What's Behind Murray Vs. Trump?

Prominent conservative scholar Charles Murray has caused quite a bit of consternation on social media with his seemingly highly personal Facebook and Twitter crusade against Donald Trump. I suspect many people are not taking Murray’s opposition to Trump well because they don’t view Murray, who got in PC hot water for his book The Bell Curve, as your typical PC signaling think tank denizen and therefore, expect different from him.

Angry people make angry accusations, so many were quick to accuse Murray of signaling to his fellow AEI scholars and the rest of the respectable set, that, while capable of wrongthink, he is not far enough off the ranch to support Trump. I don’t know for certain that Murray is not signaling this, but I think his opposition to Trump can be understood based on another dimension. I believe this because I have observed the same tendency in others who policy wise seemingly have reasons to be sympathetic to the Trump campaign.

Certain political commentators, of which Murray is an example, undertake their commentary in a very high minded and serious manner, and they likewise take the political process very seriously. For these folks, Trump, who does not play by the normal rules of decorum, is an affront to the process and should be opposed on those grounds alone. Opposition to Trump seems to be to them a defense of the very system, and if it signals anything it is this seriousness and respect for the process aspect as much as anything else.

This sort of visceral opposition to Trump could come from the left, the right or the center. I believe it reflects to some extent the old money vs. new money distinction, both actually and metaphorically. While Trump did not come from a poor family, his family wasn’t that rich, so Trump behaves like new money - the brashness, the ostentatiousness, the conspicuous consumption, etc. As I mentioned in another article, I think a lot of Trump’s presentation and appeal is that he is in essence just a guy from Queens who made good for himself, and who may still have a bit of a chip on his shoulder. Trump’s Flyover Country supporters see a kindred spirit who happens to be a billionaire, but for those significantly concerned with propriety, they see an intolerably boorish lout. 

While this opposition could come from all points on the political spectrum, it presents a particular dilemma for high minded sorts of a traditionalist and conservative bent. Traditionalists and conservatives have always placed great emphasis on manners and codes of behavior, for good reason. Such things foster good order and are inherently conservative in the most basic sense of the word.

From this view, comments about your female opponent’s appearance or alleged references to your female antagonist’s bodily functions are ungentlemanly. Repeatedly calling people stupid or engaging in back and forth with your critics on Twitter is pedestrian and below the dignity of the process and the office he seeks.

Charles Murray’s opposition to Trump strikes me as primarily coming from this perspective. John Derbyshire attributed it to Murray’s “Midwestern niceness,” but herein lies the disconnect between Murray and many of his usual fans.

Many of Trump’s supporters support him precisely because they no longer respect the process. They see the process as rigged and inherently hostile to them and their interests. For this reason, Trump’s brashness and willingness to say things the typical politician would not is not a liability, but an asset. While they don’t necessarily value rudeness, they’ll tolerate it or even consider it a necessary evil, in light of the current state of affairs, and they positively value his combativeness and willingness to engage the enemy.  When Trump supporters are questioned, they consistently cite this aspect of his presentation as a major reason for their support. Trump’s previous celebrity and sheer force of personality allow him to get away with saying things that ordinary political candidates cannot.

Contained in this disconnect, is another related dimension. Trump’s supporters tend to view the current situation as dire and near the point of no return. For them, opposing a candidate because he engages in Twitter battles is akin to fretting about the arrangement of deck chairs on the Titanic. For many Trump supporters, our dire situation requires extraordinary measures, not appeals to the sanctity of the system that got us here in the first place.

While I appreciate Murray’s and others’ support for traditional norms of behavior, as a Trump supporter, albeit a somewhat nuanced one, I agree with my cohorts that it is much too late in the game to allow his at times less than decorous behavior to disqualify him. I would suggest that the process Murray et al are attempting to protect is no longer the sacrosanct process they suppose, but is in fact a largely rigged game of political theater. Perhaps what we need at this time is not a statesman but a performance artist who can engage the system on its own terms and maybe just beat the Powers That Be at their own game.

The View From Olympus: Learning Russians

There is an old saying that Russia is never as strong as it appears to be, and Russia is never as weak as it appears to be. According to the lead story in the October 15  New York Times, "Russian Military Uses Syria as Proving Ground, and West Takes Notice," the pendulum is swinging from focusing on Russia's weakness to seeing her again as strong and threatening. Much of the latter is threat inflation, an old Pentagon practice during the Cold War. (After lecturing on military reform many years ago at the Air Force's Squadron Officers' School, an Air Force intel captain came up to me and asked, "Does military reform mean we can stop inflating the threat?")But it does seem the Russians have learned. The Times story notes that Russian jets in Syria are now conducting as many airstrikes in a day as the U.S. and its allies have been carrying out in a month. Sortie rate is an important measure of an air force's effectiveness, and ours has long been abysmal, except for the A-10. The newer our equipment, the worse the picture, because each new aircraft we buy requires more maintenance hours per flight hour than the one it replaced.But the real importance of President Putin's military reform program lies not in equipment but in ideas. As American military reformers used to say, quoting Col. John Boyd, "For winning wars, people are most important, ideas come second, and hardware is only third." The Times noted that Russian reforms have included tactics and strategy, not just equipment. And they included the all-important "people" category:

Mr. Putin . . . began a military modernization program that focused not only on high-profile procurement of new weapons . . . but also on a less-noticed overhaul of training and organization that included reduction in the bloated officer corps and the development of a professional corps of noncommissioned officers.

As any visitor to an American headquarters quickly sees, Russia was not alone in having a bloated officer corps. But ours keeps growing.We here witness an old military phenomenon: the loser learns while the victor goes to sleep on his pile of trophies. Russia was one of the twentieth century's big losers, along with Austria and Germany. The defeat in World War I, the Red Revolution, Stalin, Communism's murder of 60 million Russians, the immense destruction inflicted by World War II, and, with the fall of Communism, Russia's retreat to roughly the borders she had when Peter the Great came to the throne, add up to a catastrophe Americans cannot grasp.But Russia is now recovering under President Putin, and her defeats and failures have taught her some things. Among those learning are the Russian military. Several decades ago, the Soviet Army historian John Erickson said to me, "Do you want to understand the Russian army today? Ask yourself what it was like under Nicholas I." I think that is no longer true.The laggard now is the U.S. military, happily vegetating in the Second  Generation of modern war, content to lose wars so long as the money keeps flowing, led largely by generals and admirals who are interchangeable in their skills and attitudes with Soviet industrial managers. The quality of the product is not important; what matters is acquiring and justifying resources.That self-satisfied (at senior levels) and sleepy military is in turn employed by a foreign policy elite that lives in Disneyland, a place where the whole world is to be reduced to a nursery run by themselves and their European counterparts. All the children will play nice because they tell them to.Among the consequences of this departure from reality is a failure to ally with both Russia and China in defense of the state system against Fourth Generation war. In Syria, while a reality-based Kremlin acts in support of the remnants of the Syrian state, we bleat about Russian air attacks on our "democratic allies" who do not exist.As I said, this is an old, old story. It always has the same ending: yesterday's winner is tomorrow's loser. Regrettably, that's us.

The View From Olympus: The Enablers

At the same time that Islam has brought terror and death to the city of Paris, France's new Jeanne d'Arc, Marine le Pen, is on trial. Her supposed crime? "Hate speech". If you tell the truth about Islam in France, i.e., that it is and always has been a religion of war, you will be arrested.Nowhere else do we see so clearly the relationship between Islam and cultural Marxism as in France. Cultural Marxism gives cover to Islam while Moslems kill Frenchmen. As French blood flows in the streets of Paris, French cultural Marxists stand guard, ready to bring "hate speech" charges against anyone who dares answer the question, "why?" Why, because the Koran explicitly calls for violence against unbelievers and Islam considers forced conversions legitimate. Anyone who converts under duress and later says "I didn't mean it" is under automatic sentence of death as an apostate. Islam's war against French men on French soil will continue until France submits to Islam. Moslems do the killing, but cultural Marxism is their enabler.Meanwhile, next door in Germany, that country--the anti-German Germany that is the Federal Republic--is importing more of what just happened in Paris. Frau Merkel says her "vision" is at stake. What is that vision? A deracinated world where an Afghan or an Arab has just as much right to enjoy the benefits of life in Germany as does a German. Hausfrau Merkel isn't deep enough to be a cultural Marxist. She's just their dupe. That's okay with them, so long as she continues to import Islamic Fourth Generation war into Germany.Why does cultural Marxism welcome people who will kill cultural Marxists as enthusiastically as they kill Christians? Because, as the members of the Frankfurt School make plain in their writings, cultural Marxism has no positive vision to offer. It is about "negation", i.e., bringing everything down. It will ally with any force that aids its struggle to destroy Western culture and the Christian religion. Islam has been doing that since it first emerged out of the Arabian desert. What could be a better tool for the cultural Marxists?Because of the rate at which Islamics are pouring into Germany and murder in the name of Allah is occurring in France, Frenchmen and Germans are beginning to see beyond the conditioning cultural Marxism has used to entrap them. More and more, as they face the truth about Islam, instead of seeing "Hitler" when they look in the mirror they see Charles Martel and Friedrich Barbarossa.In France, Frenchmen have an option denied Germans. They can vote for a party, the National Front, that will compel Islamics either to acculturate and become French or to leave. If the culturally Marxist French Establishment keeps the National Front from power, well, French men then have another option, one for which they are famous: riot in the streets and hang every Moslem they can lay hands on from the nearest lamppost ("a la lanterne!").The good news in all this is that Europeans' revolt against Islam and its inherent violence endangers the rule of the cultural Marxists. European publics know that something is wrong with thier traditional political parties. They don't know exactly what--few have heard of the cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt School--but they know those parties insist on leaving the door to Islam open and denounce anyone trying to close it as "fascists" and "racists". Once Europeans turn forcefully against Islam--and they are moving that way--they may also turn against those who invited the murderers in. So we may hope. If it happens, the victims of the Paris massacres will not have died in vain.

The View From Olympus: The Fourth Generation Warfare Handbook

The Fourth Generation Warfare Handbook, co-authored by Lt. Col. Greg Thiele and myself, is now available on Amazon. At present, it is only an e-book; the real book should be available early next year. The publisher is Castalia House Press.The Fourth Generation Warfare Handbook is a follow-on to my Maneuver Warfare Handbook, which was published in 1985 and is still in print. The new book's origins lie in the Fourth Generation Warfare seminar Lt. Col. Thiele and I taught for some years at the Marine Corps' Expeditionary Warfare School. That seminar wrote a number of field manuals for 4GW, published as manuals of the K.u.K. Austro-Hungarian Marine Corps. Greg and I distilled the content of those manuals, added a good bit of material of our own (especially on true light infantry, normally the most effective force against 4GW opponents) and have published it in a form we think will reach more readers than have the field manuals.The new book presumes the reader is familiar with the framework of the Four Generations of Modern War, although it does offer a summary of the first three generations in an appendix. After a discussion of the theory of 4GW which focuses on the dilemmas it poses to state armed forces, dilemmas which usually lead state militaries to defeat themselves, it turns to the practical problems 4GW presents. This is consistent with its nature as a handbook: its purpose is not academic discussion but providing useful ideas to those serving in state forces.One of the potentially most useful tools it offers is the grid: a nine-box square with the three traditional levels of war, tactical, operational, and strategic, on the vertical axis and Col. John Boyd's three new levels, physical, mental, and moral, on the horizontal axis. State armed forces (including police) can use the grid to evaluate planned missions by asking what results the mission is likely to bring in each of the nine boxes.At present, most missions are evaluated in only one box, the tactical/physical. These are the two weakest levels of war. The blowback the mission brings at more powerful levels, especially the most powerful box, strategic/moral, helps explain why state militaries usually lose Fourth Generation wars. By using the grid to anticipate negative results at higher and more powerful levels, it may be possible to avoid those negative effects by changing what is done tactically and physically.European readers of The Fourth Generation Warfare Handbook may wonder why much of the latter part of the book is devoted to true light (or Jaeger) infantry. The reason is that the U.S. armed forces mis-define light infantry as line infantry with less equipment. This false definition leads the Americans to think they have light infantry when in fact they do not. Because true light infantry are usually 4GW forces' most dangerous opponents, this leaves the U.S. largely disarmed in this kind of war. Its fall-back of massive firepower literally blows up in its face at the moral level, ensuring its defeat. (The closest thing the U.S. has to true light infantry is probably the Marine Scout/Snipers. According to one report from Afghanistan, the Taliban refer to the Scout/Snipers as "The Marines who are well-trained." The Pashtun are, and long have been, some of the world's best light infantry.)For Americans, the Handbook's chapter on how to convert line to light infantry may be its most important. Many infantry battalion, company, and platoon commanders would like to make the switch, but don't know how. Now they will.My hope is that the The Fourth Generation Warfare Handbook will prove as useful to members of sate armed forces a has the Maneuver Warfare Handbook. 4GW is a more difficult challenge than 3GW, maneuver warfare. Because only those state armed forces that have made it into the Third Generation have any chance of winning in 4GW, both books are likely to be around for a long time.

The Stupid Party Elevates Paul Ryan

The late conservative columnist, Sam Francis, once quipped that the Democrat Party is the Evil Party and the Republican Party is the Stupid Party. This cannot be repeated often enough. The Republican Party has repeatedly demonstrated that it has no idea what is best for its continued viability and the people who actually vote for it.The persistent problem with the Republican Party is that every election cycle it pitches to the besieged middle class in Middle America and then goes to Washington and does the bidding of donor class fat cats. The flyover country middle class has continued to go along with this game because in our alleged “two party” system at least the Republican Party pretends to like them. The Democrat Party on the other hand, which is historically supposed to be the party of the working man, long ago gave up the pretense of actually caring about the economic interests of or even liking flyover country yokels. Instead Democrats by and large see such yokels as a major part of the problem due to their Bible-clinging and gun-toting ways and status as bearers of some mystical privilege. But the masses can only be expected to put up with this dynamic for so long before they’ve had enough and demand change. This appears to be happening, yet the Republican Establishment scratches its collective head in befuddlement. “Why are the plebs so angry?”What the success of the Donald Trump campaign should clearly demonstrate to the GOP leadership and its elected representatives if they are paying attention or care is that average Republican voters are not really motivated by the prospect of cuts in the marginal income tax rates of the rich. They believe the middle class is under siege from well-connected corporatists above and a permanent underclass below, and that the federal government works for the interests of both of these and against their own, and about this they are manifestly correct.So how does the Republican Party respond to this disconnect? It elevates to the House Speakership a man, Paul Ryan, who is a virtual caricature of all that is wrong with the GOP, and I might add, it does so with the acquiescence of a lot of the “Freedom Caucus.” What? Was the Monopoly Man not available?Donald Trump is resonating with the flyover base, much to the chagrin of the Establishment and their lackeys in the “conservative” punditocracy, on two issues in particular, immigration and trade. Both are near and dear to the heart of the base because both address two of the main things that have caused middle class fortunes to stagnate, economic globalization and the mass importation of cheap labor, both illegal and legal.In the midst of this rebellion in the heartland, the Republican Party keepers of the flame insisted on anointing Paul Ryan as Speaker, after their original choice crashed and burned, but Ryan could not be more wrong on these two issues at the heart of the base’s uprising.Ryan is a hard core amnesty supporter. By Republican standards he is an “extremist” on the issue. He also supports virtual open borders with regard to legal immigration, a policy that not only would perpetuate the problems of unemployment, underemployment and stagnant wages that already plague us, but would guarantee that the Republican Party will become a permanent minority party, virtually irrelevant on the national stage, within a few election cycles. Talk about the Stupid Party. Many of them appear to not be able to do basic math.On globalist managed trade deals (To call them free trade deals is a scandalous misuse of language.), Ryan is again the worst of the worst. Ryan is not just a casual supporter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the legislative gimmickry of fast track that enabled it. He co-authored (along with faux populist Sen. Ted Cruz, I might add) a blatant piece of apologia for fast track and the TPP in the Power Elite … err I mean … Wall Street Journal before said power elite ramrodded the fast track abomination through Congress. Way to represent the peeps there, GOP.What this shameful Ryan spectacle once again demonstrates is that the Republican Party is worse than worthless when it comes to representing the interests of the majority of people who actually vote for it. It’s recent history (since the '60s +/-) has been to serve as a sort of safety valve to diffuse periodic fits of anger from the masses when they wake up and realize they are getting screwed. People of good will may differ on whether this means the Republican Party needs to be reformed or scrapped and replaced, but what should be obvious to all who are not beholden to the donor class is that the current situation is intolerable. I suspect that for now the one most helped by the Ryan debacle is Donald Trump.

The Election

As is often the case in the hall of mirrors that is the Establishment, the election of 2016 is not what it seems. Officially, it is about choosing nominees from a wide variety of candidates, at least among the Republicans, then hearing them battle it out in policy-oriented debate.But that is just kabuki for the rubes out in flyover land. The Establishment knows the real game, or thinks it does. Each party will, in the end, choose an Establishment nominee, and which one wins is not important. The Establishment will remain in charge, and nothing will change.On the surface, that is probably what will happen. If there is a credible third party candidate, he will find the system is so rigged by the two parties that are really one party that he has small chance. The Establishment will remain in power, confident it will always do so.That confidence is misplaced. At a level deeper than the kabuki and the Establishment's rigged system, powerful forces are in motion. What the election is really about is these forces, their outlets, their prospects, and the likelihood that the Establishment, which is blind to them, is already living on borrowed time.Both here and in Europe, popular support for anti-Establishment candidates and parties is skyrocketing. Trump and Sanders are both troubling the Establishment by their levels of support and its staying power. The Establishment knows neither will become president, because it has rigged the game.Still, their popularity sends a message that has brought unease to the corridors of power. Who are these awful people? What leads them to dissent from the Establishment's combination of, on the one hand, cultural Marxism, and on the other, a fat cat world where one hand washes the other (Wall Street and Washington) and Establishment membership brings great wealth? I mean, don't they see there is no other possible way? Could there really be so many "thisists" and "thatists" out there, people who dare express views that would cause every door in Washington to slam in their faces? Seen dimly in the candlelight, angry faces are staring in the hall of mirrors' windows.What is driving this, both on the Right and the Left, is a growing understanding at the grass roots level that the Establishment's policies do not work. We start stupid "humanitarian" wars--Hillary loves them--and then lose. We flood America and Europe with immigrants who will never become Americans or Europeans. We praise every culture and religion except our own. In the U.S., the crime problem is discussed with no reference to the fact that most of the violent criminals are black or Hispanic.On Wall Street, the .1%, whose enormous wealth seldom comes from producing a product but rather from financial manipulation (which, when it fails, has to be bailed out by the rest of us) buy Congressmen and Senators by the dozen. Those Members of Congress make sure "free trade" continues to benefit the super-rich while the middle class, what's left of it, sinks into poverty. As the jobs vanish and the institutions ordinary people depend on fail, the Establishment, both its political and its financial wings, insulates itself from the failures. They take the lifeboats while everyone else goes down with the Titanic.Both here and in much of Europe, at least a third of the public knows the Establishment's policies don't work. That has put anti-Establishment parties, Right and Left, in places like Sweden, France, Switzerland, and Greece in power or within striking distance of power.Here, again, the Establishment is right in its confidence that both major parties' nominees will come from and represent the Establishment. One will almost certainly win.But here's an idea that would give them fits. When the conventions are over and the nominees chosen, an independent ticket emerges that can get itself on every ballot. What ticket? Trump for President, Sanders for Vice President, with both promising that Sanders will handle foreign policy and defense policy (only) and Trump domestic policy (only). Sanders would keep us out of more wars and begin defunding a military that can't win Fourth Generation conflicts. Trump would start stripping political correctness out of federal government policy and enthusiastically turn on his fellow billionaires and their dragon hordes.Would a Trump/Sanders ticket win? A plurality of the popular vote, maybe; the Electoral College, almost certainly not. But Left/Right coalitions against the center have potentially great power. And voters would have a choice, not an echo.

The View From Olympus: Futility

The United States is bombing in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, most recently a hospital in the latter. Russia is bombing in Syria. Saudi Arabia is bombing in Yemen. What do all these have in common? Futility.Bombing is now what a state does when it wants to appear to be doing something, but would really rather not. It is governments' easy out. A faction at court is whispering that our interests are being slighted in Karjackistan? The opposition in parliament is saying we are a "do-nothing" government? But, good sirs, we are doing something. We're bombing!Does this mean the people killed and maimed by the bombs, and the airmen who put themselves at risk, are doing so for nothing? Not at all. They are giving their lives to protect politicians' backsides. What cause could be more noble?There is a test to determine whether a government is serious or is just playing at war. Is the bombing integrated with actions of a capable ground force? In Iraq and Afghanistan, the answer is obvious.An aside: The U.S. Army, which has patches for everything, including digging latrines, designed a patch for the troops now back in Iraq. Regrettably, just before it was issued, some spoilsport noticed it was a virtual duplicate of the symbol for the Muslim Brotherhood. May I suggest an alternative? How about an American soldier desperately trying to rally a mob of fleeing Iraqi or Afghan troops?In some parts of northern Syria, our bombing, at least some of it, has been in support of an effective army, the Kurds. But the Kurds' reach is geographically limited, and the Turks are now bombing them. Were we serious, we would tell the Turks to stop, or if necessary give the Kurds some air cover.The Saudis and their Gulf State allies have put ground forces into Yemen, but they haven't attempt much, probably because the Houthis can kick their butt. The main effect of their bombing has been the usual one, i.e., make all the locals come together against them. When people are bombed by aircraft immune to any response, they get motivated to strike back in other ways.That brings us to the Russians in Syria. Diplomatically, Russia's bombing campaign has given her a seat at the table. The fighters she has deployed are a warning to the Turks and others not to bomb Assad's forces. But Moscow, unlike Washington, is run by realists. Realists know bombs alone do little to attain any serious objective. That suggests Russia will also send in ground troops the aircraft can support.As she appears to be doing. At first, the Marines, airborne, and Spetznaz the Russians sent into Syria seemed to be for airfield defense. That is certainly part of their mission. But reports suggest they are now entering into the ground fight. Moscow also announced Russian "volunteers" would be heading for Syria. The word "volunteer" has never had quite the same meaning in Russia as it does elsewhere.Not surprisingly, Moscow's realism is beating Washington's drole de guerre. Iran and Iraq (yes, the Iraq 5000 Americans died to create; thank you George W.) just signed an alliance with Moscow, leaving us out in the cold. Why? Because when Moscow says it will help, the help starts arriving next week. It does not come with absurd "human rights" conditions attached telling the Iraqi government not to employ its most effective forces, the Shiite militias. Russain weapons are simple enough for the locals to use and maintain. Maybe Russians can even provide trainers whose trainees fight instead of running. The Army's National Training Center discovered long ago that Russian tactics are easier to teach and learn, and more effective, than American tactics.The story in Washington and in European capitals is the same in everything: rule by an incompetent and disinterested elite that lives in Disneyland, can't make things work, and isn't serious about anything but remaining the elite. At some point, drole de guerre will yield to a bottom-up feu do joie. 

The View From Olympus: Invasion by Immigration

Were Russian tank divisions now pouring into Germany, it is safe to say Germany would be fighting back. As it happens, Germany and Europe are now suffering an invasion more dangerous than that would be. Yet all Frau Merkel can do is stand by the side of the road handing posies to the invaders.As I have pointed out for many years, in a world of Fourth Generation war, invasion by immigration is more dangerous--not less dangerous--than invasion by a foreign army. Why? Because unless the invaders are a Roman army, the enemy army usually goes home. He may permanently occupy a province--Silesia, Elsass-Lothringen--but an enemy state seldom swallows the whole thing and changes it into a place unrecognizable in both its people and its culture to those who lived there before. At least until Stalin did it to eastern Poland and Germany east of the Oder-Neisse line.But vast numbers of immigrants do exactly that. The reason Gaul, Spain, Britain, and Italy in the year 800 bore no resemblance to those places in the year 300 was mass immigration. The current invasion of Europe by Moslems from the south is actually worse, because while most of the barbarians moving in wanted to become Romans--their numbers were too great for that--Islamics have no desire to assimilate. They plan to Islamicize Europe.The September 18 New York Times quoted Marine le Pen of France's National Front as saying, "Unless the French people take action, the invasion of the migrants will be every bit the same as that of the fourth century, and could have the same consequences." Regrettably, the invasion of France has already succeeded, leaving that country occupied by millions of Islamic Arabs bitterly hostile to French culture.But the suicide of Germany and the rest of Europe that is welcoming the invaders must continue so long as Globalists remain in power. The notion that all peoples, religions, and cultures are wonderful and peaceful (except Western culture, the White  race, and the Christian religion, which are evil and oppressive) is central to Brave New World's ideology. That ideology is, of course, the cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt School. Its goal, from its initial conception in 1919 (independently) by Gramsci in Italy and Lukacs in Hungary, has been the destruction of the Christian West.In all the West, as of now only one country, little Hungary, is acting to halt the invasion. This role is not new to Hungarians, who fought the Turks for centuries. Not only has Hungary forcefully closed its southern border, it has rightly called for a joint European force to defend the borders of Greece. The best place to stop the invaders is on the beaches. If the Greek islands are easy for the migrants to reach, they are also easy places from which to send them back.Europe's and especially Germany's welcome to hostile invaders has its roots, as does so much evil, in World War I. As we commemmorate that awful tragedy, we should continually remind ourselves how deeply it still warps our societies, to the point where they commit suicide. The West's lost belief in itself and its willingness to become a doormat for other cultures and religions comes straight from the Somme, Ypres, and Verdun. The absence of any Western country beyond Hungary to stand up to the invaders is part of the price for the fall of the Houses of Hapsburg and Hohenzollern. It is not hard to envision Kaiser Wilhelm's orders to his troops in the face of today's invaders, nor his reaction to the fact of Germany being led by a Hausfrau.As I wrote recently, Germany's reaction to invasion is so detached from reality, so much a product of Wolkenkukusheim, that is may end up for the good. Frau Merkel and the rest of the anti-German Germany notwithstanding, the German people are starting to resist. The empty thrones in Berlin and Vienna await their Christian monarchs.

The View From Olympus: Puffery

A naive article in the August 26th New York Times raised the question of whether U.S. military headquarters were overstating the results of our campaign against ISIS. Of course they were, and are. How do I know? Because such puffery is standard operating procedure all the way up the chain of command.The Times reported breathlessly that

The Pentagon's inspector general is investigating allegations that military officials have skewed intelligence assessments about the United States-led campaign in Iraq against the Islamic State to provide a more optimistic account of progress...The investigation began after at least one civilian Defense Intelligence Agency analyst told the authorities that he had evidence that officials at United States Central Command...were improperly reworking the conclusions of intelligence assessments prepared for policy makers, including President Obama.

Yawn. The only surprise here is that the Times is, or acts, surprised. It may actually be surprised, because the quality of reporting on military affairs has gone to hell in the last three or four decades. One hopes President Obama and those close to him know most if not all intelligence estimates they are given are puffed to favor whatever the military bureaucracy wants to be true. That means whatever makes it look good and supports the case for more money.Americans who know the system may think it has to be this way; it is simply how military and intelligence bureaucracies work. It's no different in other countries. But here's the surprise: there was an exception.In a brilliant article published several decades ago, I don't remember where, Professor Williamson Murray told the story of a military that did the opposite. Titled "The German Response to Victory in Poland," it detailed how the Wehrmacht reacted to a stunning victory, in the first test of what is popularly known as Blitzkrieg, not by crowing on its dunghill as we do (Grenada, Panama, the First Gulf War, the initial stages of the Second Gulf War ["Mission Accomplished"]), but with intense self-criticism. The higher the headquarters, the more insistent were the demands for the bad news: what had not worked, which units and commanders performed poorly, where pre-war training had proved deficient. More, the German chain of command was able to meet those demands with honest reports and assessments. The result was a far-reaching program of reforms, implemented under forced draft, without which the 1940 campaign in France might have had a different outcome.Why was the German chain of command able to do what ours cannot? The answer lies in the characteristics the German Army looked for in its officers. First, it demanded complete honesty at all times. Not only was active dishonesty not tolerated, neither was passive dishonesty: keeping your mouth shut and letting something you knew was wrong go through. The sin of omission was considered worse than the sin of commission.Second, it despised careerism. The surest way to guarantee you would not get promoted was to show you cared about it. Of course, like any army that does not want to institutionalize moral cowardice and the Peter Principle, it did not have a rule of "up or out."Third, the characteristic the Wehrmacht valued most highly in an officer was strength of character, which it defined as an eagerness to make decisions, take responsibility, and get the result the situation required, regardless of orders, procedures, or obstacles.That yielded a chain of command that could both require and provide honest reporting.What about us? The picture is a diametric opposite. Trapped in our up-or-out personnel system, officers quickly learn to tell those above them what they want to hear. Doing otherwise could endanger their promotion. Lying is not only tolerated, it is expected. The Army recently did a study confirming this, which I referenced in an earlier column. It is no different in the other services.Second, obviously, with up-or-out everyone is compelled to be a careerist, and most general officers have become general officers by being careerists from day one.Third, consistent with its inward-focused, Second Generation culture, the U.S. military is frightened by officers who take initiative, violate procedures, and get results. Strong character upsets apple carts. Officers who show it are weeded out at every level of promotion, so few make it to or near the top. The percentage of military competent captains is a lot higher than the percentage of militarily competent generals.So we have a system that lies to the public, lies to the president, and lies to itself. The last may be the most dangerous.

Towards a True Economic Third Position

There are at present many efforts to create a third position in economics, most of which go from the spectrum of kooky voodoo economics such as Social Credit Theory on the right and Participatory economics on the left, and essentially socialists in third position clothing such as syndicalism and fascism. The goal of this essay is not to deconstruct these false third position models, but to offer a true third position. This will essentially be similar to distributism, though I have some objections to distributism as it is now popularly formulated. For more on that see my essay “Rethinking Christian Economics.”The Biblical Economic ModelWhen we discuss what economic model we should have we first need to discuss what is the nature and end of man. If man has no nature and/or no end, then any old system should work since man would be infinitely malleable and able to fit into any system with sufficient conditioning, ergo none would be better than another. This I reject. I agree with the Shorter Westminster Catechism that, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.” I will not attempt in this article to give justifications for this assumption, merely assume it as the first principle of anthropology.If we accept this basic principle of anthropology, we then look to the Bible to see what end God directs us to. If we use biblical principles we see that many forms of economic action are condemned as sin. The most significant change would be the outlawing of usury. We see prohibitions in Leviticus 25:36-37; Nehemiah 5:7-10; Psalms 15:5; Proverbs 28:8; Ezekiel 18:8-17; Ezekiel 22:12. We see in Psalms 28:8 and Ezekiel 22:12 that God views usury as akin to extortion. There was an exception for Jews to lend money to gentiles at usury in Deuteronomy 23:20. I believe that Christ in his Parable of the Good Samaritan where the term neighbor is expanded to include not only Jews, but also gentiles closed that gap, since exchanging usury is not a form of love. We see in Luke 6:35 that Christ demands we do not lend expecting anything in return. With such evidences I think that the Gentile loophole has been closed to a complete prohibition on charging of usury.We see in Psalms 24:1 that God owns the earth which implies that property taxes are immoral since the government has no right to extract profit from what it does not own. Eminent domain (legalized state theft of property) is immoral where we see Ahab and Jezebel in 1st Kings 21 first murdering Naboth and then stealing his property, which was given to him as a trust by his father. As we see in Proverbs 13:22 that one should leave an inheritance for one’s children which would imply that the death tax and inheritance tax is immoral. We see in Numbers 36 the right of women to inherit property. From 1st Timothy 5:3-16, in which Paul exhorts families to take care of their elders and if the widow has no family or their family is unable to care for them then the church should do so, we can derive the principle of subsidiarity: a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to co-ordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.” Socialism is fundamentally evil in that, insofar as it destroys private property and establishes a welfare regime, one is correspondingly less able to maintain one’s elders.Private property is the bedrock of civilization, as Aristotle observed, men take better care of what they possess and that private property facilitates two virtues: continence and liberality. Based on the principle that no man can live in isolation for only animals and gods can live self-sufficiently in isolation, Aristotle argues that people come together to form families and families come together to form states (in his case city-states). We see that in capitalism the individual is the focus of the economy, in socialism the collective, and in distributism the family. The family is the smallest self-sufficient unit in society and thus is the wellspring of society. The word economics comes from the two Greek words Oikos (Household) and Nomos (Law). We see that historically economics was concerned with providing enough for each household to take care of its needs. This principle of self-sufficiency is the foundation of further civilizational development and as such the economy should seek to encourage self-sufficiency. In Joshua 14 and 15 we see that God desires tribes (extended households) to have land to be self-sufficient. In fact that land is not to be sold; for with the implementation of Jubilee every 50 years and the story of Naboth, we see that God desired the dispersion of property not its concentration.How do we Get There?Clearly our current economic model is not distributism and is a mixture of capitalism and socialism with seemingly the worst of both. I propose three possible methods used individually or in conjunction that could allow a transition from our current mixed-economy to a distributist economy: (1) prosecuting firms for criminal action and restoring to the victims fourfold (Luke 19:8); (2) the example shown in the Peasant’s Land Bank, and (3) the Land-to-Tiller Program.I propose that firms that have engaged in criminal action be prosecuted and their assets be redistributed to the aggrieved parties fourfold, what I call the Zacchaeus Plan. This would work to divest the corporations of their ill-gotten gain and serve to chip away at concentrated wealth.The Peasant’s Land Bank was an effort by secretary of finance Nikolai Bunge to give the peasants access to credit to purchase land from the Boyars (nobles) and in conjunction with this effort Stolypin realized that the lack of a middle class would only aid in the fomenting of rebellion and economic stagnation. After seeing the Revolution of 1905 he correctly identified the need for agrarian form. Seeing that a middle class is founded on independent property holders they sought to purchase land from the boyars to distribute the land back to the peasants. While marred by corruption and inefficiencies the process was largely successful, and by 1913 the bank had helped the peasants acquire 46 million acres. For more on the Peasant’s Land Bank and other Russian agrarian reforms see Russian Peasants and Village Lands, 1861-1917: A Summary Compiled by Alan Kimball.In Taiwan’s Land to the Tiller Program, property was peacefully and lawfully transferred from the Chinese landlords to the peasants. Chaing’s land reform can be understood in four parts: (1) leasing to the peasants land owned by the government, (2) reduce rent to 37.5%, (3) selling government land to peasants, (4) Land to the Tiller Program. The Land to the Tiller program transferred land from the landlords to the peasants by compensating the value of the property from the landlords with 70% of the price being paid in rice and potatoes and the remaining 30% in stocks in rising government firms.There are many possible peaceful and lawful means by which to transfer property in a more equitable way to the people without the needless bloodshed demanded by lunatic socialists and anarchists.How Do We Stay There?I have basically two means by which this property regime can be maintained. Firstly, I accept Aristotle’s notion that while man’s desires are potentially infinite, the number of goods available in the world are finite, and that man’s desires should be curtailed by education. So we begin by educating people to be content with what they need. As a practical legal method I argue for a return of biblical Sabbath year and Jubilee. We see in Deuteronomy 15:1-6 that every seven years (Sabbath Year) the tribes of Israel were required by God to free slaves, admittedly only Hebrew slaves, and forgive debts. In Leviticus 25:8-12 we see that land should be returned to its original owner. In practical terms Jubilee could be modeled in using the concept of usufruct. I will use the Investopedia definition of usufruct:

“A legal right accorded to a person or party that confers the temporary right to use and derive income or benefit from someone else's property. Usufruct is usually conferred for a limited time period or until death. While the usufructuary has the right to use the property, he or she cannot damage or destroy it, or dispose of the property.”

If we consider limiting the time period to fifty years I think we have a rough approximation of usufruct-Jubilee contract.ConclusionI assert that third position economics on both the right and the left goes from either kookiness or socialism. I propose an alternative biblical/Aristotelian distributism model. I have provided a few possibilities by which our current property regime can be legally transformed into this new property regime, and how such a regime can be maintained, which is more than any anarcho-socialist on the Left or social credit theorist on the Right can do.

The View From Olympus: Europe Revolts!

The mudslide of Third World immigrants pouring over Europe would seem to mark that continent's end. They will come by the millions and tens of millions, so long as Europe's door remains open. Few will ever acculturate. Instead of becoming Europeans, they will turn Europe into a duplicate of the hellholes they are trying to escape.Europe's culturally Marxist elites are incapable of stemming the tide. Their ideology forbids them to do so. German chancellor Merkel, who appears to be as fervent a cultural Marxist as Walther Ulbricht was an economic Marxist, was quoted in the September 1 New York Times as saying, "If Europe fails on the question of refugees, if this close link with universal human rights is broken, then it won't be the Europe we wished for." If Frau Merkel's "universal human rights", which do not exist--rights belong only to a state's own citizens--triumph, there won't be a Europe at all.Given the lock cultural Marxism has on all of Europe's leadership, except perhaps Hungary's, it would seem to be game over. Cultural Marxism will attain the goals it set in 1919, the destruction of Western culture and the Christian religion, at least in the West's heartland.But I don't think that is what will happen. Instead, I think we are on the verge of a revolt against cultural Marxism and the elites by ordinary Europeans.That revolt has been underway for some time in Britain, France, and Scandinavia. It has manifested itself in the growing electoral strength of real conservative parties, such as the UK Independence Party, Marine le Pen's National Front, and the Sweden Democrats.But what of Germany? German law makes it difficult for any German nationalist party to rise. The Bundesrepublik is effectively an anti-German Germany, and most expressions of volkish loyalty are forbidden. All Germans are supposed to do is apologize endlessly for the whole of German history, not just the thirteen years of the Third Reich. Arminius, it seems, was also a Nazi, as his rejection of Varus and his fellow Roman immigrants shows.Lenin said that no revolution could begin at a railway station in Germany because the Germans would have to line up to buy tickets. It is true German culture is a culture of order. But it is precisely because of that i think this revolution, the revolution against millions of immigrants and the ideology that demands their entry, will really take off in Germany.Immigrants from places like the Middle East and Africa bring disorder with them. They come from places where the German virtues--honesty, forthrightness, cooperation for the common good, civic-mindedness, even basic cleanliness--are unknown or regarded as something for simpletons. In those cultures, the only rule is, "Grab whatever you can for yourself." Lying, cheating, stealing, all are perfectly fine, because you owe nothing to anyone who is not a family member. The world outside the family is Hobbesian. Push, punch, scream, and grab: that is the behavior these people have learned from birth. They will not forget it because they now live in an ordered, honest society.A few years ago, in Stockholm, I needed some pipe cleaners. I stopped in a shop and bought a pack for 30 crowns. I thought that was expensive even for Sweden, so I checked the price in a different shop: 13 crowns. Then the light bulb went on. I realized the man who charged me 30 crowns wasn't Swedish. He did not look Swedish, nor did he speak English with a Swedish accent. He was Middle Eastern. He had done what everyone does in his culture: cheat anyone he could. In Sweden it's easy because people do not expect to be cheated.This is now coming to Germany like a tsunami. The anti-German German government has told people to expect 800,000 refugees just this year. Again, so long as the door remains open, they will come in the millions and tens of millions, a tide of refuse covering Germany and the rest of Europe.I don't think the German people will stand for it. I predict a revolt. Already, Merkel is being booed and people are carrying signs saying "Volksverrater," "traitor to the people." How the German people will revolt, I cannot say; at the ballot box, perhaps, if given a Völkisch party to vote for. If that route is closed to them, they may take to the streets, tickets or no. They are not going to put up with Germany being turned into a place of dirt and disorder.If you haven't read Look Who's Back, you may want to.

A Ruling Class Hissy Fit

The reaction of the ruling elite and their minions in official conservadom to the Donald Trump surge is best characterized as a hissy fit, an extended temper tantrum that the GOP base isn’t doing what they want them to. The elite and their gatekeepers can’t seem to figure out why Trump is surging and why the peons who support him won’t listen to their betters. What is more puzzling is why they didn’t see this coming and why it hasn’t happen sooner. The writing has been on the wall for a while.Anyone who wants to understand the Trump phenomenon should read the book The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It by Angelo Codevilla. It was first published as a rather longish essay in the American Spectator magazine. It was so well received that American Spectator updated it, added an introduction by Rush Limbaugh and published it as a book.At first glance, Codevilla perhaps seems like an unlikely candidate to write such a book. Arguably a member of the ruling class himself, he was first an influential government employee before moving on to the Hover Institute think tank and then to Boston University as a professor of international relations. With a Ph.D from the Claremont Graduate School and a history of foreign policy hawkishness, he was also perceived as at least somewhat neoconish. My impression is that he may have backed away from his hawkishness a bit in the last few years, but where exactly Codevilla stands on foreign policy is beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice it to say that regardless of Codevilla’s own shaky credentials as a pitchfork-wielding man of the people, his insights in the book ring true and are much appreciated.Whether Codevilla intended it as such or not, The Ruling Class has been praised as a brilliant example of elite class analysis. According to Dr. Paul Johnson of Auburn University, elite theory suggests that:

American politics is best understood through the generalization that nearly all political power is held by a relatively small and wealthy group of people sharing similar values and interests and mostly coming from relatively similar privileged backgrounds. Most of the top leaders in all or nearly all key sectors of society are seen as recruited from this same social group, and elite theorists emphasize the degree to which interlocking corporate and foundation directorates, old school ties and frequent social interaction tend to link together and facilitate coordination between the top leaders in business, government, civic organizations, educational and cultural establishments and the mass media. This "power elite" can effectively dictate the main goals (if not always the practical means and details) for all really important government policy making (as well as dominate the activities of the major mass media and educational/cultural organizations in society) by virtue of their control over the economic resources of the major business and financial organizations in the country.

Well, you don’t say? This observation is a “no duh” to Trump supporters. A bear does what in the woods?According to Codevilla, Democrat voters are much more satisfied with their party because they see it as serving their interests. On the other hand, Republican voters, who are mostly middle-class yokels in flyover country, are not happy with their party because they see it as asking them for votes every two years then promptly going to Washington and serving the interests of someone else, the primarily bi-coastal elite donor class.For example, “Fast Track” trade legislation was recently rammed through Congress at the behest of the Chamber of Commerce set thanks to the yeoman efforts of Republican legislators to salvage it following a legislative setback. This was despite polling data and an overwhelmingly disproportionate number of calls, letters, and emails that indicated their base was extremely hostile to it. And then party leaders and Conservative Inc. gatekeepers scratch their heads and can’t figure out why some people are so angry and supporting Trump. Trump is the chickens coming home to roost.I have no use for the Republican party leadership, but I don’t doubt that some of the conservative gatekeepers are well intentioned. Trump is not a check-all-the-boxes conservative to say the least, and he certainly says things that shock the sensibilities of small-government and free-market advocates. I’m sure many are sincere in their attempts to safeguard the Republican brand and conservatism as they understand it, but the gatekeepers too often come off as apologists for said fat cat elites, often to the point of parody. Unlike political hobbyists, most voters are not ideologues. Many people vote viscerally and appearances and general impressions matter to them. Which candidate really cares about me? If that’s the question for the angry GOP base, Trump crushes ¡Jeb!It is not impossible to mix free-market orthodoxy with populism. Ron Paul was able to walk this fine line with some success. In fact, as Codevilla points out in The Ruling Class, popular sentiment has increasingly come to be characterized by “leave me alone and get out of my business” attitudes as the government has expanded and become more and more intrusive, but you can’t come off like the guy on the Monopoly board either. If the leadership of the Republican Party and Conservative Inc. want to reconnect with a base they are quickly losing, I suggest they pick up a copy of The Ruling Class, and give it a read. I doubt it will do much good, but maybe they won’t be so baffled.

Counterattack!

A modern military defense, as first developed by the German Army during World War I, is based not on rigidly holding a line but on the counterattack. If the enemy initially penetrates, so much the better; it is all the easier for the counterattack to destroy him.Unfortunately, in politics, conservatives' defenses remain pure trench warfare. The strategic result is slow but steady defeat. What if instead we began counterattacking? How might this work?The cultural Marxists' recent victory on the the gay "marriage" issue--such a marriage actually remains impossible, because it is not what the word "marriage" means--provides an example. This victory, enabled by an ideologically-driven four-vote block on the Supreme Court that sees itself and acts like a revolutionary tribunal (and is thus illegitimate) merely sets up the cultural Marxists' next attacks. They will be directed against any institution that continues to reject gay "marriage", including churches that will not perform such ceremonies (their tax exemptions will be threatened) and private wedding-related businesses that will not serve gay weddings; the latter we have already experienced, in the form of lawsuits against such businesses.Here is a perfect example of a situation where conservatives could counterattack. If the law will not offer a conscience protection clause for such businesses, we can make the Left regret the absence of such protection. How? Examples include:

• Go to Jewish bakeries and order cakes decorated with the swastika.
• Order cakes decorated with the Confederate battle flag from black-owned bakeries.
• Order cakes from gay-owned bakeries decorated with the words, "God hates queers."
• Go to gay-owned florists and order flower arrangements for rallies against gay "marriage".

I am certain other conservatives can come up with more ideas along these lines. The goals is to put members of the cultural Marxists' coalition in the same position as Christians who own wedding-related businesses. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Two can play at this game.We might do well to make that phrase, "two can play at this game," the motto for a conservative strategy of counterattacking instead of just trying to fend off the Left's attacks. Conservatives have sufficient creativity to come up with specic ways to counterattack in many situations. What is lacking at the moment is the concept of a counterattack-based defense. We need to make that concept central to our efforts to protect what is left of our traditional culture. The alternative is a strategy that only influences how quickly we lose.

The View From Olympus: News Flash! Air Force Gets First Victory in "War on Terror"

After just fourteen years of combat, on Friday, August 21, the U.S. Air Force scored its first victory in the "War on Terror", history's first war against an emotion. Not surprisingly, the victory had nothing to do with aircraft. It was won by an enlisted airman who courageously took on a heavily-armed would-be terrorist on a train from Amsterdam to Paris. With help from two other Americans, one a National Guardsman, and two European civilians, the airman saved many innocent civilian lives. Far from being equipped with the latest bombs and missiles, the airman, Spencer Stone, and those assisting him were unarmed.There are some important points hidden in this otherwise minor incident. First, the U.S. Air Force won what it has been incapable of winning thus far in 4GW, a victory at the moral level. The moral victory came because the American airman was an unarmed man confronting another who was well armed. This reversed the usual situation. In all other 4GW to date, the Air Force has been the heavily armed party fighting against people with few or no air defenses. What Martin van Creveld calls the power of weakness guaranteed that no matter what the Air Force accomplished physically, it lost.Second, the Air Force's victory came not be cause of its vast command and control system, with its many layers of headquarters and endless complex procedures, but because one enlisted man took the initiative and acted to get the result the situation required. He exhibited Third Generation behavior in a Second Generation system. He was only able to do that because he was on leave.Third, Airman First Class Spencer Stone, his two friends, one a civilian, and the two European civilians showed how an effective defense against random, loner 4GW attacks works. It cannot depend on the National Security State. Even with its vast (and unwelcome) growth, the NSS can only cover a small fraction of a society's vulnerable points. Effective protection in 4GW depends on a citizenry that will act in its own defense.What the situation requires is in effect an updated form of a universal militia, a militia for Fourth Generation war. Unlike past militias, this one will not be a formal organization. There will be no uniforms, ranks, drill, or weapons. It will consist, ideally, of every male old enough but not too old to fight. Its members will pledge themselves--the pledge may be explicit or implicit--to act as Airman Stone and his helpers did on the train to Paris. When a "terrorist" (or just a nut case) shows a weapon, everybody jumps him. Some may die. On the train to Paris, those who acted said later they expected to die. But no loner or small group of shooters can hold off lots of other men coming at them, even if they are unarmed. Once would-be terrorists know they will be opposed and overrun, some will be deterred. Those who go ahead anyway and open up on civilians will lose at every level. Physically they will get stomped. Mentally they will fail to terrorize, because their actions will be met not with terror but with courage. Morally they and their cause will suffer a heavy defeat because they will be fought and beaten by those weaker than themselves, i.e., people without weapons. They will lose for the same reason the U.S. Air Force lost every previous engagement in the "War on Terror": Goliath always loses.For those of us who do not welcome the National Security State, a universal 4GW militia offers a way to provide security with liberty. The NSS is and will always be a threat to liberty, because it represents ever-greater government intrusion into our lives. A militia poses no such threat. Unarmed and purely defensive, it does not threaten liberty, it exemplifies it. It shows how a free people replies to danger: through individual initiative. 

The View From Olympus: A Voice From the Past

Last year, friends gave me a splendid Christmas present in the form of all ten volumes of Samuel Pepys' diary covering the years 1660-1670. (As if that were insufficient, they accompanied it with a richly decorated chamber pot for the Imperial Library). Pepys, a civilian, was primarily responsible for developing the first modern naval administration, which turned a collection of ships into the Royal Navy.The diary's entry for July 4, 1663, touches on a broader matter. After visiting a general muster of the King's Guards, Pepys wrote,

Where a goodly sight to see so many fine horse and officers, and the King, Duke (of York) and others come by a-horseback . . . (I) did stand to see the horse and foot march by and discharge their guns, to show a French Marquesse (for whom this muster was caused) the goodness of our firemen; which endeed was very good . . . yet methought all these gay men are not soldiers that must do the King's business, it being such as these that lost the old King (Charles I) all he had and were beat by the most ordinary fellows that could be.

Pepys' theme, the defeat of parade-ground armies by "most ordinary fellows", is an old one. It appears to be unknown to our own military, or, more likely, they know it but cannot conceive it applies to them.But it does. With all their vastly expensive equipment, they can put on a wonderful show, shows such as Gulf War I and the initial phase of Gulf War II. But once they no longer face another king's Royal Guards and come up against those ordinary fellows, they lose. The U.S. Marines, who put on a show all the time, and a very convincing one, are now 0-4 against guys in bathrobes and flip-flops armed with rusty AKs. Pepys' age-old theme repeats itself.This faces us with two problems, one difficult, the other impossible. The first is how to turn a parade ground military into one that can fight war as it is, not as they want it to be, and win. We know the basic answers: reduce the number of officers above the company grades to a fraction of their present number, fire the contractors, get rid of up-or-out, adopt a regimental system and a true general staff, and change the type of people we promote. Do the intellectual work necessary to understand Fourth Generation war, and revise doctrine and training accordingly. Dump the hi-tech weapons useful only for parades. Most challengingly, get rid of the U.S. military's 2GW culture with its inward focus and adopt the Third Generation's outward-focused culture.All that would be hard enough. But before we can attempt any of it, we must confront the impossible problem: finding national political leadership willing to put enough chips on military reform to make it happen.If we survey the current crop of presidential candidates, we find not a one who even knows what military reform means. Most of the Republicans just howl for yet more spending on the Pentagon, to make the parade ground military even bigger. The Democrats, as usual, know nothing about defense and could not care less about it. Three candidates might--might--listen to someone who does know what military reform means: Trump, Sanders, and Rand Paul. The only reason to think they might have an interest is that they are anti-Establishment. The mice who are the remaining candidates squeak and twitter with fear at the notion of changing anything. A hint they might do so would be enough to endanger their Establishment membership.When Trump says the problem is that our current politicians are dumb, he is half right. Most show intelligence at only one task, promoting themselves. But the other half of the problem is that they are cowards. They will risk nothing for the good of the country.The reason Trump and Sanders are surging is that both have shown not only some sign of a brain, but also guts. The American people know something is drastically wrong with our country's direction, and they are desperate to find a leader who will change our course. Most of our soldiers and Marines know the same about business as usual in their service. Where are real military leaders, men with brains and courage, to come from? Nowhere, so long as the politicians who choose our senior commanders and service chiefs remain mice.

Donald Trump vs. Davos Man

Coined by political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, the term "Davos Man" was meant to refer to members of the global elite who view themselves as completely international. They have no need for the term "nationality" and feel that governments are merely shadows of time past to be used as facilitators in their global operations. ~ Akash ArasuThe pundit and activist class can’t seem to figure Donald Trump out, but as I have attempted to argue elsewhere, Trump’s politics are not really as inscrutable as all that. Trump is that guy at the barbershop who says "We need to run the US more like a business. What America needs is a CEO, not another President." Trump just happens to have a lot of money and the credentials to be that CEO himself. The theme that the US is getting out negotiated on the international stage and we should start acting more in our own economic best interests have been there since Trump first became a public figure in the 1980's. Trump, for example, opposed NAFTA before opposing trade deals was the cool thing to do on the right. The consistency of this message suggests that it is sincere, regardless of whatever one might think about the Trump phenomenon that has erupted since he announced his campaign. This economic nationalist message is the key to understanding Trump’s politics. All the rest is noise.Due to their confusion about where Trump is coming from, an argument that I have encountered frequently in social media and the conservative blogosphere is the contention that Trump is actually himself just another member of the Establishment. Therefore, his anti-Establishment supporters are misguided and being played. But if Trump is just another member of the Establishment, why does he have the Establishment so panicked? There is more to being a card carrying member of the Establishment than being rich, hobnobbing with stars and giving money to politicians in both parties. People who mistake the trapping of wealth for Establishment status are allowing the details to distract them from the big picture.In fact, Trump’s economic policies and theoretical framework challenge the Establishment’s basic operating assumptions to the core. The Establishment economic policy is globalist neoliberalism. They want to decrease the importance of national borders and national sovereignty in order to make the world safer for international finance and commerce, hence their support for mass immigration and sovereignty-compromising “free trade” deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership.Trump’s opposition to “free trade” deals and open borders and unabashed advocacy of economic nationalism directly challenges the Establishment consensus in a way that no other candidate does. All the major candidates in both parties with the possible exception of Bernie Sanders actually take Establishment neoliberal presumptions for granted.I wince a little when I hear Trump says that America’s leaders are “stupid” and are being out-negotiated by the more clever leaders of Mexico, Japan, China, etc. This is grating and potentially unhelpful. What is really the issue here is not smarts but priorities. The leaders of these other nations negotiate with the economic interests of their own countries in mind, while the US negotiates on the basis of fidelity to some imagined set of international rules of fair play, which just so happen to perpetuate the current system that enriches the global elite at the expense of national integrity. But regardless of Trump’s less than ideal formulation, who else is saying this?Trump is ultimately a patriot who loves his country and wants to restore it to its former glory, as suggested by his campaign slogan “Make America Great Again.” Imagine that. But this chauvinistic attitude is contrary to the rootless cosmopolitanism of the global elite.  If you’re still struggling with Trump’s place in relation to the Establishment, ask yourself this: “Would Trump fit in at the World Economic Forum?”  Trump is not Davos Man described in the introductory quote. He is the antithesis of Davos Man. He is a red-blooded American patriot from Queens, New York who just happens to have a really big bank account. Criticize Trump’s policies and ways if you must, but let’s not have any more of this nonsense that he is just another member of the Establishment. If you don’t see the fallacy of this claim, you don’t get why Trump’s rise represents such a fundamental challenge to the ruling order.

The View From Olympus: President Obama is Right

Real conservatives hate war. War is the most expensive activity the state can engage in. Its outcome is always uncertain. Only revolution is a more powerful agent of social and cultural change, change conservatives exist to oppose (and war may be a prelude to revolution). Large standing armies are both an enormous expense and a threat to the rule of law. No wonder Edmund Burke, when Parliament was debating a possible war in the Low Countries, exclaimed, "A war for Antwerp? A war for a chamber pot!"President Obama was thus right in both senses of the word when he said on August 5th of his deal with Iran, “Let's not mince words: The choice we face is ultimately between diplomacy and some sort of war--maybe not tomorrow, maybe not three months from now, but soon."The President was right because, in the end, we have two choices: a deal with Iran, or war with Iran. There is no evidence we could negotiate a better deal than the one the Obama Administration got. All the (well-financed) debate you will hear and read over specific terms of the deal are irrelevant. If we reject it, for whatever reason, we are on course for yet another war in the Middle East.If Congress rejects the Iran deal, Iran will see no path to removal of the economic sanctions that hurt not just the regime but the Iranian people. The Iranian public will agree with the radicals that American enmity is implacable. The regime and the people will come together in favor of a greatly expanded nuclear program, one that will include numerous nuclear weapons and delivery systems for them. They will be able to purchase both the know-how and the systems themselves from Noth Korea, which has them now and would probably be happy to sell them tomorrow. That could reduce Iran's "break-out time" to weeks.Given the (unwise) statements by American political leaders across the spectrum, including President Obama, that the U.S. will not allow Iran to have nuclear weapons, such action on Iran's part would mean war. None of our leaders has the courage to say that an Iranian bomb is no threat to the U.S. and that we are not going to start yet another war on behalf of a certain small Middle Eastern country. The current leadership of that country and its agents here are always happy to fight to the last American soldier.Some voices in Washington will argue that a war with Iran would be a naval and air war, which we could win easily at small cost. That assumes the Iranians are stupid enough to play our game. I doubt they are. We have thousands of American troops within easy reach of Iran, in Iraq and Afghanistan. One phone call from Tehran to the Shiite Iraqi militias would be enough to round up the roughly 3000 American soldiers in Iraq tomorrow and turn them into hostages. American troops in Afghanistan would be a longer reach, but one that would be easy enough if Iran were to make a deal with the Taliban, which so far it has fought against. An alliance with a lesser enemy against a greater is an old strategic gambit. The world's oil supply would be another American hostage: plan on oil at $300 a barrel if you can get it.President 0bama's deal with Iran is right diplomatically and strategically. It is also on the right politically, i.e., it is conservative. No real conservative can want another Middle Eastern war, especially after we have lost two. That may point to the likely outcome of a third. The Pentagon has learned nothing from its failures.Meanwhile, Jeb Bush just announced that he has learned nothing from his dumb brother's failures and would like to repeat them. According to the August 12th Cleveland Plain Dealer, Jeb said he would fight ISIS in Syria by uniting

the moderate forces fighting IS in that country and for U.S. troops to "back them up as one force.""And we should back that force up all the way through -- not just in taking the fight to the enemy, but in helping them form a stable, moderate government."

Why not? It worked so well in Iraq.Ironically, Jeb made his modest proposal of turning Syria into Switzerland in a speech attacking Hillary, who is equally enthusiastic about "humanitarian intervention".Obama has stayed out of Syria, except for the usual bombing, and out of other Middle Eastern wars, at least after the debacle in Libya. Perhaps he learned from that blunder. Bush, Clinton et. al. seem incapable of learning, even from many blunders. At least when it comes to questions of peace or war, Obama is the real conservative.

The View From Olympus: Will the Real Military Please Stand Up?

Several weeks ago, something very important in the development of Fourth Generation war happened. On our own soil, the U.S. "military" had to be protected by civilian volunteer militiamen.The protection of U.S. military recruiting offices by armed volunteer militiamen occurred in response to the Islamic attack on two recruiting centers in Chattanooga. The Defense Department soon asked the militiamen to cease and desist, which they did. The fact that a militia's defense of the U.S. "military" lasted only briefly does not undo its significance. The sort of thing we are used to seeing in hollow states such as Lebanon happened here.The militia's action was not required, let me stress, because the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines who man our recruiting stations are incapable of defending themselves. The can do so, and would be happy to do so (well, the men anyway). Accounts of the Islamic attack suggest many of the recruiters behaved bravely, risking and sometimes giving their lives to protect others. They could not defend themselves because they are not allowed to be armed.Here is where the importence of this incident to the development of 4GW on American soil, something we should greatly fear, is to be found. The reason our military personnel are not allowed to be armed is two-fold. Both point to the essence of 4GW, the emptying out of the state of its content, at the moral level.The first reason is that too many of our servicemen's superiors, both generals and civilians (including their ultimate superiors, the politicians) are moral cowards. They live in terror that an incident could happen where they might be held responsible, endangering the thing they live for, personal career success. Armed servicemen might lead to--horrors!--shots being fired. Murphy's Law dictates that if enough shots are fired (even though we are talking very few), a civilian might get hit. The press will howl, "Who is To Blame?", crying women will be interviewed on television, and "successful" people may find themselves in an unwelcome spotlight. Better to leave our "military" disarmed. The casualties will only be little people who don't count.The second, and related, moral hollowing-out of the state we see demonstrated by not allowing our servicemen to carry weapons in the womanizing of the culture, concerning which I have written before. Women are genetically programmed, by evolution, to seek safety. Guns strike most of them as unsafe. The general or politicians who dared to say, "

Courage, people. Freedom requires taking risks. Yes, there may be some shoot-outs as our military personnel protect themselves and others from 4GW attacks, and yes, civilians may get hit in the crossfire. That is part of the price we must pay for liberty,

would end his career. The general would be fired, and the courageous politicians would be defeated at the next election as the women's vote went to his opponent, who would no doubt to promise to "keep women safe."There is yet another wrinkle, one that plays both to womanizing the culture and "leaders" who flee responsibility. If we arm our servicemen, does that include gang members or other servicemen with non-state primary loyalties? Both have already shot and killed other American servicemen. The answer, obviously, is no. Should people with likely non-state primary loyalties be allowed to join and serve in the U.S. military? Again, no.Then rise the shrieks and howls of the cultural Marxists, screaming "discrimination!" The moral cowards among our "leaders" have been conditioned to crawl and grovel before any accusation of political incorrectness, while those womanizing the culture are part of the culturally Marxist coalition.A state that wishes to survive in a 4GW world will learn to discriminate. Its military leaders will be chosen for their Verantwortungsfreudigkeit, joy in taking responsibility. Its political leaders will be men who put the good of the whole over the long term first and themselves a long way second. What is the chance America will do or have any of those things? The same as its chance of surviving as a state.

On Cities and Community

I presume to believe that I am not alone among traditionalists and conservatives in having a distaste for the modern city. Not only are they dirty, loud, obnoxious, crime-ridden, vice-infested, and often have the sanitary rating of a septic tank, but they tend to be places that bring out the worst in their residents. The larger the city, the worse they seem to be. It is almost as if cities act as focal lenses for the innate sinful nature of mankind, taking it and amplifying it synergistically whenever huge numbers of people are aggregated together in such close proximity.Yet, as a classically-minded student of Western history and civilization (I would classify myself as a “Neo-Ciceronian” if I absolutely had to identify with an “ideology”), I find this view to be at odds with how our forbearers thought of cities.For instance, in his oft-quoted but ill-translated dictum, Aristotle said that “man is a political animal.” This translation is unfortunate because it gives the modern observer, especially Americans who are often and unfortunately ignorant of classical thought, an incorrect sense of what Aristotle meant. He did not mean that man is at his fullest when he’s arguing about abortion on an internet forum or voting for which candidate from the Republicrat Party will (mis)represent him in Congress. A more correct translation of Aristotle’s statement would be that “man is a creature of the polis.” The polis, often called the “city-state,” was the focal point of classical Greek life. As such, it was more than just a location in which people aggregated to live their separate lives. Instead, the polis was a living, breathing organism. It was a community in which man not only lived his private life, but in which he was practically compelled to lead a public existence as well. In classical Greece, a man who refused public participation and led an exclusively private life was looked down upon. He was an idios, from which we derive our own term “idiot.” People who did not have a poleis culture, which included many of the peoples that the Greeks thought of as barbarians, and even rustic Greeks like the Thessalians, were viewed as being malformed and incomplete.The Romans had a similar view of things. Cicero (and surely his opinion must count for a lot!) lauded cities as beneficial and fulfilling for mankind, for much the same reasons as did Aristotle and other Greek thinkers. To be a citizen of a city of free men (municipia) made you a fuller person than the rustic provincial non-entity. And ultimately, this was why the highest aspiration for the upward-mover in the Empire was to be able to participate in the legal fiction of being a citizen of the city of Rome, even if one never actually laid eyes on it during one’s lifetime.This dichotomy in my own mind – a distaste for the cities I see around me, but the reverence for “the city” in our classical heritage – has gnawed at the back of my mind for quite a while. But then the resolution of these contradictory impulses came to me. The difference between the two lies in their differing aspects of “community”, the one being based upon our Traditional sense of community and identity, the other being directly opposed to it.As should be inferred from the comments above, classically-speaking, cities were not simply large aggregations of people. They were viewed as communities. They shared a commonality not only of culture and language and religion, but of purpose and direction and will. Or at least that was the idealized view of them, even if ancient cities departed from this to varying degrees in practice. What one person did for the community affected everyone else. The heroes like Pericles provided benefits to all the citizens of Athens. The traitors like Alcibiades caused great harm to them all.As Jeff Culbreath said (even if in a bit different context), “The nature of tradition is that it is lived in community.” Traditional life requires community because that is what allows individuals to live together without resorting to become wards of the external state or becoming competing elements within a society that only serve to rip it apart from the inside out. Community is what allows the family to prosper. Community engenders bonds of loyalty, purpose, and reciprocity. Community is what allows society to enjoin the “gentle persuasion” of stigma and social pressure against those who deviate too grossly from traditional modes and patterns, instead of using the “violent persuasion” of the force and power of the state. Community is what allows each member to work with and persuade others towards a common end without falling either into dictatorship of ochlocracy. It is not surprising that the most successful genuine republics (among which the United States would not be included, for we ceased to be a genuine republic by 1865) have been those with a strong sense of community and common purpose.It is exactly this that is missing from the modern American city. Think about what our cities are today, even the relatively well-functioning ones. They are simple aggregations of large numbers of people who are yet largely disconnected from each other. The people of Boston or San Francisco or Atlanta have no commonality of purpose. They have no unspoken yet very real bonds of loyalty and affection uniting them. They are the very essence of the idiotes of classical Greece, men and women whose sole loyalties are to themselves and their immediate families and the instant gratification of their desires, with no thought of their communities as a whole. Even in cases where ethnic enclaves may exist which create a small semblance of community, this extends only so far as the ethnic boundaries lay – they certainly do not unite these cities into “political” wholes in the Aristotlean sense.As such, it is little surprise that such cities are riven with crime (after all, you don’t rob or murder people you feel bonds of love and loyalty toward). No wonder these cities need the heavy hands of militarized police to keep their denizens in check. Are we surprised that they’re dens of iniquity and vice, when there are no social pressures from any community of Tradition to govern the baser impulses of these people?How did this aberrant style of city come about? It occurred as a result of the Industrial Revolution and the social upheavals in labor and the movement of populations from the countryside to the cities that happened as a result. People left their traditional communities – places where their grandparents had lived where their grandparents had lived – to become atomized cogs in the industrial machinery that drove the rise of automated, bank-financed corporatism. Cities in the classical era and the Middle Ages existed, and many were quite large, but within them, everyone who was not a criminal or an outcast had a place of dignity and relevance and respect and worth. In the industrial city, man became an expendable gear; if one breaks, replace him with another one who just floated in from the countryside. Ultimately, the problem is not the advance of the technology itself, but of the failure of social man to guard against the commoditization of human beings in a way that never could and never did occur in traditional society.The question then is, what can we do about this, if anything? Really, there’s nothing we could do about the state of our cities, short of nuking them and starting over. But as Traditionalists, we can seek to regenerate outlets for traditional society within the machine, at a demotic level. Start with the family, not just the nuclear, but the extended family. Work to create a sense of community with your neighbors. Seek to drive toward common purpose with those of a common culture. Build this around the churches, which in addition to meeting the spiritual needs of the people, have also served the practical roles of transmitters of social purpose and organizers of traditional society. Understand that, unlike what many of the libertarian “rugged individualists” may say, “community” does not mean “communism”. Community is not a dirty word. Community is the heart of our traditional culture. We can recover that culture when we recover that community.

The View From Olympus: Chattanooga

Fourth Generation war visited Chattanooga last week at the cost of four Marines and one sailor dead. It was not the first instance of 4GW on American soil, and it will not be the last.The killer was, again, Islamic. Islam is by no means the only non-state entity to which people may give their primary loyalty, but it is one of the more dangerous.To diminish the risk of 4GW posed by Islam, we need to take two actions. The first is to stop Islamic immigration into this country, and not only Islamic immigration, but immigration by anyone who is likely to refuse to acculturate. All immigrants who refuse to become culturally American provide a base for 4GW.The culturally Marxist Establishment insists on keeping the border open to such people because they help it attain its two main goals, first set by Gramsci in Italy and Lukacs in Hungary in l9l9, destroying Western culture and the Christian religion. Protecting ourselves from imported 4GW is "discrimination" in cultural Marxism's vocabulary. In a 4GW world, any state that wants to survive will discriminate very carefully in terms of who it lets in.The second action we need to take is to stop messing around in other peoples’ parts of the globe. So ong as we keep hitting them with drone and air strikes, they will try to hit us back on our own soil. What else should we expect? That war is waged only by one side? Here, the problem is not the cultural Marxists but people who call themselves "conservatives". They are not. Desires to rule the world and cram Brave New World down everyone else's throat are anti-conservative. At root they are nationalist, and nationalism arose on the left, not on the right. Russell Kirk was no friend of nationalism.Most interesting to me was our response to the Chattanooga killings. As in previous such cases, from the president on down we responded with anguish, with weeping, with great sorrow for this terrible tragedy.That is the response of a womanized culture. A masculine culture responds by getting mad and hitting back, hard.Of course the deaths of five servicemen were tragic for their families, friends and communities. But the pathetic spectacle of President Obama again mourning a "national tragedy” but doing nothing is not how a state that wants to live would act. (Note that few if any of the Republican candidates would behave differently.)A womanized culture is soft. Its reaction to anything bad is to weep, hold hands, put up memorials of flowers and teddy bears and generally dissolve in a puddle of tears. The world is seen as a boudoir, and the manners of the boudoir are carried into the real world. The real world chews them up and spits them out. As any student of history knows, softness is a society's last condition before it is swept away.An America with a masculine culture would have replied to this and other incidents with what 4GW theory calls the "Hama model". The President would have gone on television within a matter of hours to say to the nation, "As I am speaking, hundreds of American bombers are wiping the city of Raqqa off the map and killing every living thing in it. I warn all civilians in any other territory under the control of ISIS to flee. The same thing can happen to you." Not only would this have hit ISIS hard physically, it would have deprived it of its base, a much more serious injury. If no civilians would remain in any area controlled by ISIS, ISIS could not function.But presented with this alternative, our womanized culture again wrings its hands and weeps. "Oh, oh, women and children would be killed, so would poor, innocent animals. We would become war criminals. Oh, oh. Blub, blub."The Hama model does not contradict what I said earlier about our war of endless pinpricks. On the contrary, not doing "precise" air and drone strikes is part of the Hama model. It says, in effect, "Leave us alone and we will leave you alone. If you hit us, we will annihilate you. The Hama model is over fast.Instead, we will continue to wage a losing war of little, indecisive actions, the kind of war women wage on each other in their offices and clubs. Not content merely to womanize the general culture, Washington is now womanizing the military itself. I don't know which is laughing louder, Heaven or Hell.