The French Elections 2017 (Round One)

François Hollande, widely considered to be a failure with single digit approval ratings, has – unusually for French politics – decided not to run for a second term.

The polls are now split almost evenly between four canditates: The neoliberal Emmanuel Macron; the hard left Jean-Luc Mélenchon; the conservative François Fillon; and the nationalist Marine Le Pen.

The Socialist candidate, Benoît Hamon, a representative of the Globalist Left who advocates for greater social spending, a universal basic income, and is on record complaining about there being “too many white people” in his hometown of Brest, is trailing badly in the polls.

The two frontrunners will face off in a second round on May 7.


french-election-2017-candidate-positions

Source: Data Debunk.

Who’s Who?

One of the very best summaries I’ve seen on this is from this podcast between Amren’s Jared Taylor and the French identitarian thinker Guillaume Durocher.

The power summary below is mostly based on that conversation.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon

  • Ideology: Populist Left.
  • Wikipedia: “Domestic policies proposed by Mélenchon include a 100 per cent income tax on all French nationals earning over 360,000 Euros a year, full state reimbursement for healthcare costs, a reduction in presidential powers in favour of the legislature, and the easing of immigration laws.
  • That said, the Guardian’s neoliberal warmonger Natalie Nougayrède really dislikes him for his populism and relatively Russophile positions, so he can’t be all that bad.

Emmanuel Macron

  • Ideology: Globalist Center.
  • Former banker for Rothschild & Cie Banque; Minister of Economy under Hollande, but refrained from becoming a member of the Socialist Party, and has disassociated himself from Hollande’s government; pushed for reforms to make the labor market more flexible; used that as springboard to market himself as independent candidate.
  • No such thing as French culture, there is only culture in France and it is diverse.
  • Obama at least waited until he became President to start his apology tour. Called French colonialism a crime against humanity while in Algiers.
  • Russophobe – promises he will force Putin to “respect” France.
  • According to Durocher, “a very strange dude.” Married his HS teacher at the age of 18, even though she was 24 years his senior and had three children from a previous marriage. Unusually for a French politician, he has refrained from having affairs with younger women.
  • Is seen as the favorite of the Establishment liberal elites, and usually leads in the polls.
  • Durocher: Is getting the HRC treatment – journalists love him, oligarchs love him, he is on all the trendy magazine covers! But as with HRC, this implies that there might also be an artificial character to his poll numbers.

François Fillon

  • Ideology: Globalist Right.
  • Catholic; married to Englishwoman, has 4 children; PM under Sarkozy; not radical, but went off the reservation when he said France should help Putin against ISIS – in French politics, you have to be anti-Assad (and de facto pro-Islamist).
  • Moderately Russophile: Has acknowledged Crimea is Russian in “terms of history, culture and language,” and stresses the right of national self-determination, recalling Kosovo. But is this a genuine position, or a marketing ploy to gain the support of French farmers hoping for a repeal of Russian food sanctions?
  • Started off strong, but has since become embroiled in corruption scandals – usually this happens to politicians after their Presidency, not before. He has lost the support of the UDI party, and his spokesman has resigned. Durocher notes that he has never seen this amount of pressure against a mainstream candidate. This is suspicious, because many French politicians practice petty nepotism.

Marine Le Pen

  • Ideology: Populist/Nationalist Right.
  • Not as hardcore as her father, but still the best from an HBD/IQ-realistic perspective: Wants to shut down immigration, make naturalization virtually impossible, no birthright citizenship. If she can fulfill her promises, she will at least put a tourniquet on the demographic replacement.
  • Durocher: While the National Assembly may be uncooperative, she can put some items of her program to the referendum, such as #Frexit.
  • Strongly Russophile: Has stated that Crimea is Russian, that Russia is as European a country as any, has personally met with Putin (if she is going to be accused of being a Russian shill, one supposes she might as well reap the benefits of it by posing for a photo opp with a major world leader).

Who Will Win?

france-elections-2017-media-coverageAs Durocher said, the media absolutely loves Macron; according to a study by Harris Interactive, he gets more than twice as much positive as negative coverage (46% to 19%).

The numbers are almost inverse for Melenchon (20% to 35%), and unrelentingly negative for both Fillon (11% to 57%) and Le Pen (15% to 55%).

(Free Western media, folks! Not biased Kremlin TV.)

Le Pen suffers from the classic problem of all nationalists in multiparty systems – there is a hard ceiling to their support, beyond which all other forces – liberals, socialists, conservatives, maybe Islamists at some point in the future – set aside their differences to shove Hitler back into the closet.

For instance, in a Macron vs. Le Pen second round, /ourgal/ is pretty much bounded at 40%.

A vast improvement over her father, to be sure – his ceiling was around 20% – but still apparently hopeless.

In line with this, the Depuis 1958 Monte Carlo simulations model predicts the following chances of ultimate victory: Macron 91%; Melenchon 5%; Fillon 4%; Le Pen 0%.

On the other hand, if Brexit and Trump have demonstrated anything, it’s that opinion polls can be wrong – especially regarding unrespectable, or as we Russians ironically say, “unhandshakeworthy,” questions.

As Durocher points out, there is this dominant ideology in France – the only respectable and “handshakeworthy” one – that stands for globalism, for open borders, for devolution of sovereignty to the EU, for dependence on financial markets, for demographic replacement with an “endless tide of Africans and Muslims.” If you are don’t like it, then too bad, you are a fascist. Just as a Silicon Valley office drone would be well advised to keep his pro-Trump opinions to himself, so as a Le Pen supporter you will be ostracized from many French social circles.

france-elections-2002-opinion-pollAnd there is good evidence that there is a “Shy Tory” effect in France. In the famous 2002 elections, for instance, opinion polls had Jean-Marie Le Pen at 8%, hopelessly behind favorites Jacques Chirac and Lionel Jospin.

In the event, Le Pen stormed in to a second place finish with 16.9%, just above Jospin with 16.2%, though the forces of the Republic rallied in the second round to deny the fascist victory.

france-elections-2017-predictitMore importantly, the gamblers – the people with #skininthegame, the people who put their money where their mouths are – consider that Marine Le Pen has a ~30% chance of eventual victory (Oddschecker, PredictIt).

The gamblers were more correct than the pollsters and experts on Brexit. The gamblers were more correct than the pollsters and experts on Trump. Now we are are about to see if we can complete the trifecta.

Betting against the gamblers is… a gamble.

Feel free to place your predictions in the comments.

EDIT: Rather belated, but here’s a Vote Compass for this election: https://votecompass.france24.com/president/home

france-elections-2017-preferences

 

Anatoly Karlin is a transhumanist interested in psychometrics, life extension, UBI, crypto/network states, X risks, and ushering in the Biosingularity.

 

Inventor of Idiot’s Limbo, the Katechon Hypothesis, and Elite Human Capital.

 

Apart from writing booksreviewstravel writing, and sundry blogging, I Tweet at @powerfultakes and run a Substack newsletter.

Comments

  1. My prediction (made a few hours before voting started):

    Melenchon – 18.0%
    Hamon – 8.0%
    Macron – 20.5%
    Fillon – 20.0%
    Marine Le Pen – 25.5%

  2. As I posted earlier, Alain Soral predicted in his video recorded on Thursday that the first round will break down as:

    1st: Le Pen
    2nd: Fillon
    3rd: Mélenchon
    4th: Macron

    He visited Moscow a while ago. And did a talk and book signing. It’s at YouTube under: “Alain Soral en Russie – La conférence de Moscou”.

    https://twitter.com/AlainSoralOffic/status/739258171773030400

  3. As summarized by Jean-Marie Le Pen:

    “Such are the candidates: MELENCHON, communist. MACRON, opportunist. FILLON, recidivist. As for me, I’m voting for MARINE!”

    https://twitter.com/lepenjm/status/853614379711025156

  4. I’m curious, what does the Francophone Internet think about Macron’s sexual orientation and marriage? Is there anything beyond “this looks weird”? Any evidence? And yes, of course it looks weird.

  5. Prediction:

    1.) Le Pen – 23.5%
    2.) Fillon – 21.0%
    3.) Macron – 20.9%
    4.) Melenchon – 20.0%

    2017 as 2002.

    (Macron loses some marginal supporters to Fillon, at last minute, due to the terror talk after latest shooting.)

  6. German_reader says

    “Obama at least waited until he became President to start his apology tour.”

    Did Obama really go on an “apology tour”? Tbh I’ve always thought that’s some stupid Republican myth unconnected to reality. At least I can’t recall Obama apologizing for the Mexican-American war which might have been vaguely analogous to what Macron did in Algeria.
    That Macron guy is really bad news from what I can tell, he really is the establishment candidate. I don’t read much mainstream German media nowadays, but skimmed through some articles in the most recent issue of liberal globalist weekly ZEIT. It contained statements by about 20 German “intellectuals” (including that horrible Frankfurt school fossil Jürgen Habermas, and a lot of cretinous novelists) and many of them were enthusiastic about Macron. Quite telling.

  7. When compared to the Anglosphere, they generally prefer not to get into the private lives of their political players but they repeatedly hint at him being a bisexual oddball.

  8. MLP has only promised to reduce net immigration close to zero, unfortunately, and there are several other reasons to be dissatisfied with her, including her homosexual entourage. Still, her victory would undoubtedly be the best of the available alternatives.

  9. Marcon is indeed bad news, but a victory for him might not be the end of the world. I can remember the UK 2010 election, where Nick Clegg was the touted as the urban liberal Messiah. Once in office, he cucked hiss millennial supporters as quickly and brazenly as trump seems to have done to his and the party was wiped out at the subsequent election (though unfortunately not completely).

    If elected MLP will have the same problems as pre-cucked Trump; a totally hostile legislature, bureaucracy and media meaning she’d be lane duck from day one.

  10. At the very least there should be some sexual perversion. I mean, gerontophilia in itself is a perversion, especially for men.

  11. That Macron guy is really bad news from what I can tell

    Not for Germany. He is the German candidate.
    And unlike other establishment candidates, he and his centrism are going to wreck the established party system, creating new space for fringe parties.
    I recommend this article: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/04/france-elections-emmanuel-macron-fn-en-marche/.
    It explains why the rise of French centrism was increasingly inevitable after 2002.

    Beffa, who has joined Macron’s En Marche!, admitted in 2015 that he “dreamt to see France governed by a grand coalition with Alain Juppé as president and Emmanuel Macron as prime minister so that they can together implement Schroeder-like reforms.” In another interview, he went on, “In all successful countries . . . there is a unity of the Right and the Left around centrist positions.” But, he explained:

    In France, there are 20 percent on the Left, the Front de Gauche, the Greens, who do not admit the reality, and approximately the same thing, 20 percent or maybe more, who, currently, at the far right, do not accept it either. There remain 60 percent. If they split in two, well, we’ll never have a majority for reforms.

    Surprisingly, Beffa’s model for this grand coalition, besides Germany, comes from the centrist coalitions of the Fourth Republic. That said, he still wants to preserve the powers the executive branch gained under the current constitution, which has been a key strategy for maintaining ruling-class influence on the political system. Beffa wants to modify this system to avoid political polarization and create a broad centrist coalition. This explains why both he and Macron call for the introduction of some degree of proportional representation into legislative elections.

    Here, they clearly take inspiration from other parliamentary systems, especially Germany’s. French ruling elites now see German coalitions as a source of strength for domestic capitalism. Further, they are currently preoccupied with implementing reforms that would restore their credibility in the eyes of their German counterparts. So it comes as little surprise that they want to imitate the German system.

    Indeed, French reforms are the prerequisite for German ruling elites to embark on a broad reform of the European Union and the eurozone. This reform should create a system of fiscal transfers managed by a eurozone finance minister, further centralizing power at the supranational level. Macron, Beffa, and others have repeatedly made this point over the past years.

    In Germany, Schröder’s move to the center and Merkel’s move to the center created space for Linke and AfD, respectively.

  12. jimmyriddle says

    Fillon’s wife is Welsh, not English.

    Macron is rumoured to be in a homosexual relationship with the head of the state broadcaster.

    He denies it, but he certainly blipped Boy George’s gaydar:

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4275808/Boy-George-mocked-support-Emmanuel-Macron.html

  13. On the other hand, if there really was an alt-right candidate, would he (in this case, she) openly espouse alt-right views, or would he publicly espouse views which are at least somewhat acceptable to the establishment? Obviously it’s not only difficult to find votes for the view that there needs to be an ethnic cleansing of nonwhites, but it could lead to prosecution and being dropped from the ballot.

  14. Fillon’s wife is Welsh, not English.

    She is both. Her father was an Englishman, hence Anglo-Welsh.

  15. Le Pen is by a long way the best available candidate, and voting for her would be as obvious a choice as voting for Trump in the US election or UKIP in a UK election. That’s despite the reality that she has dodgy connections who will likely use their influence to push negative issues – homosexuals pushing the pro-homosexuality agenda and jewish people pushing the pro-censorship and pro-Israel/pro-interventionist issues, in particular.

    On the other hand, she clearly has infinitely more substance – both personal and political – than Trump, so won’t likely be as open to an outright betrayal as he has proved to be. And in any case, as with Trump, the mere fact of her winning will achieve most of the achievable goals anyway, regardless of what she actually does in office.

    The ideal result in the first round would be Le Pen and Melenchon first and second. That would set up the perfect second round choice – a no win for the globalist establishment. Unfortunately, as with most ideal results, it’s highly unlikely.

  16. all the banking mafia candidates for the most critical roles are blackmailable

    (Presidents, Prime Ministers, NATO general secretary etc)

  17. the don’t knows are the critical segment – half of them are privately for Le Pen but are scared of the media stasi

    no idea if that’s enough

  18. Leaked results, can’t vouch 100% for authenticity.

    http://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/856129039442030592

    Looks like Team Globalism isn’t very popular in the French colonies.

    French Guinea hosts the French space program, so presumably has many military/patriotic-scientific types. Explains why MLP did especially well there? (LDPR tends to do inordinately well at Baikonur).

  19. French Guinea hosts the French space program, so presumably has many military/patriotic-scientific types. Explains why MLP did especially well there?

    Not quite.
    The turnout in French Guinea was quite low thanks to the local protests which lasted for the last five weeks.
    Dissatisfaction with the establishment = people do not vote for the establishment candidates.

  20. Pollster intuitions:

    French polling expert just told me their intuition (NOT their polling numbers) is Le Pen 27%, Fillon 23%, Macron 21% & Melenchon 17%

    Just bought a bunch of Fillon shares at PredictIt for 11 cents (though they’re rising fast). Looks like the Macron is a flop.

  21. No, that cannot be!
    En Marche!

  22. Yes, sexual intercourse is for making healthy babies and young women are best for that. That’s yet another thing Marxist-Leninists and traditionalists agree upon and the libertarian-libertine globalists don’t.

  23. Jaakko Raipala says

    Nonsense. The Marxist-Leninist program was free love, abolishing marriage, promoting abortion and legalizing homosexuality and that’s what Soviet Russia tried when Lenin was actually in power. “Libertine globalists” are in 100 % agreement with Marxists because they are Marxists.

    On topic, I can’t imagine French voters caring one bit about Crimea. The opinions of Western European politicians on it are going to be all adopted for deal making and party political reasons which means they can flip completely if another opinion turns out to be more convenient. The only exception is if a politician has a Russian or Ukrainian spouse or something similar to provide a personal connection to the events.

    All the candidates look like complete disasters but I’m rooting for Le Pen anyway.

  24. I’m talking about Marxist-Leninists now or people raised under it and stull strongly influenced by it, not the Bolsheviks running around doing all sorts of things after the revolution. The East Bloc and Old Left were not libertines and the globalists are barely Marxist at all. All they have in common will Marx and the Bolsheviks is that they love destroying other people’s religions and traditions, are internationalists and materialists in every sense of the world.

    All the candidates look like complete disasters but I’m rooting for Le Pen anyway.

    No, both Le Pen and Fillon are valid, good quality candidates.

  25. The USSR turned social conservative around 1935. That’s when homosexuality was outlawed, school grades reinstated, modernist art replaced by realistic art, etc. For the entirely of the Cold War the USSR represented social conservatism and the US represented social liberalism.

  26. But yes, Lenin and co., the Old Bolsheviks whom Stalin executed in 1937-1938, were socially liberal. They had something called the “glass of water theory of sexuality” among many other lefty ideas. If Stalin didn’t turn right in the mid-1930s, the West would have never started its Cold War against the USSR.

  27. both Le Pen and Fillon are valid, good quality candidates

    Compared to a Macron or a Merkel or a Hillary, certainly, they are. Otherwise, of course, it’s easy to imagine way better leaders for France.

  28. I understand where you come from, but Stalin executed a lot of non-Old Bolshevik people in the mid-1930s. Social conservatives don’t execute random people just for the hell of it.

  29. Early exit polls predicting a Marcon, Le Penn runoff. On the bright side, mlp definitely won’t cuck her suppoters Trump style. The vital stats for France and the eurozone in general aren’t good, so a Marcon presidency could easily be a train wreck.

  30. First indications seem to be suggesting Macron-Le Pen second round.

    Pretty straightforward choice for the establishment types. Macron is probably the worst case out of the available options, with his only redeeming feature being that he will likely terminally discredit the “centrist” fanatics if things go badly for France in the next few years.

  31. First exit polls are in and they’re not very encouraging.

    Macron (EM-*): 23.7%
    Le Pen (FN-ENF): 21.7%
    Melenchon (FI-LEFT): 19.5%
    Fillon: 19.5%

    Well, at least MLP goes through. But with those numbers, she doesn’t really have any chance in the second round.

    Since its an exit poll, I suppose “shy voter” effect is still possible.

  32. Which candidates are the most pro-Palestinian and which would pull France out of NATO?

  33. Social conservatives don’t execute random people just for the hell of it.

    In fairness, Franco did.

    (I don’t write that as a brain-dead “antifa” or liberal ignoramus – I think Franco’s victory was probably the best outcome available for Spain in the late 1930s, and I am a social conservative myself. But he was (unlike Hitler or Mussolini) a social conservative and he did kill lots of people. That’s just what governments under threat by subversive and/or foreign-backed oppositions do.)

  34. German_reader says

    Eh, that’s pretty bad, horrible if that Macron becomes president as seems likely.

  35. The numbers were inflated by the side which he defeated, but it was still a lot of people. Hundreds of thousands, I think. I’m sure that a lot of them were innocent, and that was bad.

    The political violence which started in 1917 stopped in 1938. If Stalin hadn’t defeated the Old Bolsheviks, it would have never stopped, unless a different Stalin-like figure would have stopped it in the same way that he did.

    The thing that was unusual about the 1937-1938 spate of violence was not the volume (the Civil War and the famines killed more people), but the fact that for the first time a lot of it was directed against Bolsheviks. The anti-kulak portion of 1937-1938 was the continuation of prior, Old Bolshevik policies. Which stopped when Stalin defeated Old Bolsheviks by shooting them, and never recurred after that.

    I had an argument with the commenter AP about this. He says that Stalin became an absolute ruler in the late 1920s or early 1930s, so he should bear full responsibility for the famines. IIRC, Stalin was not able to execute any of his enemies until December of 1936. And this great purge of the country’s leadership didn’t stop until 1938. Until they were eliminated, they could have always come back.

  36. Mélenchon

  37. Those results are very good for her: she is facing a flaky lightweight and can pick up anti-globalists on the left and patriotic conservative voters from the candidates who failed to make the second round.

    https://twitter.com/JulianAssange/status/854674089218387972

  38. Diversity Heretic says

    I’m watching French TV right now and there appear to be some protests in Paris (Place de la Bastille). One wild card for the second round might be the amount of protest/violence the Le Pen second round candidacy provokes. It’s kind of a strange thing to hope for, but serious riots might put Le Pen over the top. Otherwise she’ll top out at about 40%. But just wait until Macron tries implementing his economic reforms–the unions and civil servants will be in the streets at that point.

  39. German_reader says

    How can those results be described as “good” for Marine Le Pen? According to that poll even 53% (!) of Fillon voters intend to vote for Macron in the 2nd round.
    Rather depressing really.

  40. Seamus Padraig says

    I agree with you. Stalin was not in complete control until the late 30s. It was the famine which so completely discredited the old-line Bolsheviks (Kaganovich, et al.) so that Stalin could finally get rid of them. Stalin is vilified in the west, not for what he did wrong, but for what he did right. But then, given that most western communists were actually (((Trotskyites))), this makes perfect sense.

  41. Those results are very good for her: she is facing a flaky lightweight and can pick up anti-globalists on the left and patriotic conservative voters from the candidates who failed to make the second round.

    That seems more than a little optimistic to me. The second choice figures in the tweet you included suggest Melenchon voters would go for Macron over Le Pen 30-11 and Fillon voters would do the same by 53-21, and they are by far the biggest groups.

    Granted there are plenty of ways to attack Macron, but he’s the establishment candidate and is guaranteed overwhelming media bias in his favour, and blanket protection from damaging criticism in the mainstream media.

    I’d say this means we’ll all have to weather a Macron presidency and make the best of it – which might mean the Front National’s original game plan for winning the Presidency – in 2022 – is a good bet. If things don’t go well for France in the next few years, anti-establishment feeling in France will hit new peaks under Macron.

    It’s a missed opportunity to hit the EU a killing blow whilst it’s rocking from Brexit, though, but that was always a long shot. Then again, I’m an instinctive pessimist who was pleasantly surprised by both the Brexit vote and the Trump victory, so you never know.

  42. Whatever one thinks about Stalin’s motivations for the mid-30s right-wing turn or about his culpability for the things that went on before that turn, there was a turn. That’s a fact.

    Homosexuality was legalized by the Bolsheviks in 1917, banned by Stalin in 1935, legalized again by Yeltsin around 1990.

    Abortion was legalized in 1917, banned by Stalin in the mid-1930, legalized by Khruschev in the mid-1950s.

    School and university grades were abolished in 1917, reinstated by Stalin in 1935.

    Modernist art was promoted by Bolsheviks after 1917, replaced by realism in the mid-1930.

    Local, non-Russian ethno-nationalisms were promoted by the early Bolsheviks. Stalin turned away from that policy in the mid-1930s, though not completely, not as much as modern Russian nationalists would have liked.

    Free love (the glass of water theory of sexuality) was promoted by the early Bolsheviks, replaced by social conservatism in the mid-1930, replaced by the sexual revolution of the 1990s.

    Even Ded Moroz (the Russian version of Santa Claus) was brought back in the mid-1930, together with large parts of old, pre-revolutionary culture.

    The blowing up of churches stopped sometime in the 1930s. In 1943 Stalin concluded a “concordat” with the church.

    And on and on.

  43. The only second round match up that could have been better for Le Pen would be her versus Mélenchon. Anything else would have been worse than what we have now: her versus the globalist flake.

  44. LondonBob says

    Was hoping for Fillon against Le Pen.

    Still big step forward for the NF, but she has that hard ceiling of 40%.

    Macron is globalist wet dream, disaster, a better presented Hollande. When he is similarly disastrous Marion Le Pen will have a real chance, he is indeed the Obama candidate who must inevitably fail before the NF can win.

  45. In the French race the hope lies with Macron having a scandal. Fillon had a scandal of his own in this race, both Trump and Hillary had unexpected scandals in the last days of their race. The current state of global political technology (Russian term) uses last-minute scandals more than the prior iterations did.

  46. Pretty clear where the French political establishment stands:

    Fillon: “There is no other choice than to vote against the far right. I will vote for Emmanuel Macron.”

    Hamon: “I encourage everyone to fight as hard as they can to fight the extreme right, and to fight for Macron”

    French prime minister:”I solemnly call for a vote for Emmanuel Macron in the second round in order to beat the Front National”

    Ex-PM Alain Juppé: “The far right would lead the country to disaster.”

    Former PM Manuel Valls: “As in the first round I will vote Macron… for France”

  47. Macron is globalist wet dream, disaster, a better presented Hollande

    Agreed, though perhaps better viewed as France’s Blair imo, though without Blair’s fortuitous inheritance of an economy in pretty good shape from preceding Tory rule and probably (hopefully) without a similarly favourable spell (1997-2007) in the global economy.

  48. Agreed with German reader.

    Those numbers are catastrophic. Pretty much all the Melenchon and Hamon voters will go over to Macron, and even a majority of Fillon’s.

    Even of Dupont-Aignan’s voters – he is, along with MLP, the closest there is to (original) Gaullism in French politics – only about half look like they’re going to go over the MLP.

  49. Fillon is disappointing.

    Giving up so early, and endorsing Macron while so explicitly condemning MLP. I was under the impression he was a cut above the usual cuckservatives, but I guess not.

  50. That was always going to be the case. Macron is still the best candidate for her to be running against now. This was never going to be easy.

  51. German_reader says

    It probably shouldn’t be that surprising. Given how subversive the Catholic church today is (that cretinous demagogue in the Vatican just compared refugee camps in Greece to concentration camps), most Catholic/Christian politicans aren’t to be trusted anyway on the immigration/multiculturalism issue. They’ll make some noises about fairly irrelevant side issues like gay marriage, but on the central issue of Muslim and African immigration they’re worse than useless.

  52. Diversity Heretic says

    A sense of perspective: this is the first time that the FN even goes to the second round since the fluke of around 2002 (I think) when Jean Marie Le Pen ended up against Jacques Chirac. And Chirac crushed him something like 80-20. Marine got more than that in the first round. Neither candidate of the two traditional major French political parties will go into the second round and the Front Gauche and Les Républicains are nearly even, with the Socialists gaining votes at minor party levels. Things are changing in France.

    If the demographics of France weren’t changing so rapidly, this result might set Marine Le Pen up for a victory in 2022, when she”ll still be in her early 50s. But the number of Arabs/Muslims increases every day, both through immigration and differential birth rates. Things will just get harder and harder for the français de souche.

  53. LondonBob says

    Clutching at straws but aren’t the NF more popular the younger you are, each electoral cycle they will improve?

  54. I’d hope so. Though see what I wrote in the other thread about Jobbik in Hungary: probably the youth are less likely to support any party (but once they get older, they’ll support establishment parties), and in the case of Jobbik the “they have a majority support among those below age 30” was always based on just one outlying poll, and wasn’t sustained later. How many polls show this better support for them among the younger generations, and also how high is political activity among young people? I think people inclined to nationalism might become active at an earlier age.

    It’s like lower turnout was predicted to help Le Pen (because FN voters are more likely to vote). Among the younger generations there’s a permanent lower turnout.

  55. Yes, but not “just for the hell of it”. In the opening months of the war lots of people were killed by the mid- and lower-ranks of all sides and in the Republican zones anarchy often prevailed (as you might expect of anarchists) so there were plenty of capital charges to go around. Franco’s “Old Guard”, if you can call it that, were fairly safe (from him, at least).

  56. It’s a race between demographics and uncuckening.

    PS. I’d also note that JMLP was considerably more hardcore than his daughter, who has made a lot of efforts to moderate the FN’s image. That’s fine, but in practice, it might mean there has been little in the way of a real social shift towards nationalism.

  57. Just another reminder that when it comes down to it the only really operative part of “centre right establishment” is “establishment”.

  58. Indeed, but Stalin didn’t kill people “just for the hell of it”, either.

  59. this is the first time that the FN even goes to the second round since the fluke of around 2002 (I think) when Jean Marie Le Pen ended up against Jacques Chirac. And Chirac crushed him something like 80-20.

    That reminds me that the sleazy Chirac refused to debate JMLP between the two rounds because the latter shouldn’t be granted legitimacy or something. Presumably there will be a head to head debate this time.

  60. He killed a lot of people, but not nearly as randomly as Stalin. I like Glossy, so don’t want to start a big fight here, especially since it’s off topic, but why did he have to have someone like Voznesensky shot?

    I don’t think Stalin could be rehabilitated even regarding his role post-1938. He did some good things, but altogether he was needlessly murderous even during this period.

  61. I also don’t think it’s tenable to suppose that Stalin didn’t have full power until the mid-1930s.

  62. LondonBob says

    MLP

    18-24. 21%
    25-34. 24%
    35-49. 29%
    50-59. 27%
    60-69. 19%
    70+. 10%

    Pensioners not embracing the NF brand of change.

  63. Maybe you should know that seven years ago prime minister Fillon offered Macron the position of assistant chief of staff.

  64. That’s pretty far from “the younger, the more likely to vote Le Pen”. Unfortunately, the growing number of Arabs/blacks among the younger generations is probably a big factor in the smaller FN percentage there.

  65. These two girls supported Fillon in the first round but are voting for Le Pen in the second.

    Q: “What do you like about her?”
    A: “Her extremism. I like that.”

    https://twitter.com/F_Desouche/status/856244080707350528

  66. Agreed, though perhaps better viewed as France’s Blair imo

    Agreed but one possibly critical difference – Blair went to work for Morgan Stanley after leaving politics. Macron worked for Goldman Sachs before.

    #

    the bad news: the second choice percentages look bad (but don’t count out the secret don’t knows yet)

    the good news: the centre-left vs centre-right puppet show is over in France and the hybrid establishment uniparty has revealed itself

  67. Erik Sieven says

    MSM loved how old British voters voted for Brexit, they could´t stop talking about that. I suspect they will talk much less over this pattern in France

  68. one way to look at those numbers is subtract the non-French percentage from the total and think what percentage of the remainder vote FN

    so
    age 70+ (guess 90%?) would mean only 9% support FN
    age 18-24 (guess 60%?) would mean 1/3 support FN

    (at a minimum, some lying)

  69. I like Glossy, so don’t want to start a big fight here, especially since it’s off topic

    A fair point, and I agree.

    Perhaps we can just agree that social conservatives in power can and do kill people pretty arbitrarily when they consider it necessary. Pinochet was another example. The fact that hysterical leftists grossly exaggerate the supposed crimes of these men and ignore their reasons for acting as they did doesn’t mean they didn’t kill people based on pretty flimsy suspicions, often confessions under torture or security police suspicions. Conservatives aren’t immune to the perceived dictates of necessity when the gloves are off, and when you are fighting a civil war or ruling in the aftermath of one with just one slip between you staying in power, and your death and likely that of most of those you hold dear, that perception probably gets pretty broad.

  70. Blair went to work for Morgan Stanley after leaving politics. Macron worked for Goldman Sachs before

    And both will have worked for the international bankers whilst in office.

    the good news: the centre-left vs centre-right puppet show is over in France and the hybrid establishment uniparty has revealed itself

    I agree. That’s why I think if things don’t go noticeably better for French people over the next few years, the 2022 election will be by far the best opportunity yet to break through and see one of the “parties of national survival” finally get into office in one of the major US sphere countries. The globalists, having used up their “left” and”right” parties, will also have used up their “third way” option, and they will have nowhere left to hide.

  71. LePen will never have a better chance than this. The rules are going to be changed if she comes too close.

  72. In 1950 there was no civil war, nor an aftermath of one. Voznesensky was a firmly committed Stalinist, as he was led to be shot, he was pleading with his guards to let him talk to Comrade Stalin. Which is a reminder that even after the war thousands were shot each year, including successful generals of the Red Army (and the Red Air Force, I think several of the latter’s senior wartime commanders were shot on some trumped up charges after the war). I think once Franco consolidated his power, no more mass murders took place.

  73. little in the way of a real social shift towards nationalism.

    It might mean that there are actual numbers of nationalists, but that they will not entertain the anti-Semitic and fascist oriented garbage. A genuine populist nationalist who appears competent and who is unencumbered by fascist tendencies might do really well in France, the US and in any number of countries.

  74. By age group:

    Support for Melenchon (30%) + Hamon (10%) = 40% amongst youngest French.

    Le Pen: 21% amongst youngest; peaks at 29% amongst 35-49; then goes to 10% amongst 70+. (as per LondonBob’s comment earlier).

    The old people are huge fans of Fillon (45%), but <60s don't care for him.

  75. TelfoedJohn says

    Le Pen is Nationalist-Left, not Nationalist-Right (unlike her father).

  76. “Which is a reminder that even after the war thousands were shot each year”

    That’s not my impression. According to the Russian Wikipedia, the specific case that you mentioned, the one in which an economist named Voznesensky lost his life, involved the execution of 23 people. 2 died in prison before trial.

    «Всего было осуждено 214 человек, из них 69 человек основных обвиняемых и 145 человек из числа близких и дальних родственников. Кроме того, 2 человека умерли в тюрьме до суда. 23 человека осуждены военной коллегией к высшей мере наказания (расстрелу)»

  77. 1.) Le Pen – 23.5%
    2.) Fillon – 21.0%
    3.) Macron – 20.9%
    4.) Melenchon – 20.0%

    Actual result seems to be

    Le Pen 23%
    Fillon 20%
    Macron 23%
    Melenchon 19%

    This prediction was within 1% of each actual result, except Macron’s (I undepredicted him by 2%). So enough “undecideds” broke for Macron after all. Could’ve easily gone differently with a different news-cycle or worse weather.

  78. I’d love to see the cross-tabs on that support by age group controlling for race. (As we saw in November 2016, all age groups of Whites voted Trump).

    Hmm, on second thought, that’d be illegal in France, wouldn’t it.

  79. Wait a minute. Does that mean that Duranty was not quite the shill he was subsequently made out to be?

  80. Does anyone have a ‘White Vote’ estimate? (Excluding non-European foreigners and descendants).

    Any good ideas on how to estimate one?

  81. Felix Keverich says

    lol, are you Jewish by any chance. Why is “anti-Semitism” a concern to you? I think we can agree that when a certain ethnic minority takes over mass media, and uses it to promote non-white immigration/LGBT/invasion of Syria etc, it becomes a problem.

  82. LondonBob says

    Le Pen needs to moderate her economic positions, no one will vote to collapse the economy. Sure the Euro doesn’t work but talk about kicking out Greece rather than leaving yourself, keep that to yourself. Also voters tend to, or allow themselves to, see immigration as an economic issue. Attack immigration on an economic basis, the blood and soil stuff is implied.

  83. It might mean that there are actual numbers of nationalists, but that they will not entertain the anti-Semitic and fascist oriented garbage.

    I’m not aware of any genuinely “fascist” policies or attributes of any significance associated with any of the mainstream parties of national survival (Front National, UKIP, AfD). That’s almost all just dishonest demonization thrown at them by those who hate them.

    Antisemitism is a slightly different thing, because the reality is that given the C20th rise of zionism and the existence of Israel as an explicitly jewish state, jewish identity politics is its own form of nationalism, which in practice (like islamist identity politics) stands in opposition to the national identity of the countries in which those who advocate it live (other than Israel, of course), which are in Europe and the US culturally Christian (or post-Christian) countries and not jewish countries. So ordinarily you would expect a nationalist party in such countries, in principle, to be opposed to undue influence of jewish identity issues just as it should be opposed to muslim and other foreign identity issues. Despite that, there is no overt anti-Semitism in UKIP, the Front National has deliberately distanced itself from antisemitism of any kind, and I suspect the AfD’s official position is the same (though I’m not as familiar with German politics).

    Most accusations of “anti-Semitism” targeted at the parties of national survival seem to be as hysterically overblown, dishonest and inaccurate as are the accusations of fascism. This is as you’d expect of a dishonest smear term of this kind, like the other smear terms of the same class designed to smear political opponents of identity lobbyists: “racism”, “islamophobia”, “homophobia” etc.

    Not especially venerating jewish culture or people is not the same as hating jews, though I understand that in the US it is generally regarded as such in practice.

  84. Le Pen is Nationalist-Left, not Nationalist-Right (unlike her father).

    Seems to me such distinctions are rather anachronistic. The issues of existential importance are nationalist-globalist, not left-right, however you define those terms (unless obviously you incorporate some of the former issues into your definitions for the latter)

  85. I’m not going to try to argue that Stalin didn’t kill lots of people, nor even that he was necessarily a social conservative (though Glossy makes a good case for it, he clearly wasn’t in his youth, at any rate). Just that killing lots of people doesn’t preclude being a social conservative.

  86. TelfoedJohn says

    I make the distinction because Anatoly states she is Nationalist Right, but the votecompass chart shows her slightly on the Left.

    I’ve also read this good article on the BBC:
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/marine_le_pen

    …which makes clear that her instincts are left, and her closest advisor is explicitly nationalist left.

  87. that’s the critical data – how close to complete polarization things are among the young

    (polarization being upper middle class SJWs + immigrants vs everyone else with little or no middle ground)

    no idea how to figure it though

  88. they will not entertain the anti-Semitic and fascist oriented garbage.

    I’m not aware of any genuinely “fascist” policies or attributes of any significance associated with any of the mainstream parties of national survival (Front National, UKIP, AfD). That’s almost all just dishonest demonization thrown at them by those who hate them.

    I don’t know the details on the European parties. I know that Marine kicked her father out and doubled her electoral support. She did the “right” thing by doing so.

    So ordinarily you would expect a nationalist party in such countries, in principle, to be opposed to undue influence of jewish identity issues just as it should be opposed to muslim and other foreign identity issues.

    I don’t have any problem with my American “nationalism” including American Jews and Ameican muslims.

    Which is not to say that I don’t support an immigration hiatus for everyone except Einstein material and supermodels.

    Most accusations of “anti-Semitism” targeted at the parties of national survival seem to be as hysterically overblown, dishonest and inaccurate as are the accusations of fascism.

    Yes, you are correct. This does not change the fact that there are, in fact, anti-Semites and fascists, and if you wanted to have a “nationalist” party you would have to decide whether to include them in your group or not. The French can decide for themselves who that want to be “French,” same for AK and other Russian nationalists. My main concern is American nationalism, and I think that there is a slender path that is available that excludes overt racists and Nazi wannabes.

    Not especially venerating jewish culture or people is not the same as hating jews, though I understand that in the US it is generally regarded as such in practice.

    Your understanding is incorrect.

  89. German_reader says

    “and I suspect the AfD’s official position is the same ”

    They have occasional antisemitic individuals (e.g. in the state parliament in Baden-Württemberg they had one really crazy representative – a former Maoist – who apparently believes the Protocols of the elders of Zion to be basically true; once that became public the AfD quickly wanted to get rid of him and he’s no longer a member of the AfD group in the state parliament), which is to be expected in any new right-wing party. But the party as a whole definitely isn’t antisemitic. Of course it has still been heavily criticized by Jewish organizations because of issues like commemoration of the Nazi past, circumcision of infants/children and general “nastiness” towards “refugees” (funnily enough some of the same Jewish spokesmen now seem to be getting paranoid about the probably non-trivial number of visceral antisemites among “refugees”). Recently Frauke Petry tried to counteract this by claiming the AfD was a pro-Jewish party and by taking a pro-Israel stance, which seemed rather misguided to me. You can’t win with those issues either way, and it’s probably best just to ignore them.

  90. Nate Silver
    ✔ ‎@NateSilver538

    Nationalist candidates have done pretty badly since Trump won. Wilders & Le Pen faded down the stretch run. Hofer underperformed in Austria.

    Interesting attempt at spin.

    Silver obviously wants us to think that “not winning spectacularly, but still getting improved and in some cases unprecedented levels of support” equates to “doing pretty badly”.

    Wilders didn’t match his former high of 15.4% in 2010, but boosted his vote from 10.1% in 2012 to 13.1% in 2017, in second place to the governing party.

    Le Pen boosted the Front National first round result from 17.9% in 2012 to 22% in 2017 and won a place in the runoff for only the second time ever, with the previous occasion in 2002 seeing her father get into the second round with only 16.9% of a much lower turnout (4.8 million FN voters then, 7.4 million today).

    Hofer won a nationalist place in the presidential runoff in Austria for the first time since WW2, and only narrowly lost with the usual wall to wall establishment and mainstream media hostility and bias.

    If that’s “doing pretty badly” by Silver’s estimation, a couple more electoral cycles of “doing pretty badly” will see parties of national survival in power across Europe.

    [Posted this to Steve’s thread as well, but since it’s pretty much a lottery actually getting comments approved in a timely fashion there, I don’t feel bad about double posting.]

  91. I could be wrong, but I have always heard that Lenin derided the glass of water theory.

    I used some magic to find the following quote:

    Of course, thirst must be satisfied. But will the normal person in normal circumstances lie down in the gutter and drink out of a puddle, or out of a glass with a rim greasy from many lips? But the social aspect is most important of all. Drinking water is, of course, an individual affair. But in love two lives are concerned, and a third, a new life, arises, it is that which gives it its social interest, which gives rise to a duty towards the community.

    and

    As a communist I have not the least sympathy for the glass of water theory, although it bears the fine title ‘satisfaction of love’. In any case, this liberation of love is neither new, nor communist. You will remember that about the middle of the last century it was preached as the ‘emancipation of the heart’ in romantic literature. In bourgeois practice it became the emancipation of the flesh. At that time the preaching was more talented than it is today, and as for the practice, I cannot judge. I don’t mean to preach asceticism by my criticism. Not in the least. Communism will not bring asceticism, but joy of life, power of life, and a satisfied love life will help to do that. But in my opinion the present widespread hypertrophy in sexual matters does not give joy and force to life, but takes it away. In the age of revolution that is bad, very bad.

    Now this was quick magic, and I did find it in English, not Russian, but it comports with my general previous impression.

    Nu vot, da?

  92. This does not change the fact that there are, in fact, anti-Semites and fascists, and if you wanted to have a “nationalist” party you would have to decide whether to include them in your group or not.

    The very fact that excluding anti-Semites is seen by some (and in particular by those controlling access to the mainstream media) as determinative of respectability imo shows the vital importance of standing up against that pov. Much as excluding “racists” cripples any chance of coherence in immigration policy, so suppressing “antisemitism” and excluding anyone even accused of it cripples any chance of resisting undue influence in the other direction, in favour of jewish identity interests, which appear (mostly, obviously) to be pro-globalist, pro-censorship and pro-Israel, all of which are imo counterproductive to the national interest, certainly for a European country.

    Of course, even suggesting that there could be such a thing as jewish identity group interests is enough to get one convicted of “anti-Semitism” (unless of course one is doing so from the pov of a jewish identity lobbyist), which again emphasises the vital importance of standing against this taboo.

    I don’t know the details on the European parties. I know that Marine kicked her father out and doubled her electoral support. She did the “right” thing by doing so.

    Clearly, that’s what Marine LePen and her advisers think – that it was supposed “anti-Semitism” on her father’s part that was holding the party back (rather laughably, since the “anti-Semitism” of which he was accused was actually just failing to pay properly inflated respect to the Holocaust taboo).

    However, the reality is that nationalism was not a big issue anywhere in western Europe in the late C20th, until the past decade, except in secessionist regions. As the impetus towards nationalism has grown and propelled formerly idealist nationalist parties closer to power, so opportunists have climbed aboard and sought to dilute any idealism in directions they think will gain them power while protecting their particular interests – a natural and inevitable process. It’s impossible to disentangle the strands to reliably determine cause and effect.

  93. You can’t win with those issues either way, and it’s probably best just to ignore them.

    If only it were possible to do so….

  94. Here’s the Russian Wiki about this.

    “The Glass of Water theory – views of love, marriage and family which were widespread (especially among the young) in the first years of Soviet rule. They included the rejection of love and the reduction of relations between a man and a woman to an instinctual sexual need which has to be satisfied without any “conventions”, as simply as the quenching of thirst. (having sex simply like drinking a glass of water.)”

    You’re right though, the article goes on to say that Lenin was against this theory. I didn’t know that. Before Stalin monopolized all power in the 1930s the Communist party was governed collectively, so a policy could go forward and have an effect, as the above paragraph implies it did, without Lenin’s approval.

  95. Fair enough.

  96. Well, there is no point in just going back and forth with us saying the other is wrong.

    I will stick to the politics in the US. Trump just proved that there is a populist and nationalist constituency that can elect candidates. He gathered significant Hispanic and black support in spite of the MSM continuously screaming Nazi and racist.

    You don’t seem to be able to distinguish between the positions and policies of a political party and MSM propaganda.

  97. Which candidates are the most pro-Palestinian

    A trivial issue .

    which would pull France out of NATO?

    None.

  98. OT: have you heard of the story where some SWPL do-gooders signed some kind of bail or pledge (Verpflichtungserklärung) for refugees on the understanding it would expire once they were granted residency or something. But it didn’t and they had to continue to pay and courts are now looking into it. This is so great, I can’t begin to describe how limited my sympathy is.

  99. German_reader says

    Yes, I’ve heard about that as well, some do-gooders who had declared themselves Bürgen (guarantors) for refugees are apparently even threatened by financial ruin because of that. It’s probably rather mean of me, but I have to admit I find that rather hilarious…

  100. Yes, after the war mostly bigwigs were shot. Small fry just got prison.

  101. Greasy William says

    Girl on the left is hot, girl on the right, I dunno. 6/10. Would bang but nothing special.

    I think Marine only gets 38 in the runoff by that’s okay for now.

  102. Greasy William says

    Clearly, that’s what Marine LePen and her advisers think – that it was supposed “anti-Semitism” on her father’s part that was holding the party back (rather laughably, since the “anti-Semitism” of which he was accused was actually just failing to pay properly inflated respect to the Holocaust taboo).

    Uh no. The issue with LePen Sr. is that her father wanted FN to be the typical European far Right “Palestine/Iran” party which actually worked for picking up a handful of Muslim votes but was utterly useless in winning over real people because outside of the internet and Latin America, no non Arab/Muslims care about the Palestinians or Iran. This is why Ron Paul failed, why the BNP went nowhere, why Jobbik is dying and why LePen Sr. couldn’t move the FN forward over the course of multiple decades.

  103. Greasy William says

    Nobody cares about the Jewish control of the media or finance, even you. It’s just a red herring Palestinian lovers bring up.

    I can’t speak for iffen, but anti-semitism is not a concern for me, it’s an annoyance. You morons keep trying to run on a “save the Palestinians!” platform and then blame us when your fellow goyim don’t give a shit about them.

    Marine jettisoning the Palestine/Iran stuff is the only reason the FN has gone from 18 to 36 percent. If the FN was still campaigning on the anti Israel stuff, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation because nobody would give a shit about the FN.

  104. You don’t seem to be able to distinguish between the positions and policies of a political party and MSM propaganda.

    You accuse me of precisely what you are guilty of. As I noted, Le Pen was never meaningfully “antisemitic”, except in the sense that he said things jewish lobby groups thought shouldn’t be allowed to be said, and didn’t see jewish lobby concerns as his concerns. As a result he was viciously and dishonestly targeted by both those lobbies and by his rivals seeking to exploit the charges to damage him and his party. This is nothing unusual – it’s routine in the countries of the modern US sphere.

    And you make the point yourself – yes, Trump was (absurdly) hysterically accused of being “racist” and “anti-Semitic” when he was and is clearly neither.

    The general growth in support for nationalist parties is most likely despite the continuous accusations and the false perceptions deliberately maintained by the establishment media, because it has occurred across a wide range of countries and parties, of very different nationalist backgrounds. It has occurred because there is a clear need for it, in the face of the problems of globalisation, mass immigration and interventionism, not because of any futile attempts to pander to a mainstream media and political establishment that is not ultimately interested in compromise or honesty, only in suppressing a threat to its owners’ power and wealth, or political objectives.

  105. Seamus Padraig says

    Of course Duranty was a shill. Living conditions were very harsh in the USSR in the 20s and 30s. No one disputes that here. The point at issue is whether or not that was the personal fault of Stalin.

  106. Uh no. The issue with LePen Sr. is that her father wanted FN to be the typical European far Right “Palestine/Iran” party which actually worked for picking up a handful of Muslim votes but was utterly useless in winning over real people

    You confuse your own identity group obsessions with reality.

    For the latter, here’s Anne Coulter on Le Pen senior, back in 2002:

    French voters tentatively reject dynamiting Notre Dame

    But liberals don’t like Le Pen. They want Muslims to do for Paris what they did for Kabul, and Le Pen stands in their way. After years of irrelevant rants against Muslim immigrants, Le Pen’s anti-immigration message has finally hit a nerve with voters.
    …..
    Liberals are hopping mad about this turn of events. Consequently, they are accusing their beloved French of “xenophobia.” “Odious xenophobia,” in the words of a New York Times editorial. The Times was in such blind rage that it simultaneously denounced Le Pen for capitalizing on opposition to immigrants, “mostly Arab,” and for speaking in “anti-Semitic overtones.” How, precisely, opposition to anti-Semitic violence committed by Arabs reflects anti-Semitism remains murky.

  107. jim jones says

    Surely Britain has shown that exit from the EU does not collapse the economy. Those Frogs need to show some spine and elect Le Pen.

  108. That is absolutely hilarious. Looks like it’s limited to five years now, if this report is correct:

    Germany: government demands more money from some citizens who sponsored refugee families

    Of course, morally such an obligation ought to be for the lifetime of the sponsored party, and ought to be required for each and every economic migrant.

    Then again, morally all the declarations by celebrities that they would house migrants in their own homes should be legally enforceable as well.

  109. Dreadnought says

    From russian perspective, I’m guessing its more favorable to have a vehemently pro-muslim multiculti president(s) in Europe if they are part and parcel of the russophobe neoliberal system.

  110. Anti-semitism about finance is considerably older than the Palestinian affair, about which, as you say, few except Arabs and some college students really care.

    I’m willing to admit that the financial octopus has spread to include far more than Jews by now, though.

  111. French girls aren’t so pretty to look at; it’s the way they carry themselves, something you can’t see in a still picture.

  112. You accuse me of precisely what you are guilty of.

    What we have here is a failure to communicate.

    Trump proved that American “nationalism” can gain majority support.

    Anti-Semitic and fascist electoral support in the US likely tops out in the 1%-2% range.

    Soft white nationalism sans anti-Semitism likely tops out in the 15%-20% range.

    If a Trump, or a populist American nationalist political group entertains and colludes with WNs and anti-Semites the electoral support will likely top out in the 5%-10% range.

    If one has a chance, a slender chance, for an populist American nationalism, why would you throw it away just to cater to obnoxious racists and anti-Semites?

    It appears to me at this distance that there is no chance to revive “French” nationalism into an electoral majority.

    I am undecided about Britain and do not have good knowledge of the other European countries.

  113. LondonBob says

    Trump was perceived better on the economy, he also successfully framed immigration as an economic issue. The problem patriots have is being seen as competent, MLP has done very well professionalising her party but she still falls down on economic competency. Anyway for a lot of these parties it is about influencing the debate as much as anything else, for most being seen as open borders is electoral poison now.

  114. Of course, morally such an obligation ought to be for the lifetime of the sponsored party or his descendants, and ought to be required for each and every economic migrant.

    FTFY

  115. for most being seen as open borders is electoral poison now

    There is a distinct and committed open borders, anti-nationalist political current in the US. I suspect that it may be even stronger in Europe.

    It is not always explicit. You could just have a lack of immigration law enforcement like we have had in the US for 30-40 years.

  116. I had an argument with the commenter AP about this. He says that Stalin became an absolute ruler in the late 1920s or early 1930s, so he should bear full responsibility for the famines. IIRC, Stalin was not able to execute any of his enemies until December of 1936.

    Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929 and Bukharin was expelled from the Comintern that same year. Stalin may not yet have had the power (or perhaps simply didn’t yet think of doing this to his old comrades) to execute people at will, but had no real rivals to his power by the 1930s and no one capable of forcing policies upon the state, over Stalin’s objections.

    Stalin used the “right-wing” Commies such as Bukharin to crush Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev in the mid-20s, then reversed himself, adopted the defeated “left-win” Commies’ policies in the late 20s and politically eliminated Bukharin. By about 1930 he was in total political control. If you disagree, perhaps you can name someone who rivaled him in power at that time?

    The anti-kulak portion of 1937-1938 was the continuation of prior, Old Bolshevik policies. Which stopped when Stalin defeated Old Bolsheviks by shooting them, and never recurred after that.

    1. Mass repression of kulaks occurred when the Old Bolsheviks were already purged from any positions of power and were sitting in prisons. Some of them had already been executed –
      Zinoviev and Kamenev were killed in 1936.* Attributing the mass execution of kulaks to these killed or powerless, about-to-executed people is ridiculous.
    2. It never recurred because kulaks were eliminated and the countryside was collectivized. There was nothing left to “continue.”

    You forgot to mention that over 100,000 Orthodox priests were shot between 1937 and 1938.

    You forgot to mention that the surviving remnants of the pre-Bolshevik aristocracy were mostly purged in 1937-1938 as well.

    *These two guys, killed in 1936, were the peasant-haters. So Stalin’s actions against kulaks could not possibly have been attributable to anyone else.

    ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

    So, under Stalin’s rule, landowning and the traditional peasant countryside were utterly destroyed, and the Church experienced mass murder with its remnants tightly bound to and forced to serve the Atheist State. Pre-Commie elements were also destroyed, in order to create a fully new Soviet Man.

    Stalin’s regime was “conservative” in the same way that Mao’s or North Korea’s regimes are “conservative.”

    You are on record stating that Stalin’s Russia was more conservative than the Russia of Nicholas II. Do you still stand by that statement?

  117. Trump certainly was elected, but his post-election trajectory shows Randal’s point why civic nationalism is not going to work (even if it could get elected, which is not the case in many European countries):

    Much as excluding “racists” cripples any chance of coherence in immigration policy, so suppressing “antisemitism” and excluding anyone even accused of it cripples any chance of resisting undue influence in the other direction, in favour of jewish identity interests, which appear (mostly, obviously) to be pro-globalist, pro-censorship and pro-Israel, all of which are imo counterproductive to the national interest

    With Trump’s election, there was no coherent vision as to why Somali or Syrian refugees are perpetually detrimental to the well-being of the US, nor just what was wrong with certain ethnic lobbies pushing for wars in the Middle East.

    Trump might have been honest during the campaign, but his civic nationalism left him vulnerable to influence by pro-refugee or pro-Israel scammers.

  118. Trump certainly was elected, but his post-election trajectory shows Randal’s point why civic nationalism is not going to work (even if it could get elected, which is not the case in many European countries):

    I didn’t say that Trump was going to be successful. I said that Trump proved that there is majority populist American nationalism, some of which is latent and needed someone like Trump to bring it into focus. Had Trump not been able to self-fund and had he not been adept at media manipulation we would have President H. Clinton.

    Trump has few allies in the Congress. Congress is overwhelmingly dominated by cucks, Koch fan boys and opportunists.

    As I said, I don’t think it will work in Europe.

    America is different, we have been “diverse” since the beginning and many citizens like it that way.

    With Trump’s election, there was no coherent vision as to why Somali or Syrian refugees are perpetually detrimental to the well-being of the US,

    Few Americans think that we should permanently ban immigrants, and still fewer think that we should apply racial and ethnic “tests.” Because of the extremely poor economic situation of the less skilled and able indigenes there is considerable support for a hiatus in or slowing of immigration.

    nor just what was wrong with certain ethnic lobbies pushing for wars in the Middle East.

    Israel maintains majority support in the US. That support would remain regardless of what the Israeli/Jewish lobby/Lobby does.

  119. “You are on record stating that Stalin’s Russia was more conservative than the Russia of Nicholas II. Do you still stand by that statement?”

    Yes, of course. There was no homelessness, prostitution, no drugs in the later Soviet Union. The popular culture was more moral. The share of intact families was surely higher than in the late tsarist period. Everybody worked and there was economic equality. This was the period in Russia’s history when Russia contributed the most to science and technology.

    To be anti-late-Soviet is to be against culture, civilization, and wholesomeness, for drabness, tackiness, poverty, ugliness, war, oligarchy, corruption, etc.

    That later, kinder, gentler Soviet Union would not have been born without Stalin’s mid-30s rightward turn.

  120. Few Americans think that we should permanently ban immigrants, and still fewer think that we should apply racial and ethnic “tests.”

    In other words, America is doomed, the question is, is it going to be 40 years or perhaps 100 years. Because currently America is pushing for multiculturalism (i.e. death and destruction) for every single white country (except Israel), I’d be happier if it died an earlier death. You are a force of evil, doomed to death, so then it’s better if you die sooner than later. (Of course, I’d prefer if you managed to rid yourself of those demonic forces of evil which currently possess you. I’m just assuming it’s impossible.)

    Israel maintains majority support in the US. That support would remain regardless of what the Israeli/Jewish lobby/Lobby does.

    All peoples have favorite countries on the other side of the globe. It just so happens that the favorite country of the American people is Israel. No need for a Jewish lobby here.

    Can you name the favorite country of Japan? Which country is it that you wouldn’t be able to run for public office in Japan if you offended that country? Can you tell me India’s favorite country? Or that of Brazil?

  121. The issue with LePen Sr. is that her father wanted FN to be the typical European far Right “Palestine/Iran” party

    I think Jean-Marie Le Pen has always been a supporter, though not a sycophant, of Israel. His problem has been with French Jews, who are overwhelmingly hostile to French nationalism and supportive of mass immigration.

  122. For anyone wondering why Stalin kept purging the party, looking for traitors among the top leadership long after he won:

    How did the Soviet Union fall? How did this enormius tragedy of the 1990s, which killed many millions of people happen? There was a bad apple in the leadership who sold the country to foreign powers for a chance to be patted on the shoulder and called a reformer. I don’t know what Stalin would have called this – maybe leftist deviationism. It wasn’t classic treason, but the effects were the same.

    Millions of lives would have been saved if Gorbachev had been repressed back when he was a regional party chief.

    It seems that in the months after Stalin’s death Beria wanted to “liberalize” in the same way that Gorbachev did later. This was prevented by his arrest and execution.

    This sort of thing is always a danger. How can the Rise of China end? Some vane fellow who’s read too much Economist magazine, secretly sympathized with Tian An Men protests, etc. may come to power in 20 years and lead his people back to poverty and civil war with “reforms”.

    If you don’t control the popular, global definition of cool, you always have to be vigilant about that kind of stuff.

    Having said this, I don’t know anything about the Leningrad Case specifically. What these people advocated, did they advocate anything at all, was there anything to the case – just what I saw in the Wikipedia, and that’s not enough.

  123. Jaakko Raipala says

    The problem with any such “anti-Semitic” strategyis, indeed, focus on Israel and fake tears for Palestinians. Fake tears for Palestinians works for the anti-Israel Left because Israel is everything they hate – a sort of European nationalist country that is, in their view, “colonizing” a group of non-white natives – so even if their love of Palestinians isn’t genuine their hatred of Israel clearly is.

    It doesn’t work for nationalist Europeans because they obviously don’t hate nationalism so anti-Israelism from their side only comes across as crusading against Jews for the sake of crusading against Jews. It’s also obvious that their real frustration with Jews is the media and finance influence so when they go after Israel as the substitute target it just comes across as weakness and surrender to the enemy’s frame of acceptable targets.

    The Jewish question is likely to erupt again in the near future as World War II fades from memory and the right take on it would be a great opportunity for nationalists. Heavily Jewish media and academia lecturing us all that nationalism is wrong and that everyone must become diverse and multicultural and Israel following entirely different ideas is just too much of a contradiction.

    Unfortunately right now it looks like no one knows a good strategy for nationalists so the resentment of this contradiction is just likely to feed left-wing anti-Israelism.

  124. The Jewish question is likely to erupt again in the near future as World War II fades from memory

    And as whites become a minority. The Blacks or Arabs etc. in Europe won’t care for Jewish sensibilities that much. The remaining white Europeans might be forced to convert to Islam, which in turn will liberate them from any residual guilt. Oh, and after Eurabia, good luck for Israel alone in a sea of Islam… Multiculturalism will be a great tragedy for Jews.

  125. part of the reason they hold no sway

  126. “The remaining white Europeans might be forced to convert to Islam, which in turn will liberate them from any residual guilt. Oh, and after Eurabia, good luck for Israel alone in a sea of Islam… Multiculturalism will be a great tragedy for Jews.”

    That’s what I don’t get.

    Look beyond Jews. A lot (but not all) are totally on board with this globalist/SJW thing.

    But it really seems to me that the globalists (what I’ll call them for short) fundamentally don’t understand the real situation in the world.

    They seem to think they are some kind of … universal value or something, it’s the natural new order of the world. And if some particular place happens to be unpleasant or sour, they can just pick up and “base” somewhere else, no problem.

    Only thing is I personally believe their current state of existence is a house of cards. I don’t think the Asian nations will ever become comfortable habitats for them akin to New York, London, and the like.

    And unless something is done in Europe, it sure looks like what you describe is going to happen within 50 years or so.

    Then what? Where they going to go? Does someone honestly think China or India is just dying to get the elite talent at Goldman Sachs or something to set up operations there? I’m sure they wouldn’t mind the new Goldman Sachs being there; only they are going to want to fill it up with Chinese or Indians.

    My take on it, perhaps informed by this site, is that you have to have a Western European mindset in a society for them to exist at all. And if the government doesn’t cooperate, the current state of affairs vis a vis income distributions can’t exist at all.

    I think their belief is that it is actual ability, intelligence, talent, whatever that put them in their current position. As opposed to capturing the regulators, and defacto taking over the US government (and other Western European nations).

    Only thing is one day they will have to compete with a similar group in a clannish society. Or someone like Don Corleone. What happens if the politician you buy off with the promise of eventual great wealth from post office speaking gigs comes home to find his maid has a bullet in her head, and there is a horse’s head in his bed (or whatever, just saying)?

    He might decide that maybe their money isn’t good if he is dead. Besides the Don pays well too.

    Now hypothetically one of this hypothetical rebased Goldmanites might decide to try and play the new game. Only they are hothouse flowers, they just aren’t going to be any good at it.

    So I think perversely they are maneuvering for their own dissolution as well.

  127. Chrisnonymous says

    The wife looked pretty f—able at the time they met. The strange thing is not that an 18 year old got involved with a 40 year old (I was attracted to fit 40 year olds at that age), but that it seems not to have been primarily sexual, inasmuch as they’re still together.

  128. Yes, hooking up for sex with a 39-year-old at age 15 is normal (I wouldn’t perhaps be very happy with the teacher if I was a parent, but wouldn’t terribly mind it). Falling in love with her could still be normal, though it raises the question of how the adult thought about this. (I mean, if she really loved him, would she have blocked him from having children? marrying him? I mean, in retrospect we know they stayed together, but they got married when he was 18 and she 42. She could’ve proposed that they stay boyfriend and girlfriend for a while, or something…) In any event, staying with her and not cheating on her as she was getting older and older, with no children or anything to keep them together. I have seen plenty of very well maintained 50-60-year-olds, on a photoshopped picture they still look more or less fantastic, up close the skin pretty much shows the age, even if, perhaps, in some cases the skin also looks perhaps 5-10 years younger. It’s in itself strange, to say the least.

  129. Sorry, I checked, they married when Macron was 30 or almost 30. In any event, stranger things have happened. I wouldn’t care for his personal life if Macron was to send the Arabs home.

  130. It’s just a red herring Palestinian lovers bring up.

    Jaakko Raipala has a good comment.

    Extreme right wing types don’t give a rat’s ass about Palestinians; they just hate Jews.

    Left wing types do care about Palestinians because they have, as Sailer says, more victim Pokémon points. The obvious conflict for leftists is whether Jews are considered white.

    One of my objections to anti-Semitism is that it confuses the issues and lends itself to manipulation by the media, for example, as in the false accusations that we say made against Trump.

    Plus, I don’t like a lot of ethnic or religious hatred unless there is no other way.

  131. So I think perversely they are maneuvering for their own dissolution as well.

    Yes. The banking mafia are adapted to being free riders in a western society – but they don’t know that yet.

    If they “win” they’ll take themselves down as well which is some consolation.

  132. Jews opened the borders because they thought it would make them safer.

    Anti-semitism on that basis is perfectly rational and reasonable – admittedly there’s also a more obsessive kind.

    Either way media control means if people want to talk about it with normies they have to use euphemisms – which is better anyway imo as it makes membership in those labels voluntary rather than ethno-sectarian.

  133. German_reader says

    If I understand correctly your position seems to be that Jewish nationalism in the US, manifested for instance in pro-Israel lobbies like AIPAC and the activities of neoconservative networks, is just fine and something to be accepted (because hey, white Americans just love Jews anyway and like bombing Muslims in the Mideast). Frankly, coupled with your support of the civic nation model this reeks of the double standard rightly criticised by many white nationalists. I mean ok, I actually agree that a country like the US can’t work anymore as an explicitly racial state based on cultural WASP supremacy like it did for the majority of its existence before the 1960s (and unfortunately a similar state is probably true now for many Western European countries as well, due to the foolish immigration policies of recent decades). The white nationalist vision of e.g. Richard Spencer probably couldn’t be made a reality without massive bloodshed, which is undesirable. So some sort of civic nationalism seems like the only possible way right now (though obviously preferably one with massive immigration restriction and renewed respect for the Northwest European cultural core of the US). For something like this to work however ALL groups will have to participate on an equal footing and ALL particularist nationalisms will have to be treated the same way (that is, they’re all equally legitimate or illegitimate). In the present US context this unavoidably should mean that organized Jewish nationalism has to be criticized and cut down to size, especially given its undeniably harmful effect on US foreign policy in recent decades. Otherwise, what’s your reasoning for morally condemning white nationalists? You rail at marginal, mostly powerless people expressing antisemitic opinions on the net, but somehow people whose nationalism actually has serious, negative consequences right now in the present are supposed to be beyond criticism????

  134. German_reader says

    “Because currently America is pushing for multiculturalism (i.e. death and destruction) for every single white country (except Israel), I’d be happier if it died an earlier death. You are a force of evil, doomed to death, so then it’s better if you die sooner than later.”

    Hard to disagree with that…given what the US has become (or maybe always was?), its hegemony cannot end soon enough.

  135. German_reader says

    I don’t know about that, Jean-Marie has some strange connections…he’s friend with a guy like this (even godfather for one of his children):
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieudonn%C3%A9_M%27bala_M%27bala
    Which is pretty weird and doesn’t really make sense apart from a “We have common enemies” perspective. To me it indicates poor judgement on JMLP’s part. Marine may well have been right to get rid of the old man.

  136. “You are on record stating that Stalin’s Russia was more conservative than the Russia of Nicholas II. Do you still stand by that statement?”

    Yes, of course. There was no homelessness, prostitution, no drugs in the later Soviet Union.

    Answer the question that was asked.

    Do you stand by the statement that Stalin’s Soviet Union was more conservative than the Russia of Nicholas II?

    A conservative society would include homelessness, prostitution, and drugs on the margins because such things exist when a society is not totalitarian/utopian. Like other leftists you seem to equate “conservative” with “strict” or “moralistic” and therefore that a totalitarian society that enforces a rigid moral code must be a “conservative” one. Let me guess – you believe that Cromwell was more conservative than the monarch he replaced; ISIS more conservative than Arab tribal elders and their traditional religious leaders, Nazis more conservative than the pre-war monarchies, etc. Your twist is that unlike other leftists, who use this false idea of conservativism to attack conservatives, you embrace the lie.

    Stalin’s USSR finished off what was left of the old order – most of the surviving aristocrats, many of the professionals, people once involved in capitalist trade, over 100,000 clergy, free peasants and private land. He eliminated the old world, enabling the new one to be formed.

    As for the late-period USSR, the issue is bit different. Once an old order is destroyed and a new way created and made stable, what is traditional can be radically different. We see this in how Christianity undid and remade the pagan world.

    Bolshevism is no Christianity, of course. But by the 1980s in Russia, a society with its own traditions, holidays, customs and values was in existence (two examples – New Years had really displaced Christmas as the main family holiday and most important winter holiday; abortion was seen as a normal way of birth control). To the extent that the society was in harmony with its own traditions it was a conservative one. Of course, this society was essentially a Frankenstein’s monster created out of the dismembered, rotten corpse of the murdered Russian Empire. And it was quite brittle and prone to self-corruption; an animated corpse is not the same thing as living, real being after all.

  137. Thanks, I’ll try my hand at explanation.

    One absolute key is that I do not consider American Jewish or other Americans’ goodwill toward Israel as inimical to the interests of the US. If one does not pre-suppose the attributed harmful effects, quite a bit of your argument fails.

    white Americans just love Jews anyway

    Yes, there has been a strong thread of respect for and goodwill toward Jews because of the nature of our Protestant heritage. We saw the increased use of the term Judeo-Christian as an attempt to shield Jews from anti-Semitism in the run-up to WWII. I come from an Evangelical background that reveres Jews as God’s original chosen people and that translates into my continued support for many Evangelical beliefs and ideas, especially when I think that they are not being accorded the same prerogatives as other groups in making their opinions heard and respected.

    double standard rightly criticised by many white nationalists.

    I see some legitimacy in this argument. However, America was founded by a diverse assortment of peoples and even though WASPs were predominate for a long time, we have evolved to be more inclusive of the races and religions that have been in “our” country from its beginning. Israel was founded by and for Jews. Israel can continue as a Jewish state or they can evolve, but they were not founded by a diverse population like the US so the same “rule” does not apply to them. We (the US) can’t go back to something that we never had; it would have to be a new creation.

    So some sort of civic nationalism seems like the only possible way right now (though obviously preferably one with massive immigration restriction and renewed respect for the Northwest European cultural core of the US).

    I don’t see anything here that I don’t support.

    organized Jewish nationalism has to be criticized and cut down to size, especially given its undeniably harmful effect on US foreign policy

    It is deniable and debatable. I agree that the influence of the lobby/Lobby is outsized.

    Otherwise, what’s your reasoning for morally condemning white nationalists? You rail at marginal, mostly powerless people expressing antisemitic opinions on the net, but somehow people whose nationalism actually has serious, negative consequences right now in the present are supposed to be beyond criticism????

    I only condemn WNs within the context of US politics. (Although I think that it is too late to work for Britain and many of the European countries.) If we have Armageddon that pits white against black, I will fight for the white side.

    I don’t consider Jews or Israel beyond criticism. I have some of my own and agree with some of the complaints that I see here. I will not usually join in such criticism here because I believe that if you lie down with dogs you will get fleas.

  138. As I explain in this post, which is written in French, Le Pen has absolutely no chance: http://necpluribusimpar.net/pourquoi-le-pen-ne-peut-pas-gagner-et-autres-reflexions-sur-le-premier-tour/. She will be trounced by Macron in the second round. I will probably write a post in English to explain why soon, but the comparison with Trump is very misleading. She really can’t win.

  139. Do you stand by the statement that Stalin’s Soviet Union was more conservative than the Russia of Nicholas II?

    Late-Stalinist USSR was more conservative than Nicholas II’s Russian Empire.

    I’ve dealt with the nonsense contained in the other parts of your post before.

  140. Dieudonné has quite the history.

    Basically they dried to make him into one of those politically correct minority mascots but it ended up blowing up in their faces.

    There is the remarkable case of Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, a French comedian of native Breton and Black Cameroonian descent. Dieudonné was also promoted by Jewish “anti-racists” to spread multiculturalist propaganda in his comedy shows and campaign against the Front National in the town of Dreux. The early Dieudonné, in his words, “dream[ed] of the Francophonie” (i.e. of the mostly Euro-Maghrebi-Black African French-speaking world).
    But in a rare case of manly pride and civic consciousness, Dieudonné persevered in applying this same “anti-racism” he had been taught to one people too many: Israel. That was something the “liberal Zionist” Jews had not counted on, and they reacted with absolute ferocity against their former protégé. He awoke to his manipulators. But the métis stood resolute, something unheard of for any Western celebrity since Charles Lindbergh, and focused his “anti-racist” aim at the most intense, hypocritical, and deceitful racism in human history: “international Zionism.”
    Dieudonné is condemned to apatrie. He took a native French wife. Above all he embraced Jean-Marie Le Pen,[11] Alain Soral, and all those who, in their own way, fight against international Zionism and for the life of the French nation.

  141. Agreed.

  142. “Do you stand by the statement that Stalin’s Soviet Union was more conservative than the Russia of Nicholas II?”

    Late-Stalinist USSR was more conservative than Nicholas II’s Russian Empire.

    Good. It’s good for others to see the extent to which you are a fool. Your other claims can be judged accordingly.

  143. Thanks, rT. Damn, you make me feel like a wishy-washy liberal. 🙂

  144. German_reader says

    “I see some legitimacy in this argument. However, America was founded by a diverse assortment of peoples and even though WASPs were predominate for a long time, we have evolved to be more inclusive of the races and religions that have been in “our” country from its beginning. Israel was founded by and for Jews. Israel can continue as a Jewish state or they can evolve, but they were not founded by a diverse population like the US so the same “rule” does not apply to them. We (the US) can’t go back to something that we never had; it would have to be a new creation. “

    That seems like a highly questionable interpretation of US history to me tbh. It’s of course true that there has always been an universalist strain in the American project. However the US political nation (which apart from a few marginal exceptions didn’t include blacks and Amerindians) at the time of its founding consisted predominantly of various Protestants of British background who strongly identified with certain British political traditions (“the rights of free-born Englishmen” and the like); the part of the 13 colonies’ white population that wasn’t British by origin consisted of other Northwest European Protestants (Dutch, Germans etc.) that were relatively close to the British and in any case quite easily assimilable.
    So at its founding there definitely was a strong ethnic-cultural component to US identity. It’s of course true that over the course of US history the definition of who could be an American became progressively wider (though for a long time a racial component was a core element of it – iirc the possibility naturalization was explicitly linked to whiteness, and at least in theory that remained the case until the mid-20th century) until by the later decades of the 20th century it indeed became universal. But that was a process, and maybe not inevitable.
    And if anything, Israel’s founding population was actually more diverse than that of the US. Ashkenazim and Mideastern Jews are far more different culturally and genetically than the various Northern European Protestants who founded the US were. Israel has also always had a significant non-Jewish population. So by your logic, Israel definitely can’t and shouldn’t be a Jewish nation state (not saying that I share this perspective, it just seems to me that this is the logical consequene when one applies your view of US history to Israel – though obviously there are many important differences).

    “One absolute key is that I do not consider American Jewish or other Americans’ goodwill toward Israel as inimical to the interests of the US. If one does not pre-suppose the attributed harmful effects, quite a bit of your argument fails.

    That seems highly debatable to me, one can easily get a very different impression when one reads someone like Philip Giraldi (who may be somewhat obsessive and maybe even occasionally unfair…but hey, the guy is a former CIA operative and probably knows a few things about those issues). But even if it weren’t inimical to US interests, the kind of relation the US has to Israel isn’t healthy, especially so in a ever more diverse civic nation supposedly based on values. The kind of ethnoreligious identity politics (whether from Jews or Christian Zionists) underpinning unconditional US support for Israel is simply toxic for the kind of civic nationalism you seem to desire, because it’s a blatant example that talk of universal norms, colorblindness etc. is just a smokescreen behind which ethnic and religious groups pursue their own selfish interests.

    “I don’t consider Jews or Israel beyond criticism. I have some of my own and agree with some of the complaints that I see here. I will not usually join in such criticism here because I believe that if you lie down with dogs you will get fleas.”

    To some extent I can understand that given the various Holocaust deniers and hardcore antisemites congregating in the comment sections of some articles here on Unz (and occasional articles published here like those originally from the Occidental observer can definitely be called antisemitic with reason). But honestly, no offense, I have to say you seem to be somewhat obsessed about this issue. I have to wonder if this isn’t due to the religious conditioning in your youth.

  145. German_reader says

    I’m not sure if I would trust counter-currents’ interpretation of his career…frankly, he seems like an unpleasant third-worldist, anti-white activist (maybe similar to those Nation of Islam freaks in the US who are pretty antisemitic as well). Seems pretty misguided to me to associate with someone like this. That’s actually one of the problems of antisemitism and “anti-zionism”…it makes some nationalists deranged enough to consider alliances (like with hardcore Islamists) that make absolutely no sense.

  146. However, America was founded by a diverse assortment of peoples and even though WASPs were predominate for a long time, we have evolved to be more inclusive of the races and religions that have been in “our” country from its beginning. Israel was founded by and for Jews. Israel can continue as a Jewish state or they can evolve, but they were not founded by a diverse population like the US so the same “rule” does not apply to them.

    Ridiculous double standards like this is why (political) anti-semitism is entirely rational.

  147. What we have here is a failure to communicate.

    We are in danger of talking past each other, for sure.

    The basic point is that most of the people accused of being anti-semites (like most of those accused of being “racists”) are not anti-Semitic in the sense of hating jewish people. If they are “anti-Semitic” it is in the sense of not especially loving jewish people or culture, not supporting jewish identity lobby interests (especially Israel) and declining to reverence jewish idols and taboos (usually the Holocaust). For these supposed offences decent people are accused of hating jewish people (that’s the implication of an accusation of anti-Semitism), smeared by association with the German Nazis, often driven out of mainstream employment or politics and sometimes even locked up (in Europe and increasingly the UK).

    They even did it to Pat Buchanan, ffs, who even (the honest amongst) his political enemies who know him well will admit doesn’t hate anybody who hasn’t earned it personally. I’ve experienced the exact same treatment myself, though only in a minor way. It’s a systematic and consistent practice.

    There’s every reason to suppose the same applies to Le Pen senior, and indeed by extension the party hierarchy of the Front National, and all or most of the nationalist parties smeared as “Nazis” or “anti-Semitic”.

    The only way to end it, as with the similar abuse of the charge of racism, is to stop regarding “antisemites” and “racists” as beyond the pale and as pariahs, and start regarding them as just people you disagree with. That might appear to be a quixotic, unachievable goal in the current circumstances, but the fact is that these societal attitudes do change, over a period of decades, and this one will as well. It wasn’t always thus, and it will not always be thus. Whether it triggers a violent backlash probably depends how far it is allowed to continue before it is reversed, and how much bitterness and hatred its enforcement creates before it is overturned.

    It appears we agree that charges of antisemitism or of racism do damage nationalist parties. As I noted above, it’s impossible imo to disentangle cause and effect in the recent widespread rise of nationalist parties and the tendency for opportunists to join them when they start to rise, and seek to make them more acceptable to the establishment during the process.

    You think that nationalist parties can (in theory at least) somehow cleanse themselves of badthink and of badthinkers, and emerge as parties acceptable to the mainstream. I think that’s hopelessly naïve, and that experience shows that the smears and accusations just continue anyway, until you’ve done a Trump and turned fully around to be exactly what you campaigned against.

    I also regard the few “genuine” racists and anti-Semites, that you would purge from any political activity or representation, as actual people, with opinions that they are entitled to hold and that should be accommodated within a broad nationalist party so long as they are not involved in violence. You regard them as unpersons who should not be allowed any human dignity as far as political activity is concerned. More to the point, I regard them as extremely important politically and socially, both as suppliers of political energy and as essential balancers against the power of the lobbies they oppose.

  148. I think it cuts both ways. Dieudonné, who is half white already, was also converging on some kind of French nationalism. I think he married a French woman, so his children will be three-quarters white French, and now with his friendship with Le Pen he is at least accepting of French nationalism.

  149. Which is pretty weird and doesn’t really make sense apart from a “We have common enemies” perspective.

    Seems entirely understandable to me, on precisely the terms you put it. Both men have been victims of exactly the same kind of smears, from mostly the same kinds of people (not just jewish lobbyists, but also establishment rivals or political enemies seeking to exploit charges of anti-Semitism to attack them).

    I too feel a sneaking respect for Dieudonne every time I hear he has defied another attempt to stop him exercising his right of free speech in ways that are unwelcome to the powerful, despite the fact that in most areas he represents everything I would set myself against.

    Friendships across political divides are not unheard of. You can interpret them negatively as signs of hypocrisy or positively as signs of openmindedness and decency, according to taste and particular cases, I suppose.

    To me it indicates poor judgement on JMLP’s part. Marine may well have been right to get rid of the old man.

    It certainly hasn’t made the establishment and mainstream media any less focused on smearing the FN as unacceptable. He was getting on anyway and it was time for a change of leadership, but whether the removal of easy open goals for the establishment media outweighed the loss of integrity and betrayal of core supporters, who knows?

  150. RadicalCenter says

    See your point, but it may overstate the support or concern for Israel among people living in the USA.

    Let’s ask the tens of millions of Mexican and half-Mexican “Americans” which is their favorite foreign country. You think they’d typically say Israel, or Mexico?

    Let’s ask the 40-45 million or so Africans living in the USA which is their favorite country. You really think they’d say “Israel”?

    Same question for Asians living in the USA.

    What you’re effectively claiming is that white Americans are so extremely overwhelmingly in favor of Israel as their favorite foreign country that they outweigh the utter indifference or hostility of the other large and rapidly growing demographic groups in the USA. Maybe not true even now, if we could all actually be asked, and certainly won’t be true soon.

  151. German_reader says

    ” He was getting on anyway and it was time for a change of leadership, but whether the removal of easy open goals for the establishment media outweighed the loss of integrity and betrayal of core supporters, who knows?”

    Hard to tell, but at least Marine seems to have been somewhat successful in increasing support for the FN (even though unfortunately it’s still not nearly enough). I agree with you that there’s a danger of “selling out” and being absorbed by the dominant mainstream. The question however remains “Where do you draw the line?”. I have to admit I don’t really have an answer to that question.

  152. German_reader says

    According to polls more than 60% of Americans actually would like the US to take a neutral position towards the Israel/Palestine issue:
    http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/u-s-public-opinion-and-israelpalestine/

    It’s obviously true that there’s significant support for Israel among the “amen corner” of the American public, many of whom seem to have a rather strange ideas not in line with the main currents of Christian tradition. But I don’t buy the idea that there’s some super-consensus in favour of Israel that has arisen naturally and organically.

  153. it makes some nationalists deranged enough to consider alliances (like with hardcore Islamists) that make absolutely no sense.

    In the case of Le Pen and Dieudonne we aren’t talking about any kind of political alliance, as far as I’m aware (though I stand to be corrected in this as I’m aware my knowledge is sketchy here), just (evidently) a personal mutual respect, aren’t we?

    That said, unless things change dramatically, there will likely come a time when it will be necessary to make such alliances once the possibility of saving any semblance of a nation is gone. If nationalists lose the current political fight, as seems entirely possible, then all bets are off. In a multicult state, the spoils are divided amongst the identity lobbies, and what remains of the nationalists in European regions will be just another squabbling identity lobby group, albeit probably still the biggest of them.

  154. German_reader says

    That’s a depressing prospect, but sadly it might not be an unrealistic one.

  155. But I don’t buy the idea that there’s some super-consensus in favour of Israel that has arisen naturally and organically.

    The idea is pretty laughable. It’s something that has been intentionally manufactured by the Israel lobby, but the primary component in that lobby (by numbers at any rate, not necessarily financial clout) has been American protestant Christians, especially evangelicals and dispensationalist types (the rational equivalent of the Iranian/Saudi islamic fundamentalists, and probably more dangerous overall, albeit supposedly on “our” side).

    People like this:

    Evangelical Christians plead for Israel

    They don’t (openly, at any rate) use non-state terrorism much, as the islamists do, because they mostly don’t need to – they have the military resources of the world’s only superpower and its allies, satellite states and protectorates to do their killing for them.

  156. I have to admit I don’t really have an answer to that question.

    You and me both.

    Fortunately we don’t need to make the decisions, just second guess them 🙂

  157. However, America was founded by a diverse assortment of peoples and even though WASPs were predominate for a long time, we have evolved to be more inclusive of the races and religions that have been in “our” country from its beginning.

    WRONG. The United States of America was founded by and for WHITE PEOPLE.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalization_Act_of_1795

    http://www.npiamerica.org/research/category/what-the-founders-really-thought-about-race

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924

    The 1965 immigration act that overthrew our country could only be passed under false pretenses– they had to assure us that it wouldn’t change our demographics because it was understood we were a WHITE NATION.

  158. ussr andy says

    what would Stalin have to do concretely though, in order to earn the label conservative from you?
    re-creating the “Russia we lost” was not an option. Dismantling the system that began as radical-lefitst altogether and joining the NWO was not an option either (retrospectively) because you see what happened in the 90’s, plus both things would be revolutionary in themselves.
    I’m not arguing, I’m just curious (even though I, too, think the repression of social ills is a good metric of conservatism, to a first approximation)

  159. I have to wonder if this isn’t due to the religious conditioning in your youth

    Well, aren’t you the bright fellow, since this is what I explicitly stated in several of my comments.

    Forget this comment. I am trying to learn to play nice. I’ll get back to you.

  160. ussr andy says

    PS I’m aware the “no alternatives” trope is considered evil by some people (Steven Cohen), but I’m not using it to argue in favor of Stalinism or anything

  161. RadicalCenter says

    Einverstanden.

  162. what would Stalin have to do concretely though, in order to earn the label conservative from you?

    This question is akin to asking what Franco or Horthy or Kolchak would have had to do, to earn the label of leftist. Or what would Hitler have had to do to earn the label of philosemite.

    re-creating the “Russia we lost” was not an option

    Yes, only in a book could Sharikov have been returned to his natural state. But…

    Enough of the lost Russia was still around in 1925 that while recreating it would no longer have been feasible, it would still have been possible to enable conditions that might have led to some sort of regeneration, stunted as it would have been. Under NEP the peasants still owned their own lands as they had done before the Revolution; this could have been left alone. Stalin did the opposite, he utterly destroyed the countryside, transforming farmers into agricultural workers. Backing off from the Church and allowing it to play its traditional role would have been another; here, too, he did the opposite, slaughtering over 100,000 priests and recreating the Church as an instrument of the Atheist state. Amnestying the old aristocracy and allowing them to return and contribute to the country, while purging the Bolsheviks and banning their party as well as that of the SRs (here there is some overlap with what he actually did – but he did so in order to finalize his own power) as punishment for the crimes of 1917. Restoring, where possible, stolen property, at l;east if owners were still alive and were willing to return to Russia if in exile abroad.
    Leaving alone the professionals and scientists who had worked during the old regime. At least these are my quick, unthought-through speculations.

  163. Greasy William says

    It’s also obvious that their real frustration with Jews is the media and finance influence so when they go after Israel as the substitute target it just comes across as weakness and surrender to the enemy’s frame of acceptable targets.

    No it isn’t. You don’t give WNs/Paleocons enough credit.

    Talk to Jobbik supporters, Stormfronters, Ron Paul supporters/Paleocons, or German Nationalists or read their writings and they will all make it clear that the Palestinians are their number 1 priority and often the Palestinians are there only priority. The finance/media stuff is a red herring, nobody cares who runs the Fed, the New York Times or Goldman Sachs.

    In the mid 00s a very large faction of Paleocons and WNs were advocating making peace with mass immigration as a way to better fight Israel. They have been temporarily silenced by the populist backlash over the last few years but they are still out there.

    Now don’t get me wrong, most WNs are morons and not in touch with reality, but even they know that running on a Palestine/Iran platform is electoral suicide. And yet they keep doing it because it is what they really care about.

    I don’t understand this need that Jews have to pretend that their enemies don’t really love the Palestinians and Iranians. It is natural that enemies of the Jews would love such evil and worthless peoples.

  164. Greasy William says

    The basic point is that most of the people accused of being anti-semites (like most of those accused of being “racists”

    If you are against the existence of the State of Israel, you are an anti-semite. Period. If you against mass immigration, you are a racist. Period.

    Those are just facts. Your anti-semitism and/or racism may be justified, but it is no less real.

  165. Greasy William says

    But I don’t buy the idea that there’s some super-consensus in favour of Israel that has arisen naturally and organically.

    There is a super consensus for benign indifference. Most Americans don’t care about Israel. They go through their entire lives not thinking about it one way or the other, much like most Europeans. The difference is that in the US there is no organic tradition of anti semitism like there is in Europe and in fact there is a tradition of philo semitism, so there is a lukewarm support amongst the people for Israel and a much stronger support from the elites.

    The end of US support is inevitable but it also doesn’t matter. When the US stops giving Israel aid, selling Israel weapons and vetoing anti Israel UN resolutions, literally nothing will change. Israel will continue to kill Arabs and the rest of the world will continue to do nothing to stop them. Then all the Unz people who are today complaining about how the US is too supportive of Israel will switch to complaining that the US isn’t doing enough to help the Palestinians, and everybody will continue to ignore them just like they do now.

    It’s all one big circle.

  166. In the mid 00s a very large faction of Paleocons and WNs were advocating making peace with mass immigration as a way to better fight Israel. They have been temporarily silenced by the populist backlash over the last few years but they are still out there.

    I’m not seeing this. Could you name them and maybe link where they say this?

  167. Talk to Jobbik supporters, Stormfronters, Ron Paul supporters/Paleocons, or German Nationalists or read their writings and they will all make it clear that the Palestinians are their number 1 priority and often the Palestinians are there *only* priority.

    No, they aren’t. Where did you get this idea?

  168. What you’re effectively claiming

    No, I’m not claiming this, iffen is claiming this, and I was sarcastically replying to him.

  169. Greasy William says

    Sobran, Michael Collins Piper, Scott McConnell. I don’t have any links but read their stuff and they are pretty open about it.

  170. German_reader says

    I’m not American and only somewhat familiar with Scott Mcconnell’s writings…my impression is he’s somewhat fluctuating on the immigration issue. Back when The American conservative started, he wrote iirc that demographic transformation through mass immigration is NOT conservative by any meaningful definition. A few years ago he seemed somewhat more ok with it though (even stating at one point that he thinks the US will be fine with a non-white majority). Now he seems more skeptical once again. So superficially there may be something to your interpretation…it still seems like a gross over-generalization to me though (also rather obsessive…iirc at one point you asked AK what Putin was going to do for the Palestinians…that was quite bizarre).
    Weird direction this thread has taken…to get back to topic, in case anyone hasn’t seen it:
    http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/03/31/big-stakes-in-the-french-presidential-election-governance-versus-the-people/
    It contains an interesting summary of Macron’s career (at least I found it interesting, because of course you usually don’t see it presented quite like that).

  171. German_reader says

    Yes, I agree, these are seriously scary people. Giraldi had a piece some years ago about how influential people with that mindset supposedly are in the US military:
    http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/old-testament-army/
    Obviously we’re not in a position to judge how accurate this is, but if true it’s quite disturbing.

  172. anti-Semitism is that it confuses the issues and lends itself to manipulation by the media

    Actually, to borrow a term from Yehuda Bauer, it is anti-antisemitism which is confusing the issues. For example “Iraq was a war for oil.” Or “In retrospect, Iraq was a colossal mistake, but nobody could’ve known that.” Or “Iraq was necessary so that the terrorists went there instead of coming to America/Europe, it kept us safe.” Simply by refusing to notice the Jewish 800 pound gorilla in the room, you cannot make sense of the world.

    I don’t like a lot of ethnic or religious hatred unless there is no other way

    I don’t like it either. You don’t have to hate blacks to point out that they are prone to violent criminality. It’s in our best interest (in whites’ best interest, and also that of blacks) to understand this, so that we can devise social policies which take such hatefacts into consideration, to prevent or avoid many unnecessary murders. Unnecessary murders of whites by blacks, and also unnecessary murders of blacks by blacks. Also unjust indictments of white police officers. Also unjust indictments of black police officers, as happened in the Freddie Gray case.

    Similarly, if we understand Jews’ tendency to support multiculturalism and for promoting policies often only tangentially beneficial to Israel (but highly harmful to the rest of the world, like toppling the Assad regime), we might be able to better criticize them (and so make them less influential). In a country where the majority of people are aware of Jewish ethnic solidarity (even to the detriment of gentiles) it’s more difficult for such Jewish-influenced policies to get traction.

    I certainly don’t hate Jews, labeling any criticism of Jews as “hatred” is anyway a very primitive way of thinking. I dislike Jews as a group for their disregard of gentiles’ interests, while I admire them for their talents and intelligence. On a personal level, I often find Jews (at least Hungarian Jews, I have little experience with others, I also have less common cultural grounds with others) to be pleasant company, though perhaps that’s just a function of their on average higher intelligence. Why is it “hatred” to point out both their failings and virtues, just as with other ethnic groups?

  173. One absolute key is that I do not consider American Jewish or other Americans’ goodwill toward Israel as inimical to the interests of the US. If one does not pre-suppose the attributed harmful effects, quite a bit of your argument fails.

    Well, Jews also often assume that what’s beneficial to Jews is also beneficial to anyone else. This is a serious distortion.

    Let’s take the case of Syria. The US has spent a lot of money on trying to topple the Assad regime. It led to a large number of Syrian refugees arriving in the US (and an even larger number of them arriving in Europe). If the effort would be successful, it would lead to the wholesale massacre and ethnic cleansing of Syrian Christians, Alawites, and similar other minorities. The war has already resulted in wholesale massacres and horrible, gruesome deaths of countless civilians, both minorities and those belonging to the Sunni Muslim majority.

    I consider affecting such massacres of innocent civilians (which will inevitably lead to hatred of the US and the West in general and their meddling), as well as the resettlement of large numbers of refugees into Western countries, also the toppling of a more or less secular regime in favor of Islamist militias is inimical to what I believe to be US and European interests. Even if it was neutral, spending a lot of money on something that’s not beneficial is in itself inimical to our interests.

    I also think this is just pure demonic evil, at least in light of how little benefit it brings to Israel (“weakening Iran” or something). Or do you think the gruesome deaths and expulsions and rapes etc. of so many innocents is morally neutral, or even morally good?

  174. Greasy William says

    iirc at one point you asked AK what Putin was going to do for the Palestinians…

    Because I misunderstood what AK was trying to say in that article. I thought AK was of The Saker school, instead AK is some type of bizarre WWI style of Russian Nationalist. I apologized to Anatoly for my outburst which is something I practically never do.

    You kinda just admitted I was right with the Scott McConnell thing: in 2008 he was all about a non white majority because he thought it would be good for the Palestinians, now he is starting to walk it back but it’s all just for show. Look at how many supposed Trump supporters turned on Trump for shooting up an airbase runway in Syria.

  175. If you are against the existence of the State of Israel, you are an anti-semite. Period. If you against mass immigration, you are a racist. Period.

    Those are just facts. Your anti-semitism and/or racism may be *justified*, but it is no less real.

    This is you employing strategic equivocation, as is the essence of the”antisemitic” or “racist” smear. It’s a form of what is known as a “motte and bailey fallacy“: you employ one meaning of the term and when challenged on it revert to another meaning that is more defensible.

    So you (or someone employing the same tactic as you) will claim that someone you want to demonise or whose opinion you want to delegitimise is a nasty antisemite or racist or islamophobe, implying they are motivated by bigoted hatred and associating them with the likes of Nazis, then when challenged by someone pointing out that the target of your ad hominem (an attempt to discredit an argument or position by attacking the person presenting it is just that) doesn’t actually hate anyone, you revert to a much broader definition of antisemitism or racism or islamophobia to ensure that they are included.

    This is how all the ad hominem smear terms work – antisemitism, racism, islamophobia, homophobia, etc.

    The best response is to point out that in that case either the charge of “anti-Semitism” or “racism” or whatever is untrue, or being “antisemitic” or “racist” or whatever is not inherently a bad thing to be. The latter is clearly the case if they just mean “being opposed to the existence of Israel” or “opposing mass immigration”, both of which positions can easily be argued for.

  176. Look at how many supposed Trump supporters turned on Trump for shooting up an airbase runway in Syria.

    This is again you interpreting things through the distorting prism of your own evident obsession with Israel and Palestinians.

    Trump supporters who turned against him over the attack on Syria, like myself, were most likely motivated by the fact that it was a fundamental betrayal of what he said or implied during the campaign to make them supporters in the first place, which was that he would turn against stupid interventionism, and turn against the stupid confrontation of Russia. It’s now clear (and the attack itself was merely a crystallising point for a wider change of policy) that there is to be no end to the policy of regime change in Syria, nor to the policy of confrontation of Russia.

    It’s got nothing to do with Palestinians, I’d venture, for almost any former supporter of Trump.

  177. “being opposed to the existence of Israel”

    Just for the record, while I’m a bit agnostic about whether I’d have supported the creation of Israel in the first half of the 20th century, I’d strongly oppose the dissolution of Israel now, because it would lead to the unnecessary destruction of lives and property and probably wholesale ethnic cleansing (on a scale larger than what Israel committed back in the late 1940s, because the population density is much higher now). I’d also wouldn’t wish for that many Jewish refugees to come to Europe or other white countries.

    I’d just leave Israel to its own considerable resources to deal with any threats that are present or might emerge in the future, and decide on a case by case basis whether or how much to help them, based on Western interests. Let’s not pretend that this would lead to an immediate destruction of Israel or a second holocaust.

  178. in the first half of the 20th century

    I think I would have turned quite understanding by 1942 at the latest.

  179. Greasy William says

    So you (or someone employing the same tactic as you) will claim that someone you want to demonise or whose opinion you want to delegitimise is a nasty antisemite or racist or islamophobe, implying they are motivated by bigoted hatred

    There is nothing wrong with bigotry or hate. You are one attaching values to these terms, not me.

    That said, it doesn’t even matter what motivates you. If you are against mass immigration (as I am), that is a racist position. It doesn’t matter whether or not you are motivated by antipathy towards immigrant groups, you could be motivated even by something like environmental concerns and it is still racist. It’s good racism, but still racism.

    Same deal with Israel.

  180. There is nothing wrong with bigotry or hate. You are one attaching values to these terms, not me.

    Those are the values that are, as a matter of objective fact, attached to those terms in ordinary English language discourse.

    If you are against mass immigration (as I am), that is a racist position.

    Of course it isn’t, necessarily. It can be, clearly, depending on how it is motivated and applied (though you’d have to carefully define what you mean by “racist” to have any really meaningful discussion because the term is so routinely abused that it cannot really be used honestly without careful definition), but it isn’t necessarily. If you adopt a civic definition of nationality (as for instance Steve Sailer has argued for in the past) and seek to apply immigration restrictions on a strictly non-racist basis, then it is not by any plausible definition “racist”.

    It might be arguable that most supporters of immigration controls in practice are racist in the sense that they actually apply a more blood and soil kind of definition of nationality (without necessarily admitting it even to themselves), but that’s a different argument. And again, it’s difficult to use such an argument in public discourse without exposing yourself to the likelihood of falling victim to the aforementioned motte and bailey doctrine.

  181. It’s not really an argument we should divert into here imo, but fwiw I’ve come around from my early life support for Israel (pre-1980s) to the position that its creation was one of the great crimes, and blunders, of history.

    That doesn’t necessarily mean that the ending of Israel in its current form is a wise thing to seek, for the reasons you point out, among others, but my original point was merely that it’s perfectly possible to argue against the continued existence of Israel in its current form without being meaningfully anti-Semitic.

    I’d just leave Israel to its own considerable resources to deal with any threats that are present or might emerge in the future, and decide on a case by case basis whether or how much to help them, based on Western interests. Let’s not pretend that this would lead to an immediate destruction of Israel or a second holocaust.

    That is what my own position would be, in practice.

  182. Greasy William says

    If you adopt a civic definition of nationality (as for instance Steve Sailer has argued for in the past) and seek to apply immigration restrictions on a strictly non-racist basis, then it is not by any plausible definition “racist”.

    Sure it is. Why do you think Derbyshire un-ironically describes himself as a racist white supremacist?

  183. the various Holocaust deniers and hardcore antisemites congregating in the comment sections of some articles here on Unz

    I agree that obsessive Jew-haters can be annoying. Holocaust denial also offends my sensibilities regarding the truth. I mean, the holocaust really did happen, and I cannot really condone ideas which just happen to be untrue. Even if I support abolishing all “hate speech” laws, including the holocaust denial laws. I occasionally chime in in this thread in that spirit.

  184. Not because he opposes mass immigration, but because he thinks whites are superior (they build better societies, create better science, better arts, etc.), and he thinks its a biological racial attribute. But this belief is neither necessary nor sufficient to oppose mass immigration. For example you might actually believe all that and still support mass immigration (thinking that whites will come out on top in any society, like Latin America), or you might not believe in it and still think immigration needs to be curtailed (like Paul Krugman some years ago wrote that it’s easier to build social safety nets etc. in the absence of mass immigration).

  185. Sure it is. Why do you think Derbyshire un-ironically describes himself as a racist white supremacist?

    What rT said.

    Derbyshire self-describes as a racist and white supremacist” and “Derbyshire opposes mass immigration” does not imply “opponents of mass immigration are racist“.

  186. Steve Sailer

    I don’t read that much of him, but my understanding of one of Sailer’s main themes is taking the concept of racism, and its inherent connotations, and standing it on its head. Indeed, “invading the world” is arguably much more racist than “inviting the world” is, for lack of a better term, anti-racist.

  187. “invading the world” is arguably much more racist

    You would think that, but that’s not how it works.

    For example the letter of the law allows President Trump to prevent any foreigners or any groups of foreigners from entering the US. The law (according to the majority of the same interpreters of it) also allows him to kill any number of foreigners by ordering military attacks (like drone attacks) on them. So you would think that either both of these things have the same constitutional status (both constitutional or both unconstitutional), or only the cruise missile strikes / drone attacks are unconstitutional. You would be wrong! Trump can order any number of military attacks on any groups of foreigners (it’s constitutional), but he cannot deny entry to those same foreigners into the US (that’s unconstitutional). Therefore, strangely, the only seemingly constitutional way for President Trump to deny visa to foreigners is to have them killed in drone strikes or cruise missile strikes.

    I think racism works the same way: it’s not racist to bomb the shit out of Muslim countries, starting wars in them (which then lead to the violent deaths of hundreds of thousands or even millions of them), but it’s racist to deny them their right to immigrate.

  188. Plenty of other reasons to dislike the old rogue, though.

  189. I mean, the holocaust really did happen, and I cannot really condone ideas which just happen to be untrue.

    Do you think that there was something unique about the Holocaust, or was it just another ordinary massacre or genocide?

  190. And if anything, Israel’s founding population was actually more diverse than that of the US.

    Jews form a genetic cluster, I don’t think that you can get a similar genetic cluster of European Protestants. Jewish religious identity overwhelms any putative Northern European Protestant identity. The European Union is coming un-raveled, not Israel.

    The kind of ethnoreligious identity politics (whether from Jews or Christian Zionists) underpinning unconditional US support for Israel is simply toxic for the kind of civic nationalism you seem to desire

    I don’t see any problem for my civic nationalism. It doesn’t upset me that some people of Irish descent identify with the Republic of Ireland rather that Northern Ireland.

    I have to say you seem to be somewhat obsessed about this issue. I have to wonder if this isn’t due to the religious conditioning in your youth.

    I am not obsessed. Where does that leave your observation? I think that I would still favor the existence of Israel even without the Evangelical background.

  191. If you are against the existence of the State of Israel, you are an anti-semite. Period. If you against mass immigration, you are a racist. Period.

    Those are just facts.

    These are not facts, they are opinions. Further, they are opinions that do not have the support to convince me.

    I grant that most, but not all, who are against the existence of Israel do so because it is full of Jews.

  192. The basic point is that most of the people accused of being anti-semites (like most of those accused of being “racists”) are not anti-Semitic in the sense of hating jewish people.

    This is not the basic point for me.

    Regardless of the fact that labels are thrown about inaccurately and falsely for partisan purposes, anti-Semites actually exist. My interest is in learning how to accurately identify them.

  193. “Do you think that there was something unique about the Holocaust, or was it just another ordinary massacre or genocide?”

    Loaded question.

    But to answer it on face value, there have been so many massacres and genocides in history, there probably has to be one similar somewhere.

    As for unusual features of the Holocaust?

    1) Record keeping. Not so much that lack of records has been a strategy for conquerors, tyrants, genociders to avoid prosecution (that was a non-issue until relatively recently). Rather it’s just that writing stuff down wasn’t Genghis Khan’s bag. That was an occupation of the massacree.

    And as usual the Germans wound up this feature to the nth degree. Used to be a luxury massacre was a trench with some quicklime thrown on you. Most of the time the corpses were a feast for buzzards.

    2) The whole Rube Goldberg approach. Classically you just break someone’s skull, burn down their hut and call it a day.

    The Germans had this elaborate prison camp, poison gas, incinerator thing. Oh yeah, and details like extracting teeth for gold fillings, and whatever the story is on the skin and whatnot.

    The Great Khan’s guys would most likely have been happy to pull teeth if anyone had gold ones (it’s debatable if they would kill you first – guess that is the most practical though). But the rest of it? Fancy is when the Mongols bothered to decapacitate the corpses to build a mountain of skulls (google what they did to Islam. That was a hatchet job).

    3) The relative lack of brutality. Yeah, I said that. The motif in history has been a chaotic nightmare of fires, screams, rapes, and gangs of men savagely beating one of the victims to death amid laughter and glee.

    Hmmm google “Blood Eagle.” That was a scandinavian thing. The Swedes had some act I can’t remember the name of, where they took someone and filled his mouth with sh*t, piss, or whatever else was foul to basically drown you (that was relatively recently when Sweden was a big noise about 1700).

    That is one thing the Germans did differently. So industrial, bloodless. The Russians just put one bullet in your head and moved on. A quiet grave in the forest no one will ever find again was the way they rolled.

    Anyway that’s my take on things.

  194. I take your response as a tentative yes, pending the finding of a genocide that matches the characteristics of the Holocaust.

  195. Most modern mass murders or genocides are quite unique. Can you name me one genocide which matches the characteristics of the Cambodian genocide?

    The Soviet massacres are not unique in the sense that they were copied by other communist regimes, but even there there was a lot of variation, like the Great Leap Forward was quite unique in that they destroyed not only lives but a lot of property, too. They brought down some third of the Chinese housing stock, for example, after which people were left without adequate housing. They destroyed a lot of agricultural tools, too, and it was one of the reasons for the ensuing famine. It wasn’t good for anyone, not even Mao.

    Since the Armenian genocide (to which Hitler himself referred to several times as an example) was quite different from the holocaust, I take it it was unique as well, I guess.

  196. Top Trump Administration counterterrorism adviser Sebastian Gorka abruptly left a panel on fake news at Georgetown University on Monday after he was questioned about his work at Breitbart and links to a far right Hungarian group with Nazi ties, three people who were there told NBC News.

    This topic that we are on is very important.

  197. Regardless of anything, Gorka is a loon. His PhD was worthy of a degree from Trump University.

    I don’t know about his Nazi (or “Nazi”) ties. Perhaps he had some ties to the Hungarian hard nationalist scene, though I think he was mostly a mainstream Fidesz guy who more or less broke with Orbán (or at least somewhat distanced himself) over some policy issues in recent years. (For example Orbán’s recent friendliness to Putin.)

  198. genocide which matches the characteristics of the Cambodian genocide

    They targeted intellectuals and the educated.

    Katyn Forest comes to mind.

    Massacres motivated by religious differences are a dime a dozen.

  199. What do you know about the Vitezi Rend? This connection is what they are getting at.

    He may be a loon, but a few weeks back he left Steve Inskeep on NPR speechless and I thought that it was priceless.

  200. I think when you ask “unique”, you mean “uniquely evil” or “uniquely cruel” or “uniquely bad in some hard to define way”, and my answer to these is no. There was plenty of cruelty, evil and other bad things in it, as in other instances of mass murder and genocide. But not more than in many other instances of mass murder.

  201. Horthy was elected Regent after the dethronement of the Habsburgs in 1920, but he didn’t have the right to ennoble people. He founded the Vitézi Rend (rend means order, and vitéz roughly means something like warrior or knight or brave soldier) to circumvent this: he had the sole right to award membership, which was heritable, members were allowed to use the word “Vitéz” in their names, and they were given some small (really small, something one family could toil on) pieces of land.

    After 1945 the order was disbanded, its members were labelled fascists (which some of them were, but most of them were not, as it was awarded for ordinary achievements or loyalty to Horthy, who personally wasn’t a fascist anyway), and many of them went into exile, where they created not one, but I think two or three successor organizations over the decades. They (or at least maybe one of the organizations) even kept awarding membership to new members. The successor organizations think the other one(s?) is (are?) illegitimate, so they hate each other.

  202. INSKEEP: But let me – in the minute we have…
    GORKA: That’s why we’re…
    INSKEEP: In the minute we have, I just want to be clear on something. Terrorism specialists have focused more on people who are radicalized who are already in the United States, who may have a personal problem or they pick up an ideology, they’re radicalized. That’s a problem we’ve actually seen in recent years. In about 30 seconds, what specifically is the administration doing to focus on that?
    GORKA: We’re not going to listen to so-called terrorism experts who were linked in any way to the last eight years of disastrous counterterrorism. We’re going to take a new approach. We have a new president.
    INSKEEP: Self-Radicalization is not a problem? Are you saying it’s not a problem?
    GORKA: No, I’m not. I wish you wouldn’t try and put words into my mouth. I’m trying to explain that we have a different approach because the last eight years of denying what the threat is, saying we need jobs for jihadis, it’s about root causes and upstream factors is wholly fallacious. If it were poverty and lack of education…
    INSKEEP: Dr. Gorka…
    GORKA: …Was the cause of terrorism, then half of India would be terrorists. And they’re not.
    INSKEEP: I’ve got to stop you there. But I enjoyed you taking the time. Thank you very much, really appreciate it. That’s presidential advisor Sebastian Gorka.

  203. I mean: was it a holocaust, or was it the Holocaust?

  204. Katyn Forest was a small piece of massacre, and was committed by soldiers from another country. It’s nothing like Cambodia where a leadership of a country managed to quite randomly murder a quarter of the population. The randomness is key, since it wasn’t really a case of one subset of the population killing another, rather a mass murder within the group.

    Massacres motivated by religious differences are a dime a dozen.

    So are ethnically motivated massacres, or massacres committed against market dominant minorities by their host populations.

  205. I was only referring to his argument specifically on immigration, whereby he has argued for limiting immigration on explicitly non-racist grounds in opposition to the white nationalist position adopted by Jared Taylor. He justifies it as protecting the interests of all existing US citizens, rather than one group over the others.

    Sailer vs. Taylor, Round II —”Citizenism” vs. White Nationalism

    There are many ways to argue against mass immigration, and the racist ones are not necessarily the least forceful, but it’s certainly very easy to construct non-racist arguments.

  206. German_reader says

    ” Look at how many supposed Trump supporters turned on Trump for shooting up an airbase runway in Syria.”

    That doesn’t necessarily have anything do with Israel…one doesn’t have to be explicitly against Israel or care much about Palestinians to recognize that Western interventions in the region have been disastrous and that regime change in Syria is a bad idea.
    As for McConnell, you might be right…I have no way to see what’s going on in that guy’s head.

  207. “I mean: was it a holocaust, or was it the Holocaust?”

    The Holocaust?

    Look chief, you know we are almost to a man autistic pedants here.

    Stalin’s purges and especially what happened in China dwarf the Holocaust bodycount in the 20th century alone.

    China is a favorite of mine in a ghoulish way when it comes to these kinds of things. The scale means anything melodramatic that happens has dire consequences.

    This is my 2nd favorite (or at least memorable) “Holocaust” in world history:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion

    Not exactly comparable to the Holocaust exactly. But a whole heck of a lot of people were killed:

    “The war was the largest in China since the Qing conquest in 1644, and ranks as one of the bloodiest wars in human history, the bloodiest civil war and the largest conflict of the 19th century, with estimates of war dead ranging from 20–70 million to as much as 100 million, with millions more displaced.[12]”

    I think this is the all-time champ though (but it is disputed):

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Lushan_Rebellion

    “Some scholars have interpreted the difference in the census figures as implying the deaths of 36 million people, about two-thirds of the population of the empire. This figure was used in Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature, where it is presented as proportionally the largest atrocity in history with the loss of a sixth of the world’s population at that time,[18] though Pinker noted that the figure was controversial.[19]

    Johan Norberg, who in his book Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future is generally supportive of Pinker’s arguments, gives the number of 13 million people (citing Matthew White’s The Great Big Book of Horrible Things), which he notes is still highly significant, representing about 5% of the 8th century world’s population.[20]”

    Again controversial and disputed. But if you do go with Pinker’s numbers (or even the latter guy’s), that’s not Holocaust. That’s Apocalypse. End times.

    That’s one of the survivors basically realizing that his family, everyone he ever knew, everyone they ever knew… is dead. Tears mixed with ashes.

  208. by their host populations

    Can we have a host without a parasite?

  209. Regardless of the fact that labels are thrown about inaccurately and falsely for partisan purposes, anti-Semites actually exist. My interest is in learning how to accurately identify them.

    If this is your interest, then I’d have thought the fact that most of those accused are not in fact what they are accused of being would be pretty basic for you, wouldn’t it?

    By seeking to identify and (in actual practice, whether or not in intent) hold up for special dehumanisation (removal of political activity rights, employment and even liberty, in some cases) those who hold these opinions, you help to sustain the motivation for the false accusations that make your task impossible.

    I’d say “good luck with that”, but actually however inherently futile your quest is, your attitude fuels the problem warping our societies and politics.

  210. German_reader says

    Yes, I totally agree, whatever one thinks about the way Israel came into being, it exists now as a Jewish nation state, and its dissolution would lead to serious suffering and injustice.
    Personally I have issues less with Israel itself anyway than with many of its supporters in Western countries.

  211. The randomness is key, since it wasn’t really a case of one subset of the population killing another

    No, they targeted the educated, ethnic groups, and religious groups. Plus anyone they considered to be a political opponent, which of course is very common.

  212. By seeking to identify and (in actual practice, whether or not in intent) hold up for special dehumanisation (removal of political activity rights, employment and even liberty, in some cases) those who hold these opinions, you help to sustain the motivation for the false accusations that make your task impossible.

    You are just making stuff up and attributing it to me.

    I simply want to know how to identify Nazis and anti-Semites in case there are political groups in the US, now or in the future, that I might want to join. I don’t want to associate with Nazis or anti-Semites. If that is my only choice, I will just sit tight and let the SJWs do their work unmolested by me.

  213. Every murder is uniquely important and horrifying to its victim and his friends and relatives. To more objective onlookers, while some might have unusually barbaric or horrifying particular features, they are all just murders to be categorised as seems appropriate.

    Same applies to mass murders and genocides, which are commonplace in human history, albeit generally ramping up in scale over time, as improved technology and organisation enables more industrial scales of operation. The killings committed by Germans and their allies in WW2 are just another example of this general feature of human existence, and to elevate them to something uniquely different and special is to distort understanding of reality, and consequently politics (which is precisely the purpose of doing so, of course).

  214. Can we have a host without a parasite?

    If you are a guest in someone else’s home, are you a parasite?

  215. German_reader says

    “Jews form a genetic cluster, I don’t think that you can get a similar genetic cluster of European Protestants. Jewish religious identity overwhelms any putative Northern European Protestant identity. The European Union is coming un-raveled, not Israel.”

    I’m admittedly hardly an expert on genetics, but I don’t think that view is tenable. It seems to be true that most Jewish populations have common ancestors in the ancient Near East, but as far as I know Ashkenazim (who genetically are about 50% South European), Sephardim and other groups like Yemeni Jews (not to mention Ethiopian ones who genetically seem to be just Judaized East Africans) are quite distinguishable by genetic tests. And on a cultural level there were and are clear differences betweeen the different groups. Even today despite decades of intermarriage surveys seem to indicate enduring differences (e.g. Ahskenazim are more likely to be secular and regard Jewishness as an ethnic identity, whereas Mideastern Jews seem to be more likely to regard it rather as a purely religious identity). Israeli nationalism, while clearly based on ancient traditions and group identities, is quite obviously a modern creation – the very fact that Zionists revived an ancient, liturgical language for its purposes, shows how “artificial” it is in some ways. Now personally, I don’t think that makes Israeli nationalism illegitimate…but your contrast with the supposedly diverse founders of the US is really quite strange and imo not based on the facts.

    I don’t see any problem for my civic nationalism. It doesn’t upset me that some people of Irish descent identify with the Republic of Ireland rather that Northern Ireland.

    It may not upset you, but I guess people in Britain didn’t find it that great when Irish-Americans in Boston donated to the IRA…but I suppose such kind of dual identities and their consequences are supposed to be just normal in the US.

    “I am not obsessed. Where does that leave your observation? I think that I would still favor the existence of Israel even without the Evangelical background.

    It isn’t primarily about Israel (despite my misgivings about certain aspects of it, I’m actually in favour of its existence as a Jewish nation state as well…given the largely successful attempt by Germans and some German allies like Romania to exterminate Jews during WW2, there’s a good rationale why a Jewish nation state is necessary). But most of your posts on Unz review seem to be about looking for antisemites and getting in net feuds with them. Now undoubtedly there are quite a few on this site, including some rather deranged individuals. Whether it’s productive to get this agitated about them, seems doubtful to me though. But that’s your decision of course.

  216. Sometimes you start off as a guest and end up being a parasite. In-laws come to mind.

  217. But most of your posts on Unz review seem to be about looking for antisemites and getting in net feuds with them. Now undoubtedly there are quite a few on this site, including some rather deranged individuals. Whether it’s productive to get this agitated about them, seems doubtful to me though. But that’s your decision of course.

    I simply want to know how to identify Nazis and anti-Semites in case there are political groups in the US, now or in the future, that I might want to join. I don’t want to associate with Nazis or anti-Semites. If that is my only choice, I will just sit tight and let the SJWs do their work unmolested by me.

  218. Abraham’s Children in the Genome Era: Major Jewish Diaspora Populations Comprise Distinct Genetic Clusters with Shared Middle Eastern Ancestry

    http://www.cell.com/AJHG/abstract/S0002-9297(10)00246-6

    Thus, this study demonstrates that European/Syrian and Middle Eastern Jews represent a series of geographical isolates or clusters woven together by shared IBD genetic threads.

  219. German_reader says

    Your original statement was:
    “Jews form a genetic cluster”
    which is clearly different from
    “There are several Jewish populations forming distinct clusters, but they have shared ancestry in the ancient Near East”.
    I never disputed the 2nd statement, in fact that’s just what I wrote in my own comment.

  220. your contrast with the supposedly diverse founders of the US is really quite strange and imo not based on the facts.

    Most of the founders were British.

    The Indians were here when we got here. We imported the blacks. They both are considered Americans now, I didn’t say that they were “the” founders, I said that they were here at the founding and were participants in the economy and nation from the beginning and have made contributions to America from the beginning and since.

    The distinctive feature of Israel’s founding was the fact that the “founders” were Jews and the nation was founded for Jews. They didn’t import any non-Jews and they excluded the “others” already there and have not decided that the others should be full citizens.

  221. If you had a genetic profile of a German Jew whose grandparents were born in Germany (assuming you could find one), do you think that that profile would more closely match your profile or the profile of a random Israeli Jew?

  222. I am open to correcting any misunderstanding of the genetics that I might have.

    It is my understanding that if we took 100 Germans and 100 Israeli Jews at random, and did the analysis, one cluster would be Germans and one cluster would be Jews.

    If we took 100 German Catholics and 100 German Protestants and did the analysis, there would not be two clusters.

  223. Now undoubtedly there are quite a few on this site, including some rather deranged individuals.

    How confident are you in your identification skills? Do you wait for them to raise their hand before you decide? Do you take every statement at face value?

  224. German_reader says

    You wrote
    “However, America was founded by a diverse assortment of peoples ”
    which is clearly a dubious statement, since now you’re admitting that the US as a polity was founded by colonists who were predominantly British. It’s of course true that blacks contributed to the American economy, and ultimately at least to some degree to mainstream American culture as well, but as slaves they had little choice in the matter, and I don’t see how it could be claimed they were among those who “founded” America.
    At the very least your phrasing was open to misinterpretation.

    “The distinctive feature of Israel’s founding was the fact that the “founders” were Jews and the nation was founded for Jews. They didn’t import any non-Jews and they excluded the “others” already there and have not decided that the others should be full citizens.

    Which is clearly at odds with the general spirit of the age (at least in the West) which extols universalism and antiracism as the highest virtues.
    Are there a lot of old-school Jew-haters who just hate Israel because it’s full of Jews? Of course. But you can’t get away from the fact that Israel is intended as a nation state which is by definition exclusionary to some degree. Now personally I happen to think that such a conception of the state is totally legitimate, as long as it respects the rights of long-established minorities (which Israel arguably doesn’t do in every case, but that’s a different matter). The problem just is that many, many supporters of Israel in Western countries are total hypocrites who promote antiracism and multiculturalism in Western countries while at the same time defending and promoting even rather crass manifestations of Israeli nationalism. That’s quite obviously a double standard.

  225. German_reader says

    “If we took 100 German Catholics and 100 German Protestants and did the analysis, there would not be two clusters.”

    Maybe not (though most people in southern Germany do look different from people in e.g. Schleswig-Holstein…I grew up in northern Bavaria and from my impressions most people there weren’t blond and blue-eyed), but many East Germans are somewhat distinguishable genetically from people in western Germany…which isn’t surprising since they’re the descendants of Slavs who were Germanized during the Middle Ages.
    Anyway, this discussion is somewhat pointless…I never disputed that there is some genetic basis to Jewish nationhood. The starting point of this discussion was your claim that somehow the US at its founding was already vastly more cosmopolitan than Israel, and I just doubt that claim is tenable. I gave you arguments why I think so, if you don’t find them convincing, it’s ok.

  226. At the very least your phrasing was open to misinterpretation.

    Yes, I should have said that they were here at the founding, not that they were founders.

    What do you propose for the 2nd & 3rd generation Turks in Germany who are citizens?

    What should the “French” do about the Algerians and Moroccans who are citizens?

    The problem just is that many, many supporters of Israel in Western countries are total hypocrites who promote antiracism and multiculturalism in Western countries while at the same time defending and promoting even rather crass manifestations of Israeli nationalism. That’s quite obviously a double standard.

    I know you are not looking at me.

  227. German_reader says

    “What do you propose for the 2nd & 3rd generation Turks in Germany who are citizens?”

    Nothing, I think it was a grave mistake to allow their immigration in such numbers, but I’m not of favour of expelling them by ethnic cleansing or whatever you want to imply. The Turkish issue in Germany by itself should be manageable and tolerable anyway.
    But as for the arrivals of recent years, yeah, I definitely want as many as possible of them to be kicked out again. They are invaders and have no right of being here.
    And there’s no reason to put “the French” in scare quotes…you know, the French do exist.

  228. That’s quite obviously a double standard.

    There was a lot of implicit and assumed ideas by the founding fathers as to whom were the intended beneficiaries. They certainly didn’t have their leetmen in mind. As I said, America has evolved to include everyone as citizens. No group was originally explicitly identified.

    Israel was founded explicitly as a Jewish state and as a “home” for the Jews.

    I don’t see it as a double standard to say that not every country has to follow exactly in the same path as the US with regard to immigration and citizenship. Recent history reminds us that it might be a good idea for “Jews” to maintain control of their own country.

    I would have no objections if Germany did not allow immigration and restricted citizenship to the descendants of the people who were in Germany at its founding. However, since Germany has accepted immigrants, it would be unjust to revoke their citizenship.

  229. And there’s no reason to put “the French” in scare quotes…you know, the French do exist.

    It wasn’t scare quotes. It means that I am aware that these days not everyone agrees as to who is “French” and who is not. The “French” themselves disagree.

  230. Jaakko Raipala says

    European Protestants are an extremely tight genetic cluster (with the exception of Finns who were not a significant part in America’s founding population) or two clusters very slightly separated by the North Sea. The genetic distances between the Englishmen, Dutch, Germans and Scandinavians that make up the majority of the American founding population are very small compared to the genetic distances between the Jewish subgroups that formed Israel.

    It’s true of course that this genetic cluster nearly seamlessly transitions to Czechs, Frenchmen and other neighboring non-Protestant groups but the point is, if you just limit yourself to European Protestants (without Finns), you’re going to get people so close to each other that you’d never expect them to be different ethnic groups just by genes alone.

    This is one of the conclusions of genetic research that should be getting tons of attention but isn’t because it doesn’t fit the ruling ideology of the West: Europeans are extraordinarily close to each other if you compare similar subcontinental regions, with a few fringe exceptions like Finns and Sicilians. The white race is a real thing, a whole cluster of its own, and America as an example of nation-building from a diverse set of peoples is actually only successful as far as it drew from the linguistically and state historically diverse but genetically very un-diverse Europeans.

    France, to return to the topic of the thread, is another example of success at nation-building from linguistically but not genetically diverse peoples and their decision to attempt the same recipe with distant peoples has not worked out the same way.

  231. German_reader says

    “Recent history reminds us that it might be a good idea for “Jews” to maintain control of their own country. “

    I actually agree with that. However, while the Jewish experience in the mid-20th century may indeed have been especially terrible (it’s hard to get worse than a systematic genocide like the Final solution), I don’t see why it should be illegitimate for other nations to take measures to ensure their ethnic group remains a majority in its homeland. But somehow that’s just seen as wrong in today’s dominant discourse. Take Poland for example, a nation the Nazis wanted to destroy and that was under foreign domination for much of 200 years. Despite that history of national suffering, Western multiculturalists still insist Poland should open itself up to mass immigration. And of course, the Holocaust is often used as a weapon for that argument…if you don’t want that kind of immigration, you’re somehow just like the Nazis and haven’t drawn the right lesson from history. And here again we come to the double standard I mentioned…somehow the right lesson for Jews is to have their own, nuclear-armed nation state…but Europeans should voluntarily dismantle their own nation states (which in most cases are substantially older than Israel). Now you may not think like that, and maybe even most Israelis don’t think like that, but it’s undeniable imo that many supporters of Israel in western countries argue like that. And they’re hardly ever forced to explain this blatant contradiction. It shouldn’t be surprising that this causes a certain level of resentment.

    “I would have no objections if Germany did not allow immigration and restricted citizenship to the descendants of the people who were in Germany at its founding. However, since Germany has accepted immigrants, it would be unjust to revoke their citizenship.

    Yes, even though I dislike the present situation, I have to agree with that.

  232. I can understand what you are saying, and I agree with much of it.

    However, isn’t it the case that from the beginning Israel was by and for Jews. Germany and Poland on the other hand would, today, be trying to change to a Germany for Germans only and a Poland for Poles only. You can see the difference.

    Even so, I think that immigration control is totally a sovereign right. As we agree, considering recent immigration, no injustices should be inflicted upon current citizens.

    Definitely it is not valid to use the Holocaust as an argument to deny nations the right of immigration control.

  233. So, in your view, the solution would be to found Germany 2.0 in place of the present Germany with the explicit notion “Germany 2.0 for Germans only”, expel all non-German residents, and then call it a day? I mean, Israel started out by expelling the majority of the inhabitants of the area which later became Israel. Sure if you can find nothing wrong with it, then you could probably find no problem with expelling a tiny minority of the population of the future Germany 2.0.

  234. A question to native English speakers.

    Did my wording imply that I considered Jews parasites or something? Or is iffen’s remark in bad faith?

  235. The best response is to point out that in that case either the charge of “anti-Semitism” or “racism” or whatever is untrue, or being “antisemitic” or “racist” or whatever is not inherently a bad thing to be.

    The latter is what will inevitably happen if the smear-mongers keep it up. Getting people into a frame of mind where they think racists and anti-semites are the good guys is not going to be to the interests of “minorities” in the long run.

  236. massacres committed against market dominant minorities by their host populations.

    Host country

    parasites

    lobby/Lobby

    holocaust/Holocaust

    Words have meanings.

  237. German_reader says

    “However, isn’t it the case that from the beginning Israel was by and for Jews. Germany and Poland on the other hand would, today, be trying to change to a Germany for Germans only and a Poland for Poles only. You can see the difference. “

    I think you’ve got that wrong. “Poland for Poles” (or maybe “Poland for Poles and related peoples”…I don’t think most Poles nowadays mind Ukrainians that much) would be merely a confirmation of what Poland de facto is today, a fairly homogenous nation state. And Germany as a German nation state (which unfortunately probably isn’t 100% possible anymore) would merely be a return to what Germany was for the majority of its existence since unification in the 19th century, including a large part of the existence of the modern federal republic. The change to a conception of Germany as a country defined solely by “constitutional patriotism” (that is some kind of proposition nation along the modern US model) is really quite recent – arguably only in the last 30 years or so – and was never really accepted by many Germans, despite the heavy propaganda for it.
    And everything you write in any case could just as well be applied to Israel, in fact probably with even more justification since its non-Jewish minorities actually are the original inhabitants of the country. I don’t know why you continue to insist that somehow Israel is supposed to be just special, it makes no sense to me.

  238. So, in your view, the solution would be to found Germany 2.0 in place of the present Germany with the explicit notion “Germany 2.0 for Germans only”, expel all non-German residents, and then call it a day?

    Only if you wait about 2 thousand years.

  239. This is getting retarded.

    Just an example of the “non-random” nature of the killings: people wearing glasses were considered “educated”. By the way, killing the educated is quite common tactic of… enemy tribes. For example in Burundi the Tutsi once massacred all Hutus who had a secondary education or higher. But you never here stories of Tutsi or Hutu leaders targeting the educated in their own respective tribes.

    which of course is very common

    No, it’s not at all common to massacre a quarter of your population, with the majority of the victims belonging to your own ethnic group.

    It is actually way more out of line with normal human behavior than what the Nazis did, which was essentially “hey, let’s band together and go to the lands of all these other peoples, kill them en masse, enslave them, rob them of their belongings, and, while we’re at it, let’s just murder each member of this market-dominant minority tribe living in our midst”. This is something most tribes in human history would’ve understood quite readily: the Goths or the Teutons or the Huns or the Assyrians or Spartans or… basically, any warlike tribe ever. (Yes. This includes the Romans and the Athenians as well. They would’ve understood it, even if perhaps the killing the market-dominant minority thing wasn’t to their tastes.) What Pol Pot did would’ve been incomprehensible to them or to anybody ever, just as it is incomprehensible to us, or to Cambodians living today or then. It was pure madness.

  240. I only understand dogs and fleas.

  241. somehow Israel is supposed to be just special, it makes no sense to me.

    would, today, be trying to change

    That’s why I put the today in there.

    You want Israel to change from closed to open and at the same you want Germany and other European countries to change from being open to closed.

    Israel has never been anything but closed.

    Germany, the US and other countries voluntarily changed from closed to open.

  242. You seem to believe in magic.

  243. German_reader says

    “Germany, the US and other countries voluntarily changed from closed to open.”

    Against the wishes of very significant shares of their respective native populations.
    And as I wrote, in the case of Poland or other Eastern European countries it isn’t the case of them being “open” right now…no, Western “anti-racists” and multiculturalists try everything they can to force those countries, which are still relatively homogenous (apart from the Roma minority), into opening up to mass immigration like Western Europe did, and demonize Eastern Europeans as “racists” for their opposition. Just as any Western European who objects to demographic transformation gets demonized.
    Really, I don’t even consider myself to be that anti-Israel, but your special pleading is quite irritating.

  244. This is getting retarded.

    Yes, you are arguing that what the Nazis did was normal behavior.

    Killing people of your own or other tribes during civil war, war, and revolutions is normal. One could even make the case that massacre and genocide is normal on the basis that it happens so often.

    The methodical and relentless drive at all costs to exterminate the Jews of Europe was not normal.

  245. Western “anti-racists” and multiculturalists try everything they can to force those countries, which are still relatively homogenous (apart from the Roma minority), into opening up to mass immigration like Western Europe did, and demonize Eastern Europeans as “racists” for their opposition.

    I don’t agree with this as I think I have made clear. Nation states have the right to control their borders. I have stated before that I am in favor of an immigration hiatus for the US.

    You stated that there were quite a few anti-Semites at Unz. I asked how you determine who is and who isn’t and if you thought you were any good at identifying them.

    Aug. 31, 2015 4:51 p.m. ET

    Poland’s prime minister said Monday her country would accept more refugees than previously promised as part of the European Union’s effort to tackle a wave of immigration from North Africa and the Middle East, but not many more because it is already burdened with an influx of people from Ukraine.

  246. Did my wording imply that I considered Jews parasites or something? Or is iffen’s remark in bad faith?

    Clearly the word “host” has two meanings, and my own immediate interpretation was the obvious one – host as in host/guest. Iffen latched onto the one that best fits his particular interests – host/parasite. Witchfinders see evidence of witchcraft in things others regard as ordinary.

    As for whether it was in bad faith or not, only iffen could say. It could either have been a genuine mis-reading (I wouldn’t have taken that implication from it, but I don’t have the same particular interests as iffen), or his comment could have been a joke.

  247. Presumably those who do it think their side will always be on top.

  248. The methodical and relentless drive at all costs to exterminate the Jews of Europe was not normal.

    No one denied that Germans were more methodical than Assyrians or even the Romans. On the other hand, we know of no examples of Roman soldiers getting nervous breakdowns or committing suicide after having smashed a few Carthaginian babies’ heads against some walls. The Germans, on the other hand, were desperate to find psychologically easier ways to commit mass murder, which is how they arrived at gas chambers. The Nazis are perhaps the only known mass murderers in history who had no stomach for mass murder.

  249. German_reader says

    “You stated that there were quite a few anti-Semites at Unz. I asked how you determine who is and who isn’t and if you thought you were any good at identifying them.”

    Why the f*** would it matter if I could determine who’s an antisemite and who isn’t? There are the obvious nutcases who get into Holocaust denial and who see Jewish plots everywhere, but I just keep my distance from them (most of them seem to congregate anyway in comment threads for articles I don’t read or just skim through…the really severe cases don’t turn up in Sailer’s or Karlin’s blog anyway which are my main interest in reading Unz review). Apart from that I’m definitely not going to make some sort of antisemitism test and get into arguments with anyone who harbours some sort of anti-Jewish opinion. This isn’t a church, not even a political party where everybody has to agree on some sort of core doctrine…it’s just a website to comment on articles and exchange views. And I’m glad that freedom of expression is allowed here, even if that includes some unpleasant or deranged people spouting their nonsense…because free speech is getting a damn rare commodity nowadays.

  250. Iffen does not often feign innocence, unlike many at this site.

    I wanted to know whether he was using host in the manner that 99% of the commenters here use it.

    When it writes of market dominant minorities do you suppose he’s talking about Koreans in LA? Patels in the lodging industry in the US? Chinese and Singaporeans in Vietnam?

  251. You are just making stuff up and attributing it to me.

    No, I’m not. I wrote “in actual practice, whether or not in intent” specifically to avoid this error.

    You are perfectly entitled to obsessively hunt out anti-Semites and racists in order to avoid finding yourself in the same organisation with one, and I’ll leave you to say whether the more likely outcome when you find one would be you quietly leaving or you first trying to get the person in question banned or evicted.

    All I have done is point out that your attitude has consequences, particularly given how widespread it is (mostly as a result of persistent propaganda specifically intended to make it widespread). One of the consequences is that it’s hugely productive to make false accusations.

  252. which is how they arrived at gas chambers.

    I thought that it was because of the rubber shortage.

  253. Why the f*** would it matter if I could determine who’s an antisemite and who isn’t?

    Because you say they are here which implies that you can identify them. If you can identify them you must have some method or rules. If you have a method you should be interested in its accuracy.

  254. Jaakko Raipala says

    You’re just endlessly producing strawmans. Being frustrated over the double standard imposed on us by the Americans where Israeli ethnonationalism is sponsored and celebrated but European ethnonationalism is suppressed and demonized doesn’t mean that someone wants Israel to become another dystopia of mass immigration, forced diversity and anti-ethnonationalism.

    Germany did not voluntarily change, it is an an occupied country that is not allowed to make its own decisions in these matters.

  255. ” On the other hand, we know of no examples of Roman soldiers getting nervous breakdowns or committing suicide after having smashed a few Carthaginian babies’ heads against some walls. The Germans, on the other hand, were desperate to find psychologically easier ways to commit mass murder, which is how they arrived at gas chambers. The Nazis are perhaps the only known mass murderers in history who had no stomach for mass murder.”

    Times and peoples change.

    Did a quick google, but couldn’t find the anecdote I was looking for.

    The Romans once sieged a Gaulish citadel, and elected to starve them out.

    The Gauls ate their own women and children before actually surrendering.

    The ancient world was a hard, hard place. Only thing is the ancient world is still with us in a lot of places. Actually there may be more “ancient world” than modern if you really did an accounting of things.

    Heck maybe it was just a moment.

  256. German_reader says

    Obviously he was referring to cases like the Chinese in Southeast Asia and Jews in some parts of Eastern Europe before WW2.
    There’s even literature comparing the two cases, see e.g. here:
    https://books.google.de/books?id=BgWumPDyaSIC&pg=PA16&lpg=PA16&dq=antisinicism+antisemitism&source=bl&ots=5Dd7GJ-gaO&sig=BqdDRkMsrrU9_PjFdkNg4ZQ1QGc&hl=de&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiqnMyfucDTAhWBwBQKHVMDDWkQ6AEIJDAA#v=onepage&q=antisinicism%20antisemitism&f=false

  257. bad faith

  258. Iffen does not often feign innocence, unlike many at this site.

    But the witchfinder knows the guilty are among us, eh, regardless what they might say?

    I wanted to know whether he was using host in the manner that 99% of the commenters here use it.

    Really, I struggle to understand the motives for trying to obsessively ferret out nefarious motivations supposedly behind what people write here. I mean, it might make sense on an ordinary site where you could hope to get the crimethinker in question banned or censored with a plausible enough accusation, if that’s the way you roll, but this (unusually, nowadays) is a free speech site where such motivation and political acceptability tests are not imposed. The fact that open and relatively extreme antisemites and racists and others are allowed to comment here without harassment is precisely what opens up the space for those with less committed views to speak freely and makes for a far better discussion site.

    Why not just address what people write rather than obsess about their motives? I mean, ad hominem is a legitimate tool of political (as opposed to logical) debate which we all use, but why make such a big issue of it in this special case? What are you expecting to achieve by “unmasking” a secret anti-Semite here – a round of applause and a cookie?

    When it writes of market dominant minorities do you suppose he’s talking about Koreans in LA? Patels in the lodging industry in the US? Chinese and Singaporeans in Vietnam?

    Obviously he was, as well as about jewish people in pre-WW2 Germany. That’s what the term “market dominant minorities” self-evidently means, though if you want you can obviously dispute the accuracy of the term in that application.

    when it writes

    !?

  259. Thanks.

    I think I will read this, that should keep me out of trouble for a while.

  260. The methodical and relentless drive at all costs to exterminate the Jews of Europe was not normal.

    Was the methodical and relentless drive to exterminate the Kulaks normal?

  261. Because you say they are here which implies that you can identify them. If you can identify them you must have some method or rules. If you have a method you should be interested in its accuracy.

    That’s precisely the key point. At the risk of presuming German reader’s intentions (I trust he will correct me if I’m wrong), he judges people here by what they write here, not by what he speculates their motives might be. His complaint about obsessive anti-Semites is that they write lots of stuff he regards as silly and unpleasant, which is clearly his prerogative. He doesn’t seem to need to go hunting for cloaked anti-Semites, as you seem to.

  262. it

    typo

    Freud?

    open and relatively extreme antisemites and racists and others are allowed to comment here

    Same question to you as to German_reader. How do you identify them? Is your identification accurate? If open and extreme ones comment here, do you suppose not a single un-open one is here?

  263. I was thinking about how the Vietnamese killed a few ten thousand Chinese as recently as some thirty-seven years ago, or Indonesians had some anti-Chinese pogroms in the 1960s and then again in the 1990s, how there were multiple pogroms against Indian (including Pakistani) and Arab trading communities, or how the Turks exterminated perhaps two million Armenians, which I have already mentioned.

  264. German_reader says

    “His complaint about obsessive anti-Semites is that they write lots of stuff he regards as silly and unpleasant, which is clearly his prerogative. “

    I’m mostly annoyed at those people because they’re often quite obviously deranged, cluttering up the comment threads with their obsessive (and often very long-winded) screeds and making genuine discussion quite hard. That’s the reason why I think it’s a good thing if Karlin keeps obvious crazies out of his blog, even though I’m generally very much in favour of free speech.
    But yes, I’m not much into the moral outrage business (or at least I hope I’m not…occasionally I do get triggered somewhat, e.g. when someone claimed the mass assaults in Cologne in 2015/16 hadn’t taken place…but even then I try to control my reactions). I have a lot of opinions myself other people would regard as outrageous, and I’m glad relatively open discussion is possible here.

  265. How do you identify them?

    Who cares?

    If an “un-open” holder of a viewpoint with which I disagree is on here, hell, if he’s really a serial killer posting from his cell, what does that matter?

  266. How do you identify them?

    By what they write, obviously. I might point it out if it were relevant to the particular discussion, but I wouldn’t normally bother arguing with them about whether or not they are “antisemitic” or “racist” (or even “Zionist”), or devoting too much energy to speculations as to their motivations.

    Is your identification accurate?

    Who cares? Why would anyone care? If I bother to point out my opinion and they dispute it, so what?

    If open and extreme ones comment here, do you suppose not a single un-open one is here?

    Who cares? Why would anyone care?

    Clearly you do, and that’s your prerogative, just as it is mine to point out that imo your approach is irrational and in fact hugely counterproductive.

    it

    typo

    Freud?

    Probably. Perhaps you should consider why you harbour such a strong personal hatred for those to whom you attribute particular political opinions and whether it’s healthy to do so 🙂

  267. German_reader says

    “If open and extreme ones comment here, do you suppose not a single un-open one is here?”

    Why does that matter to you? I mean even if someone harbours anti-Jewish sentiment in his heart, you should try to refute the arguments he makes if you disagree, not just impute some supposedly hidden malign intention (and besides, most people who harbour strong anti-Jewish sentiments will probably be quite open about it here anyway since you won’t face any negative consequences for it). Randal is right, this really is getting into witchfinding territory, and I don’t understand what you’re trying to achieve.

  268. If you are interested, I wrote a detailed blog post in which I explain why Le Pen can’t possibly win the election, and why the comparisons with Brexit and Trump are extremely misleading. Unlike the previous one, this one is in English 🙂

  269. Look at how many supposed Trump supporters turned on Trump for shooting up an airbase runway in Syria.

    This sums up the problem.

    Israel and neocons want regime change in Syria because they think the cost/benefit to Israel is positive – nothing strange about that, realpolitik blah blah.

    The insane part is how you can’t even register that the cost/benefit from someone else’s point of view might be different and therefore believe everyone who opposes it must do so for the same but opposite reason you support it i.e. they also think it’s good for the Jews and are against it out of anti-semitism.

    Quite clearly regime change in Syria (and the attempted regime change up till now) would be very negative to the various religious minorities in Syria, Syrians generally, most of the surrounding countries who don’t have closed borders with Syria, Europe and the rest of the Western world dealing with the refugees, all the raped children in western swimming pools being covered up by the media, plus the chance of WW3 through Russia not backing down.

    So for pretty much everyone else the cost/benefit of regime change in Syria is negative hence the perfectly rational response of the alt-right to bombing Syria.

  270. RadicalCenter says

    I have no objection whatsoever with Jewish people having a physical territory where racially Jewish people are favored.

    And no problem with them barring some or all non-Jewish people from becoming citizens and voting, barred from permanent residency, or barred from owning real estate or critical infrastructure or resources (water, oil, natural gas, minerals, precious metals, etc.).

    I don’t pretend to know what the most appropriate, just, or workable borders of that Jewish country should be, and I sure as Hell do NOT want my government intruding into that mess. It’s not worth the life of a single American boy (soldier), and it’s not worth further borrowing by our government to fund these endless interventions in the Middle East that arguably benefit Israel but almost never benefit Americans on balance.

  271. I’m somehow quite sure I read more about the holocaust than you did.

    The gas vans (which were originally invented by the NKVD and it is speculated that the Germans could’ve gotten the idea from the USSR) were first used by the so-called T4 program, which was the mass murder of the mentally ill. Since the bodies sometimes had to be returned to the families, and anyway it was run by doctors, shooting was not a preferred method, while lethal injections were cumbersome and slow. So they started using the gas vans.

    Then the mass shootings started in Russia, and in a few months it evolved into a mass extermination program against Eastern Jews, and the executioners immediately started having the already mentioned psychological problems. So Himmler (who himself fainted when observing a mass shooting) proposed using the T4 expertise and the gas vans. The vans were not very satisfactory, but after Hitler ordered the extermination of all Jews in the German sphere of influence (probably in December 1941), they started building extermination sites with gas chambers. Auschwitz was the last one and the first one to use cyanide. It was also the most refined such extermination site, the most industrialized, where the psychological burden on the exterminating personnel was the smallest.

    Since the Germans very quickly shot over a million Jews (as well as large numbers of non-Jews), it’s obvious that they could’ve easily shot the 5-6 million Jews whom they murdered. They only needed the elaborate system with gas chambers to ease the psychological burden on themselves.

  272. German_reader says

    Reasonable position, I agree.

  273. RadicalCenter says

    My paternal ancestors who came to the USA from Bavaria and Austria were indeed not blond-haired.

    But most of their recent descendants (the ones here in the USA) were blue-eyed, including my dear late father. Just anecdotal evidence, FWIW 🙂

    Es lebe Bayern!

  274. RadicalCenter says

    Ebenfalls.

  275. Heck maybe it was just a moment.

    That’s how things look like. On the other hand, it could be the artificial intelligence that destroys us.

  276. So for pretty much everyone else the cost/benefit of regime change in Syria is negative hence the perfectly rational response of the alt-right to bombing Syria.

    It was also a clear sign of Trump folding on a host of other issues. (Just to clarify, I don’t mean that the issues are parasites.) On illegal immigration or refugee policy, etc.

  277. German_reader says

    Es lebe Bayern!

    Indeed, even today it’s relatively pleasant and sane compared to much of the rest of the country which is descending into ever deeper madness. I’m not confident it can last though.

  278. Can you explain what is likely to happen in the legislative elections?

    Will the National Front actually win more seats? Other parties? Will Hamon’s party still have a significant presence? Fillon’s? Melanchon’s? Macron’s?

    Your system is very unfamiliar to many of us. Even the British one is better understood in the US.

    And will Macron be confronted with a untenable legislature? From here it appears he isn’t going to have a real base to change much of anything. – Or deal with any new or old problems.

    And will 2022 be a repeat of this for the National Front? Or could they break through then?

  279. The legislative elections will be very interesting, in part because it’s very unclear what’s going to happen. I don’t have time to say more right now, but I will try to do so after the second round of the presidential election.

  280. Thanks. I wrote another blog post in English where I explain why Le Pen can’t win.

  281. German_reader says

    “Will the National Front actually win more seats? ”

    I’d be interested in that as well, if I understand correctly the voting system is deliberately designed in a way that ensures FN gets very few seats. In 2012 they only won 2 seats, despite getting almost 14% in the first voting round.

  282. It was also a clear sign of Trump folding on a host of other issues.

    Yes, probably equally important from an alt-right pov. The reasons i listed are more normie reasons.

  283. (Just to clarify, I don’t mean that the issues are parasites.)

    Now, now, get them out of a wad.

    People will look back in 75 years and likely just see it as another “tribal” dispute.

  284. I’m somehow quite sure I read more about the holocaust than you did.

    Perhaps, because I’ve never heard about all these psychological problems gumming up the gears of the killing program. I do remember reading that Himmler had a weak stomach and that Hitler did not listen to any of the details of what was being done.

    What kind of psychological problems are we talking about? What % of personnel? Did they send personnel for treatment? Any instructions to the medical staff as to what treatment was required survive? What would such instructions say? Something like, “Herr Doctor, this soldier is faking injuries so he doesn’t have to shoot women, old men, children and babies, get his head straight or we will have to shoot him”?

  285. It is illogical to complain that the multiculturalists or other (insert boogeyman here) make false accusations of anti-Semitism against people then turn around and say that you are not concerned about who is or who is not an anti-Semite. You have to know what is anti-Semitic and what is not before you can decide if the charge is false. If you can’t decide who is anti-Semitic and you have no interest in determining who is and who isn’t; it is (again) illogical to complain of “false” charges.

  286. Jaakko Raipala says

    Maybe the only thing that can be said to that is that, yes, as long as I see Jews networking their way to power positions to promote their ethnic goals while trying to block others from doing the same, I am an anti-Semite and I consider it a reasonable position.

    But remember that the vast majority of anti-Semites are peaceful moderates who don’t support any violence or terrorism…

  287. Greasy William says

    What you consider folding I consider realpolitik. Trump is operating under certain constraints that mean he has to do things he doesn’t want (show bombing empty Syrian airbases) and can’t do everything he does want (suspending the refugee program).

  288. what is anti-Semitic

    define anti-semitic then

    (without any obvious double standards)

  289. “What you consider folding I consider realpolitik. Trump is operating under certain constraints that mean he has to do things he doesn’t want (show bombing empty Syrian airbases) and can’t do everything he does want (suspending the refugee program).”

    What constraints? The Republican Party controls both branches of the legislature and the executive branch. Presumably Lindsay Graham/Paul Ryan/John McCain are a minority who can roadblock everything by voting with the Democrats, but literally he cannot be forced to do anything in particular as far as I can tell.

    So why did he bomb Syria? What is he trying to accomplish with this North Korea idiocy?

    Seems to me he is doing it because he wants to, or he is totally controlled by Jared/Ivanka, or the Deep State, or maybe he was a sham the whole way.

    However it works I’ve thrown in the towel on the man. I expect nothing from him. Hopefully we make it to 2020 so he can be shown the door.

    Hopefully he was the very last boomer who will ever hold office (that hasn’t been discussed much here, 1992-2020 was too darn long).

  290. I object to it because it’s not a useful term, being merely a smear, like “fascist”. If it had an intelligible meaning as a description of a political system, as indeed it did in its first days of employment in the era of the Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards, then there ought to be no objection to its use.

    Though:

    I think anyone has a perfect right to object to being “charged” with some unpopular opinion or other, rather than being engaged in dialogue. I would consider it absurd if, being a Protestant, I was told in a conversation about, say, the composition of the local school board by a Catholic interlocutor: “Well, that’s all very well, but, after all, why should we listen to a heretic?”

  291. What constraints? The Republican Party controls both branches of the legislature and the executive branch.

    You just named the constraint: the Republican Party. Most GOP members are on his side (sort of) but enough of them are against him on immigration and other things that when joined with the Dems can defeat him on the key domestic issues that matter to voters. A supposedly conservative majority on the Supreme Court – Gorsuch’s nomination was forced through hours after the Syria attack – is also no guarantee of getting his way. Unless the US gets into a quagmire somewhere or loses lots of troops in an incident foreign policy won’t be an issue for more than a very small percentage of voters. He might end up being just another worthless conservative but it’s ridiculously early for throwing in the towel.

    Anyway, like most of the posts here we’re way off topic.

  292. They actually got almost 18% in the first round, not just 14%, but it’s true that they only got 2 seats. The electoral law makes it difficult for a small party that can’t make alliances with other parties to get any seats. It wasn’t designed to keep the National Front out of Parliament, but it effectively worked to do that until now. However, since the French political scene is considerably more fractured this year, and the National Front is stronger than ever, it will likely get more seats this year. In fact, I think it may be able to get enough of them to constitute a parliamentary group, which requires at least 15 seats and would confer various advantages to the National Front in Parliament.

  293. aren’t the truest germans from the baltic coast(highest rates of red hair, blondism, colored eyes)?
    Everything south, I would guess, would have celtic ancestry, or worse, roman introgression

  294. jim jones says

    It seems rational to me that citizens are defined by genetics rather than political fiat, Japan has followed this path and has virtually no crime.

  295. Most accusations of “anti-Semitism” targeted at the parties of national survival seem to be as hysterically overblown

    Jews know what they are talking about. Any nationalism will lead to to some form of anti-semitism as long as there are Jews around. One could the think that now when Jews have their own Heimat it should not be their concern.

  296. What’s interesting is that he could reduce refugee flows (theoretically to zero, but maybe it could be attacked by some liberal court… anyway there were no reductions at all), then there’s DACA (which to my knowledge is illegal anyway). The Syrian strikes were technically illegal. So he is doing at least two technically illegal things (attacking Syria and giving work permits to illegals) which are the diametric opposite of his campaign promises. He could at the very least have stopped the illegal permits and dragged his feet on Syria. So far Congress has given him nothing for his policies at all. So what kind of negotiations tactics is it when you give a lot of things upfront without getting anything at all, hoping for the goodwill of your enemies (who have tried to not just defeat but destroy you just a few months ago)?

  297. So what kind of negotiations tactics is it when you give a lot of things upfront without getting anything at all, hoping for the goodwill of your enemies (who have tried to not just defeat but destroy you just a few months ago)?

    I’m not saying this is what necessarily did happen, but there might have been some kind of deal whereby his enemies relented on trying to destroy him, and they agreed to just try and defeat one another. The way the whole Russia/Trump collusion story just kind of disappeared down the memory hole looks like a concerted and directed effort. That, plus the timing and method of the Gorsuch nomination, which also appeared coordinated.

    As outraged as I was by the Syrian strike, it could, in certain contexts, be viewed as nothing more than a display of impotent rage. But, in my view, he has expended any initial trust and goodwill. I’m going to assume he’s just another scum until he manages to proves otherwise.

  298. The way the whole Russia/Trump collusion story just kind of disappeared down the memory hole

    It’s difficult to push that line when there’s a risk of an imminent nuclear war with Russia. In light of the Russian reactions it’s impossible to push that story. So it disappeared without anyone ever actually retracting it or apologizing for having pushed this obvious lie.

  299. My reading of both the US political elite and general public is that they do not assess the risk of imminent nuclear war with Russia in the same way as, say, you and I might. This is extremely distressing, to put it mildly, not to mention what makes the situation that much more dangerous, but it seems so regardless. When I explain to Americans that we are closer now to nuclear war between Russia and the US than ever since the Cuban missile crisis, perhaps even closer than then, it’s not like the concept is met with derision. It’s something they can’t even seem to get their heads around. The political and chattering classes also behave in a concurrent manner.

    In light of the Russian reactions it’s impossible to push that story.

    Could you please elaborate a bit what you mean by this?

  300. When I explain to Americans that we are closer now to nuclear war between Russia and the US than ever since the Cuban missile crisis, perhaps even closer than then, it’s not like the concept is met with derision. It’s something they can’t even seem to get their heads around. The political and chattering classes also behave in a concurrent manner.

    I don’t know how old you are, but for my generation and older (those who were adults in 1990 when the risk of war between the US and the Soviet Union finally disappeared), we grew up with the daily threat of nuclear immolation potentially at very short notice. The younger generations (who now include people in their mid-20s up to even 30s) never experienced that and haven’t internalised what it means in the way we had to.

    As far as these younger peoples of the US and the countries of the European US sphere (Balkans aside) are concerned, the only experience they’ve had of war is of “humanitarian” interventionist adventures in remote foreign lands with no risk of retaliation except via pinprick terrorist attacks (and they are heavily if not always entirely successfully indoctrinated not to see such terrorism as blowback for their own governments’ aggressions and interference), and the only losses to their people as minuscule numbers of mostly volunteer professional soldiers. War is not real for them, and nuclear war doubly so.

    The risk of a nuclear war is probably, as you say, now higher than it has been since the Cuban Missile Crisis, thanks to the US regime’s policies over the past 20 years. Personally I don’t think it’s all that high in objective terms, but then again it wasn’t all that high in 1962 – any risk of such serious consequences needs to be taken seriously. Now, as then, both sides know that nuclear war would have unacceptable consequences for their own side, win or lose, but still the climate is such that all that would be needed would be a few miscalculations by some people we already know to be advocates of reckless aggression, and some bad luck.

  301. You seem to have resorted to rather desperate logic-chopping here, and I think you must know on some level that what you are arguing here is absurd.

    It is not necessary to have a foolproof test for secret anti-Semites to know that false charges are being made. Apart from personal experience, there is also witness experience of such charges being made against people who you know enough about to know they simply are not jew-haters, for transparently dishonest politically partisan motives and based upon evidence that doesn’t remotely justify the charge.

  302. but then again it wasn’t all that high in 1962

    You clearly do not know enough about history. One of the most important men in all of history that most people have not heard of (including you) is Vassily Arkhipov. The US navy was trying to surface submarines around Cuba by sending non lethal mines into the water below, in one of the submarines there was confusion if war had already begun, three officers had authority to launch nuclear weapons in the submarines, of the three officers two decided to launch, Arkhipov decided against it. If you don’t consider that has high, then do tell what in your opinion is ?

  303. The way the whole Russia/Trump collusion story just kind of disappeared down the memory hole looks like a concerted and directed effort.

    The Russia story was made up by the media to allow Obama’s team to bug Trump officially rather than with a Watergate style break-in using private contractors.

    They probably got something.

    (as if they got something they wouldn’t need the story any more)

  304. If one uses a category that one cannot define or identify in one’s thinking and analyses, especially at crucial points, the conclusions will be hit or miss. If that is choppy logic so be it and I will stick with it.

    It doesn’t have to be fool-proof, just as accurate as possible.

    I look at things a little differently, if you and others are not interested it doesn’t alarm me.

  305. three officers had authority to launch nuclear weapons

    I think some people are arguing that it was only one tactical nuclear weapon (a nuclear torpedo), which would’ve been enough to sink a ship (or perhaps a few vessels), but maybe it wouldn’t have started an all-out nuclear exchange. In any event, it would’ve meant serious US casualties (I guess hundreds of sailors and a major vessel), and it’s difficult to predict what the leaderships of the two then superpowers would’ve decided.

    Let me add to your story that the decision of the three officers was decided by majority vote, Arkhipov needed to convince one of the other guys. Let me add that he was the commander of a group of submarines (and oddly second-in-command on board the actual sub, being both commander and subordinate to the captain of the ship), and on any other submarine the decision would’ve been made by just two officers, the captain and the political officer (the latter had veto power only, needed to approve it, but only the captain could initiate the proposal). I’d guess Arkhipov as senior commander had more understanding of the situation, which perhaps lower level officers lacked.

  306. They say Macron is like a French Obama, but I also see him as a Angela Merkel in male and French packaging.

    LaPen should far and away be the leading candidate if the French people were unbrainwashed and spiritually healthy. The fact that nationalist, nativist candidates throughout Western Europe in particular and the Western world in general struggle so mightily bespeaks a sickness so serious that a good portion of our people are already dead and cannot be saved.

    In the white West, I envision the healthy, identitarian portions branching off from the self haters and self flagellators and evolving into a distinct, new people. Given the level of rancor between the two camps, especially in America, that already appears to be happening.

  307. French love ‘les maquereaux’ (never spelt macro). Dégueulasse.

  308. I meant to respond to your earlier comment.

    One of the problems of white nationalism is that it would be a new creation. It has never existed before. Even though we know that there is a white cluster, there are individuals who form a cline to the other clusters. I have never see any coherent explanation from any white nationalist as to what place they would have.

    Up until a few years ago, I was unaware that some WNs accepted Jews as white, I always assumed that white nationalism would exclude Jews.

    Why do you reject something like Sailer’s citizenism?

  309. Trump has a convert Jewish daughter, three Jewish (biologically half-Jewish, but raised in Judaism) grandchildren, a half-Jewish daughter-in-law, five quarter-Jewish grandchildren. He has several close Jewish associates, lawyers, accountants, businessmen, friends. He’s spent his life in a heavily Jewish city in heavily Jewish industries (real estate and media). He’s spent some money sponsoring Netanyahu’s campaign in Israel, and has often expressed his admiration of Israel and Jews. Not once did he do anything that could be construed as anti-Jewish, and it wouldn’t be logical given his personal and familial relations to them.

    Yet he was publicly and forcefully accused of anti-Semitism. Not once, not twice, several times, there was a whole media campaign (actually, several such campaigns) accusing him of that.

    Perhaps you can agree those were clearly false accusations.

  310. I’m not sure about Eric Trump’s wife (I read she was Jewish, but somewhere I read she wasn’t, I’m not sure), but Tiffany Trump’s boyfriend is also Jewish, a son of a friend and associate (lawyer) of Trump. Ivanka said his father encouraged her to convert to Judaism. (I guess that was a condition of marriage by the Kushner parents.) Apparently all or almost all of the adult Trump children are dating or married to people of Jewish descent.

  311. Perhaps you can agree those were clearly false accusations.

    Not only do I agree, but I was absolutely certain within my own thinking and without consulting any other person or source. I knew that the people making the charges were either ignorant or they were willfully engaging in partisan propaganda, or both. My question is how many people were influenced by this to the extent that it affected their voting choice? And more than that, I think that it is possible to sort these issues in a reasonably reliable manner to counteract such false accusations. Of course there is no organized opposition with good standing to fight against such propaganda.

    On a similar note and back to the topic of this post, a couple of days ago a pundit being interviewed on NPR averred that if Le Pen was elected president, France would be in turmoil, similar to the turmoil that the US is experiencing.

    Turmoil.

    The problems to be solved can’t be addressed by one person. There is no organized opposition. Individuals going up against groups are slaughtered.

  312. And if we took 100 Mizrahim, 100 Palestinians, and 100 Ashkanazim what would happen?

  313. I think that it is possible to sort these issues in a reasonably reliable manner to counteract such false accusations.

    You mean it’s possible to logically argue against the accusation that someone unusually positively disposed to Jews as individuals and to the Jewish people and religion in general is anti-Semitic? This has never been a logical accusation.

    You cannot logically deny such an odious accusation. “I am not a pig-fucker – says Donald Trump.” “Donald Trump is not a pig-fucker – says the Iffen League Against False Accusations.”

  314. I think the Jews would cluster together in relation to the Palestinians, and the three together would cluster together in relation to 100 Germans.

  315. Individuals going up against groups are slaughtered.

    This is why you need organized white advocacy within your citizenist utopia. Without some white nationalism (while black advocacy, advocacy for all sorts of immigrant groups like La Raza etc. are permitted) citizenism is not viable.

  316. Talk about bad faith.

    I think that it would be possible to discredit the accusers as being partisan or ignorant.

  317. This is what the Hillary types want, except of course no WN groups.

    Trump was the citizenism candidate. Hillary was the divider. He won. It’s a Hail Mary presidency. But he proved that it is not impossible.

  318. The Ashkenazi would probably be slightly closer to Italians than to the Mizrahi, and the Mizrahi (many Mizrahi groups, at least) closer to Palestinians than to the Ashkenazi. The Yemeni Jews are closer to Yemeni Arabs than any other Jews. Not to mention the Falasha.

  319. Why do you think that? The Ashkenazim would be half way between the Palestinians and the Mizrahim, who would cluster close together. Do you also think Ethiopian Jews would cluster with the Mizrahim & Ashkenazim?

  320. The Ashkenazim would be halfway between the Germans and Mizrahim, who would cluster with the Palestinians.

    Do you also think the Ethiopian Jews would cluster with the Ashkenazim?

  321. I see another you are but another promoter of that fake religion, “holocaustianity ™”…
    Let’s see–2.8 million jews in Europe during WW2 and 3.4 million “holocaust ™” survivors immediately after WW2. The actual number of non-combatant casualties in the European theater of operations (ww2) is approximately 731,000–NOT “6 million”, according to International Red Cross figures. Having full and unfettered access to the camps, the IRC would have noted if there were any mass killings taking place.
    The numbers just don’t add up.
    If a country were hell-bent on committing genocide, WHY WOULD THEY BUILD CAMPS, hundreds if not thousands of miles away, complete with recreational facilities, medical facilities, food service, and other ancillary facilities? The logistics of transportation would have been a daunting task, as Germany did not have the fuel for either transportation or camp operation.
    Would it not have been easier to dispatch the victims as the jewish communist Bolsheviks did at the dawn of the Bolshevik revolution?
    Having been a visitor at Auschwitz, the so-called “gas chambers” are clearly a hoax. There are no gas-tight seals, the doors open the wrong way, and there would have been no protection for the operators of these obviously fake “gas chambers”. The crematoria chimney is not connected to anything…
    As to the crematoria, in order to dispatch “6 million”, they would have had to been operational into the 1950s…
    The “holocaust ™” fraud is one of the most successful scams pulled on the world–it is long overdue to put this non-event into the dustbin of history. Let’s also prosecute the promoters of this “event” for fraud…

  322. Jews form a genetic cluster, I don’t think that you can get a similar genetic cluster of European Protestants. Jewish religious identity overwhelms any putative Northern European Protestant identity. The European Union is coming un-raveled, not Israel.

    I am open to correcting any misunderstanding of the genetics that I might have.

    When I wrote the above comment I was expressing my understanding that genetically, the Jews were “more” of a cluster that European Protestants. I still think that, although I allow that I may be incorrect. Maybe you can show me a Protestant cluster and prove me wrong. It is true that I was mainly thinking of the original European Zionist Jews. I had forgotten the distances between the various groups in the diaspora.

  323. Mar 8, 2017 Marine Le Pen vs. The World

    On April 23rd, 2017, France will hold their Presidential election featuring National Front leader Marine Le Pen who has faced significant opposition from the establishment French politicians, the European Union and even the banking establishment.

    https://youtu.be/R6pXP_IM6vw

  324. Hitler did not listen to any of the details of what was being done

    That’s questionable. Himmler spent a lot of time in his office without anyone else present. There is evidence that after his first visits to extermination sites (mass shootings, later extermination camps etc.) within a few days he always visited Hitler and talked to him for hours on end. We don’t know what they talked about (they met quite often – Stalin also saw his security chiefs quite often, and was very well informed of a lot of details of the purges and other activities of the security organs), but in my opinion it’s very very likely that Himmler told him a lot of gruesome details. I think that the worry that members of the execution squads could suffer nervous breakdowns or else perhaps become brutalized could easily have come from Hitler himself. In any event, it was a major worry of Himmler.

  325. German_reader says

    Thanks, that’s very informative.

  326. I suspect I know at least as much about the topic as you do, unless you are very unusually well informed on it. Limited naval use does not constitute “nuclear war” in the sense I was using the term and would not necessarily have led to unlimited escalation.

    My point was that even in 1962 the leaderships on both sides knew they could not afford a nuclear war, even if as today many of the senior military men and politicians were foolishly rash in their policy advocacy. Certainly the Russians were well aware of the disadvantages they faced in a nuclear exchange and clearly had no intention of risking one over Cuba. Hence the risk of nuclear war was basically the risk of escalation by misjudgement or mistake.

    Any judgement of such risks is inherently subjective and highly questionable. I chose to use the phrase “not all that high” perhaps in a different manner than you would, but I’d stand by it. Risks imo were probably higher during the later deterrence period when response times were much lower and missile arsenals were much larger and more effective, and men like Arkhipov were commanding SSBNs with colossal firepower rather than naval attack submarines, though I’m aware this is not a mainstream view.

  327. No matter which frenchie is elected, one thing that won’t change is the french predilection for spitting in tourista’s food. The even have special words for it……”ranch dressing”.

  328. The Catholic church excommunicates doctors when they perform abortions to save young girls’ lives from too early pregnancies (at the age of 9! and raped by their relatives), all in the name of “sanctity of life.” But the same sanctimonious Catholic church prefers not to “notice” the war crimes and horrific slaughter unleashed by such devoted catholic as Tony Blair. In the name of human dignity, Tony Blair should have been excommunicated years ago.

  329. Can’t Stesquen the Lesquen!

  330. “No-one remembers that in 1940, it was a Fascist minister, General Charles De Gaulle, who refused the shameful armistice with Nazi Germany. This man, the official heir apparent of Marechal Philippe Petain (who was his daughter’s godfather), charged into the Resistance alone. Struggling against his education and his prejudices, he slowly gathered around himself, against the wishes of his ex-mentor, French people from all horizons to defend the Republic. He linked up with a left-wing personality, Jean Moulin, who, a few years earlier, had secretly embezzled money from the Minister of the Marine, and trafficked weapons with which to support the Spanish Republicans against the fascists.
    No-one remembers that a colleague of De Gaulle, Robert Schuman, wrote his signature on the armisitice of shame, then, a few years later, founded the European Economic Community (currently the European Union) – a supra-national organisation based on the Nazi model of the « New European Order », against the Soviet Union and today against Russia.”
    http://www.voltairenet.org/article196096.html

  331. The Guardian has been rooting for Macron. Why?
    Comment section: “The Guardian is owned by GMG Hazel Acquisition 1 Limited, which is based in the Cayman Islands. That in turn is owned by the Scott Trust Limited, which is chaired by investment bankers and other ultra-rich individuals. In 2008, GMG Hazel paid no capital gains tax at all on a £307 million in profit. It therefore makes sense that they support Macron – a wealthy former Rothschild investment banker. The Guardian and the banking elite are two cheeks of the same backside.” https://off-guardian.org/2017/04/24/graun-celebrates-macrons-avowal-to-despoil-working-people-wreck-infrastructure-enrich-banking-class/

  332. You are arsehole. German Nazis murdered millions of Poles, Russians and Jews. Before the war up to 3.5 millions Jews lived in Poland alone. After the war, some 300.000 were registered. The idea, that all of them escaped to the west or to the east is preposterous, especially as Polish underground was sending detailed reports about mass executions and ongoing destruction of Polish Jewry.