to wait for the Federal Government to fall of its own weight. Now, it was down for the count. It would thrash around on the mat for a while, but I knew it would never get on its feet again. So we could be bolder.On July 2, 2025, a mixed force of Maine Guard and Christian Marines arrived at the border crossings and rounded up the Customs officers. We gave them a choice. They could join the new Maine Customs Service and follow Maine laws, or stay with the feds and get shipped south. Most lived in Maine and were happy to join us. They despised Washington as much as any of us.Just thirteen Customs agents said they wanted to remain with the feds. We took them down to Augusta, where on July 4, in festive fashion, they were paraded in their U.S. Customs Service Uniforms. We then bent them over, cut the seat out of their trousers, painted their backsides red and bundled them all into a boxcar with waybills for Washington, D.C. As their train pulled out of the station, the Governor led the crowd in a rousing toast to Maine, a sound dollar, and liberty.

The View From Olympus: The Brinton Thesis in Action

The headline on page A7 of today's (July 1) New York Times reads, "ISIS Threatens Al Qaeda as Flagship Movement of Extremists." Al Qaeda, it seems, is being outflanked. What a shame.ISIS now has the street cred al Qaeda achieved with 9/11. Why? Because 9/11 was a long time ago, and ISIS is doing things now while al Qaeda is off the front page. ISIS's spectacular advance in Iraq may be followed by an equally rapid withdrawal, because that is how light cavalry warfare goes. If ISIS does show staying power, that will indicate it is largely a front for the Baath , which is what I suspect. ISIS's announcement of a "caliphate" with (surprise!) its own leader as caliph is also good for lots of ink, but like its military advance may fade quickly. Under Islamic law, ISIS does not have the authority to proclaim a caliphate or a caliph. The legitimate caliph is the head of the House of Osman, the dynasty that ruled Turkey as both Sultan and Caliph up to 1923.If we stand back from the daily headlines, the ISIS phenomenon and especially its displacement of al Qaeda look like a textbook case of the Brinton Thesis in action. Named for historian Crane Brinton, whose specialty as a scholar was the French Revolution, the Brinton Thesis says all revolutions proceed in a series of coup d'etats leading ever more to the most extreme positions, until a final "coup of Thermidor" pulls everything back to the center and the revolution is over. Based on what happened in France--the coup of Thermidor, which was a month in the French revolutionary calendar, marked the end of the revolution--the Brinton Thesis has shown wide application. I suspect that Iraq at present is another textbook case.What does this suggest for American policy? First, because the coup of Thermidor must come from within, we and everyone else concerned should wait. We cannot make Thermidor happen. Second, American intervention against ISIS, which would really be intervention on the side of the Shiites against the Sunnis, is likely to slow down the process we want to see move as quickly as possible. As has been true since day one of the war in Iraq, we would be working against our own interests. Third, as is the case now in Afghanistan, every American casualty will be directly traceable to ass-covering by politicians, in this case President Obama who seems to lack the guts to just say no to pressures to get re-involved in Iraq. How hard should it be to refuse to go back into a sewer you have finally crawled out of?The one exception to point three will be if we have to send in forces to secure an evacuation of all Americans from Iraq. The fact that the additional troops we just sent have as their mission securing the embassy and the airport may indicate we are planning for that.How soon might the coup of Thermidor happen if we are smart enough to stay out? My guess is that we are witnessing the early stages of Islam's Thirty Years' War.

The View From Olympus: An Ounce of Prevention

The old saying, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure," is never more true than when applied to Fourth Generation war. Once a terrorist attack has happened, all "first response" is too late for the state. It has failed in its duty to maintain order, which means its legitimacy takes a big hit. Incompetent first response can degrade it further, but from the state's perspective, prevention is 90% of the game.It is thus with great delight that I report a new book that addresses prevention in useful ways. The title, Left of Bang, may confuse some; it is military slang for "before an event happens," i.e., before an IED goes off or a sniper shoots. Written by two Marine officers, former Captain Patrick van Horne and Major Jason A. Riley, USMCR (with a forward by Steven Pressfield, whose book Gates of Fire is the best introduction to warre, war at its most primal level), the book reflects lessons learned by Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those lessons were embodied for a time in a Marine Corps program called Combat Hunter, which in turn suggests a connection to true light infantry (known in much of Europe as Jaegers, the German word for hunter).The book's thesis is simple: humans have a universal body language that, once learned by an observer, gives away their intentions and thus enables effective prevention. The authors call the art of reading these signs "combat profiling," and they divide it into six domains. "Profiling" is of course a dirty word to cultural Marxists, but in the real world all law enforcement is and must be based on profiling. There simply aren't enough cops (or Marines in combat overseas) to consider everyone equally likely to be a criminal or a threat.Left of Bang offers more than a theory. It is also a well-written instruction book in how to learn combat profiling. I won't try to condense the lessons here, as the bones of the theory have too much meat on them to cover in a column. Best advice: buy and read the book if your job has anything to do with preventing terrorism or violent crime.While written for Marines, Left of Bang has even more relevance to police. The state's first line of prevention is police, not the military, because in the battle fore legitimacy it is to the state's advantage to consider 4GW crime (even though it is actually much more than that). Since 9/11, police have pursued "first response" enthusiastically, in part because it had lots of money attached. But, again, first response is too late. From the perspective of policing, the whole game is prevention. Once "bang" has happened, policing has failed and other emergency services largely take over. Every police chief and police agency in this country should get a copy of Left of Bang--and tell the cultural  Marxists, when they howl, to go sit on an IED. Cops profile because they have to.Left of Bang will face a legitimate question: just how universal, across cultures, are the indicators combat profiling relies on? This question is less important for police, except when dealing with immigrants. But for soldiers and Marines fighting in parts of the world where cultures are very different, it is important. One example: in Bulgaria, shaking your head up and down means no and side-to-side means yes.This is primarily a question for anthropologists, but even if signs are less universal across cultures than Left of Bang suggests, the value of the book is unimpaired. It would just mean that before going into a foreign country, soldiers and Marines would have to read into body language and other indicators in the particular culture.Left of Bang was written to keep Marines alive, but its value reaches far beyond the Marine Corps. So long as the United States insists on sticking its nose into every quarrel on Earth, we will remain a target for a wide variety of 4GW elements. Prevention, not "first response," must be the state's objective. Left of Bang tells us how prevention might be accomplished. Its authors have  done a great service to both Corps and country.

Victoria: Chapter 16

By the third decade of the 21st century, the dissolution of the United States had reached the point where each year brought a new crisis. The crisis of 2023 began with the Persell Amendment to the Clean Air Act, a measure intended to prevent the smoking of tobacco.I am not making this up. I know it sounds like satire, but it happened.In the 1990s and 2000s, as the greatest country in the world turned itself into a cultural toxic waste dump, one of the great issues that absorbed the federal government's attention was – tobacco smoke.The government and the “health industry” that lived off the government whooped it up that tobacco smoke was second only to Xyclon B as the worst thing you could inhale. At first, they just tried to get smokers to quit. But like all bandwagons of the absurd, once their campaign got rolling it rolled over everybody. Soon, they were shrieking that just smelling the smoke from someone else’s pipe, cigar, or cigarette was enough to put you in the grave tomorrow, or by next week at the latest. They called it “second-hand smoke.”Of course, you got far more crap in your lungs just walking past a bus, but that didn't matter. Smoking was outlawed far and wide where anyone might smell the smoke. Smokers were literally driven out, into back alleys and onto loading docks for a furtive puff.A reasonable man, or even woman, might have considered that people had been smoking for some centuries, yet by a miracle the human race had survived. Smokers and non-smokers had even managed to get along, quite nicely in most cases. The secret was etiquette. Good manners dictated that some places were for smoking and some were not, and that where the lines were uncertain, smokers asked the assembled company for permission before they indulged. Previous to the hysteria, permission was usually graciously given, and no one seemed the worse for it.But by the early 2000s, anti-smoking militancy was the “cause” of the day. Avoiding tobacco smoke had become the equivalent of Fletcherizing – the 19th century movement that promised sparkling health and a Methuselah lifespan to anyone who chewed each bite of food one hundred times. Americans always were suckers for health crazes.And politicians were always on the lookout for suckers. So when the Clean Air Act came up for renewal in 2023, Senator Whitman Persell (“Wimpy” to his friends), Democrat of California, saw a chance to score some points with the anti-tobacco harpies. He proposed an amendment whereby anyone who smelled tobacco smoke anywhere might sue any nearby smoker. The plaintiff did not have to prove that the smoker was smoking at the time; the fact that he or she was an admitted smoker was considered proof enough. The amendment encouraged triple damages for “pain and suffering.” With the enthusiastic backing of the Cisneros administration and the usual craven collapse by Congressional Republicans, the amendment was signed into law. The Health Nazis triumphantly proclaimed “the end of tobacco smoking in America.”As the law intended, smokers found themselves hunted like rats. A smoker, placed under oath on the witness stand, had to admit smoking or be guilty of perjury. But if they admitted they smoked, they lost the suit, along with their life savings and most else they owned. Repairmen, neighbors, even family members would come into a smoker’s home and promptly file a lawsuit, which they won. If someone smelled smoke in someone else’s clothes, they sued and won. The Surgeon General even issued a pamphlet suggesting ways smokers could be trapped into revealing their filthy habit, and then sued. It was a virtual reign of terror, enforced by impoverishment.But the result was not the end of tobacco smoking in America. The result was war. Smokers fought back.It started about six months after the Persell Amendment took effect. In Pasadena, a little old lady had been sued by a Meals on Wheels deliverywoman who had spotted a telltale cigarette butt in her kitchen garbage. As usual, the smoker lost, and the court ordered her home seized and sold to pay the deliverywoman her winnings. In the final court session on the case, the little old lady pulled a Saturday Night Special out of her handbag and blew away the judge and the plaintiff.She was shot down herself by a sheriff, but on her way to court she had sent a letter to the L.A. Times explaining her action. “I had nothing more to lose," she wrote. “I would rather die quickly than be left on the street, penniless. And I won't stop smoking. I was born and grew up in England, and I remember how, in 1940, when a Nazi invasion seemed certain, Churchill had posters printed up saying, ‘You Can Always Take One With You.’ So that is what I will try to do.”Her story was picked up by the rest of the media, not in sympathy but to demonstrate how all smokers were dangerous extremists. However, smokers got a different message. “You Can Always Take One With You” posters appeared on walls and street signs. Other smokers who had lost everything, or feared they soon would, began shooting. They shot judges and lawyers. They shot the people who had sued them, or other members of the plaintiffs families. They shot government health personnel. One of them shot Senator Persell; regrettably, he survived. They all left the same message: “I had nothing more to lose.”Up in Maine, our Maine First state government saw an opportunity. The Governor proposed, and the legislature adopted, a “Resolution of Nullification” that stated that hereafter, the Persell Amendment would not apply in Maine. Maine folks still had good manners, and we would handle tobacco smoke the old way, as a matter of etiquette.The feds understood quite well what nullification meant for them; that battle had gone the other way in the 1830s, and the long-ago victory was still an important part of their power. They went to the Supreme Court and Maine was overruled.But our Governor, John C. Adams, stuck to his guns – or rather, our guns. He wrote to the President and told him the Nullification Ordinance still stood, and that whatever a federal court might rule, no monies based on a Persell Amendment judgment would be paid in Maine. If Washington didn't like it, they could try to send in federal agents again. We Christian Marines made it clear we were not averse to another meeting like the one at Lake Sebasticook, and the state militia raised on the occasion was still available.Under normal circumstances, Cisneros probably would have sent in federal agents, or troops. But the federal government was by this time caught up in a real crisis, and it didn't have much attention to spare to the tobacco question. Once it was clear we had successfully nullified Persell, Vermont and New Hampshire did the same, as did the states of the deep South. Elsewhere, smokers kept shooting.The smokers’ defiance had showed the power of leaderless resistance. In former wars and revolutions, effective, sustained resistance required leadership and organization. Without a Continental Congress or a Jacobin Directorate or a Bolshevik Party to guide and direct and order, action could not be sustained. Now, in the 21st century, the Internet supplied “virtual organization” by allowing the actions of one to inspire others, and the actions of those others to instruct and animate more. From the standpoint of the government, it was a nightmare; the rebellions (there were soon many) had no head that could be cut off, no junta or central committee or official spokesmen who could be arrested or assassinated. The ubiquity of the Internet meant it could not be silenced, and it could not discipline itself to pass over stories that people wanted to see. For good and for ill, the Internet was the sorcerer's apprentice.Now pardon me, if you'll be so gracious, while I light a fresh cigar.

On Loyalty and Identity

Recently I received an email from a friend commenting on ethno-nationalism. She contends that while group belonging by birth is a factor in establishing societal cohesion, loyalty is in reality much more important to that end. I generally agree with her assertion, but with some qualifiers.Group or institutional loyalty certainly goes a long way, but it is only a part of the whole equation. The other side of that coin is acceptance by the rest of the group, which in turn nurtures loyalty. Loyalty and acceptance together form an identity, a term that the Right needs to learn to embrace.The word “identity” works well because it does things that other terms such as “race,” “ethnicity,” or “nationality” cannot, at least not as elegantly, and it paints a picture of the realities of human tribalism. This is because identity is not like loyalty to a sports team. Fans can pick the team they like, wear the jersey, and cheer for the men on the field who wear those same clothes, all while requiring no measure of personal sacrifice. But arbitrarily declaring citizenship, waving the flag, and singing the state anthem simply does not cut it. Tribal identity requires more than superficial markers of loyalty.Birth into the group and blood heritage are concrete foundations—reasons for loyalty. Coincidentally, they are also the primary bases for group acceptance. One's blood ties to his ancestors supports admission to the tribe and provides an impetus for learning the myths and traditions of the folk. Loyalty to the tribe develops organically, because it is “ours.” Our people, our culture, our God, our king, our homeland, our ancestors are all worthy of great sacrifice.“Identity” is also useful, particularly these days, because it is not hung up on purity. It gets us to focus on race to the extent that it matters. Identity acknowledges that being of the blood is integral to tribal identity, but also that it is unproductive at best to quibble over percentages of foreign admixture. It simply is not important. Belonging to the tribe is akin to being part of the family, rather than whether one falls into a category that must be defined by statistics and figures. The important questions must be, “Are you tied to us by blood or similar bond?” and “Are you willing to sacrifice everything for our culture and our people?”Julius Evola, one of tR's greatest inspirations, wrote extensively about the relationship (and even preeminence) of “race of the spirit” to “race of the body.” In Synthesis of the Doctrine of Race he writes,

Race is a profound force manifesting itself in the realm of the body as in the realm of the spirit. In its full meaning the purity of race occurs when these two manifestations coincide; in other words, when the race of the body matches the race of the spirit and when it is capable of serving the most adequate organ of expression.

And later,There are actually too many cases of people who are somatically of the same race, of the same tribe, indeed who are fathers and sons of the same blood in the strict sense of the word and, yet who cannot “understand” each other. A demarcation line separates their souls; their way of feeling and judging is different and their common race of the body cannot do much about it, nor their common blood.  The impossibility of mutual understanding lies therefore on the level of supra-biology. Mutual understanding and hence real togetherness, as well as deeper unity, are only possible where the common "race of the soul" and the "spirit" coexist.Merely being tied by blood, although significant, is not enough to form an identity. Loyalty to the group, its culture, and its institutions are all prerequisites for acceptance and belonging.Ignoring loyalty and identity is having tremendous ramifications for governments today. Decades of rule by disloyal ideologues is withering away at the legitimacy of the post-Westphalian state. The modern nation-state is no longer an instrument for the defense and betterment of a people (if it ever really was), and people are beginning to realize this. They are recognizing that their leaders are not part of the tribe.Identity may be the state's only hope of survival and, yet, coincidentally, is the only political movement with a possibility of shaping what might come after it. It is also the only vehicle rightists can use to revive and defend Western Tradition. Resource:http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Sunic-Evola.html

David Frum Owes Conservatives an Apology

[PHOTO] Iraqis who have volunteered to join the army and fight ISIS militants parade in Baghdad. (Reuters/The Atlantic)Wow! Former neocon hawk David Frum urges against further US involvement in Iraq in this Atlantic op-ed. I was shocked when I saw the title: “Iraq Isn’t Ours to Save: A Hawk's Case for Caution.” While the article is not a complete repudiation of his past neo-conservatism, it’s not nothing either.First what it is not. Frum is careful to clarify that he still supports an active interventionist foreign policy. He begins by stating:

I was a strong supporter of the Iraq war. Now I urge caution about military action against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) insurgency in the country.U.S. intervention to defend its interests and support its friends remains essential.

He advises against US involvement primarily because he believes saving the Maliki government serves the interests of Iran, which reveals he still has that peculiar neocon obsession. But contrary to the hysteria of many of his fellow hawks, he concedes that ISIS is a purely regional threat and not the global or, even more foolishly, existential threat that the alarmists are making it out to be. He also believes there is little likelihood that ISIS will succeed in “taking over” Iraq. They will meet increased Shiite and Iranian resistance as they move toward more heavily Shiite regions.For someone who once co-wrote a book called An End to Evil in which he treated the mere existence of terrorist and rogue regimes as a threat that the US must confront, his admission that ISIS is only a local problem is a significant concession.It is this concession, though, that is most shocking:

The United States overestimated the threat from Saddam Hussein in 2003. Without an active nuclear-weapons program, he was not a danger beyond his immediate vicinity. That war cost this country dearly. The United States failed in its most ambitious objective: establishing a stable, Western-oriented government for all of Iraq.

Again, for someone who was a chief neocon propagandist prior to the Iraq War, this is a significant admission. He concedes that we overestimated the threat from Saddam Hussein, although the “Without an active nuclear-weapons program…” clause leaves room for him to warmonger against Iran in the future. He also admits that we failed in our mission to establish a Western-friendly government. While he doesn’t say as much, he arguably implies that this was an unrealistic goal to begin with. He says we left Maliki with a framework, but expresses no surprise that that framework was quickly subverted.I think some of what we see here is part of Frum’s broader transformation to “thoughtful” moderate. Frum began as a fairly typical mainstream conservative who even once wrote a book chastising the Republicans for not being conservative enough on big government and spending. He slowly transformed into a “reform conservative,” aka a moderate, which cost him his job at the American Enterprise Institute and National Review. While I don’t agree with his move toward moderation, I have always thought that Frum, while blinded by his ideology on foreign policy and too quick to smear his perceived enemies, is not a complete idiot and knows how to count.For example, Frum has always been sounder on immigration than many of the other neocons, I highly suspect this is because he can do math, apparently unlike many of his fellow Republicans, and knows that importing a bunch of new Democrat voters does not bode well for the future electoral success of the party that supports his foreign policy agenda. Likewise, his move to moderation likely reflects his ability to count noses and his belief that the GOP must become more competitive in the Northeast and Upper Midwest if it is to remain a viable national party. As a true-believing conservative I don’t support this approach, but it is clearly recognizable pragmatism.What has always struck me as obviously unworkable about Frumism, however, was his seeming belief that he could keep his hawkish foreign policy interventionism but wed it with social and economic moderation. There is simply no significant constituency for this. Just look at how well Rudy Giuliani fared outside New York. (And Giuliani really isn’t that much of an economic moderate.) Moderates tend to be moderates across the board. People who value moderation for moderation’s sake are likely to be social, economic, and defense moderates. I believe Frum recognizes that a hawkish foreign policy is also a liability with the moderation caucus he is attempting to court, hence his efforts, which began before this article, to polish the rough edges off his militarism.That said, here is what I want to know: Now that Frum has admitted that the Iraq War was a mistake, when is he going to apologize to all the paleoconservative and libertarian war opponents that he slandered in his now infamous National Review hit piece, “Unpatriotic Conservatives” In that piece he smeared many conservatives who are likely favorites of readers of this website such as Pat Buchanan, Robert Novak, Thomas Fleming, Sam Francis, Joe Sobran, and Charley Reese. They clearly got the Iraq War right, and Frum now admits he got it wrong. Is it not fair to believe an apology to these fine men, several now deceased, is in order? Come on Mr. Frum, we’re waiting. Dan E. Phillips, MD is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Mercer University School of Medicine in Macon, Georgia. His work has been published at Lew Rockwell, Chronicles Magazine, Intellectual Conservative, the Abbeville Institute blog, and several other places. He can be contacted at danphillipsmd@gmail.com.

Mr. Lind Goes to Washington

Earlier this week, our own William S. Lind made an appearance on C-SPAN to discuss America's unwinnable wars. See the video here.

Victoria: Chapter 15

War is the extension of politics, and politics may also be an extension of war.By 2022, the first shots of America's Second Civil War were audible. This time, instead of a few cannon firing at Fort Sumter, its heralds were the popping of thousands of caps. Blacks shot whites because they were white, and Hispanics shot blacks because they were black. Whites usually still called the police to do their shooting for them, though the results seldom justified the cost of the phone call. Koreans and Jews got shot by everybody.Right-to-lifers shot abortion doctors, who in turn relied on their needles and forceps to terminate potential future right-to-lifers. Farmers shot EPA agents, and the feds threw farmers into jails where they were homosexually raped. Once a week, somewhere in the country, the gays fire-bombed a church. Somewhere else, once a week, a bomb in a car or a briefcase took out a government office. Insurance companies would no longer sell life insurance to IRS employees.Like real war in every place and every time, it wasn't pretty. I hated it.In Maine, our hope was to keep our distance, and increase it wherever we could. That was the Maine Idea, and after we had beaten the feds both on our home soil and in Vermont, most folks were enthusiastic about it.I was pretty sure the whole political system would go down the drain sooner or later, and probably sooner. But in the mean time, we had to use it intelligently for whatever it could do for us.The Maine Idea had attracted some folks who understood politics better than I did, and I was happy to let them take the lead. They weren't politicians, just normal people who had done the grass-roots organizing that gave the Maine Idea its clout. An idea, even the best idea, seldom goes very far on its own. A good idea plus lots of people who will work for it leads to a different future.I was happy to play a fly on the wall in the meetings where Bill Kraft and other grass-roots leaders put together the Maine First Party. They figured that if a political party based on the Maine Idea controlled the state legislature and the governor's office, Maine would improve its chances of saving itself from the coming catastrophe.They found ordinary people, good people, to run for office. They got candidates on the ballot for every office in the state. They made clear exactly what they were for: a Maine that stood as far apart from the rest of the country as it could get.They also wanted a place where we could live the way State o’ Mainers had lived in times past. When some greasy reporter up from New York asked Bill Kraft what that meant, he replied with the words of the old Book of Common Prayer: we wanted to live a Godly, righteous, and sober life. To most people in Maine, that summed it up nicely.The Maine First Party faced the Establishment, local and national, with its greatest nightmare: an anti-Establishment alternative the average person could vote for. And vote for it they did. In November of 2022, when all the votes were counted, the Maine First Party held every statewide office and had majorities of better than 80% in both houses of the legislature. The Republicans and the Democrats had been wiped off the state political map.This victory at the ballot box was as important as any victory we ever won on the battlefield. It quickly led to Vermont First and New Hampshire First Parties in those states; as in Maine, they swept into power on a tidal wave of public support. The victories of the home state parties gave upper New England the chance for recovering our freedom when the time came, and laid the basis for the Northern Confederation.In Massachusetts, the same effort failed. Too many citizens of that Commonwealth found their wealth in the common trough that was government, and they were afraid of losing their regular ration of swill. They paid for it, later.I made certain every Christian Marine understood the relationship between war and politics, and politics and war. The actions we had fought, especially the Battle of Lake Sebasticook, made the Maine First victory possible. The victory of the Maine First Party in turn made it possible for us to fight for Maine's freedom, and win. Each victory fed on the other. Neither was possible without the other. Neither had any meaning without the other.Throughout history, some soldiers have argued that politics should stop when the shooting starts. What fools.

The View From Olympus: Mr. Maliki Takes a Baath

June 13, 2014The Iraqi pseudo-state is collapsing and its foreign-bred military is going home. The only surprise is that both lasted as long as they did. Once again we see the main lesson of Fourth Generation war: once a state is destroyed, no one can re-create it.President Obama is edging toward committing U.S. airpower to the conflict, though not American ground troops. With no effective force on the ground to support, air power is unlikely to be decisive. The only source of a competent ground force is Iran, and while it would be amusing to see American warplanes providing close air support for the Al Quds Force, there is no reason for America to be involved in a Sunni-Shiite civil war. On the contrary, our interests are best served if that war is long and bloody. A region with vast numbers of young men with no prospects is going to generate war. Better they fight each other than us.This latest phase of the war in Iraq has several aspects that have not received much attention. One, noted briefly by The New York Times, is that the Baath is back. Former Baathist leaders and, I suspect, Republican Guard troops are playing a significant role in the Sunni offensive. I think it likely that the role of the Baath is greater and of ISIS smaller than new reports suggest. It was only a matter of time before the Sunnis launched a strategic counteroffensive to restore their rule over all Iraq, and I suspect we are now seeing it. For Iraqi Sunnis, being ruled by Shiites is intolerable. The Sunnis are outnumbered, but the Baath knows how to organize, which the Shiites apparently do not. They may yet win this.A second unremarked aspect of the Sunni offensive is that ISIS seems to be trying to draw the Kurds in. The Kurds want Mosul, and they will be sorely tempted to move now to take it. How would this benefit ISIS? It could potentially add a Kurds vs. Arabs dimension to the conflict, and some Shiites might choose to line up with Arab Sunnis against the Kurds. This being the Middle East, everybody hates everybody else. The question is who hates whom more right now, and all Arabs hate the Kurds. (Remember, this is a place the neo-cons promised to turn into Switzerland.) Both ISIS and the Baath are smart enough to know the rule, divide et impera.A third aspect, one directly related to the collapse of the Iraqi Army, is that once again we are seeing that Arabs fight well when they rely on their own traditional way of war, which is essentially irregular light cavalry warfare. With only one exception, Jordan, Arab armies that try to adopt Western models fail. Of course, the fact that the present Iraqi Army is simultaneously a foreign creation and a collection of Shiite militias that get government paychecks are also factors in that army's collapse.The role of  the Baath and a resurrected Republican Guard in the Sunni counteroffensive may give the Sunnis an interesting mix of capabilities, with the Western-model Republican Guard serving in effect as the heavy infantry and ISIS as the light cavalry. If so, look for the Republican Guard to be the cheng force and ISIS the chi. All this would be something the region has seen many times over many centuries.Viewed  from the perspective of the state system, the best outcome would probably be a Sunni victory followed by a restored Baathist Iraq. The Baath have shown they can make Iraq into a real state; none of the other parties has evinced that capability The Baath would have to crush their new allies, ISIS, but in that part of the world you can welcome a man as your brother in the morning and slit his throat at lunch (and keep on eating). The fact that a Baath revival would best serve Washington's interests shows better than anything else the bottomless ignorance and folly of the George W. Bush administration and the neo-cons. We are left hoping for the return of the Iraq they destroyed, though, once again, America's real interests are served best by an Islamic Thirty Years War.Meanwhile, have empathy for all our men who fought in Iraq. They now face a war of lost victories. One of war's most inexorable rules is that a higher level dominates a lower. The Bush administration's failure at the strategic level could not be redeemed at the tactical level. It is a rule German soldiers of the 20th century learned only too well.

A Time For Wolves

The Wolves of Vinland are Building a Tribe Outside the System

Brothers will battle to bloody end, and sisters’ sons their sib betray;woe’s in the world, much wantonness;axe-age, sword-age — sundered are shields — wind-age, wolf-age, ere the world crumbled;will the spear of no man spare the other.– “Völuspá”

Grimnir moved barefoot through the dirt at Ulfheim like he didn’t know he wasn’t wearing cowboy boots.

He rolled his shoulders, shook out his neck, and called out to Frejulf. This would be Grimnir’s third match of the day, and it wouldn’t be his last.

Frejulf seemed chipper for a kid who knew was about to get his face fucked up. He was a junior patch member of the Wolves, and this was going to be a disciplinary beatdown. Grimnir, leader of the Lynchburg chapter, had promised that if Frejulf didn’t get some extracurricular mixed martial arts training within a few months, he would show him why he needed it. Frejulf knew his time was up.

A red bearded patch with an algiz ᛉ rune tattoo on his freckled shoulder started picking out a tune on the banjo.

Grimnir and Frejulf touched their MMA gloves. Then hoots, hollers and brawling.

The fight was over in less than a minute.

Frejulf had blood on his face when he got up. He looked a little dazed, but he was smiling. He’d taken his medicine like a man, and hadn’t made too bad of showing — all things considered.

Paul Waggener, who you know as Grimnir, gave him a quick hug and a pat on the back.

There’s this video making the rounds designed to convince people that the worst thing you can tell a young male to do is “man up.”

It’s far worse to let a young men luxuriate in his own tears and fears and fantasize that he’s something special for doing nothing special. That’s a degradation of his spirit and a waste of a perfectly good Y chromosome.

A fat lip is just a fat lip.

Grimnir grabbed a wifebeater, cleaned the mud off his face and called out for a prospect to bring him a beer. He looked on as the fights continued. A few more serious matches, and a lot of light sparring. Another bloodied smile, a mild concussion and some vomiting. All in good fun.

Grimnir told me that the fighting was just a warmup for the main event at dusk. His brother, Jarn-nefr, who runs the Wyoming chapter, added later that the greatest achievement of the Wolves has been their ritual practice.

The Wolves of Vinland officially identify themselves as “a tribe of folkish heathens.”

About seven years ago, Grimnir and Jarn-nefr were running a black metal venue in the Lynchburg, Virginia area, and they decided to start a regular Viking theme night. They drank beer, played Icelandic folk music, and started reading the Eddas. As more of their friends became interested, they decided to move things outside. The Wolves started holding regular sumbels in a National Park.

The sumbel is a common practice in Germanic paganism, derived from ancient texts like Beowulf, Lokasenna and Heimskringla. Sumbel loosely means “feast” or “gathering” and often involves “boasting” or “toasting” with drinking horns filled with mead.

As the Wolves entered their second year, the guys started wrestling at sumbel, and some of the members started wearing motorcycle gang style “battle jackets.” From the initial “come one, come all” approach, a natural hierarchy and sense of collective identity emerged. The men felt the need to determine who was “in” and who was “out.” Oaths of loyalty were taken, and new members were filtered through a prospecting system. As Grimnir said to me, “why hang out with just anyone?”

By the end of the third year, the current system was more or less in place, and all new members had to be voted in unanimously at the Lynchburg group at Ulfhiem. The Wolves have members in eleven states and a handful of international prospects. They’ve been denounced as “luckless bastards” by some more “settled” heathen organizations, so they decided to make a joke of it. Several of the Wolves wear “luckless bastard” patches on their battle jackets.

Ulfhiem is a 12-acre property owned by the Wolves. There’s a small cabin, a tool shed, and a structure for smaller fires where music is played. In 2013, the group crowd-funded the construction of a massive longhall, which is almost finished. The majority of the group’s activities, however, are funded by dues.

The afternoon of fighting was part of the Wolves’ monthly “moot” — a word with deep Indo-European roots that means “meeting” or “gathering.” It’s where “moot point” comes from. Originally, “moot point” meant an issue that needed to be resolved by an assembly of a people, but has come to indicate an issue already resolved and therefore irrelevant. Part of the moot’s purpose is for patched members of the Wolves to discuss official business. At some point during the afternoon, Grimnir called them over and they disappeared to vote on patching in a new member — and other subjects unknown to outsiders.

As Sköll chased the sun across the sky, I joined some of the prospects at the top of a hill. They were cutting themselves and using their own blood to draw runes and sigls on a large piece of white fabric. It was the sail for a fifteen or twenty foot long mock wooden ship they’d built earlier. I helped them fill the hull with branches for the night’s ritual — a yearly celebration of Baldr’s funeral.

The women of the tribe prepared food and we ate as home-brewed mead and beer were passed around. Grimnir joined a few of the other musicians and played country music. A couple of kids had their own wrestling matches. Everyone was restlessly waiting for dusk. As golden hour approached, a tall guy with several runic brands on his lanky frame came over to talk to me about the ritual. His name was Finnulfr, and he’d given a workshop on sigils earlier in the afternoon. He invited me to come down and “get crazy” with the guys in their ritual pre-funk.

Grimnir handed me the end of a bottle of home-brewed mead and told me to kill it. It was deliciously dry compared to the sugary meads I’d tasted in the past. I followed him and a few others into the woods and down a hill to a place called the Ve. There was already a small fire going, and Finnulfr and the others were busy preparing for the ritual. It was almost dark, and the failing light beyond the crackling fire of the Ve seemed cold and blue. Three black, rune-painted drums were beaten in a steady, ominous rhythm. The men took off their cuts and shirts and passed around a bowl full of black ash, blood and  mead. Each Wolf smeared it on his face, chest and arms. One of them asked me to draw algiz ᛉ on his forehead. I wasn’t sure how much I should participate as an outsider, but I was glad when he smeared the black goop across my face in some unknowable configuration.

After they’d all anointed themselves, they gathered around one of the drums and started a group death drone that sounded a bit like low Mongolian throat singing. Different men picked up different registers, adding growls and howls to an otherworldly mix of primal sounds.

This is the point where you decide whether you want to remain a smug “objective” outsider, or allow yourself to be moved by the experience and become part of it. You decide whether the movie is good enough to lose yourself in it.

I wanted this experience. I traveled across the country for it. I closed my eyes for a while and let go.

Somewhere between the drums and the hums and wild throat singing, out here in the darkness, we folded into the headspace of our barbarian fathers. Men, magic and nature were all the same thing, and the world was alive again.

After a few more minutes, the drumming reached a climax and stopped. The men got up and there were embraces and pats on the back and shoulder and the hand-to-forearm handshake the Wolves favor. There was some joking and quiet laughter, but the Wolves reminded each other to keep the mood.

I was seated beside an eight foot wooden stretcher covered in black cloth that symbolized Baldr’s corpse. Grimnir came over and handed me a plastic milk jug full of wormwood-infused homebrew.

“This should get you in the mood.”

I took a few pulls, but Grimnir and Lyðulfr insisted that I keep chugging it until I’d swallowed what I’d guess was at least a full pint. I drank until they were satisfied and joked about being an old man, but the truth was that I wanted to make sure I’d be able to remember the night.

It was whispered that we had about twenty minutes before the actual faining would begin. Finnulfr explained later that it was called a faining instead of a blot because no sacrificial blood would be spilled during this particular ritual. Some of the guys relaxed, and some of them focused on final preparations. Grimnir, Jarn-nefr, Finnulfr and Lyðulfr had each prepared readings for Baldr’s funeral and they quietly coordinated them.

The story of Baldr’s death, harrowing and rebirth comes from the Völuspá in the Poetic Edda, was developed in the Gylfaginning in Sturluson’s Prose Edda, and was retold by poet Matthew Arnold in 1855.

Baldr was the son of Odin and brother of Thor. As the god of light and purity, he was known as the most beautiful of all the gods. He and his mother, Frigg, dreamed of his death, so Frigg asked all of the plants and animals and stones to swear they’d never hurt him. She overlooked the mistletoe, because it seemed harmless and too young to swear. Because nothing could hurt him, he became invincible, and the gods made a game of hurling things at Baldr — knowing he’d be unharmed. Loki, ever mischievous, made an arrow (or a spear) of the mistletoe, and gave it to the blind god Höðr to shoot at Baldr. When he shot the arrow, Baldr fell dead.

The gods wept and placed his funeral pyre on a ship to burn at sea, “for that is what the dead desire.” In death he went to the underworld, with Hel, and although his mother tried to broker his release, he was forced to remain there until Ragnarök, the end of the world. After the other gods die and the giant Surtr sets fire to the world with his flaming sword, Baldr will be released from the underworld and begin a new age with the survivors of the cataclysm.

The story of Baldr is a story of hope and the rebirth of beauty and purity following an age of darkness and despair.

We saw lights following the path down the hill. The drums started up again and everyone took their places. The women and other members of the tribe gathered above the Ve.

When everyone was settled, Finnulfr called out the directions with a spear — invoking the land spirits, gods and ancestors. Grimnir, Jarn-nefr and Lyðulfr gave fiery, nearly Nietzschean speeches about self-overcoming through discipline and will, and increasing the honor of the group by becoming a higher version of oneself. Grimnir reminded the assembled heathens that they were in a place “out of time,” consciously revolting against the modern world and becoming a different kind of man. He spoke about the evils of the encroaching world and concluded that it was a good time to be a wolf, because the future belongs to wolves. Lyðulfr spoke about the rebirth of Baldr and knowing that light will come from darkness. He ended his grim, pagan sermon by shouting “LONG LIVE DEATH!”

After all of the men had spoken, Jarn-nefr introduced a prospect who had travelled from Wyoming to moot. He was a tall, solid guy with white-blond hair. I’d watched him win a boxing match earlier that day. Jarn-nefr wrapped a wolf skin around his shoulders and directed him to a stone podium to read out his oath to all and become a full member of the Wolves of Vinland. His name was “Ref the Fox.”

At that point Finnulfr and the others “loaded” some mead with galdr, meaning that they sung sacred songs over it. The women of the tribe took the sacred mead around the group and filled each horn with enough for one toast to the gods. After drinking, we each spit in a bowl that was passed around, and the contents of the bowl was poured out onto the ground.

Jarn-nefr initiated the procession back up the hill, and told everyone to prepare their thoughts for sumbel and take a moment to be sure their words would be “worthy of the gods.”

The Wolves carried Baldr’s body carefully and somberly up the switchbacks, and laid him on his pyre.

We gathered in a circle around the ship, and sumbel was held, with toasts made by all to gods, heroes and ancestors followed by a round of more personal boasts and oaths. Some toasts were serious, some were grand, some were sad, and some were funny.

When we’d gone around the circle three times, someone placed a rune-painted plaque in front of Baldr’s corpse. Some words were spoken in his honor, and Jarn-nefr set the ship on fire. We watched the conflagration grow from a light crackling of hay bales and branches to a blazing bonfire with flames jumping fifteen or twenty feet in air.

The tribe dispersed, with folks going back to the smaller fire to check on children or to grab musical instruments or more booze. Several songs were sung in unison, including the Wolves’ own battle hymn, “I’m A Good Old Rebel” and some old seafaring tunes. I pulled out a pack of cigars, offered one to Grimnir and a couple of the other guys. We smoked them by the calmed fire, which still glowed in the outline of a ship. Grimnir put the moves on an unattached female and disappeared into the woods. Some of the Wolves retired to tents, some to cars and some just passed out in the dirt next to the glowing coals.The Wolves wouldn’t want me to trivialize my experience by comparing it to something as bougie as a television show, but I have to admit that my time at Ulfeim felt like a cross between Sons of Anarchy and the Vikings.The exception is that, unlike those shows, Ulfheim is not just a set up for another go-girl narrative or another hair-pulling drama between women. What happens at Ulfheim is designed to create authentic brotherhood between men. It’s about escaping to another world, not just for an hour or even a day, but for good. The Wolves of Vinland are becoming barbarians. They’re leaving behind attachments to the state, to enforced egalitarianism, to desperate commercialism, to this grotesque modern world of synthetic beauty and dead gods. They’re building an autonomous zone, a community defined by face-to-face and fist-to-face  connections where manliness and honor matter again.If they can do it, what’s stopping you? Originally posted at Jack Donovan's website.