The View From Olympus: WTF?

Marine General Joseph F. Dunford, who has been nominated to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is by reputation one of our best and brightest generals. Friends who have worked with him tell me he's great. In his short tenure as Marine Corps Commandant, he moved to end much of the nonsense that had gone on under his predecessor, including suppression of dissent. Virtually all the Marines I know let great hosannas ring when he took over.So how, in his recent confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, did he get it so wrong?According to the July 10 New York Times, General Dunford told the committee,

Russia's aggressive behavior and its nuclear arsenal make it the single greatest national security threat faced by the United States...Throughout the hearing, when asked about threats, General Dunford returned repeatedly to Russia..."If you want to talk about a nation that could pose an existential threat to the United States, I'd have to point to Russia," he said. "And if you look at their behavior, it's nothing short of alarming."

Where did this come from? If General Dunford just meant that the size of Russia's nuclear arsenal means they could threaten our national existence, he is technically correct. But the same could be said of Britain, France, China, and Israel, all of which could drop enough nuclear warheads on us to destroy the country. We don't consider those countries threats, because we know they don't plan to do that. Russia doesn't either.If General Dunford means that Russia's actions in Ukraine so threaten us that they make Russia our number one enemy, that is also nonsense. The U.S. has no interest at stake in Ukraine, and General Dunford suggested we should send weapons to the Ukraininans to fight the Russians. Russia has no troops in Mexico or Canada, nor is she considering sending arms to the Taliban, ISIS, Mexican drug cartels, or anyone else we are fighting. Just who is the threat to whom here? Most fundamentally--and I am going to write this in big letters--THE WORLD HAS CHANGED!The main threat to the United States is not any other state. The main threat is spreading statelessness and the Fourth Generation elements that fill the resulting space. What the U.S. and the international sate system need is an alliance of all states against non-state forces. The two allies we need most, the only two strong enough to do us some good, are China and Russia. The only way Russia would be likely to become a threat to us is if the Russian state were to disintegrate. That was a real possibility under President Yeltsin. President Putin's great achievement has been strengthening the Russian state. For that, we should thank him. Instead, the incoming JCS chairman has pronounced Russia our number one threat.General Dunford's flight into fancy did not stop with Russia. According to the Times,

Asked whether the military had the ability to destroy Iran's nuclear program, General Dunford was unequivocal. "My understanding is that we do, senator," he said.

Again, this may be technically correct. We may be able to destroy most Iranian nuclear facilities. But we cannot destroy the knowledge Iran has, knowledge which would enable them to rebuild quickly. After such an attack, Iran would unquestionalbly move to build a bomb, something it is not doing now. And Iran would respond on the ground using allied Shiite militias to round up all the American troops in Iraq and probably attacking those in Afghanistan as well, with plenty of help from Afghans.So what gives? How could one of, by reputatioon, our best generals get it so wrong? He did not appear to be doing as the White House bid; it distanced itself from his remarks. Was he nervous before the committee? Had someone coached him with answers intended to please committee chairman John McCain, who wants war with Russia and everyone else?There may be one clue to an answer. If, when interviewed by the White House, a candidate for the JCS nomination said what I said, namely that wars between states are obsolete and the real threat we face is 4GW, he would not be nominated. Too many rich rice bowls in Washington depend on preparing for wars with other states. Only "peer competitors" seemingly justify the vast defense budget and huge weapons programs. Against 4GW opponents, they are useless or worse.Perhaps General Dunford does know that the world has changed. Perhaps he is just playing the role he must in the usual kabuki until he gets the JCS job. At that point, he will try to move Washington to confront reality. I have thought that before about senior Marine generals about to move up. So far, I have been disappointed.

The Not-So-Dark Ages, Part II

In my previous essay, "The Not So Dark Ages", I attempted to dispel certain myths and misconceptions about the Church’s relationship to science in the medieval and classical eras. The focus was primarily on the West. Now I shall be turning to the East. The atheist polemics nearly always deal with the Catholic church during this period, the fact that the Eastern Roman Empire centered in Constantinople and the Eastern Orthodox church which also resided there is so unknown as to not even be fodder for a polemic is a sign of the sad hand Byzantium has been dealt by history. The Eastern Roman Empire survived for another thousand years after the fall of the Western Empire. I will henceforward refer to the Byzantine Empire as the Roman Empire, since the Byzantines themselves never saw themselves as anything other than Roman and I will not use the term Eastern either since there was only one Roman Empire, even in 395 it had two joint emperors. It preserved much of the classical knowledge that was lost in the West and in its fall the last line of ancient Romans fled to Italy, and in the process aided the nascent Renaissance.There is a pernicious falsehood that has been circulated by modern liberal scholars that it was the enlightened and scientific Saracens who in the dark ages gave learning to the rude and uncouth West. While there is some truth in it, that through the Arabic philosophers in Spain much learning was gleaned by the West and aided in the rise of Scholasticism, it is only a half-truth. For while the Saracens themselves were rude and uncouth barbarians pillaging the Roman Empire and the remains of the once proud Sassanid Dynasty, Constantinople, the seat of the Roman Empire, still was the leader in scholarship, its twin in the south, Alexandria, had a long history of Christian, as well as pagan scholarship. Furthermore the Persian imperial capital at Ctesiphon held the last remnants of the ancient pagan academy (in 529 AD the Emperor Justinian closed the academy and its scholars fled to the court of king Khosrau I). So with the vast ammount of pagan and Christian learning from Alexandria and Ctesiphon it was the Saracens who were the students and the Christians the teachers. If in later centuries the Saracens repaid their debt in scientific, philosophic, and mathematical discoveries let us not forget that they first paid homage to the scholars of Constantinople.Before I discuss the great minds of the Eastern Church I feel compelled to explain a little of the importance of the Medieval Roman Empire and why it is so little regarded. The Medieval Roman Empire served two vital roles among many in service to the west: (1) it protected the nascent West from barbarian invasion and (2) preserved the light of learning in the sea of night brought on by the Germanic and later Saracen invaders. The number of invasions and invaders that assaulted the Medieval Roman Empire are too numerous to tell here, but suffice it to say there were three major enemies of the West that were either thwarted in their endeavor or as in the case of the later, succeed in a time when the West was strong enough to offer its own defense. The study of Byzantine history was quite popular in Bourbon France and 18th century Europe. It was the work of mean minds such as Voltaire and Gibbon, who in casting away the heritage of Christianity, spent their vitriol on defaming the Medieval Roman Empire. What was inaugurated by Deists was finished by Atheists, to such an extent that popular knowledge of the Medieval Romans is all but nonexistent.In the 7th century a titanic class between Romans and Persians occurred in the near east, a war of such a scale had not been seen since the Punic Wars of republican Rome. The Persian armies at their apogee had overrun all of Roman Asia and Egypt. Though ultimately defeated by the military genius Heraclius and the stout defense of Constantinople, a formidable foe was prevented from threatening the weak and young West. The next foe would arise out of the ashes of the old, the Saracen threat would plague both the Roman Empire and the West for centuries to come, but the heaviest blows occurred on the stout walls of Constantinople where in 674-78 and 717-18 the Saracen armies were scattered in no small part due to the new weapon of Greek fire, which I will refer to later. Lastly the Turks who came in the 11th century and would ultimately overcome the Roman Empire, were delayed for centuries, which in turn bought time for the Hapsburgs to develop enough strength to rout the Turks at the gates of Vienna.The second debt owed to the Eastern Christians is their preservation of ancient texts. We must not forget that there never was any dark age in the eastern Christendom. The Roman Empire continued on as it always had. It might not have had the luster and glory of Old Rome, but their love of the classics never abated and was safely persevered until its transmission to the West in 1453.I will divide this period into three eras: the Lighthouse 476-867, the Macedonian Renaissance 867-1261, and the Palaeologean Renaissance 1261-1453. This is a somewhat coarse classification but I believe it fits the broad contours of Eastern Christendom’s scientific and philosophical contributions. The first period was simple enough: when all the lights of learning went out in the West and East due to two barbarian invasions, Constantinople alone stood as the beacon of light and learning to the western world. The second period includes not only the Macedonian Dynasty, but subsequent dynasties as well; the classification was more of an intellectual one than a dynastic one. The last period focuses on the last flourishing of Roman thought with the Palaeologeans until the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453.

Before the Fall

As a preface to the latter scholars two Eastern luminaries who thrived before 476 deserve mention Anatolius of Laodicea (died July 3, 283 AD) and Nemesius a fourth century thinker.Anatolius, an inhabitant of Alexandria and later Bishop of Laodicea, was gifted in mathematics, geometry, philosophy and astronomy. Due to his erudition, a request was made by the Alexandrians for him to start a peripatetic school in their city. Eusebius reports that during the siege of the Pyrucheium or Bruchium, Anatolius was able to negotiate with the besieging Romans to allow the women, the children and the elderly of the rebels to withdrawal from city unharmed. These were rebels who had supported the Arabian queen Zenobia in her uprising against Rome. We see the triumph of Christian charity over the barbarities of war. He is noted for his use of astronomy in calculating the precise date of Easter. It is notable that the neo-platonic luminary Iamblichus was a pupil of Anatolius.Nemesis of Emesa, the city of which he was bishop, is notable for his early description of the nature of the circulation of blood. He appears to have anticipated the work of William Harvey by 1,500 years. Yet the imperfection of his knowledge and the ignorance of the importance of his discovery led it to fall into obscurity.

The Lighthouse 476-867

When the last Roman Emperor of the West was displaced by his master of arms, Odoacer, the last vestige of Roman political rule was gone and the long night of barbarism began. I have previously recounted the heroic efforts of isolated scholars in the West to stem the tide, but in the East there was no loss of learning. In fact classical learning, flourished in the Roman Empire of the 5th and 6th centuries.Six luminaries of this period deserve mention: John Philoponus of Alexandria, Kallinikos of Hieropolis, Isidore of Miletus and Anthemius of Tralles, Hunayn ibn Ishaq and Qusta ibn Luqa.John of Philoponus was an Alexandrian polymath who studied philology, Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theology. His scientific work can be divided into three areas: (1) broad scientific theory, (2) the study of space, and (3) the study light. According to David C. Lindberg in his Science in the Middle Ages Philoponus based his scientific inquiry on three axioms (1) one God created the universe, (2) the heavens above and the earth below operate on the same basic principles, and (3) the stars are not divine. These principles would also have been shared by Jewish and later Islamic scholars. Philoponus’ surviving works indicate that he might have studied the world on the principles of the scientific method even using controlled experiments. Using such methods Philoponus concluded that the velocity of a falling object is independent of its weight, which predated Galileo by a thousand years. Philoponus rejected the standard Aristotelian definition of motion. Aristotle argued that an object moved only under two conditions: (1) a source of imparted motion to that object and (2) that source must be in physical contact with that source. Aristotle hypothesized that the air itself must impart motion to a flying object such as a stone or arrow. Philoponus reject this notion and argued that motion of an object could be imparted motion by the motive source, and that motive energy as it is dissipated propels the object forward. In this scenario the air hinders the motion of a flying object rather than aiding it. Philoponus disproved Aristotle’s view that objects of different weight fall at different velocities by performing the same sort of experiment that Galileo would uses a millennia later.Philoponus disagreed with Aristotle on the plausibility of a void. Aristotle believed that a void was impossible in principle. Philoponus argued that the void might not be possible in nature, but was an essential postulate in order to explain motion in a plenum. On a related topic Philoponus argued that space should be viewed in three-dimensions. His work on light hinted at some of the discoveries of Maxwell and Einstein as his work on space had hinted on the discoveries of Galileo. Philoponus’ work was largely forgotten as a result of his nemesis Simplicius who condemned him for his monophyiste views, which in 681 got Philoponus anathematized, another victim of the religious infighting that plagued the Roman Empire.Isidore of Miletus and Anthemius of Tralles should be as famous as Michelangelo and Da Vinci, but falling down the Orwellian memory hole first constructed by small minded deists like the rest of the Middle Ages they are not. These two engineers constructed the greatest architectural wonder of their age, Hagia Sophia (the Church of Holy Wisdom). Isidore was taught geometry and physics in Alexandria and later Constantinople, he was the first to organize Archimedes’ work into one complete volume. Anthemius was a geometrician and architect. Not only were these men gifted geometricians, but they were also master logisticians who were able to manage the tremendous logistical feat of bringing the materials necessary for constructing the church from around the Roman Empire and organizing the labor force to construct it. The finished church was the largest domed building in the world at that time.Kallinikos of Heliopolis was a Syrian refuge who fled to the court of the Roman Emperor and offered his secret of what would later be known as Greek Fire, but was known to the Romans as Sea Fire. There are numerous explanations as to the chemical nature of Sea Fire, but we do know that naphtha was a key ingredient. This medieval “Napalm” would serve a vital role in repelling the Saracen siege of Constantinople in 674-8 and 717-18. This closely guarded state secret rendered Constantinople unconquerable by sea and by implication land (since it could never be starved into submission), until the Crusader siege of 1204 where the Venetian’s fleet of wooden galleys were coated with canvas and leather soaked in vinegar (one of the few means to retard Sea Fire, the other two being sand and urine) captured the city.Hunayn ibn Ishaq a 9th century Assyrian Christian in the service of Caliph Al-Mutawakkil as the Caliph’s personal physician is notable for his study in ophthalmology and the translation of the works of Galen into Arabic. Ishaq’s Book of the Ten Treatises of the Eye was the most systematic account of eye and its functions yet given. He relied heavily on the works of Galen and contains the earliest known description of the anatomy of the eye. As personal physician to Caliph Al-Mutawakkil, Ishaq had his loyalty tested when the Caliph asked him to develop a poison for uses on the Ishaq’s enemies. Ishaq refused and was imprisoned for a year. When released, the Caliph confronted him again and threatened death if he did not perform the action. Ishaq still refused. The Caliph then revealed he had been testing the loyalty of his physician. The Caliph then asked Ishaq why he preferred death to creating the poison. Ishaq stated that he swore the Hippocratic Oath “to do no harm” and that his religion taught him to love enemies. We see again the triumph of Christian compassion in a dark age of barbarism and war. Ishaq’s voluminous translations of Greek philosophical and scientific texts in to Arabic garnered him the title of “Sheik of the Translators.”Qusta ibn Luqa, a contemporary of Ishaq, a Melkite Christian and a master physician and translator was a key element of the Greek-to-Arabic translation that took place in the 9th and 10th centuries. While he translated into Arabic many Greek works on medicine, mathematics and geometry, he also wrote many original treatises of his own. Luqa’s De Differentia Spiritus et Animae was one of the few works not written by Aristotle that was on the reading list of natural philosophers in the University of Paris in 1254. The Islamic scholar Ibn al-Nadim says of him: "He is an excellent translator; he knew well Greek, Syriac, and Arabic; he translated texts and corrected many translations. Many are his medical writings." As we saw in the west with the Irish and Anglo-Saxons so we see in east with Syriac Christians that it was the servants of Christ who exerted the greatest effort in preserving the classics.The Medieval Roman Empire was the first political system to have institutionalized medical services. The first hospital was created by St. Basil in the 4th century. The church as always led the way in this effort. As I noted in my previous essay the Monastic institutions played an invaluable part in propagating hospitals and medical institutions. While it is true that classical Rome had medical institutions they were primarily military in nature and service. With the Christian system it was open to all. At first the urban centers were where the majority of these hospitals were located, but by the 9th and 10th centuries such institutions had become common in the rural areas as well. We see an organized process of education of physicians from the University of Constantinople. These hospitals were run on relatively ‘modern’ principles; physicians were required to wash their hands, patients were given private beds and instructions were given to keep the patients warm. By the 12th century separate rooms for outpatients and surgery were present. Of all Medieval Roman institutions that most resembled modern ones, the hospital system was that institution.

The Macedonian Renaissance 867-1261

While not as self-consciously organized as the Carolingian Renaissance, the Macedonian renaissance marks a flourishing of Medieval Roman art, literature and science. Under the patronage of the Emperors Leo VI “The Wise” and his son Constantine the arts flourished. One could say that Patriarch Photius I the teacher of Leo was the originator of this revival in learning and with him we shall begin our study. We shall also discuss Leo the Mathematician and Michael Psellous.Photius I was one of the most influential patriarchs in all of the history of Constantinople; his erudition and philosophic learning have been marred by power struggles and theological disputes culminating in the Photian schism, his episcopacy and the schism named after him are not our present concern, but rather his invaluable contribution to the preservation of the classics. His magisterial work was the Bibliotheca or alternatively titled the Myriobiblos. The Bibliotheca is a collection of fragments and reviews of classical and Christian works that Photius read and preserved. Thanks to Photius’ preservation what we have of the works of Ctesias, Memnon of Heraclea, Conon, Diodorus Siculus, and Arrian we owe in part or in whole to him.Leo the Mathematician was a 9th century polymath adept at philosophy, mathematics, geometry and medicine. He was considered a national security asset, so when Caliph Al-Ma'mun asked for Leo to study in Baghdad, the Emperor Theophilous granted Leo a school in the Magnaura (a philosophical school) in order to prevent him from leaving the empire and serving its enemies. Leo was a teacher of Aristotelian logic, a collector of a wide variety of scientific and philosophical works. His practical accomplishments were a series of signal beacons he designed in Asia Minor in order to warn of impending Saracen invasion and a series of mechanical devices placed in the imperial palace to inspire onlookers.Michael Psellos was an 11th century scholar who wrote works of history, grammar, philosophy and rhetoric. His work the Chronographia is a historical account of the Roman Empire in the preceding century. His love of Platonism was so great that it led people to question his orthodoxy, which required his public profession of it to sway them. He restored a certain level of rigor in philosophical studies that had been lacking. He wrote on astronomy, music and medicine.

Palaeologean Renaissance 1261-1453

The actual origins of the Palaeologean Renaissance are debated; it is generally seen to have been precipitated by the re-conquest of Constantinople from the Crusaders. When in 1204 the Fourth Crusade sacked and conquered Constantinople, the Roman Empire was divided into two regions, the Despotate of Epirus and the Empire of Nicea. For nearly sixty years the Crusader Latin Empire looted what was left of the Roman Empire. When the Emperor of Nicea Michael VIII Palaiologos re-conquered Constantinople in 1261 the Roman Empire was restored and the newly invigorated people entered into their last cultural flowering. This new Palaeologean culture was focused on theological mysticism, more realism in paintings and the study and preservation of classical Greek texts. We shall discuss the work of two Palaeologean scholars, Nicephorus Gregoras and Maximus Planudes.Maximus Planudes, a 13th century scholar, was known for his accomplishments in literature and mathematics. Unique among the Palaelogean scholars, Maximus was fluent in Latin. He translated Augustine’s City of God and Caesar’s Gallic Wars into Greek and many other classical and medieval Latin works, and his edition of the Greek Anthology was widely renowned (a collection of epigrams from classical and medieval Greek sources). Maximus two works on mathematics are The Great Calculation According to the Indians was a treatise on Hindu numerals in their Persian form and a commentary on Diophantus (a 3rd century AD Alexandrian mathematician) “Arithmetic.”Nicephorus Gregoras was a 14th century scholar whose accomplishments were in the realm of theology, history and astronomy. His career and legacy were marred by his opposition to the dominant theology of Hesycasm and he was at odds with Queen Anna and Emperor John VI Cantacuzene. He later retired as a monk still attacking what he considered the Hesycasm heresy. His work “Roman History” was a work divided into 37 books covering the period between 1204 and 1359. Due to certain deficiencies in the work, it should be read alongside John Cantacuzene’s own works of history. His astronomical work pertains to the dating of Easter, the use of the astrolabe and prediction of solar eclipses.

Conclusion

We have seen the rich intellectual history of Eastern Christianity and that far from destroying classical civilization as the ilk of Carl Sagan would have you believe, it was the bosom in which classical civilization was preserved. The Italian renaissance was greatly enriched by the Greek emigres after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453. With the fall of the “City of the World’s Desire”, the last bulwark against Islam had fallen and in the succeeding centuries Turkish forces would spread fire and sword from Austria to Ukraine. The influx of Greek emigres did not, as was formerly thought, initiate the renaissance, but their erudition and learning certainly enriched it. It all comes full circle; the ancient Roman civilization that survived in Constantinople sent its own back to Italy and in the process greatly aided in the work of rediscovering the classic texts and improving upon them.

The View From Olympus: The Moral Level

John Boyd argued that the three traditional levels of war, strategic, operational, and tactical, intersect with three previously unrecognized levels of war, the physical, the mental, and the moral. Of these, the physical level was the weakest and the moral level the most powerful. I would add that, just as with the three traditional levels, a higher trumps a lower. In other words, if you win at the physical level but lose at the mental or moral, you lose. We have seen this truth play out in most of America's recent wars.Boyd's theoretical work applies not just to war, but to conflict of all sorts. Much work has been done to apply his lessons to business. Obviously, they apply to politics as well.All this was illustrated in events in this country over the past few weeks. After the moron Dylan Roof murdered nine black Christians who were met in a church for Bible study, he thought he had scored a victory in his quest to start  a race war. But he considered only the physical level. At the moral level, his action was a catastrophe for everything he said he represents. Why? Because Charleston's black Christians replied at the moral level, as Christians should. Instead of rioting or making demands, they forgave the murderer and mourned their dead, knowing they still live in a better place. Instead of sharpening racial antagonisms as Roof wanted, their response drew massive white support, within and beyond Charleston. The moral level trumped the physical level.Another situation made the same point. Again, the blacks' response in Charleston gave them huge moral capital. In contrast, the reply of Baltimore's blacks to what was in comparison a minor situation drove a wedge between blacks and whites, diminished the blacks' moral capital, and, in the end, hurt themselves. Whites saw the riots there as just one more iteration of the usual black act, i.e., looking for any excuse to loot and make "demands".Like Roof, Baltimore's blacks thought of conflict as just physical action. They had no concept of the mental and moral levels. Those who make that mistake lose, regardless of what color they are or what side they are on.Ironically, the best way to learn this fact may be to look at the U.S. military. Having now been beaten four times by Fourth Generation opponents, its usual comment is that it did not lose, because it could take any piece of ground it wanted to in any of those wars. That is true. But what it shows is the weakness of the physical level of war, exactly as Boyd postulated. We were beaten at the higher mental and moral levels, and a higher level trumps a lower.I suspect we will shortly see this reality play itself out again in the offensive to retake Ramadi. As usual, we will be relying heavily on air power against opponents who have none, giving them a large moral advantage. We are making the Iraqis follow our rules, which means their one effective ground force, the Shiite militias, will not take part. The Iraqi state armed forces know that once again they are being bossed by the Americans, who they hate. They will have all the fight in them most Quisling armies have. While our side will have all the advantages physically, the moral balance, as calculated not by Washington but by the locals, will favor ISIS. Light cavalry armies such as ISIS are more capable on the offensive than on the defensive, but even so, the moral imbalance may give ISIS another win.Meanwhile, a suggestion to all those, left and right, black and white, who seek to disrupt the order the American state provides (such as it is): if you fail to think your actions through on all three of Boyd's levels, understanding that the physical level is the weakest and the moral level the most powerful, you will get results opposite to those you intend. Of course, as a conservative, I would like to see the American state restore its own moral authority and do what the state arose to do, provide order. With cultural Marxism dominating both political parties, there is little chance that will happen.

The Missed Lesson of Greece's Financial Crisis

On Sunday, 61% of Greek voters rejected the European bailout referendum. The Greek financial situation has led many American conservatives (and neoliberals) to point to Greece as an object lesson in the failures of socialism. Focusing only on Greece’s spending habits, however, misses the underlying issue, and American conservatives need to understand this if they ever want to address the fundamental problem that besets ours and the world’s economy. For the record, I’m not sure the problem is solvable at this point, but we need to at least understand what it is if we hope to fix it, and the problem will not be fixed by just spending less and “living within our means.”There are no good guys in the Greek situation. Conservative critics of Greece’s socialistic ways are correct that it is not realistic for a country and its citizens to expect to continually live beyond their collective means. Excessive portions of the Greek workforce are employed by the government, and Greece allegedly cooked the books initially to make their economic situation appear better than it really was.However, what too many of Greece’s critics are failing to point out is that the world monetary system encourages debt because debt is how new money comes into the system. Every new Euro/Dollar requires debt. So the system wants manageable debt, rather than unmanageable debt, but it most certainly does not want no debt or large scale “living within our means.” Such would grind the system to a halt. So the system essentially wants the debt can kicked down the road at a slower pace than Greece is kicking it, but you still can’t avoid the ultimate day of reckoning.It is a bit rich for U.S. conservatives to finger wag at Greece for living beyond her means. While American conservatives say they want to cut spending and balance the budget, they act indignant when Democrats suggest they want to cut this or that popular entitlement or spending program, and they want to perpetually increase spending on defense because they apparently think it is the God-ordained duty of the United States to make the whole globe safe for democracy. The reason the U.S. isn't where Greece is is because we have our own central bank, but the printing press is the 800 lb economic gorilla in the room and our time is surely coming. A wag might conclude that the superficial lesson from the Greek crisis is to have your own central bank and printing presses.The take home point is that it is not enough to lecture the Greeks for being profligate Socialists, while ignoring the fact that our unsustainable monetary system actually encourages debt (national and otherwise) and can’t run without it. This is a built-in feature of the modern banking establishment, but the last major candidate who attempted to make this an issue got labeled a kook by a lot of mainstream conservatives for his troubles. So please spare me the morally superior posturing regarding the Greeks’ spendthrift ways. Our time is coming, and no one will be able to say we weren’t warned.

The Confederate Flag

I have a piece of real Confederate battle flag. It was captured by my great-grandfather, Sergeant Alfred G. Sturgiss, 177th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, at an engagement at Town Creek, North Carolina in February of 1865. I also have his musket, some other pieces of his kit, and his Grand Army of the Republic veteran's ring, which I wear. All of which is to say that I come of solid Union stock.I also know that the cultural Marxists' rabid assault on the Confederate flag and other Confederate symbols has nothing to do with the Civil War, slavery, or the massacre in Charleston. What it represents is an attempt  by the Politically Correct to move to a higher level of ideological Gleichschaltung, forced conformity.Not so long ago, thirty years certainly, probably twenty, Americans would have reacted with outrage to ideological attempts to rewrite history. Banning symbols important to previous generations, renaming public places to obliterate the past, disinterring historical heroes--as reportedly is to be done with Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, the best tactician on either side, who beat my uncle, General Samuel Sturgis, at Brice's Crossroads--were things that happened in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, not here. Now, cowed by endless psychological conditioning, Americans are silent as these things do happen here.While the assault on Dixie is motivated by the desire of ideologues to seize more power, it is justified by the demand that we all condemn slavery as the worst moral evil in the history of mankind. A few facts are in order.First, slavery was an almost universal human institution, going back as far as history itself and no doubt deep into prehistory. It is unlikely there is a single human being alive today who did not, at one or probably many times, have an ancestor who was a slave. The ancient world ran on slave power, and slaves were as likely to be Germans or Britons as Africans. The Bible, which was written in the ancient world, does not make an issue of it.Second, slaves were simply people who were captured in war but not killed. War, again through all of history and back into prehistory, was not fought in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. When you defeated someone, you took everything he had, including his person. If he or she could be ransomed (an escape only available to the rich) or sold as a slave, they were kept alive. Otherwise, they got their throat cut. Presumably, most people preferred to become a slave.Third, turning specifically to American history, the captured Africans who were sent to this country as slaves were fortunate compared to others who were sent to places such as Haiti, where there were almost no slave women and a third of the slave population was worked to death every year. What was it like to be a slave in the American south? As with almost everything in a premodern society, reality was local. Some slaves were treated badly, and others were treated well. Sergeant Sturgiss, a fervent abolitionist (his father was a Methodist minister), married the daughter of a slave owner, William Wagner of Morgantown, my great-great-grandfather. After the war, his slaves stayed with the family. Why? As house slaves--Mr. Wagner was a townsman--they were part of the family. Attempts to look at the past through  the present-day lens of wide uniformity of conditions, uniformity often forced by government, is to misrepresent history in a fundamental way.Finally, American blacks whose ancestors were brought here as slaves should count their lucky stars. Had they not been brought here--few would have been able to come on their own--their decedents would be living not in the very comfortable United States but in west Africa, one of the worst hell-holes on Earth. The whole "African-American" business is nonsense. American blacks are Americans, period. Their lives have nothing in common with life in Africa, as those who go there quickly find out.Again, none of this matters to the cultural Marxists. To them, the massacre in Charleston is simply a peg they can use to move this country one step closer to ideological conformity. But to people who prefer history to ideology, the history of slavery, and the history of the Confederacy, are not simply matters of black hats vs. white hats. As always, real history offers a more complex picture.   PS: The Okhrana has informed me that some readers of these columns were puzzled by my call to ban violent video games. I was not talking about real war games, e.g. Waterloo, Jutland, or playing squad leader on the Eastern Front. Nor did I mean games full of goblins and dwarves, i.e., a visit to Capitol Hill. Dave Grossman's work clearly shows that some first-person-shooter games, including one where the player kills police officers, duplicate the methods the military developed after World War II to overcome men's natural reluctance to kill other humans. Those games, I repeat, should be banned, especially for young people. How to ban them, given the ease with which electrons move, is another question. I do not want the federal government doing it; presumably, that would mean banning all games about the Civil War because someone would play as the Confederates (and maybe win). But no conservative can approve games that psychologically condition young people to kill, nor games where the "player" targets cops. Libertarians, maybe; conservatives, no. Go read Hobbes.

Mormons and Jihadis: Parallel Revolts Against the Modern World

We have all become familiar, at this point, with the doctrines of groups such as ISIS and al-Qaeda. The theological underpinnings, the history of Salafism and Sayyid Qutb, the crucible of 1980’s Afghanistan, have taken on tremendous significance as our existential battle with Islamism grows.What we know less about is the culture of the Islamists, the daily lives of Mujahedeen in Afghanistan and Chechnya and the deserts of Syria. This is starting to change however, as writings on the subject begin to emerge. Thomas Hegghammer recently gave a speech in which he discussed the question of “What jihadis do in their spare time”.¹ Hegghammer spoke about the love of poetry that exists within their ranks. The New Yorker recently published a similar article, describing ISIS fighters relaxing after battle, sitting around reciting poetry and songs to each other.²Hegghammer also spoke about the tendency of Islamist fighters to weep openly, an action mirroring their tendency to declare their “love” for their brothers.³ He writes: “It is curious, for example, that Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi should be known simultaneously as al-dhabbi (the slaughterer), and al-baki (he who weeps a lot).” He continues that “These ‘soft’ activities pose a big social science puzzle, in that they defy expectations [of groups such as ISIS]”.Beyond this question of “hard men doing soft things”, as Hegghammer calls it, such behavior also calls to my mind an interesting parallel, as it reminds me greatly of the Mormon patriarchs I grew up around, who were equally given to such proclamations, and equally comfortable with crying publicly.In a 2012 article on Mormon men, Kristine Haglund discusses their propensity for weeping at church services, where they articulate their thankfulness for their family and friends.⁴ She states that “They cry standing at the pulpit, speaking of their wives and children and of Jesus. They cry when they describe their friendships with the men they do volunteer church work and play basketball with.” Haglund describes the poetry of such moments, the heartfelt speeches that Mormon men give about their lives and their culture, in prose that mirrors that of Hegghammer and the New Yorker when they are describing the puzzling “softness” of Muslim jihadis.Rather than being random, I think this similarity exists for very specific reasons. Most men in our modern society do not weep openly, and there is a certain irony that it is these two groups that are the exception. Men in the West are routinely castigated by feminists and liberals for being “emotionally shut off” and “overly aggressive”, and are urged to get in touch with our feelings. Yet the only two groups of men that seem to be doing this, Mormon men and twenty-something ISIS killers, are in just about as diametric opposition to our modern liberal nation-states as any two groups can get.In a kind of round-about agreement with feminists, I concur that men must be quite confident in their masculinity to weep openly in front of other men. However, this kind of confidence does not come from a wholesale rejection or “rethinking” of masculinity, as our liberal contemporaries constantly harp on, but rather from an embracing of masculinity. When you have fought other men with your bare hands, when you have looked down the barrel of an opponent’s gun, when you have sired eight children, when you have a close-knit group of male friends who respect you and your prowess as a man, that is when you feel confident enough in your masculinity to weep openly.Many of my closest friends have been and are Mormon. I have found them, as a whole, to be loyal, dependable, solid, respectable people, and I think extremely highly of them. At times in the past there have been parts of me that wished I was a Mormon man.In regards to Islamism, I consider the practices of groups like ISIS to be repellant, and should Europe descends into civil war in a few years time (a likely prospect), I would be proud to die fighting against the Islamists to keep Europe free and European. At the same time I have had a large exposure to Islam and Islamism. I have argued with Muslims, been in fights with Muslims, and have researched jihad extensively through literature and media. I must, however, admit that though I view them as enemies, I can understand and appreciate the attraction their groups hold for young men.Therefore despite the fact that I am not Mormon, and do not believe Joseph Smith was a prophet, and despite the fact that I would gladly fight and kill ISIS members if I had the chance, I also feel, in other ways,  a certain respect for each group.I respect them because they are attempting to live a sacred life in our profane world. Amidst the overwhelming consumption of our industrialized and corporatized global culture, each is trying to create something.  They are not worshipping Nike. They are not blindly spoon-feeding themselves reality television. They are not cheering on the destruction of their race and society like suicidal European multiculturalists. They are sacrificing to effect movements and rituals that they view as sacred. They are sublimating their own desires for what they feel is the good of their descendants. Whether or not I agree with them, such a focus is highly refreshing and inspiring.As Lee Harris states in The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam’s Threat To The West, “While we think little further than our retirement, they think in terms of centuries--what, however, do centuries mean to us anymore? In the long run, we’re all dead--so who cares about the long-term fate of the West? Finally, while we raise our children to have contempt for the very traditions that created the Western cultures of reason, they are raising their children to be willing to die to keep their traditions alive.”⁵I also respect these two groups of men because they are each a rare representation of masculinity in our feminized modern world. In a society that actively despises normal heterosexual men, each group is a rare connection back to our ancestors’ notions of manhood, and to qualities that our modern culture is bereft of.  While, to paraphrase Jack Donovan, I do not consider the Islamists “good men”, they are, just like Tony Soprano, “good at being men”--they possess strength, courage, mastery, and honor, even if they use these attributes in the service of beheadings and suicide bombings.⁶As Bill Maher so controversially said in the days following 9/11, the hijackers might have been evil nutjobs, but they most certainly were not “cowards”.⁷ It takes courage to fight jihad and die shahid. It takes a less martial but still significant kind of courage to retain belief in Mormonism in the face of our secular society. It would be easy for Mormon men to give it all up for the sake of becoming “rational” and enjoying casual sex, but honestly, does it really take courage to become an atheist anymore? Does pre-marital sex take courage? Such is now the route prescribed to us in public school.  Retaining one’s faith in Mormonism, raising large families, stating openly in 2015 that you, as a man, have a unique and immutable connection to God that women do not possess; all of this makes Mormons far more manly in my book than your average liberal atheist or Evangelical, and for these reasons I salute them.As groups who believe in traditional notions of masculinity and gender roles, Mormons and jihadis are both in opposition to our modern world. Multicultural-corporatist society has deemed masculine young men the enemy. But unlike other young men, who deal with this existential crisis through a focus on alcohol, pornography, video games, and other forms of consumption and debauchery, young Mormon and Islamic men stand fast to their values, and in doing so stand in firm opposition to society.As the jihadi Isa Sa’d Al ‘Awshan writes in his poem Epistle to the Scolders: “The Age of Submission to the Unbelievers is over… I do not desire money nor a life of ease”. What can this be called but a wholesale rejection of modernity? An excerpt from a recent Nashid (poem) from ISIS reads:

Oh Istanbul!You consented to profanity in your streetsYou filled the streets with haremsWhat happened to you that in such a short timeYou yielded to despots, oppressors, and infidelsOh Istanbul!⁸

Such laments echo the refrains of Mormons, who also reject the decadence of modern life. It is this rejection that is so crucial to why Mormonism and Islam are the two fastest growing religions on Earth.Young men across North America and Europe suspect or know that the modern West is deathly ill. They likewise understand at some level that their normal urges for brotherhood and aggression put them at odds with modern society. With this being the case, is it any wonder some flock to the Middle East? The jihadis, whatever else they may be, are the only group on earth actively trying to tear down modernity.The more aware members of the Western intelligentsia understand that they are threatened by groups such as these. They are threatened by the greater birthrates of Muslims and Mormons, which mean that an increasing share of the population will hold what are to them “backward” beliefs. Whether they want to admit it or not, they (and we) are also threatened by the guns and knives and bombs of the Islamists, and the masses of “regular” Muslims who tacitly and not-so-tacitly support such violence. Yet such members of the political elite seem to think that with enough exposure, our “freedoms” will convert such groups to “our” way of life. Under this thinking, exposure to the consumeristic and sexual and entertainment opportunities of the West will cause Muslims and Mormons and other religious groups to slowly let their religiosity and conservatism fade away. Never mind the fact that this requires more and more of our children to grow up to be prostitutes, strippers, homosexuals, and investment bankers. What is even more pressing is the basic moral premise this brings--that we should pin our hopes on pleasure, decadence, consumption, and weakness.With such a strategy being the increasing modus operandi of Western nation-states, I will take my cue from the Mormons and jihadis, and embrace a life of procreation, heritage, guns, and poetry. My version won’t be Muslim or Mormon, but the constants are the same. And when the civil war does start in Europe, I and those like me will actually have lives worth fighting for.  Can the liberal multiculturalists say the same? Julian Langness is the author of the upcoming memoir Fistfights With Muslims In Europe: One Man’s Journey Through Modernity, Culture, Masculinity, and Violence, coming out in the fall of 2015. To receive excerpts and updates, please email fistfightsbook@gmail.com to be added to Julian’s mailing list.

1. Hegghammer, Thomas. “Why Terrorists Weep”. Paul Wilkinson Memorial Lecture. University of St. Andrews. 16 Apr. 2015.  Web. 16 Jun. 2015. http://hegghammer.com/ (PDF)
2. Creswell, Robyn and Bernard Haykel. “Battle Lines”. Newyorker.com. 8 Jun. 2015. Web. 16 Jun. 2015. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/08/battle-lines-jihad-creswell-and-haykel
3. Nasiri, Omar. Inside the Jihad. Basic Books. 2006. Print.
4. Haglund, Kristine. “Why Mormon Men Love Church-ball and are Scared of Homosexuality”. Religionandpolitics.com. 10 Sep. 2012. Web. 16 Jun. 2015. http://religionandpolitics.org/2012/09/10/why-mormon-men-love-church-ball-and-are-scared-of-homosexuality/
5. Harris, Lee. The Suicide Of Reason: Radical Islam’s Threat To The West. Basic Books. 2007. 260. Print.
6. Donovan, Jack. The Way of Men. Dissonant Hum. 2012. Kindle.
7. Raphael, Chris. “Politically Incorrect: A Eulogy”. Thebigstory.org. Undated. Web. 16 Jun. 2015. http://thebigstory.org/ov/ov-politicallyincorrect.html
8. Creswell, Robyn and Bernard Haykel. “Battle Lines”. Newyorker.com. 8 Jun. 2015. Web. 16 Jun. 2015. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/08/battle-lines-jihad-creswell-and-haykel

The View From Olympus: The Charleston Tragedy

Charleston, South Carolina, is one of my favorite cities. I spent some time there in February of this year, fleeing the Cleveland winter. The history, the architecture, and the food combine to make it everything a city should be. Not surprisingly, it is a model for the New Urbanism, a movement I have been involved in almost from its beginnings. No city or large town could go far wrong by patterning itself after Charleston.Another nice thing about Charleston, perhaps in part a product of its beauty, is that race relations seem good. During my several visits there, I have never felt endangered by crime, nor encountered any hostility from blacks. Quite the opposite: black Charlestonians have been just as friendly and welcoming as whites.The murder of nine black citizens of Charleston in their church during Bible study by a young white male is thus especially hard to take. Of all the places where something like this should not have happened, Charleston heads the list. Unless, of course, the killer was motivated to hit Charleston because black-white relations there are good. If so, that makes the act all the more appalling.As Thomas Hobbes perpetually reminds us, life's first and most basic social requirement is order. Order is what the state arose to provide, and it remains the state's most important function. Conservatism, too, has order and safety of persons and property as its most important goal, something Russell Kirk made clear over and over again.Any strike against order is therefore something conservatives deplore. When it comes in the form of a massacre of innocent people, whether in Charleston or in Colorado or in Norway, conservatives do more than sorrow. They rightly raise the question of why the state did not do a better job of providing order. That includes preventing nut cases from getting a hold of guns. The Founding Fathers did not intend the right to keep and bear arms to apply to the inhabitants of Bedlam.The fact that the target in Charleston was a black church and its members added another dimension to the assault on order. The best hope the black urban community has of replacing the culture of instant gratification now prevalent among many young urban blacks with a functional culture, a culture that promotes rather than undermines order, is the black church. That means whites should be just as interested in the health and well-being of black Christianity as should blacks. The lack of safety of persons and property in the black inner city hurts all Americans, regardless of color. It imposes massive costs on our society.All these considerations come together to raise the question of whether the Charleston massacre was an act of Fourth Generation war. As we have seen elsewhere in the world Fourth Generation elements fighting the state often use mass murder as a tool, because the murder of a lot of innocent people shows the state as impotent and thus undermines its legitimacy. In the Charleston case, the facts that the violence was interracial, and apparently racially motivated, and that the target was a church, a source and symbol of order, makes the question all the more acute.We do not yet know enough to answer it. It may be that the killer is simply nuts. He fits a pattern we have seen in other such mass shootings, of a nerdy, isolated kid who loses touch with reality and becomes a monster. It would not be surprising to find he was addicted to violent video games, as was Breivik in Norway and a number of other shooters. Conservatives should be in the lead in asking whether such games should be banned.But if Roof had thought out his crime in Fourth Generation terms, then it is a warning sign that matters are moving in a wrong and dangerous direction. The U.S. government's top national security goal must be preventing 4GW on our own soil. As we are seeing in Charleston, it may be that the church rather than the state is the institution best able to damp down the emotions that feed 4GW and, more broadly, disorder. So, fervently, should we pray.

The Frankfurt School Meets Brave New World

Like the fog, Brave New world continues to creep in on little cat feet. I was unexpectedly enveloped in a bank of it while reading, of all things, the Science Times supplement in the June 2 New York Times. The piece, titled  "Study Suggests Sleeping One's Way Past Bias", begins,  "It may be possible to reduce biases regarding race and gender while a person sleeps. . . "These "biases" are actually the recognition of facts. The two facts which are to be removed from people's brains while they sleep are, in this case, the fact that men and women are different and the fact that both races and ethnic groups within races, taken as wholes, have different characteristics. Thesa facts are, of course, Politically Incorrect^TM.The short Times piece goes on to describe the techniques of psychological conditioning that appear effective in obliterating  these facts.

Research had shown that biases could be reduced with a technique called counterstereotype training. . .Study participants were shown images . . . of women  and African-American men. When participants were shown images of women alongside scientific words, and African-American men alongside pleasant words, they were asked to press a button labeled "Correct" (i.e., Politically Correct). A sound followed.

Then, while study participants napped, the sounds were played back to them, and after their naps the hapless saps so bombarded  “showed a reduction in bias," i.e., a loss of ability to grasp reality.This wonderful discovery comes straight out of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, where humans were reduced to mechanisms through a combination of genetic and psychological conditioning. The conditioning techniques are sufficiently effective that very few people escaped them. They were also all-pervasive.But someone else was on to psychological conditioning in the 1930s, when Huxley wrote his book. Who? None other than the men of the Frankfurt School, those bright folks who gave us cultural Marxism, aka Political Correctness and multiculturalism. Realizing that their Marxist ideology had little future if it depended on reasoned argument, they decided that psychological conditioning would be their weapon of choice. Their disciples now practice endless conditioning techniques on us all, through the schools and universities, through the video screen media, and, it seems, through "scientific" experiments reported in the New York Times. Directors of North Korean prison camps, take note.The cultural Marxists believe their ideology can, with enough conditioning behind it, overcome reality. It will not any more than other ideologies did. But the attempt has already done vast damage to Western societies, leaving them unmoored, forgetful of who they are and unable, on the moral level of war, to defend themselves. When reality returns, it will do so with a crash.But what is repellant about the Times story is not just the ideological claptrap being shoved into the study's subjects' brains. What repels us, or should, is the whole idea of conditioning itself.Conditioning is fundamentally dehumanizing. Man was created to be a reasoning creature. Reason may be the ability that makes men most like God. Conditioning cuts reason out  of the loop. Someone who has been sucessfully conditioned cannot reason about the content of his conditioning. His own mind prevents him. A powerful feeling of doing something wrong, something bad, rises if he begins to question what has been planted in his head--in the case of the experiment reported here, even while he slept.We see again why conservatism is the negation of all ideologies, and with them the hideous methods adopted for their inculcation. Conservatives know that truth is attained only through a combination of faith and reason. We believe that schooling and culture should teach people how to reason, how to reach valid judgments based on facts. It should not surprise us that all ideologies suppress facts and forbid reason at least on certain matters. It should surprise us that the New York Times welcomes another step toward Brave New World.

This is the World You Chose: Episode 4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZyxqu9oIDkIf this were set in North America, it could be a trailer for the film adaptation of Victoria. Although the U.S. is not quite as far along, we are certainly on the same path to collapse as Europe. Learn as much as you can about 4GW now; our mastery of the art is the only thing that can propel us to something better.

The Man Who Wouldn't Be President

I am a former National Delegate for Barack Obama. In 2008 I was part of the Idaho Delegation that cast ballots for him in Denver. I was not a race-obsessed “hope and changer”. I did not particularly care that he was going to be the first black president. I had already seen past the white-guilt narrative that we learned in public school. I was however still in the grips of our Western carpe diem ethos, and this focus on personal freedom as the highest virtue led me to support Barack Obama as the candidate most likely to legalize drugs and do other things which would add to our freedom to seek pleasure.In the intervening years my politics have continued to evolve, and instead of watching MSNBC I spend more time on traditionalRIGHT and Radix, and the television has been tossed out.However I did learn a few things during those months in 2007 and 2008, some of which are very useful as the next big presidential race heats up.At the convention I was somewhat dismayed at the blind, communist-rally idolatry I saw. However, as ridiculous as Obama’s “Hope and Change” campaign slogan sounds seven years removed, the convention was genuinely filled with hope. Yes, the hope was misplaced, and many of the people most invested in Obama had entirely wrong and/or shameful ideas, but their hope was sincere, and I saw many people with tears rolling down their faces by the end.The power of grassroots organizing was equally on display. Obama may have had support from corporate shills and the media was certainly in the tank for him, but without the hard work of people on the ground like myself, Obama would not have raked in so many small state caucus delegates and Hilary would have become the nominee. In that alternate reality, McCain would probably have become president (arguably worse than Obama becoming president).This is all very relevant, however, because the current election season is bringing us an even more interesting alternate reality. This involves the candidate who the title of this article is in reference to--Rand Paul. The 2008 election cycle is informative in Senator Paul’s case because he is steadily building a tidal wave of hope, emotion, and commitment to potentially rival Obama’s back in 2008. In the rural small-state environs in which my family lives I end up talking to a wide variety of people--upper class business owners, middle class whites, non-white students, left wing socialists (former hippies), even the Medicaid trailer park population. In each of these groups I have met diligent Rand Paul supporters, and in their eyes gleam the same sparkles that I saw at the 2008 Convention. I am not comparing Senator Paul’s supporters to Obama supporters, obviously many of the Paulites have deep intellectual and policy-based reasons for supporting him and their politics are far different than the Obama supporters. However, the same currents that propelled Obama to the White House are beginning to flow under Rand Paul.My wife is a 26-year-old blonde-haired Texas belle. She attended an Evangelical college in Florida. One might think she would support Texas Governor Rick Perry, or a neo-con Republican like Lindsay Graham, maybe even an Evangelical like Mike Huckabee. However she is a die-hard Rand Paul supporter who has even tried to get me to volunteer to work for him.For myself, I am not too sure if it matters whether Rand Paul or Bernie Sanders or anyone else becomes president. With Paul or Sanders, the economic prescriptions may shift, but the steady slide into multi-or mono-culturalism will continue, as we become increasingly deracinated and consumption-driven. For this reason I am more partial to Jack Donovan’s hopes for Hilary Clinton to become president in order to wake men up to just how much society doesn’t want them, and hopefully usher in the Zombie Apocalypse sooner.However, Rand Paul’s campaign could equally affect such a wake-up call. For if, as I predict, Rand Paul becomes the Republican Nominee, then his chances of becoming president still may not rest on how good of a campaign he runs. If that is what it was based on then I would with confidence go out on a limb and state that Rand Paul will become the next president. The reason he is the “President Who Wouldn’t Be”, however, is because despite the groundswell of support he is beginning to command, despite the intellectual clout which he brings, and the presidential demeanor that he possesses, the changing demographics of America will most likely make it impossible for him to ever ascend to the presidency.Even at this point over a year before the election, the Democrats already have nearly enough electoral votes to win just from the states that always vote Democrat. This speaks to just how heavily the racial/cultural component is at play. A simulation was recently done to predict the outcome of the 2016 election based on such factors. In it, the percentage of each race voting in the 2016 election is comparable to 2012. However, in the simulation, whites vote Democrat/Republican in the same percentages as 2012, in which they heavily supported Mitt Romney. Minorities however vote for the two parties in 2004 percentages, in which George Bush won 4 out of 10 Latinos and became president. Even in this ideal scenario for Republicans, they still lose the White House handily, because the number of minority voters has grown so substantially. Thus a path to victory for Republicans is arguably impossible in 2016.This predicament is not unique to America or the Republican Party. In France, the next presidential election (also in 2016) is the last chance the French voters will have to save themselves from becoming an Islamic nation. By 2022 (the following election) the number of Muslim citizens will have become so large that it will become impossible to govern the country without their support. At that point a political (read: non-violent) solution will no longer be possible, and the only hope for the native Frenchmen will be a long slog into 4th Generation Warfare. For all intents and purposes this is what will happen even if Marine Le Pen and the National Front get elected next year, as France’s Muslims will not lose all the momentum they have gained without a fight.In America we can be thankful that things are not yet as bad as they are there, but still, there is something very distasteful about knowing that one party has potentially achieved a perpetual majority through its efforts at cultivating illegal immigration and racial politics. This was certainly helped by Reagan and the Republican amnesty he approved in the 80’s, which the Republican Party has been increasingly suffering from as a result. But the very ironic component to this is that the Democrats may be sowing the seeds of their destruction just as thoroughly as Reagan and the Republicans did 30 years ago.Latinos in America are not especially liberal people on social policies. Neither are blacks when it comes right down to it. Both groups voted heavily against gay marriage in California, and both groups have relatively high rates of religious belief and conservative values. For right now the blacks and Latinos are happy to vote Democrat; the blacks out of tradition and because of heavy reliance on government programs and the Latinos because the Democrats promise more amnesty for their relatives in the country illegally and over the border. But down the road it is not difficult to imagine a scenario in which both groups begin to vote for parties other than the Democrats.At that stage we may see the breakup of American two-party politics into a menagerie of parties more like in the United Kingdom. In that world the Democratic Party may be reduced to being America’s Labour Party, or worse, America’s Lib-Dem’s. But we as a society will also be reduced to an overall reality more like the UK as well, where political parties fight over the scrap heaps of multiculturalism, and where all mainstream parties are afraid to discuss issues which upset the delicate racial balance (see the 1400 11-16 year old white girls raped by Muslims in Rotherham).Facing such an eventual reality, I am tempted to campaign for one more round of hope and change and go vote for Rand Paul. Rather than toil over a political system on its deathbed, however, I hold out even greater hope that the Zombie Apocalypse is nigh and that our individual actions will once again have consequences--for that is truly where hope and change begins. -Julian Langness is the author of the upcoming memoir Fistfights With Muslims In Europe: One Man’s Journey Through Modernity, Culture, Masculinity, and Violence, coming out in the fall of 2015. To receive excerpts and updates, please email fistfightsbook@gmail.com to be added to Julian’s mailing list.

The Not-So-Dark Ages

The causal modern perception of the Middle Ages is that of an age of superstition, loss of classical learning, and general backwardness. To quote Hegel it was “smells and bells”. This view has been most popularized by Carl Sagan in his smash hit miniseries Cosmos and his book by the same name. The influence of Cosmos can also be seen in the 2009 Agora, about the life of Hypatia. He makes two rather ridiculous claims that undergird this entire anti-Christian fanaticism as it pertains to modern perceptions of the Middle Ages, that (1) the ancient pagans were proto-scientists on the verge of a scientific revolution and (2) that the knowledge-hating and bigoted Christians both burned down the Great Library and murdered Hypatia for their hatred of science, rendering her a martyr. This is absurd and the truth lies beyond the ability of the mentally challenged atheists who followed Carl Sagan. The Library was destroyed and rebuilt many times by Caesar in 48BC, Aurelian in the 270s AD, the Serapium (A temple to the god Seriphus which contained some remnant of the Library, mostly magical texts) in 391 AD by Theodosius, and in 640 by Caliph Omar. Hypatia was the sad victim of late Roman political intrigues and mob violence.The root of this narrative of Christian war against science, in which the Medieval Era is center, is John William Draper’s History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. As lying atheists these men had no compunction in distorting and down right falsifying history. No longer taken seriously by the modern scholarship on the subject we still have legions of braindead atheists and liberals who believe this account to be gospel truth. For a sound scholarly rebuttal of this myth see Jeffrey Burton Russell’s Inventing the Flat Earth.Having cleared the underbrush of atheist calumnies what exactly was the intellectual life of the Medieval era like? In short it was decline, preservation, and discovery. The intellectual life of Europe from about 475 to 1453 can be divided into three broad categories: 475-636, rapid decline; 636-1200, preservation; and 1200-1453, discovery. The intermediate period of preservation would have been impossible without the erudition and scholarship of Irish and Anglo-Saxons in the West and Greek scholars in the East.I chose the first set of dates going from the fall of the Western Roman Empire until the death of Isidore of Seville; the second set of dates stretches from Isidore’s death to the birth of Peter Lombard and the birth of Scholasticism; the final period stretches from the Scholastic era to the mass exodus of Greek scholars to the west beginning the Renaissance.Central to the narrative of the “Dark Ages” is the loss of classical learning that occurred during that period. Yet to blame Christianity for that loss is the height of absurdity, as I will show later; in fact the real source of the loss was the upheavals brought about by Germanic migrations and invasions beginning in 375 AD, with the entrance of the Huns on to the European scene. This narrative is often used as a bludgeon by atheists and liberals to discredit Christianity and as a smokescreen to their questionable treatment of scientists in, for example, the French First Republic and the Soviet Union. Central to the falsity of the narrative is that there never was a 
“Dark Age” in the Eastern Roman Empire. That empire centered in Constantinople lasted for another thousand years and the mass exodus of its scholars after the 1453 sack by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II helped to facilitate the Renaissance. In short there is not even a correlation that Christianity leads to the demise of learning.The rest of this essay will be devoted to giving a brief overview of the intellectual life and contributions of medieval Christendom. It will be divided into two parts: (1) Western Christendom and (2) Eastern Christendom. The importance of Eastern Christendom is seldom acknowledged in the Western Christian context, let alone the secular context, and I believe the Eastern influence was great as well, if not as well known. The second part will be released in another segment.

Western Christendom

The Western Christendom can be traced back to the permanent division of the Roman Empire into East and West by the Emperor Theodosius in 395. Organized around the Roman Imperial diocese, the Western Church developed in a trajectory quite distinct from the East. While both the Eastern and Western Christians were heavily inspired by Plato, the former were more influenced by his mystical philosophy and especially the works of Plotinus, while the West was more influenced by his rational philosophy. This of course is an over-generalization as there were certainly Greek rationalists and Latin mystics, but I believe that the theological and intellectual emphases of East and West conform to the broad counters of rationalism vs mysticism. With the triumph of barbarism in 476 the west dealt with a period of historical trauma of invasion and pillage that did not subside until the middle of the 11th century. In this political power vacuum the Latin Church based in Rome and the Celtic church based in Iona filled the void. These twin Western sources of light were the main reason why not all of classical learning was lost in the West. During the early part of this decline the Irish and Anglo-Saxon church played a dominant role; but as time wore on and the endless repetition of barbarian invasion and destruction was repeated the Latin Church began to supplant the Irish in intellectual endeavors. A proto-renaissance occurred in the late 8th and early 9th century under the Frankish Emperor Charlemange and his resident master scholar Alcuin of York. Viking invasion and legal succession crises terminated this hopeful turn of events. Italy in the 13th century witnessed the birth of Scholasticism, the culmination of the Latin Medieval mind. From Italy this philosophy spread to France, England, Scotland, Flanders, and Germany. Scholasticism in like manner would give birth to modern science in the persons of Roger Bacon and Copernicus to name a few.

Period of Decline 476-636

This period witnessed the birth of Latin Medieval thought's four great Doctors of the Latin Church; Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine of Hippo, and Pope Gregory. No less influential men include St. Patrick, Columba, Columbanus, St. Aiden, Boethius, and the man for which I end this period, Isidore of Seville.Ambrose of Milan is the first in our list of Western thinkers. He is most well-known for his role in converting his more famous pupil St. Augustine to the Christian faith. Yet in his own right he was a man of great erudition and laid the foundation of Medieval music by giving the Western World its first antiphonal psalmody. Ambrose is probably most famous for his courageous stand against Emperor Theodosius I. After Emp. Theodosius sacked Thessalonica and slaughtered 7,000 people as punishment for their uprising, Ambrose was incensed by this outrage and denied the Emperor communion until he performed penance for the act; even to the point of rebuffing Theodosius at the door of his own church as he was about to celebrate mass. The Emperor eventually repented and performed penance for his deeds. Seldom has such courage been shown in the face of absolute power; Ambrose must surely stand as one of the most shining examples of speaking truth to power.Jerome, a contemporary of Ambrose and Augustine was a man of letters, philosopher, theologian, and historian. He is most well-known for his translation of the entire Bible into Latin, the Vulgate. In addition to his efforts at translation he also wrote numerous commentaries on the books of the Bible. Inspired by classical authors like Plutarch and Seutonius, Jerome wrote his De Viris Illustribus which was biographical work covering the great Christians from Peter to his own day.St. Augustine was arguably the greatest mind of his millennium. His work in all aspects of Christian theology, philosophy, rhetoric, and invention of new genres of literature are unrivaled until the Scholastic era. One of the most widely read works of Augustine is his Confessions which was the first autobiography in history. His notion of free will and grace would lead to a rich development of Protestant and Catholic thought and as secularism rendered man in the image of God, influenced atheism as well. His forays into semiotics would later influence the 20th century deconstructionists. His pioneering work on just war, the most extensive revision since Cicero, rings down the ages. The very arguments for and against the 2003 invasion of Iraq would have been inconceivable without Augustine’s contribution to this world of thought. His De Civitate Dei is a tour de force against the contradictions of ancient paganism and one of the most influential history books of all time. His notions of two kingdoms, one heavenly and the other earthy, influenced both Protestants and Catholics and his vision of the heavenly city was eventually secularized in modern socialism and Marxism. His philosophy of mind and the trinity casts a shadow that can still be seen today. For example, Augustine’s elevation of the willing aspect of God’s personality can be seen in the philosophy of Existentialism. For if God is perfected through his gratuitous will, and secular man deifies himself, then man’s greatest form of expression is when his will is also perfected. From Camus to Derrida and everywhere in between we can see the shadow of the Augustine-haunted West.During the Ostrogothic successor to the Western Roman Empire we find a man who bridged ancient and medieval world in the West: Boethius. Boethius’ erudition extends to mathematics, logic, commentary and philosophy. Boethiu’s work in philosophy led to his formulation of the Quadrivium and the Trivium. The former pertains to arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music with the later pertaining to grammar, rhetoric and logic. His efforts at organizing and categorizing already existing disciplines influenced Western education for well over a millennium. Boethius was one of the few men of his time, in the West, who could read Greek. His efforts at translating the classical texts into Latin would be an invaluable foundation for future work.Out of the many Briton, Irish, and Anglo Saxon monks of this period I will mention three: St. Patrick, St. Columba, and St. Aidan. The importance of these men is they transformed the British Isle from a fringe on the Roman Empire/Christendom to the cockpit of learning and science in the West, though that will occur in the second period which I will discuss later.Patrick is famous for his conversion of Ireland, his youthful shenanigans and monkeyshines, and his courage. Patrick was kidnapped as a youth and enslaved by the Irish in the 5th century. His experiences as a slave led him in later years to free slaves and seek to abolish the trade itself. While not a great intellectual, Patrick’s courage and actions laid the foundation for the great flowering of Celtic learning in the 7th, 8th, and 9th centuries.Columba, the son of a nobleman, from an early age was enrolled in the monastic education system, a rich and vibrant network of autonomous schools that studied Greek and Latin and preserved the classical texts. Columba founded the influential monastery at Iona. Iona is famous for its scriptorium which both preserved and produced manuscripts. Some of the most famous manuscripts were the illuminated texts, a famous example being the Book of Kells. Columba spent much of his life converting the Scots and Picts to Christianity from Scotland.St. Aidan, a generation after the death of Columba, reconverted Northumbria to Christianity. He settled in Lindisfarne, a special dispensation from the king. From there Aidan paid for the freedom of slaves, fed the hungry, and built monasteries throughout the region.A short place must be saved for the monastic system and its importance to the Medieval Era. The Monasticism originated in the East with hermits such as St. Anthony. The collections of wandering individuals were later organized into vibrant communities by men such as Pachomius and St. Basil. The first major Western monastic tradition was the Benedictine order. The monastic tradition was dominated by prayer, contemplation, work, service, and study. Men and women had to swear oaths of obedience, poverty, and chastity. The monastic communities themselves were self-governing and a combination of a church, a school, a hospital, agricultural center, and manufacturing center. This is not to say that all monasteries or monastic communities were composed of all these aspects, but these aspects were covered throughout the gamut of the system. The preservation of classical texts and creation of new centers of learning in the darkness brought on by repeated barbarian invasions from the 5th century to the 11th would have been almost impossible, given the absence of any unifying civil authority, to keep the light of learning alive.With this trio of Celtic saints we see the triumph of compassion, love, and the Gospel over barbarism, violence, and hate, the triumph of learning, order, and reason over ignorance, chaos, and superstition. These were truly pivotal years in the development of post-Roman Europe and it is no exaggeration to say with Thomas Cahill that the “Irish Saved Civilization” through their steady and often unrewarded diligence to keep the flame of knowledge lit.The last individual we will cover in this period is the polymath Isidore of Seville. I chose Isidore to end this period with, in part, because he is often termed “last of the ancient scholars.” This is true in the sense that he was one of the last Western Scholars to be proficient in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. Isidore was a man whose accomplishments are so vast and varied that one is at a loss to understand how a man of his caliber could be totally unkown even to most educated people. As a cleric he aided in the conversion of the Visigoths from Arianism to Catholic Christianity, he headed the fourth Council of Seville in 633. As a scholar he wrote the first encyclopedia, the Etymologiae (a compilation of all classical and sacred learning covering knowledge of mathematics, astronomy, mineralogy, zoology, physiology, geography, agriculture, and medicine to name a few). He wrote works on linguistics, Differentiarum libri, on the sciences, De natura rerum, and history, works on theology, De officiis ecclesiasticis and Synonima. The scope and breadth of his learning is astounding and an example of the magnificent culmination of classical and Christian learning in the “not-so-Dark Ages.”

Preservation 636-1200

This period is primarily of interest as covering the Carolingian renaissance a period in the 8th and 9th centuries where the far sighted Charlemagne sought to keep the light of learning alive and rekindle the flame of which more will be said later. The primary center of learning during this time was in the British Isles; first Irish, then Anglo-Saxon converts led the West in intellectual thought, some of whom could still read Greek and their efforts culminated in the aforementioned renaissance. During this period of preservation I will cover four individuals: the Venerable Bede, Alcuin of York, Peter of Pisa, and Johannes Scotus Eriugena.The venerable Bede, a monk from the Monastery of Jarrow, was the first native English historian. His work, the Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum has earned him the title “Father of English History.” He covers the period of Julius Caesar’s invasion of the Isle to his own time. He also wrote textbooks on grammar, De arte metrica, and orthography, De orthographia. He helped popularize in the West, via histories, the principle of dating time anno domini (in the year of our Lord). Bede also contributed to our knowledge of astronomy and time with his De temporum ratione. He was a biographer and poet as well. He was a light shining in the dark after the fall of Rome.Peter of Pisa was an 8th century grammarian who would become Charlemagne’s latin tutor. As well as teaching grammar, Peter also wrote poetry.Alcuin of York was, if you will, the mastermind behind the Carolingian renaissance. He was invited by Charlemagne to join his entourage of scholars such as Peter of Pisa, Paulinus of Aquileia, and Abbot Fulrad. Alcuin personally educated Charlemagne’s sons and sought to curb the rude barbarism of Charlemagne’s faith and his cruel policy toward the Saxons. Through the witness of Alcuin, the “Butcher of the Saxons” responsible for slaying 4,500 of them at Verden in 783, by 797 had rescinded the death penalty for paganism. Alcuin was made head of the palace school from 782-796 with a hiatus in England from 790-93. Under his guidance the Carolingian renaissance flourished. Major advancements in grammar and learning that we take for granted were developed for the first time. Of many firsts was Carolingian miniscule. Carolingian miniscule was a form of script written in small letters, which is the direct forbearer of our modern script. Not only were the letters standardized in size and shape, but spaces between words, punctuation, and capital letters were added. The quadrivium and trivium were standardized and made the basis of education. More books were written and published in this period than in the previous centuries after Rome fell. A migration of Roman art forms to the northern regions of Europe occurred during this period laying the foundation for the later Gothic art to flourish. Musical notation in the West originates in the year 800 as a result of Charlemagne’s attempts to aid French musicians in attaining the Roman standards of music.The 8th century scholar Johannes Scotus Eriugena was known for his questionable theology, his mastery of Greek, translation of the Pseudo-Dionysius and his revival of the dialectic method of inquiry. He was the greatest Western neo-platonic thinker since Augustine.A brief discussion of the renaissance itself I believe is needed. Unlike the secular 16th century renaissance, the Carolingian renaissance was deeply religious and led by clerics. A vast project of collecting texts and organizing them, creating superior translations and correcting errors was an empire-wide task. The classical Latin texts were used primarily for improving one’s Latin to read the Christian texts. Education was a major focus of Charlemagne, though the primary beneficiaries were the clergy. The twin catastrophes of Viking invasions of the British Isles, which destroyed and denuded the intellectual cockpit of Western Europe and the ceaseless fighting between Charlemagne’s heirs led to the gradual failure of the Carolingian renaissance in truly transforming the Western world.The 10th and 11th century French Pope Sylvester II (originally Gerbert d'Aurillac) was a great student of the classics and his scientific and philosophical work helped recovered some of the lost classical knowledge. When Gerbert discovered the Arabic-Hindu numeral system he paired it with the lost technology of Abacus, thereby reintroducing it to Europe. Via his knowledge of Islamic scholars, Gerbert reintroduced the amillary sphere into Western usage. We see that Pope Sylvester’s efforts in the late 10th century helped translate Islamic rediscovery of ancient Greek learning into Western civilization.St. Victor of Hugo, a 12th century Catholic German theologian was an influential individual in laying down the intellectual framework under which modern science would develop. Hugo divided science into three fields: theoretical (mathematics, theology, and mathematics), practical (ethics, economics and politics), and mechanical (carpentry, agriculture and medicine). Hugo’s work of organizing Christian thought in such a way that included the scientific process was of great importance to the development of such thought in the West.

Discovery 1200-1453

By the middle of the eleventh century the conversion of the Norse, Poles, and Magyars coupled with Spanish Reconquista had pushed Europe’s enemies far enough away from the France, Germany, and Italy triangle that the true rebuilding of learning and civilization could be begun. By this time the Moors in Spain had abandoned their crude ways for a more sophisticated way of thinking informed by the discovery of Greek philosophy. Many 11th century geniuses such as Averroes, Avicenna, and Al Gazhali laid a foundation of Aristotelian thought that later passed into Western Europe which in turn help sparked the rise of the Scholastic movement. The Latin Scholastic era is one of the richest in Western intellectual history, but the theological works of these men will not be the subject of this paper, but their philosophical, scientific, and mathematical accomplishments. We shall look at Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Theodoric of Freiberg and Nicholas of Cusa.Robert Grosseteste, the Bishop of Lincoln, is one of the possible contenders for the father of scientific thought, the other being Roger Bacon. Grosseteste invented the notion of a controlled experiment, and though the original method was crude, it was vital and instrumental in the development of future scientific thought. Via Aristotle, Grosseteste developed the notion that through observing nature, one can deduce the laws that govern it. Through his work in optics and study of Boethius, Grosseteste concluded that the highest science was mathematics to which all other sciences were subordinate, a view that would dominate for centuries to come. Grosseteste wrote treatises on optics (De Iride) and light (De Luce) where he outlines a very correct view of the nature of color. It was the rediscovery of Grosseteste’s work that led to the University of Durham Ordered Universe team of scientists and historians to critically evaluate pre-renaissance science admitting it to be more advanced than previously thought.The other contender to being the father of scientific thought is Roger Bacon. The English friar Bacon, much as Grosseteste, wrote extensively on optics. Bacon, indebted to both Grosseteste and Islamic scientists, wrote on eyesight, color, and magnifying glasses. He was an early advocate of calendar reform. He noticed that the Julian calendar had calculated the wrong number of dates in a year, this error over centuries had led to many days being added to the true date. It was not until three centuries later that Bacon’s ideas on the calendar were instituted. Bacon is also the first known Westerner to give the formula for gunpowder. He hypothesized about lighter-than-air dirigibles and actual powered flight. He observed the sun via a pinhole projector. His efforts were invaluable in advancing the frontier of learning.Albert Magnus, famous for his theological and philosophical works, is thought to have been the first individual to isolate the compound arsenic. He reportedly heated arsenic trisulfide with soap and the result was nearly pure arsenic.Theodoric of Freiberg, a 14th century German physicist in his study of optics, correctly described the rainbow. His work De iride et radialibus impressionibus, with use of geometry and the theories of observation, was able to describe both primary and secondary rainbows, the reversal of color in the secondary rainbow, and light paths necessary to form a rainbow. In his study of optics he correctly described the path light takes as it enters a raindrop. To simulate the droplets he made spherical glass globes and filled with water in a flask.The fifteenth century polymath Nicholas of Cusa was renowned in his legal, philosophical, theological, and scientific writings. The subject of this paper will be his scientific work. Cusa argued that the Earth was not the center of the universe and that Earth’s magnetic poles were not fixed. He challenged the Ptolemaic view of the planets and their orbits by claiming that neither were perfect spheres. In manys was his work is a precursor to Copernicus’ work, even though Copernicus was ignorant of Cusa. In medicine Cusa argued that pulses should be counted. Cusa also observed that plants derive nutrients from the air, performed the first biological experiment, and proved that air had weight.

Conclusion

I have attempted in a very general way to describe the one thousand year contributions of Western Christendom. We have covered the last ancients, Augustine, Gregory, and Isidore and their accomplishments including, but not limited to semiotics, history, and the first encyclopedia, and the Irish and Anglo-Saxon monks who preserved the classical texts and led the valiant attempt at a renaissance in the early 9th century. We saw the recovery of Western knowledge and the first steps at laying the foundation for the renaissance with the Scholastics with major advancements in optics and astronomy, with respectable gains in chemistry and medicine as well. Contrary to the Carl Sagan view of history and the Draper-White view also, medieval Western Christendom was a vital and vibrant component of the Western intellectual tradition. They saved the classical texts, and improved upon them laying the foundation for the scientific revolution. We see the same process at work in Copernicus and Galileo. Their efforts would be inconceivable without the thankless work of the previous millennium. Given that this entire essay is a rebuttal of the misconceptions about medieval scholarship spread by atheists, I felt like ending with a brief note on Galileo. The standard story is that Galileo was a plucky scientist who proved the Bible wrong that the Earth was the center of the universe (even though the Bible makes no such claim), and that the Catholic church in its ignorance and superstition persecuted him and forced him to recant. The real story is a little more complicated. Galileo was not the first to propose heliocentrism; earlier Copernicus did the same with far less controversy. The controversy arose in Galileo’s confrontational attitude; he implicitly mocked the Pope in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Galileo also did not help his case by demanding the Catholic Church accept his position as fact when very little experimental evidence existed at that time. The problem of parallax was thought to be an argument against heliocentrism. Parallax is the fact that when you observe an object from two or more different locations it appears to change position. In Galileo’s day the optical instruments were too crude to observe the parallax between the stars, but as optics became more refined later people were able to observe the differences in location of celestial objects. So again the atheist spin doctors got history wrong. Christianity, far from being anti-scientific, is the womb that birthed science in the first place. I will end where Thomas Woods began in his book How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization by quoting Wisdom 12:21: “but thou hast ordered all things in measure, and number, and weight.”

The View From Olympus: ISIS's Culminating Point?

Has ISIS reached its culminating point, the point where a military offensive or a movement (ISIS is both) runs out of gas?ISIS's success in Ramadi and Palmyra seem to suggest the answer is no. On the physical level of war, it is moving from strength to strength. Its defeat in Tikrit was not so much a defeat of ISIS as of the Baath. That was not to our strategic advantage--or would not have been, if we had a strategy--because we should be seeking an alliance with the Baath against the Islamic puritans who front ISIS. That  would be a strategy. But as John Boyd often said, few people in Washington can do more than spell the word. America's "strategy" is bombing.To answer the question, we need to move from the physical level of war to the moral, which Boyd argued was the most powerful level. That is certainly the case with any movement.We also need to factor in the Brinton Thesis, which I have mentioned before in these columns. Created by historian Crane Brinton, whose specialty was the French Revolution, the Brinton Thesis postulates that all revolutions move in an ever—more radical direction in a series of coups leading to the left (left—right is not relevant here; rather, the spectrum is religious-secular). A final coup of Thermidor, the month in the French Revolutionary calendar when that coup occurred, restores the center.So our question becomes more specific: on the moral level of war, is the faction of ISIS which represents the religious puritans reaching its culminating point?That point is currently covered by clouds, so even Olympus must speculate. But some evidence suggests it may be.The first is that the puritans have turned Islam into a cult that demands human sacrifice. I am no friend of Islam, which is a religion of war and always has been (there are peaceful Moslems, such as the Sufi; peace be upon them). But from a religious standpoint, there is a vast difference between war and human sacrifice. The headless corpses that dominate the picture wherever ISIS goes are human sacrifices, no different from those offered to Baal or to the Aztec's Hummingbird Wizard, Huitzilopochtli.Every Moslem knows that Allah is not a god who demands human sacrifices. So ISIS, when it offers them, is offering them to a god who is not Allah. For a religious movement, that creates a problem of legitimacy--the most dangerous weakness such a movement can have on the moral level.Where this may lead is pointed out by the Aztec's example. The reason Cortez won is because all the other indians joined with him against the Aztecs. It seems they had grown tired  of feeding old Huitzilopochtli.ISIS cannot turn off the human sacrifices, because it depends on puritan recruits to fill its fighting ranks. Any move toward moderation, in any form, would make it impure and set the state for another coup leading yet more to the extreme.This points to a second critical vulnerability ISIS has on the moral level. It depends heavily on foreign troops.As we found out in Iraq and Afghanistan, foreigners are not loved in tribal societies. Now, conquest by ISIS means conquest by foreigners. Those foreigners intentionally disrespect many local customs, which they regard as un—Islamic, i.e., impure. ISIS's physical assaults on the monuments to the history of the local peoples is also an affront. The destruction of history we are now likely to witness in Palmyra will not make the locals happy--again, destruction carried out by foreigners.If the United States had a strategy for dealing with ISIS--Republican calls for more direct American military action are equally absent any strategy--it would seek to leverage these vulnerabilties of ISIS on the moral level. It cannot do so directly, because it also has a legitimacy problem in that part of the world. The more directly we act, the more we weaken the parties we are trying to support and buttress ISIS.The most promising strategy is to work behind the scenes to support the Baath against the puritans within ISIS. We might, for example, tell the Baath we would support them in creating a "Sunnistan" out of the remnants of Iraq and Syria. The Baath are the most likely source of the coup of Thermidor, which is what is needed to put an end to Islamic puritanism. That would be our strategic goal, if we had a strategy.As it is, the best we dare hope for is that our mindless bombing does not so strengthen ISIS at the moral level that it overcomes the critical vulnerabilities at that level its own actions are creating. It would be an unpleasant irony if, just as President George W. Bush created ISIS, the U.S. Air Force were to save it.

Paul Gottfried Reviews Victoria

Originally published at VDARE.comWilliam S. Lind is a man of many talents. He’s an institution of the American conservative movement, formerly the Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism of the Free Congress Foundation (under the late Paul Weyrich), a regular contributor to The American Conservative, and a noted military theorist. And now, with the publication of Victoria he is a novelist, putting forward a highly readable vision of the breakup of the United States and a traditionalist restoration. It’s a sign of the times that we can no longer regard such a story as implausible.Victoria is subtitled “A Novel of Fourth Generation Warfare,” and Lind’s writings on warfare bleed (perhaps too much) into his storytelling. His theory of Fourth Generation Warfare contends that warfare has ceased between states with standing armies and operative governments. Instead, it is decentralized, on at least one side, lacking a regular command structure and no longer identified with an established state or regular army. Countries like the U.S. find themselves in partisan struggles around the world that violate the “rules of war” built up under the old European state system.Bill’s ideas about changing forms of warfare may have been influenced by the German political-legal theorist Carl Schmitt, who wrote on partisan warfare after the Second World War. His novel is written under the nom de plume “Thomas Hobbes,” so even in this he reveals his connection to Schmitt, as the German jurist profoundly admired the seventeenth-century Englishman who wrote about the rise of the state [The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, by Carl Schmitt] (I wrote an intellectual biography of Schmitt and also deeply respect the philosopher who wished to protect us against “the war of all against all.”)In Victoria, all Hell breaks loose in a way that Hobbes might have understood. Yet it is only the Time of Tribulations before the golden age of social restoration that ends the novel. Indeed, we are told the ending in advance in the opening scenewhen we learn “The triumph of the Recovery was marked most clearly by the burning of the Episcopal bishop of Maine.”The feminist prelate who was incinerated had placed a statue of the Egyptian goddess Isis on the altar of her church, and her grisly execution was the beginning of rebellion against the central government in Washington, resulting in an independent state of Maine.This Northeastern outpost of “retroculture” eventually builds a coalition, the Northern Confederation, which fights off an invasion by federal forces and hostile multiculturalists. The novel doesn’t disappoint in its depictions of gory details, from Christians of all races crucified by invading Muslims on Boston Common to the revenge of patriots on Leftist tyrannies as the Confederation’s victories mount. The predictable baddies would represent a kind of rogues’ gallery for VDARE.com readers.In fact, Lind never misses his target when he describes his particular enemies, who are exactly what you would expect: Jewish liberals, brain-dead WASP patricians, loud-mouthed feminists, homosexual activists, the Open Borders lobby, and anti-White racial minorities. Most get their comeuppance, many at the hands of the forces under the command of the novel’s hero, Captain John Rumford, formerly of the USMC.Interestingly, the Southern Confederation, which starts out as a pro-Confederate secessionist movement, falls under the control of Yuppified Southerners and Northern transplants as soon as it succeeds in establishing its independence.But our heroes are aided by European conservative allies, such as Russian and German monarchists, who send what they can to the American Right in its battle against the godless American central state. The Left is meanwhile assisted by the UN, which provides whatever aid it can to the American multicultural forces. Thus Lind’s imaginary confrontation seems to be taken from the situation in the Spanish Civil War, when the Left and Right outside Spain took sides on the basis of ideological predisposition. Here too the struggle between Left and Right quickly assumes an international dimension.A scene near the conclusion features Christian churches joining together to declare a crusade against the Islamic peril, possibly an ode to the flamboyant playof the French nationalist and conservative Catholic Paul Claudel, Le Soulier de Satin. At the end of the Claudel’s play, church bells in seventeenth-century Spain are pealing in recognition of the victory of Christian Europe against the Turks in the sea battle of Lepanto (1571). The Don John of Austria at Lepanto is replaced here by the former jarhead Rumford, a kind of modern crusader who leads a religiously sanctioned struggle against the new Muslim enemy of Christian Europe.Perhaps as a sop to WASPs, Victoria ends with a tribute to “England’s longest reigning monarch, Good Queen Victoria.” A return to Victoria’s age and culture had become part of the “new Zeitgeist.” “The Frankfurt School was history, and with its game out in the open, no one fell for it any more, not even academics.”Of course, in an earlier scene that is my favorite moment in the novel, all the participants at a gathering of Leftist professors at Dartmouth have been summarily shot dead.Here I must point out one disagreement with Lind. We have strenuously debated the question of whether the social Leftism often termed “Cultural Marxism” is truly derived from a Marxist or Marxist Leninist worldview. Put quite simply: Bill thinks it is; I don’t.Related to this dispute is the question of where exactly this body of ideas and social prescriptions comes from. As you can see in the novel, Lind sees them mostly as the product of the Institute for Social Research, a think-tank that was founded in interwar Frankfurt by mostly Jewish, self-described Marxists. In contrast, I stress the acquired American identity of the “Cultural Marxists.”Perhaps Lind considers it unpatriotic on my part to see something that both of us deem obnoxious as being part of an American political legacy. Yet when I see James Kirchick, John Podhoretz and others I’d characterize as neoconservativestell us that gay marriage has become integral to Western identity, and, furthermore, that we must fight Vladimir Putin as an enemy of the “Western” tradition of gay rights, they are not really echoing German refugees of the 1930s. They are sounding fashionably American. The Frankfurt School, never to my knowledge, advocated “gay marriage” or countries with virtually open borders. American political and media elites borrowed selectively European antifascist ideas and then transformed them into an expanded concept of American pluralistic democracy.Moreover, unlike the original Cultural Marxists, their American successors are not socialists. They are friends of Wall Street and multinational corporations who have turned a now mainstreamed cultural radicalism into an American imperial mission. Hillary Clinton runs to do favors for big business in return for payoffs, while proclaiming in that Christian churches that do not accept gay marriage will have to be forced to change their “religious beliefs.” [Hillary Clinton: ‘Religious beliefs’ against abortion ‘have to be changed’, by Ben Johnson, LifeSiteNews, April 24, 2015]But is Lind’s larger scenario that implausible? It is a reasonable assumption that we could see a major collapse of the system. After all, our centralized state is highly pressured by government bureaucrats, aggrieved minorities and swarms of illegals. In Lind’s novel, as soon as the central administration in Washington ceases to keep order, various centrifugal forces surface and assert themselves.But in Victoria, the regular armed forces are overwhelmed by the operation of Bill’s “Fourth-Generation Warfare” and soldiers from all over the place eagerly defect. In the real America, the military would pound the rebels into oblivion and Fox and MSNBC would explain how we had averted a racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic takeover.However, if there were indeed a crisis, we could see secessionists or decentralists move toward a gradual, inconspicuous transfer of power. That would have to occur behind the scenes without risking a military confrontation between dramatically uneven sides.And history has a way of moving more quickly than people expect—something Lind clearly understands. At the beginning of the novel, Rumford and the other protagonists express loyalty to the Union, but only fifty pages later they are working to dissolve it. Not so absurd when one remembers that as late asChristmas, 1775, George Washington was toasting the English monarch. Not long after he’d be leading armed forces against His Majesty’s Government.Because it brings such parallels to mind, Victoria, like most everything by William S. Lind, is well worth the read.

The View From Olympus: Lessons Learned?

I recently received a copy of a brilliant after-action report, written by a Marine company commander and based on the lessons his company learned in Afghanistan. I will not name him here, because in the U.S. military no intellectual attainment goes unpunished. But he is clearly a serious student of military theory, especially Col. John Boyd's work, his understanding of which goes far beyond the usual OODA Loop. His report tells of something; rare and of great value, namely how he successfully translated theory into actions and results.He wrote his report as part of the Marine Corps Lessons Learned Program. But the name of that program raises an interesting question: have we actually learned any lessons from our defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan?The answer is clearly yes at the level of procedures and techniques. The U.S. armed forces have large bureaucracies and ranks of overpaid contractors endlessly churning new procedures and techniques. The best almost always come not top-down but bottom-up, as discoveries made by sergeants and lieutenants in direct contact with the enemy. Sometimes those are embraced by the larger service, but in general they prefer those which come top-down, both for budgetary and cultural reasons.But this focus on procedures and techniques is itse1f a warning sign that we are dealing with a Second Generation military. Both the First and the Second Generation seek to turn everything into procedures and techniques, which are taught, learned, and applied by rote. Too often, one result is that tactics are subsumed by procedures and techniques, as is evident in the U.S. military's frequent reference to “TTPs", i.e., Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures. Tactics done by rote are predictable, and a thinking enemy quickly learns how to negate them and turn them to his advantage.If we ask whether any lessons in tactics have been learned from our defeats, the general answer seems to be no. For the most part, our infantry has one tactic: bump into the enemy and call for fire. The resulting firestorm, often delivered by aircraft, may kill some enemy but also moves us closer to defeat at the moral level, where in the end Goliath always loses.The Marine captain's after-action report shows how lessons in tactics should be learned. Drawing from Boyd's three levels of war, physical, mental, and moral, he writes:

Mental isolation occurs when the insurgent fails to discern, perceive, or make sense out of what's going on around them. We were able to accomplish this by presenting them with ambiguous, deceptive, or novel situations, we well as by operating at a tempo and rhythm they can neither make out nor keep up with. During Operation . . . we conducted a night time heliborne multi-point infiltration of . . . using 16 different maneuver elements——all operating decentralized and along different avenues of approach; each going after a specific center of gravity. . . we changed the color of our utilities randomly . . . often patrolling with a hodgepodge of color schemes. This gave off the appearance that multiple "different" units were constantly operating in the area . . . We altered our patrol times, routes, durations, and missions constantly. . . Each entity was further broken down into multiple satellite units; each able to zigzag, double-back, revolve, and execute the swinging gate in support of the main effort . . .

The value here comes from the fact that the captain is describing applied theory. Other commanders can learn new tactics not by copying his, but by applying the same theory, John Boyd's, to their unique situations. This is what maneuverists mean when we say tactics is not what to do but how to think.At the operational and strategic levels, it is safe to say we have learned nothing. The central operational lesson is that neither the U.S. nor any other state has so far figured out how to generate operational success in 4GW, i.e., how to connect tactical successes to strategic victory. Had we learned this lesson, we would now see the U.S. armed forces engaging in a massive intellectual effort to answer that question. In fact, only the K.u.K. Austro-Hungarian Marine Corps has attempted to do so in a series of Field Manuals available here. From the Americans, the silence is deafening.The central operational lesson points to the central strategic lesson: don't engage in wars we don't know how to win. President Obama seems to have learned that lesson, but that makes him an exception in Washington, where both neo-cons and neo-libs pant for more wars against ISIS and other Fourth Generation entities. It is as if France, after 1940, had sought more opponents with tank armies to go up against (or around) the Maginot Line.

A Critical Evaluation of the New Right

The New Right has shown itself to be utterly incapable of organizing itself into any meaningful cultural force. A series of recent brouhahas (the RooshV-Krauser affair; the Aurini-Owen “breakup”, revelations that certain high-profile individuals were hiding their homosexual dispositions, etc.) proves that things are generally a train wreck. In the five years or so that the New Right has been active it has accomplished relatively nothing. I shall look at the individual components of the New Right and explain their fatal flaws and the solution to these options.The New Right, broadly speaking, can be divided into four groups: (1) the Dark Enlightenment (DE)/Neo-Reaction, (2) the Manosphere, (3) the White Nationalists (WN), and (4) miscellaneous.The Dark Enlightenment, an eclectic group of individuals ranging from race realists, to men’s rights advocates, to traditionalist, to transhumanists, to atheists, to nationalists, is concerned with primarily racial, sexual, and intellectual differences between people. The first problem we see with the movement is that it is all over the place. There are so many divergent interests and people that they cannot long cohere together. The perennial problem of ego wars hampers the movement, even though it is less severe than in the WN movement . Given the recent outing of undesirables it seems that the DE is composed of people of questionable character and calls into question the ability of the movement to operate for specific goals. The DE is better known for what it is against than what it is for. With the failure to engage in quality control and define itself in terms of what it is for, we should not expect much to come from the DE.The Manosphere is largely inhabited by disgruntled males who feel that modern liberalism has shafted them. About all they stand for is getting laid and maybe building self-esteem. They are riven by personality feuds as was seen in the RooshV-Krauser debacle as well as pretentious peacocks bragging of their alleged sexual conquests. The most obvious problem with this movement is that wet pants do not a revolution make; this tendency is summarized in their slogan “Enjoy the decline”. The problem is amorous deviancy and elevating it to the summum bonum or your life is merely falling into the roles programmed for you by the Kinsean and Reich controllers. If that is you, then you are the problem.The White Nationalists basically stand for a whites only society. They are also riven with ego wars, and are constitutionally incapable of anything more serious than sign waving protests and conferences. Greg Johnson at Counter-Currents seems to be one of the leading voices of this movement. Matt Heimbach at Tradyouth is another vocal exponent of said doctrines. The most glaring and obvious flaw in the movement is that despite all their harping about White Genocide and the need for more white babies, they are nearly all unattached, or if attached, are frequent users of family planning materials, as shown by their lack of children. So white people are dying and you don’t have any kids? That makes sense. This contradiction can be seen in Matt Parrott’s essay “Where The White Women At?”We see that he basically makes the calculation that it is more expedient for white people to be politically active and remain single than to form families and have children; ostensibly because white women are so dysfunctional. While I agree with Mr. Parrott on his Christian defense of celibacy, I assumed such a calling was for a life of prayer, contemplation, and good works, not street activism. Maybe the WN’s should take a page out of the Christian Patriarchy movement and have large families IN ORDER TO WIN POLITICAL CONTROL. This persistent childlessness is the major reason why the WNs should not be taken seriously. If extinction is the problem, procreation is the answer, something most WNs don’t seem to get.Miscellaneous refers to individuals who do not fit nicely in any one group. Jack Donovan is the premier representative of this group. Jack has affiliations with the DE, the Manosphere, and WNs. The real joke is that Jack is a spokesman for the New Right. Being an open homosexual, is it not ironic that people who bemoan the death of white people or the loss of traditional values turn to an agent of destruction such as Mr. Donovan? Really, sodomy is going to solve anything? Most of the miscellaneous share the same pathologies as the others. Instead of combining ideas to become a fasces, they have created a Frankenstein.Clearly western civilization is dying. The next question is why is it dying? I will let Solzhenitsyn answer this one:

More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.Since then I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.

Indeed, the godless French Revolution laid the foundations for this catastrophe. If we look at Europe in 1750 we saw a continent that (1) was racially homogenous, (2) had strong traditional values, and (3) was the intellectual cockpit of the world. It would seem all the elements of the New Right should be happy. Yet the traditional order of the Ancient Regime can be summarized in the Vichy French Motto: Travail, Famille, Patrie, or faith, family, fatherland. The traditionalist view of Faith and Family produced the flowering of European culture in the 1500 years of Christendom, only to die in the mud and blood of WW1. Any new political order must recognize the centrality of family and faith. Any collaboration with cultural Bolsheviks who advocate sodomy, fornication, drug use, and transhumanism should be shunned as unnatural and harmful. Men and women need to return to their savior, Jesus Christ, and beg His forgiveness in order to move forward. We need to move away from these sterile pretentious man-children and their incessant ego wars and return to a traditional view of life rooted in the Christian history of the West, while remembering that social activism is not a substitute for prayer, contemplation, and the performance of good works. Rather than embracing the sterile life of egoism, cheap sex, and intellectual posturing, a robust traditionalist movement needs selflessness, commitment, and integrity. We need men like Patrick and Benedict to restore the flagging fortunes of the West, as they did 1500 years ago.

Glass Beads and Tradition

When one thinks of exponents of big-T Tradition, Hermann Hesse would not usually be near the top of the list of those suggested. To the extent that he is known among readers, it is usually for his more “esoteric” novels such as Steppenwolf and Siddhartha, which became popular among the counterculture of the 1960s for their exploration of sex, drugs, and Eastern mysticism, and which continue to find popularity among imitators today. Yet, in his novel The Glass Bead Game (Das Glasperlenspiel in the original German, often entitled for English readers as Magister Ludi or Master of the Game), Hesse has presented us with a Western world in which Tradition has triumphed.The reader is never given a specific date, but contextual clues within the text seem to suggest that the Glass Bead Game takes place sometime in the 25^th century in Castalia, a fictional yet obviously Germano-Italic region in central Europe. The protagonist of this work is Joseph Knecht, a man who lived roughly two centuries before and about whom a legendary, indeed nearly hagiographic, tradition has grown.But first, the world of Castalia. Castalia – called a “province,” though to what extent this is geographical rather than organizational is never made clear – is a Traditional society. It is a static world, though not necessarily in stasis, one in which the exuberant growth and obsession with change for its own sake that plagues so much of the West today are absent. This is not to say that it is backwards or non-technological; trains, radio, newspapers, automobiles – all the trappings of the late industrial age society in which Hesse lived are all present. Universities still teach students, preparing them for careers in industry, business, or politics. Yet, the world of Castalia is one in which knowledge is viewed not in an extrapolating sense, but as something to be consolidated and interpolated – scholarly exploration involves the working out more fully of principles and homologies among various branches of knowledge. Indeed, this is the point to the titular game over which Joseph Knecht eventually became the Master.The mindset of Castalian society, especially in the slice we see represented by the “Mandarins” (the body of academics, for lack of a better word, who make up the Magisterium) is one that is quite foreign to the post-Enlightenment Western society of today. This is viewed as a good thing by the men of this future age. Indeed, our present age is looked back upon with disdain. It is referred to as “the Age of the Feuilliton,” as being characterized by an unserious, flippant attitude befitting the sort of inconsequential literature that focuses upon trivialities like fashion and personalities. At one point, the narrator relating to us the life of Knecht informs us that while in the past (our present), biographers would focus upon the quirks of personality that are prized today for making someone an “individual,” in Castalia’s age, a man is not considered worthy of biographical fame until he has proven that he can transcend his own “uniqueness” and “achieve the greatest possible integration into the generalities.” The sort of “individuality” that is prized in America today and exemplified by our “reality” television programs and obsession with sports, fashion, and other routes of “individual expression” (as well as by the increasingly socially liberal and libertarian politics of even the “conservatives”) would have no appeal to Castalians.Another thing that sets Castalian society apart from our own is its peacefulness. The Europe of this future age does not see war, something which is contrasted with our own age and its “Century of Wars” – yet another reason why our present century is viewed negatively (indeed, it is implied that the crises generated by our century eventually led Western man to throw his hands up in despair, and led to the Traditional world). This peacefulness comes from the Traditional aspect of this society – ideology, in the sense of being theoretical ideas which nevertheless motivate masses of men to kill each other in large numbers, is patently absent. One character, reflecting back on our age, refers to an “obscure sect of economists.” It’s unclear if he means the Marxists or the Capitalists, but it doesn’t really matter. The gross ideology of forming a “sect” around an economic idea is simply incomprehensible to them. Not just that they disagree with the idea, but that they don’t even understand how it could happen in the first place. Castalia is a world whose trajectory neatly departed from the eschatologies both of Marxism and of Fukuyaman-style liberal capitalism’s “end of history.” Castalia is a world at peace much because it is a world not constantly roiled with a new idea each year that absolutely must be implemented onto society immediately. Neo-conservatives would be most unhappy in Castalia.The glass bead game – the game itself as presented in the book – is really not a “game” in our sense of the word. It is, indeed, viewed as being the supreme intellectual endeavor in that age, and is treated with the reverence and devotion that professional sports are today. Matches and tournaments are televised, and there are intricate rules that determine the subjects to be used within the process of the game. Expert players are the closest thing to celebrities you will find in Castalia. While the mechanics are never fully explained, the general gist of the game is that the players seek to find, build, and extend correspondences and relationships between various branches of knowledge. In this game, it is conceivable that an expert player could delve out a harmonious relationship between a principle of quantum mechanics, the structure of a movement from one of Bach’s symphonies, and a mathematical formula governing the shape of a plant’s leaves. The approach to knowledge is intensive and introspective. This Traditional world has left off growth and expansion and the uncertainties that come with these, and has moved into a consolidating phase that does not reject the knowledge already gained, but rather seeks to explore it to its uttermost and organize it into a truly cohesive whole, matching the coherence of their post-“modern” (in our meaning) Traditional society.The story is presented as a biography, and the “hero” (thought this term carries too much baggage to be genuinely accurate) of this story is Joseph Knecht. Orphaned at an early age, Knecht – whose intelligence and capabilities were quickly recognized – was brought into the Castalian system and trained to be a “Mandarin,” the monastic body of Game players and academics who oversee the education of Castalian society. The book traces Knecht’s rise through the ranks, his procession from one point of growth to the next. Thus, it qualifies as a Bildungsroman of the finest type. Knecht eventually rises to the post of Magister Ludi – the Master of the Game, the one who oversees it all. As such, he is perhaps the single most respected member of Castalian society. And then he resigns from it all, a move as shocking as if the entire US government today were simply to resign en masse.What makes the story so compelling, from a Traditional point of view, is the nature of Knecht’s growth, and why he eventually resigned his post, and left the Castalian establishment entirely. Unlike the ideas of “personal growth” so popular today, in which the individual is encouraged to “search within himself” and find out wonderfully unique things that make him so “special” as he flits from one novelty to the next, Knecht’s growth comes through his realization of his place in his society – not to be viewed negatively as stifling or “communist” – and of his own service to its maintenance and stability (significantly, “Knecht” means “servant”). He resigned from his position as Magister Ludi not because he wanted to “try new things” or from dissatisfaction because of some lack of personal “fulfillment.” Indeed, it was just the opposite – he had reached a point where he had fulfilled his role as far as he could. There was nothing left for him to do. His life’s work, we might say, was completed. It is significant that not long after his resignation, and the first day after taking on work as the private tutor for the spoiled brat son of a close friend, Knecht passed from this earth. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.In Castalian society, we can see a world in which the precariousness of novelty does not hold sway over the hearts and minds of men. Man finds his place in the world, and seeks to fit in harmoniously, rather than trying to create for himself every angle and spike with which to jut out from the rest and draw attention to himself. It is not incidental that one point of Joseph Knecht’s growth and learning involves studying under a former Castalian master who exhibited very Sinicizing tendencies. The Traditional world of the West has much in common – more than many of today’s Neo-Cons would be comfortable admitting – with the traditional Confucian world of China during the Ming and early Ch’ing dynasties. It was Confucius who said, “If a man keeps cherishing his old knowledge, so as continually to be acquiring new, he may be a teacher of others.” The Traditional world is one in which “the names have been rectified,” so to speak, a society which is honest with itself and true to its foundations. It can teach us many things, if we will listen.

Grasping Neutrality

When I agree with someone on a political issue and I see him getting a bit carried away with his rhetoric, it’s easy to overlook. But when I disagree with someone on an issue, especially when we have essentially opposite opinions on a heated emotional issue, excesses of rhetoric really rub me the wrong way. After a while of dealing with it, poor argumentation starts to grate. Rational adults should be able to discuss an issue reasonably and dispassionately without resorting to illogic and ad hominem.I consider myself very conservative, therefore I generally agree with my fellow conservatives. When I disagree with them it is often over degree, not direction. However, I have long been a noninterventionist conservative on foreign policy, and thus I frequently find myself at odds with my fellow conservatives when it comes to geopolitics. For the record, I don’t concede that there is anything conservative about interventionism, but that is for a different essay.This has definitely been the case of late with the rise of ISIS, the negotiations with Iran, and the Netanyahu visit. For now, I’ll confine my observations to Iran, about which I have recently found myself engaged in several heated exchanges in various venues with people I likely generally agree with on most issues.It is one thing to have a difference of opinion on a matter. It is also possible for people to disagree about the facts related to an issue, or to have a different take on facts that are agreed upon. It is another thing, however, to engage in bad argumentation. An argument is wrong when it gets the facts wrong, is inaccurate, or incorrect. An argument that employs bad argumentation is a bad argument, regardless of all else.So, for example, I believe the U.S. should be neutral on the question of Irish unification. It’s not our problem. It’s not our concern. That does not, however, mean that I must hate Irish Catholics or that I am a shill for the Brits. As a Protestant I have certain sympathies, but I don’t think my sympathies should translate into official U.S. policy. But outside of certain circles, my advocacy of neutrality on the matter of Irish unification would not provoke those sorts of inflammatory charges. That the US should be neutral on a matter that is between two other countries likely strikes most people as common sense.Take, however, the very analogous situation of Israel and the Palestinians and the broader relation of Israel to her Middle East neighbors. There my fellow noninterventionists and I also recommend the common sense position of US neutrality and disengagement, but the mere suggestion of this in the ongoing debate over Iran is very likely to brings immediate charges that the advocate of neutrality must hate Israel, love "Muzzies”, and is probably an “anti-Semite”. This is flawed logic. The conclusion is unwarranted because the premise is flawed. Of course someone recommending neutrality could in fact hate Israel, love Muslims, and be an anti-Semite, but these conclusions are not necessarily true and cannot be drawn simply from the advocacy of a particular policy position.Daily I see on Facebook, or in my inbox, or in headlines at supposedly conservative websites that Obama must be a closeted Muslim who hates Israel and the U.S. and wants to see both destroyed because he is trying to reach a deal with Iran. I am no apologist for Obama who has been way too interventionist for my taste, and I don’t concede the legitimacy of the negotiations to begin with. I’m not sure how one sovereign nation with nuclear weapons and nuclear energy gets to tell another sovereign nation that they can’t have either, nor do I have any desire for the U.S. to play the role of global gun controller. That said, it is conceivable that Obama really thinks a deal with Iran is in the best interests of the U.S., as do most respondents to opinion surveys, and that he isn’t really a secret Muslim who hates Israel. These absurdly over-the-top declarations are unworthy of rational adults and mark the people who repeat them as intellectually unserious. I sure hope my fellow conservatives aren’t equally as irrational when they argue for tax and spending cuts, on which we agree.No self-respecting conservative would tolerate without objection the charge from politically correct liberals that advocating the abolition of affirmative action and quotas means one hates minorities and must be a racist. Nor would they tolerate without objection the similar charge from like quarters that disputing the often repeated statistics with regard to sexual assaults on campus must mean one supports “rape culture”. But in both cases the liberal is making the same logically flawed argument that interventionists make when they definitively ascribe a certain mindset to a political or cultural opinion. If they can’t see this, they are either dense or aren’t thinking about it hard enough.The hysteria related to the call for U.S. neutrality in the Middle East vs. the lack of hysteria related to the call for neutrality on Irish reunification (outside certain small circles) is clearly a reflection of the emotional investment of said hysterics in maintaining our current posture that is anything but neutral, rational, objective analysis of the issue. Interventionists should cite facts, challenge assertions, and dispute opinions. This is what debate is. But please spare me the flawed logic and ad hominem that so characterizes the debate today. It does not reflect well on your side.

The View From Olympus: They Just Don't Get It

Two articles in the April 25 New York Times well illustrated the degree to which states just don't get Fourth Generation war. The first was the lead story that day, titled "Despite Errors, Drones Decimate Weakened Qaeda":

Revelations of new high-level losses among Al Qaeda's top leadership in Pakistan's tribal belt have underscored how years of American drone strikes have diminished and dispersed the militant group's upper ranks and forced them to cede prominence and influence to more aggressive offshoots in Yemen and Somalia.

This "success story" is part of a broad PR offensive now underway to justify and ensure continuance of the drone strike program. But looked at through the lens of 4GW, there is no success, and the wisdom of the drone strike program is very much open to question.Congratulating ourselves that al Qaeda's leadership in Pakistan has been "decimated" is like cheering because, in an effort to pick up mercury, we have turned one big blob into lots of littles ones. More, it shows a focus on al Qaeda that is wholly unjustified. As we see with the rise of ISIS, if all the leadership of al Qaeda in Pakistan dropped dead tomorrow, nothing would change but some nomenclature.Al Qaeda in Pakistan has largely been rendered irrelevant by the continued march of the Brinton Thesis, a chain of coups d'etat ever more to the extreme until all is brougt back to the center by the coup of Thermidor. (It is no coincidence that my picture on traditionalRIGHT shows me digging into a plate of lobster Thermidor.) In effect, the Jacobins are now in power in Islamic 4GW and al Qaeda is the Montagne, yesterdays's news. Washington, it seems, reads only the news of the day before yesterday.As to the drone program as a whole, it, along with airstrikes from manned aircraft, are one of our enemies' top recruiting devices. When you circle endlessly over your opponent, now and then letting loose a missile or a bomb, you hurt him physically, you may scare him mentally, but morally you enrage him to the point where he will do anything to get back at you. The drone brings forth its low-tech equivalent, the suicide bomber. Which is more effective?Here we see one of the most important aspects of 4GW that states apparently cannot get, namely that, as John Boyd argued, the physical level of war is the weakest, the mental level (the key to 3GW) is in the middle, and the moral level of war is the most powerful. Drones and airstrikes win at the physical level at the expense of losing at the moral level. Which means, in the end, states usually lose Fourth Generation wars.The other piece in the April 25 Times says it all in the headlines: "Migration Crisis Facing Europe Cannot be Solved at Sea, Analysts Say". As usual, the analysts are wrong. The problem of illegal migration across the Mediterranean, which is a 4GW invasion of the Western heartland, can easily be solved at sea. When the migrants arrive, usually in Italy, you corral them, hold them until you've got enough, then sail them back to what was Libya. If one of the pretend governments of Libya objects, the Italian Navy has a good amphibious capability. The San Marco land and make a beachhead, the would-be migrants are deposited on it, and the Italian forces withdraw. Militarily, it's a piece of cake, though Italy would need the EU to foot the bill. The cost to Europe would be trivial compared to the bill for accepting hundreds of thousands of people who will never acculturate.Here we see the state failing at both the physical and the moral levels of war. It refuses the easy physical solution, shipping them back, because cultural Marxism has emasculated Europe's leadership morally. All you have to do is show some pictures of poor, weeping "victims" and Europe's elites melt into a pool of blubber. No matter that some of those same "victims" will be supporting jihad on European soil once they move in (Restricting refugees admitted to Europe to Christians would help, but political correctness outlaws that too.)When generations of war change, entities that don't get it disappear. The U.S. and European states don't get it. Ergo...

The View from Olympus: The Murder of Christendom

Three recent articles in The New York Times, when read in succession, tersely summarize the murder of Western, Christian civilization.The first, in the Sunday, April 19 New York Times Magazine, "Why Do They Go?" by Mary Anne Weaver, points directly to the essence of Fourth Generation war, the transfer of primary loyalties away from the state. After noting that foreigners make up half of ISIS's forces, it reports that:

"An estimated 4,000 are from Western nations, some 600 to 700 from Britain alone. More British Muslim men have joined ISIS and the Nusra Front than are serving in the British armed forces."

The second article, on the front page of the Saturday, April 18 Times, is titled "Tide of Refugees, but the West Isn't Welcoming." This is the cultural Marxists' prescription for dealing with the Fourth Generation threat Islamic immigrants pose to Western nations: bring in more Islamics. If your goal is to destroy Western, Christian civilization, that makes perfect sense.But the cultural Marxists face a growing problem: native Westerners are beginning to resist flooding their countries with people who want to wage holy war, jihad, against them. What are the cultural Marxists to do? Outlaw any discussion of the danger. The same April 19 Times printed on page A10 a piece titled, "France Announces Plan to Fight Racism." It quotes French Prime Minister Manuel Valls as saying,

"Racism, anti-Semitism, hatred of Muslims, of foreigners and homophobia are increasing in an intolerable manner in our country."

He also announced a 100 million Euro plan to fight "racism", a plan that will include "increased monitoring of online hate speech."A few facts are helpful to see what is going on here. French anti-Semitism is coming mostly from Islamics who are residents of France, many nominally French citizens. But that may not be what Monsieur Valls means by "increasing in an intolerable manner". Instead, he is referring to the fact that more and more Frenchmen are voting for the National Front, France's only hope of remaining France.  (In cultural Marxism, ideology trumps democracy; the rabble may not vote to overturn the work of the Vanguard of the cultural Proletariat.) And in cultural Marxism's lexicon, "hate speech" is any speech that defies cultural Marxism, or worse, exposes it for what it is and reveals its goal, the murder of Christendom.Here we see clearly how one hand washes the other. Cultural Marxism despises Islam because it hates all religious faith. The Islamics, in turn, would behead the cultural Marxists even before they could offer Christians the usual choice of conversion or the sword. But each thinks it can use the other to destroy the common enemy, Christianity. The Islamics in Western countries hide behind the shield of "racism," while the cultural Marxists use the Islamics to generate Fourth Generation war, both in the Middle East and in Western countries. It makes the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact look almost innocent.Meanwhile, thousands upon thousands of Islamics are streaming across the Mediterranean into Europe, offering the cultural Marxists a growing supply of foot troops. The European political Establishment, instead of calling out Europe's otherwise useless navies to protect its coasts, wrings its hands that some of the invaders are dying. The banners that conquered at Lepanto are handed to the Fourth Generation Islamic invaders to use as toilet paper.

Finally! Victoria is now available in paperback!

Thomas Hobbes' Victoria is now finally available for purchase on Amazon.If you have not read Victoria yet, click here to read the first 35 chapters for free.Follow the link below to get your copy of Victoria today!