This was a very nice livestream in which JF Gariépy gave my the chance to concisely set out my views on the intersection of Russia, the Alt Right, Russian foreign policy, and the Western media (amongst other things).
Livestream with JF Gariépy on Russia
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was written by Anatoly Karlin for Russian Reaction on May 6, 2019
Chat is all babbling about how Russia is 30% muslim, Russians are Asians, Karlin is a jew. Alt-righters really aren’t very bright.
You’re not very bright if your incapable of recognising irony.
I am always surprised how strong AK’s accent is given that he spent so much time in Britain and the US.
Video is a stupid medium.
At least give some summary of the contents (with the specific time for different topics!). As it is, I’m not going to listen to 40 minutes of that, just because there might be something interesting at some point.
Local or even regional/national accents are a priceless commodity in this day and age.
Just realistic takes about Putin, Russia’s geopolitical position, Russian nationalism, non-whites in Russia etc. Nothing new to readers of AKs blog.
In the hands of the right autist, it can produce absolute kino
These are standard Russophobe nationalist takes, why would they be ironic? The alt-right is plagued by imbeciles who read something on gab or /pol/ and then parrot is as fact. Or they see some Ukrainian yokols giving Nazi salutes and start to believe that Ukraine is the bastion for the Aryan race, to the point that some of them even fly to Donbass and kill people.
The Russophiles are just as bad too. People who think that Dugin is serious or insightful, or that Putin is going to smash the globalists, or that Russians are conservative Christians.
When Karlin mentioned the Caucasians (from the Caucasus area) Gariépy understood that as being whites (the way the term is used in America).
People repeat those sorts of things as jokes all the time. If the average alt-right person were so russophobic, then why would almost every other way of gauging alt-right opinion on Russi be positive?
It’s an interview so the video is really optional. These medium length interviews are popular background content when you’re doing something else. I like putting one on when I’m making food, cleaning or doing some other boring chore.
Gariepy is pretty ignorant outside of his narrow focus of education and he says some stupid stuff for a person who can’t stop boasting about his IQ. I started listening and I just heard Karlin say Caucasians are a special protected group in Russian hate speech laws and monsieur JF immediately thinks, amazing, white people are protected by hate speech laws in Russia…
Gariepy’s accent is atrocious. Completely unwatchable.
thx, downloading the audio now
tired of these anti-white jew bigots telling me how rotten i am
Only partly through as I’m working late, but great interview overall though Gariépy does seem quite a bit outclassed. Pretty cool headphones as well on Mr. Karlin.
There was a recent interview, a great one, in a deep-dive on the subject of Russian nationalism/politics/society. The person being interviewed was a Russian young man who born in Germany who came back to Russia in 2015, so he knows both worlds quite well. The interview is quite long, at over 2 hours, but there is no idle talk and it was done quite recently, just two weeks back, so its fresh content.
It’s a mirror since YT took down the original interview. I’d recommend just converting it to audio and listen as podcast.
In China, many of the mutually unintelligble dialects with Mandarin are dying. The more economically prosperous the region, the more endangered the local dialect is. The Wu dialects spoken in the Yangtze River Delta is definitely dying a quick death. My estimates are that only around 40% of Shanghainese children are able to hold a conversation in Shanghainese nowadays; and the majority of those speak it with a Mandarin accent and need to intersperse Mandarin words throughout to get their point across. Similar situation holds for the secondary cities in the region such as Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Ningbo. However, there has been a palpable revival of the Wu dialects in the last 5 years or so, or at least Shanghainese specifically.
I believe the Cantonese in the Pearl River Delta is not in a much better situation, although Hong Kong and Macau using it as the lingua franca and primary official language helps keeping it alive. Not to mention some of the major Chinese diasporas speak Cantonese.
Likewise in the Southeast United States, southern accents are all but dead among millennials and Gen-Zs from the major metro areas. Differences between Atlanta millennials or for example, their Chicago counterparts of the same race and/or socioeconomic standing are minimal, if not completely nonexistent.
Your public speaking is at a high level now Anatoli. You are ready for Lavelle and his crosstalk minions. Very nice progress.
What exactly is the political ideology are you trying advocate here? Are you pro or anti white?
I sympathize with this, but unfortunately, it is also a far more popular medium. There’s a good reason why many people are migrating from blogging to YouTube.
In retrospect, the mid-2000s were the golden age of blogging. The current period is the golden age of livestreaming (audio-only podcasts didn’t really take off). It might be something else by the mid-2020s. Interpretative dance?
Yes, this is an important point I didn’t clarify. I forgot to adjust for not speaking to my own audience.
Probably because of more low-IQ people being on the internet, sad to say
Some others have been ready for quite some time (ahem). On the subject of RT’s CrossTalk, Al Jazeera’s Inside Story is a reverse CrossTalk, in the form of of tending to slant the other way. Some examples:
https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestory/2019/03/russia-gained-annexing-crimea-190318190011084.html
https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestory/2018/11/triggered-military-confrontation-black-sea-181126182524351.html
A counter example:
https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestory/2019/04/zelensky-president-job-190422175328027.html
On the matter of comparing such media:
https://www.eurasiareview.com/29122014-with-room-for-improvement-rt-gives-time-to-diverse-views-analysis/
The likes of Ioffe and Weiss are shielded from challenging discourse on NPR, PBS, MSNBC and CNN.
Providing top quality analysis on a range of key foreign policy, historical, media and sports issues.
Russian hate speech law is a more complicated case. Here are some examples of people convicted under this law:
Vyacheslav Shabanov.
He was sentenced to more than three years in jail for calling to kill all infidels during the Jihad.
Michael Toure
He was given four years in prison. He was the administrator of the site “Caucasus Emirate”, called for a Jihad with the infidels.
Rustem Safin.
The Imam of the al-Ihlas mosque called for Jihad.
Two years in prison.
Ilmir Imayev. Rally with al-Qaeda flags. 3.5 years.
Vadim Khabirov. Sentenced to prison for propaganda of Wahhabism.
iirc Anatoly Karlin might have appeared on Cross Talk already, a few years back ?
I actually did point out in the interview that in Russia, Muslims and minorities are occasionally convicted on Article 282 of hate speech against Christians and Russians – something which practically never happens in West European countries with hate speech laws. So Russia is marginally better in that respect, even if 95%+ of cases target Russian ethnonationalists or just general quota-fulfilling or politicized BS.
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/1005182361804341254
I have also, in the past, pointed out on this blog that the fact that Article 282 is occasionally used against people liberals like (Muslims, the Jewish supremacist Nossik, etc.) is the main gripe that “human rights” NGO’s have/had with Article 282. They’d be very happy for Russia to retain it and even recriminalize it so long as it was only used against Russian right-wingers.
Alexey Kasyan is just a radical liberal (I’m not a fan of 282 articles, but this article brings not only harm but also some benefit)
There is a benefit to video that nobody can dispute, one can listen to them while doing work.
Yeah, surprised by Karlin’s strong accent for going to school in the U.K. and U.S. But the same with Gariépy, the French-Canadian who was a post-doc (neuroscience) at Duke University. Funny thing is I can’t think of too many Russian or French-Canadian players in the NHL who have thicker accents.
I never received an impression that liberals like Muslims or, at least Islam.
For example, when there was a shooting in a mosque in New Zealand, the majority of commentators on all liberal forums and websites supported it. (This wasn’t different to the attitude on non-liberal forums).
As for the “hate speech”. It’s not very complicated. In America there is “free speech absolutism”, but this is an internationally unusual feature, like the gun laws in America. In almost every other country (including developed and advanced countries), it is like Russia. The situation in Russia, is perhaps a slightly stronger and more idiotic version of what is in many developed countries, whether Germany, “civilized” Sweden or even the UK (the home of democracy). So while the hate speech laws are idiotic and barbaric from any liberal viewpoint (as in the arguments of John Stuart Mill), it is not uniquely so, but actually just closer to European norms than American attitudes.
It’s the same way radical feminism, does not usually attract a higher quality of women. The structure of the ideology operates as a filter for people who are less successful/more angry.
There is a set of ideologies (anti-colonialism, radical Islamism, alt-right/Nazism, environmentalism, radical feminism, Marxism, Social Justice) which are structurally the same software, but with different customization options selected – the difference in customization options selected, makes them acceptable to people with different self-perceptions, but the same emotions.
It’s also technology driven. Today, wireless headphones and bluetooth, is a lot more common than 10 years ago. People become more addicted to listening to audio, even while they brush their teeth, or are doing boring tasks in the office.
As for more “low-IQ” people. It’s true that the internet is flooded with hundreds of millions of them – but there is nonetheless more “high-IQ” content available for the very small numbers of people who self-select themselves to find that.
In YouTube, there are lectures on many complicated topics (even if they often only have 150 views), which was not the situation several years ago.
You’re correct, but unfortunately as Karlin says it’s a more popular medium.
Since this is in fact his job and not just a hobby, he has no choice but to cater to the filthy unwashed video peasants.
Interviews and discussions are also a legitimate use of the medium.
Finished the video, some thoughts and questions.
Speaking of the SJW left, how does this coordinate with the traditional Marxist hard left in Russia? I am to understand that the actual communists form the most significant alternate political bloc to Putinism. Do they welcome the cultural leftist mores or perceive them as a Western infiltration?
Building on this, do you know what they think of Crimea and Venezula? I imagine they could not be much opposed to the former, as they would seem to seek the glory days of the Soviet Union and from what I could infer, would believe that Venezula is indeed an example of a socialistic country being undermined by capitalistic pigs.
I believe gospodin spandrell called it “spiritual soverignty” or a certain kind of intellectual independence from the dominant Western thought. Does the government promote that or consider that in a soft form of “great firewall?” One could see that even in a rent-seeking way, promoting “local” media as a means of channeling corruption.
Thoughts on this? Potentially a prestige hit?
https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-is-talking-about-scrapping-kuznetsov-its-only-aircraft-carrier-2019-4
I am not in any suitable position of knowledge to talk about this topic.
But with basic video editing skills, and some infographic animation software, then a blogger can produce their own video, rather than talking to peasants – I’m not sure how much work it is though?
If I was blogger, I would probably make some videos this way, and embed them into the written blog posts.
This way you could be a hybrid between the two forms of blogging.
A blogger like Anatoly could produce videos like “CaspianReport”, but with higher quality thoughts, and then embed them in written articles of the blog.
https://www.youtube.com/user/CaspianReport
On the other hand, perhaps a lot of hours of work, unless you can hire an assistant (or at least, interns) to produce visual part of the videos where you are not just speaking. I wonder how many hours people like “CaspianReport” are using to produce each video.
French-Canadian accents
A lot of the statements of his videos (I only watched a couple) seem to be nonsense, but his presentation method is excellent.
It’s much easier to watch those kind of one person videos which include some related visuals, than the people in a Skype conversation videos.
The video that I posted earlier by the Alternative Hypothesis (and most of his other videos) are essentially that. He reads a script on a very information-dense topic with some pleasant and occasionally relevant background animations. The content is almost identical to the corresponding blog articles on his website, minus a few verbal or intonational flourishes.
At minimum, I view Youtube as positive because it cuts into the business model and eyeballs of mainstream media.
That said, there are a lot of problems with it beyond demonetizing. There is an enormous amount of low quality spam, and it is sometimes difficult to find the better stuff. I also think that too many people are addicted to it because it can service their narrow interests in a low energy way.
Great questions, thanks.
Not really well. KPRF are tankies, +/-. They have substantial support amongst people 50+ years of age; overall – perhaps ~15% overall. SJWs are very marginal people, mostly in central Moscow and SPB, students at elite universities, etc. (Not be to complacent because that also described the US up until 2012-13 or so, but I can’t stress enough that it really is marginal – doubt it’s more than 1% of the population). Overall, while closer to commies than to Putler normies/conservatives and nationalists, they’re really a subset of liberalism more than anything else. E.g., it was a bunch of liberal journos like Alexey Kovalev – he’s a semi-regular at The Guardian who has spent plenty of time in the West – who made the only real attempt to drum up a #MeToo scandal in Russia (they were unsuccessful).
One needs to remember that these people are elderly. Support for KPRF/communism scales monotically with greater age (as does liberalism and nationalism in the reverse direction). Many of them are not even aware of SJWism in principle. I suspect to many of them it would indeed come off as foreign and bizarre.
As I’ve pointed out, there is a strong and near universal consensus in Russia on Crimea. The only exceptions to this rule (and very partial ones at that) are liberals, and only a subset of them.
I strongly suspect that few Russians know or care much about Venezuela. But certainly those commies who do would support it.
Yes, certainly. They’ve been talking about it in one form or another for well more a decade, beginning with Surkov’s idea of “sovereign democracy.”
Possibly, but I question Russia’s need for an aircraft carrier in principle. The US needs aircraft carriers to project power, seeing as two oceans separate it from the World Island. Russia needs them to… signal prestige. Which the rustbucket known as the Admiral Kuznetsov can’t do anyway.
I have similar thoughts, but there’s a chance that in the future the situation would change: maybe carriers are more than fat sitting targets, after all? maybe they are still the most important thing in naval warfare? And of course Russia could get wealthier, or carriers cheaper (relative to an economy), so that Russia would be able to build a few. It’s always cheaper to maintain a useless capability for a few decades, and then expand it and make it useful, than having to build it up from scratch.
So I’d just keep the Kuznetsov as long as it’s possible, but postpone its replacement as much as possible; meanwhile, I’d concentrate on smaller ships.
I also deeply dislike video as a format.
Even the US no longer plans to position any aircraft carriers within the first island chain in the event of war with China – because they know very well that they’ll quickly become coral reefs. While technology is hard to predict, I really don’t know if it’s worth spending billions on repairing the Kuznetsov just to maintain some theoretical capability for a far future time for a theoretical conflict in the open ocean with the US.
I don’t believe that carriers are simply sitting ducks (though they very well could be), but one must first ask what strategy would merit building a carrier force which is after all very expensive.
Some recent carrier costs (ships sorted by size), with R&D excluded:
• USS Gerald Ford, $12.8 billion
• USS George H.W. Bush, $7.5 billion
• HMS Queen Elizabeth, $4 billion
• USS America, $3.7 billion
• Charles de Gaulle, $5 billion (maybe)
• JS Kaga, $1 billion
These costs of course don’t include the air-wing.
Since Russia isn’t dependent on sea lines of communication and does not have overseas allies/satellites to support (unless you want to count Venezuela and Syria), the main functions of its navy are coastal defense, strategic deterrence (including bastion defense), and interdiction.
Carriers are useful for the bastion defense and interdiction missions, but probably not worth the cost. Land-based aircraft working in concert with surface warships and submarines can perform bastion defense, and the interdiction mission can be performed by attack submarines.
A blue water carrier navy would for Russia be an ostentatious luxury unless it intends to pursue an expansionist naval strategy.
BTW, the Victory Day is coming. 8th in the West, 9th in the East.
С Днем Победы!
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/no-victory
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/stalin-is-not-great
We all hope Mr. Karlin is again busy writing something about WW2, something that will trigger sovoks, liberals, Jews, neo-Nazis and everyone else.
Well, the Kuznetsov is theoretically there only to provide air cover (and air reconnaissance) for a larger fleet. Even if it’s not very good for this role, it’s probably good enough to affect American decision-makers, and make life a bit more difficult for them.
It’s a similar problem to how many people argue that countries like Hungary don’t need air forces at all. A smaller enemy won’t have a strong air force anyway, and a bigger one… you get the point. However, fighting a war with only an air defense makes you a way easier opponent – they know they don’t even have to look for anything in the air.
Similarly, a Russia without an effective blue water navy (even if it’s bound to be relatively small and ineffective) will make the American (or any enemy) job very easy: they will know the Russians will never harass their fleet (if it keeps at a comfortable enough distance from the shore), nor will it pursue or harass a retreating fleet.
Russian coastline is getting longer due to climate change, so they have to think carefully about it.
Perhaps, though I remember thinking in the 1990s how dumb Russians were to keep expensive and useless items like heavy nuclear bombers in service. Those seem more useful now. It’s always easy to scrap something, difficult to rebuild.
Why not? Today any ship is theoretically reachable anywhere. The nature of being on a floating ship makes it harder to hide and disembark; any successful hit on a ship is fatal, deep water will do the rest. Big Navy only makes sense today against second-rank enemies and in symbolic engagements.
Slovakia just signed a deal for a few old F-16’s, and Jan Slota has been spotted drinking heavily…I wouldn’t be so blase :)…
American and NATO (and Japanese) fleets will have aircraft carriers and so a strong fighter/striker air force. You can only pursue them as far as land based fighter jet escorts permit. Land based anti-ship missiles also have a limited range only.
Ha, that’s me. Funny to see myself being mentioned on Anatoly’s blog. I’m a constant reader and most of my statistical knowledge about Russia comes from here. Glad you enjoyed the interview, I might do more stuff like this in the future.
I don’t know at which percentages Russians were sentenced under Article 282, but I found it quite interesting to scroll through the Russian Ministry of Justice’s list of banned books and written materials. Can be found here:
https://minjust.ru/ru/mobile/extremist-materials
Once you scroll past number 30 or so, most of it seems to be Islamic stuff. And most of the Russian right-wing stuff on the list have retarded, low IQ titles (basically Fedposts).
Thanks for the posting – this list of extremist materials is a lot larger than I imagined (although it includes a lot of minor, random things, like peoples’ social media posts and memes).
If you click to the end of the list, there are 4885 items there, each item decided by a court.
It would be interesting to read, if someone will compare this list historically, to the largest lists of banned publications/videos/webpages/social media posts created in other countries.
https://minjust.ru/ru/mobile/extremist-materials?field_extremist_content_value=&page=24
To be effective the fleets have to be close enough to the targets and that also makes them vulnerable to anti-ship missiles from land, air and submarines. The basic rule is that when you can get at the enemy, you are also within reach of the enemy.
If the ships stay away and hide far enough not to be reachable, what are they good for? No matter how you look at it, it is a lot of money for a questionable military capability that can today be derived much cheaper using alternative means. Water used to allow people to hide, today it is just an easier target. In a real all-out war, navies would be the first ones destroyed.
It is such a random mix of nationalist material, antisemitic material, Ukrainian propaganda, Nazi publications, anti-Russian posts, anti-church materials, anti-Soviet materials, poetry, punk songs released as mp3, Islamic posts, Jehovah’s Witnesses publications and a few things which (from the titles) just seem to criticize Putin.
Many funny entries, like banning of old academic texts which criticized national characteristics of Armenians.
In recent years, becoming more related to the internet posts, YouTube videos and mp3 songs.
Although it’s multi-media, you can see they are mainly only reading VK and YouTube. They don’t seem to monitor anything in Facebook (or Twitter or Instagram).
If you want to say something controversial about nationalities, remember to do this on Facebook, which they don’t seem to monitor at all (I’m not sure I saw any Facebook posts on the list).
Someone doesn’t know how to copy internet links
https://i.imgur.com/PbA3vdE.jpg
That said, I have mixed emotions about this. I wonder how you could test, if creating these lists has improved the governability or overall political stability (particularly in terms of monitoring the Islamist materials, where it could be most plausible).
It’s when you look at “Carrier Strike Groups”, you can realize how absurdly too much the current American military expenditure is, and how you could spend up to $680 billion per year on the military.
US Navy “Carrier Strike Groups”, like a large national airforce on the water.
I was looking at some infographics:
https://i.imgur.com/IEr0uic.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/EO4tZpmr.jpg
Each US Navy aircraft carrier has 75 planes (it’s 3/4 of the size of the Polish Air Force).
And the US Navy uses 11 “Carrier Strike Groups”
Well, in Germany for example between 5000 and 15.000 books are currently banned (exact numbers are not known, but 5000 is the absolutely lowest number given anywhere — high estimates go up to 30.000 titles). Therefore, the list on the MOJ site doesn’t seem very big to me.
As for your other comment, I’m not sure how interesting such a study would be. To me, this looks like sovoque bommercrats banning random outrageous titles. Barely anything on this list is interesting and I doubt that the censorship itself is very effective.
Quite a different thing compared to Western suppression of non-conformist intellectuals like Kevin McDonald. Once more, if not good will, it’s at least the incompetence of Russian bureaucracy that make it look better in comparison.
But even with the current tech, a Kh-47M2 Kinzhal launched from a Tu-22M3 will have a range of at least 3,500+ km (about twice the distance between Kaliningrad and London), and probably a good deal longer. My bet is that the future is missile.
Yes it’s funny how incompetent it seems. For example, they ban the Nazi books, but in what kind of order?
“My Struggle”, by Hitler, is included in list in 2010.
“Myth of the Twentieth Century” by Rosenberg in 2013.
Alfred Rosenberg “Memoirs” in 2012.
So they banned Rosenberg “Memoirs” (written during his trial about the failure of Third Reich), and then wait a year, before they ban his main work. I assume they just don’t know which of his books was important and were too lazy to read this on Wikipedia.
Still, someone probably destroyed their life, for each of those memes listed from VK.
Also you don’t want to upload controversial, nationalist or anti-religious, punk songs on Muzofon (they even incompetently include in their links sometimes, the keywords they were searching on Muzofon).
In the case of the Islamist materials, I guess inclusion is at least accompanied, or result of, anti-terrorist operations, which sounds good to me.
List also provided basis for the future actions – for example, they are listing every Jehovah’s Witness publication between 2017-2018, before recent prosecutions of the Jehovah’s Witness people.
It’s interesting in Germany, they must have censored a lot more books. If the list is 5000 banned books in Germany, this will be several times higher than Russia (as in our list, a large proportion of its composition are social media posts, songs, etc).
Western Europe is not quite uniform though. In Waterstones (mainstream bookshop in England), you can see Hitler’s book selling in the history section, and quite prominently advertised.
Carriers facilitate the projection of power into places where it is not worth the expense. Would the US have gotten involved in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Vietnam without carriers? They are good for saber-rattling, but every now and again, there is the temptation to actually swing the sword.
yeah, that was good
i buy a tiny used MP3 player for $30-$40 and put Rockbox on it, then add a 400 GB micro SD card for $80 and now i can put about 20,000 hours of podcasts on there – politics, health, fitness, etc
also some good music too – 432 hz, rain, wind, etc
just clip tiny MP3 player on my shirt and it goes everywhere with me, battery life about 12-15 hours
newer models up to 70 hours but doesn’t have clip
Even Iran can sink a carrier.
Trump might respond by nuking them; but they could do it.
The ships need to be discovered, their exact (as opposed to approximate) location measured and tracked until the missile hits them. This is far from a trivial task.
In the meantime, the exact location of military bases and airports along the coast is exactly known well in advance.
Basically you guys are betting on a static defense against a mobile force. It may work, but then again, it may not.
In the case of a war on the Arctic, a Russian carrier might be used to quickly dispatch extra air power to hot spots attacked by the enemy. All it needs to do is simply move along the coast line.
Without a carrier, the only Russian airbases will be static: so perhaps the enemy will knock them out.
Most likely it is bans in response to complaints of “activists”. That is, an Orthodox/Jewish/left/Patriotic activist discovers heretical material in the network and runs to complain to the court. On this such chaotic character of prohibitions
The Kinzhal is best against static airbases, whose location is well known in advance. Against a moving target they might have difficulties in finding and tracking their exact location.
The Tu-22M3 is a very mobile airplane, but its airports are static, and the enemy will presumably attack those. I know it sounds like a novel concept, but the enemy ships and carrier air wings also have missiles.
Yes, they need to move within range of coastal aviation and missiles to strike hits against the coastal bases, but they only need to spend a short time there, and at a time and place of their choice. So it’ll be hit and run: they move close to the coast, destroy a base, then leave. Later they move close again, destroy another base, and leave again. Rinse and repeat until no airbases are left. The fewer airbases there are, the smaller the chances of the coastal forces to inflict damage on the attacking fleet. So if they survive the first time they strike, they will have a better chance the next time.
I’m not saying it would work. Maybe it wouldn’t. We don’t know. There have been no major sea battles for 74 or 75 years.
But my point is that you cannot really say that a carrier would be useless for Russia in a defensive war, because you don’t know, and likely no one knows, and so it’s understandable that they are reluctant to scrap a capability merely because currently they cannot keep it in decent shape.
An oversimplification, as not all who can be reasonably categorized as Russophiles , are so positive of Dugin, as well as recognizing Russia’s geopolitical limits.
My thanks for your time. Some more thoughts:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/18/russia-succeeds-in-mobile-anti-satellite-missile-test-us-intelligence-report.html
Electronic warfare itself is an entire interesting ball of worms given how much firmware appears to have been designed with backdoors with the strange resulting spectacle of Chinese hackers using NSA tools.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/07/politics/china-nsa-hacking/index.html
You’re welcome, but I guess you meant to reply to AK.
Your every contribution is most valued too, of course, Herr Tor.
I hear you, but I see at least five weaknesses with this strategy:
(1) It assumes that each side’s planes and missiles have similar combat radiuses and missile ranges, but if I remember Andrei Martyanov’s articles right, at least the Kinzhals have dramatically better range than any similar missiles; (2) the real ranges of state-of-the-art missiles tend to be unknown, so it’s a serious gamble to base your whole strategy on what basically boils down to a game of inches, where all you have to go on is unreliable intelligence; (3) it doesn’t account for subs; I don’t know how many such you get for the money it would cost to keep the Admiral Kuznetsov in shape, but probably a good few; (4) any future war is bound to be a total war, so these carrier fleets aren’t the only candidates for retaliation; and (5) if history teaches us anything, it’s that the next war is always played by different rules from the previous; it may be that a future world war will be won by the side that first knocks out the other’s space tech (satellites, etc.).
Yes, this is exactly what I had in mind when I wrote point (5) above.
You can also guess from construction of the list how certain courts and police are actively searching for materials, and add related materials to the list in batches. In the internet links, they sometimes include the key words they are searching for (and you can see they only seem to look at certain social media sites).
–
Inclusion of Alfred Rosenberg and Hitler’s books, is not a good idea, in my opinion. Most people who read these texts are not fascists who believe these text.
The majority of readers know they are nonsense, but buy the books as they want to understand the history.
Similarly I have read the Koran – it does not mean I am Muslim (rather, it made me realize the problems of the ideology).
–
Whenever in the main book shop of the UK, I see books by Hitler are openly sold. (And I don’t believe it has resulted in a rise of fascism in the UK).
https://www.waterstones.com/author/adolf-hitler/744397
So are the books of Alfred Rosenberg
https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-track-of-the-jew-through-the-ages/alfred-rosenberg/9781366627551
https://www.waterstones.com/books/search/term/alfred+rosenberg
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2011/may/20/hmv-sells-waterstones-russian-billionaire
Generally true, but we are in an unprecedented situation. The most important question – maybe the only question – is what would escalate any conflict to an old out war. I think it will be a high threshold and that suggests that most navy ships would be safe. A symbolic attack on an exposed ship could happen, but short of an all-out war, they would be safe.
The question is how much longer can we go on without escalating to an all-out war. Unless we are not privy to some secrets (that’s possible) it would result in a full destruction of Europe, Russia, Middle East, North America and most of Asia. Game over, let the mestizos and Zulus restart the civilisation.
As it is today, it looks very unlikely that Russia or China with their neighborhood actions would bring the world to the point of having an all out war. They are not that ambitious. US and Nato (or some smaller players) could. They have had the initiative since 1990, they have tried to improve their strategic position, they are the most likely to trigger an all-out escalation, e.g. by placing missiles in Estonia, Kharkiv or Poland.
Can a regional war in eastern Europe be contained? What would the losing side do? What would be the winning side do fearing what losing side might do? Taking out an aircraft carrier could be done as a last, desperate message that ‘this is very serious’. But we are f..ing with the planet. Given the dominant quasi hysteria among a large part of the Western ruling elite, this might not end well.
And it’s possible students using materials classified as extremist for their diploma, have been put in prison.
https://tjournal.ru/politics/66186-student-iz-belgorodskoy-oblasti-pisal-diplom-ob-ekstremizme-ego-posadili-na-2-5-goda-za-ekstremizm
The way I see it, Russia and the US are in a nuclear peace. That peace will most likely continue.
If it does not, even if there was some threshold for escalation before nuclear exchange, I wouldn’t want to be a sailor on the one Russian carrier facing 11 US carriers (plus potentially others.), not to mention that the US has several aircraft-launching ships that it doesn’t call carriers. Economically, there is no chance of Russia achieving carrier parity, so even with a war footing, their best chance would be to invest the money in other weapons.
But, perhaps it would be better to invest in the economy or in dual use technology.
Hitler wasn’t a great writer, but the books are the superficial part of it. You probably need to regularly ban books to maintain the scope of nebulous powers against thought-crime.
Modern Germany is the legacy of occupation.
They got back their currency (though now the euro), their government, and even their army. But the anti-Nazism which was planted there has become like a thing alive – perhaps, if anything, growing in power.
This does not bode well for the rest of civilization.
Germany only exists because Russia is a generous soul. Germany survived after the 20th century, because of moderation and, ultimately, kindness in victory, of Russian people.
If you recall, Trump’s statement about Iraq – “we should have taken their oil”. Well, nobody took Germany’s BMW factories, beer festivals and Berlin Philharmonic orchestras.
You can’t blame some comparatively minor continued mental problems of Germany (which have been evident – although at first in sympathetic intellectual and artistic ways, and only later murderous military ones – since the late 19th century), on the kindness of countries they had attacked, except insofar as its continued existence was a result of that kindness.
In the long-run, the Morgenthau Plan would have been better for Germany than the ideological cancer that was planted in West Germany by the Occupation authorities.
There was substantial dismantlement of industrial plants in the Soviet occupation zone in the immediate post-war era.
As for Russian generosity, there may be some truth to that, it’s certainly true that Soviet treatment of defeated Germany was immeasurably more humane than what would have happened to Russia in case of German victory. Still, there were a lot of rather unpleasant events in 1944/45 and the Soviet Union did destroy and annex East Prussia (to which Russia or the Soviet Union had zero historic claim) and handed the rest of East Germany to Poland, so imo you shouldn’t overdo the generosity argument.
You also forget that the Soviet Union occupied only part of Germany. The thing that really saved Germany (in divided and diminished form) wasn’t anyone’s “kindness”, but the geopolitical situation of the looming Cold war in which Soviets and Americans decided Germany could be useful after all for their purposes.
Stalin wasn’t known for that quality. He did not have the manpower to eliminate the whole of Germany, though he did eliminate a part of it. The Western allies had their own desires – I don’t know if I’d call any of them generous either. It is generally not in human psychology for war victors to be generous.
During the big migrant invasion, a Jewish musician who is an old acquaintance of mine (really only a half-Jew, though he identifies) gloated that “Germany’s music will change.” I don’t know if I should say “gloated” – it was part of a statement of wokeness, but, knowing him, I could read a little between the lines.
When Franz Ferdinand berated the Mayor of Sarajevo in the Town Hall with the line “Mr. Mayor, I came here on a visit and I am greeted with bombs. It is outrageous.” It seemed like a minor conflict.
It wasn’t the Russian people who decided such things, so it’s irrelevant in any event, but Russia only occupied the eastern part of Germany. It ethnically cleansed of Germans most of the area (even excluding the Sudetenland or the many German-inhabited villages and towns in Eastern and Eastern Central Europe), and even in the small rump East Germany it dismantled much of the industry. For example the Moskvitch factory was taken from Germany.
So it’s only a good outcome for Germany compared to what they planned for Russia. (Their highest political leadership; the average German surely wouldn’t have started a war to achieve this.)
I don’t know why you mention this in the same breath as Russian kindness. BMW was in the American sector, and certainly the Americans had much fewer reasons to hate the Germans. Even so, they reduced Germany to a vassal.
Germany was forced to pay reparations way in excess of WW1 reparations (by the way those reparations were restarted after WW2, too, Germany just paid the last installment a few years ago…), so although they didn’t take the factories (from West Germany, and even there it was not completely true), they certainly took lots of their products.
(1) I’m not sure about ranges – American missiles, for example, are subsonic, and so can have very high ranges; they also think Russian range numbers are exaggerated; but even so, it doesn’t change the big picture – Russian airbases can be seen on Google Earth, while American carrier strike groups are on the move, so a lot will depend on the element of surprise.
(2) They are not basing it on inches, I certainly never suggested it. They can assemble at a safe distance from the coast (not inches, rather hundreds or thousands of miles away from the range of Russian missiles), and then attack at a time and place of their choosing, while the Russian airbases will stay where they are.
(3) Yes, though there’s a case to be made that subs are also easier to discover than generally assumed – and the subs have to discover the surface ships, too.
(4) We don’t know, but the huge Russian coastline in the Arctic would certainly be vulnerable. There could be a limited war without nuclear weapons, or there could be a war after the nuclear armageddon. Certainly nuclear weapons wouldn’t end war, since the survivors would be told by their respective governments that the enemy started the war, so hatred of the enemy would be much stronger than in WW2.
(5) Since we know nothing about how a war would look like, it certainly makes sense to keep many irons in the fire. So instead of, for example, scrapping Kuznetsov and instead making a few extra subs, they should keep many options open, because while it’s certainly possible that carriers wouldn’t work and subs would, the opposite might just as well be the case.
Let me also point out that my assumption was that satellites would be shot down immediately – that’s the only way to keep carrier strike groups hidden. We’re talking about a no satellites situation. With satellites, finding the targets for the anti-ship missiles is way easier.
I’m not arguing from a position of knowing what would be good, I’m arguing that there’s a chance that carrier strike groups could be good, and there’s another chance that they would be the only good thing in town. In a case of uncertainty, reducing the number of irons in the fire makes little sense.
The one Russian carrier would mostly operate very close to the Russian shores (so if the ship sinks, you’ll have a higher chance to be rescued), and it’ll mostly do hits-and-runs against carrier groups, or participate in defensive battles close to the shore, in combination with a strong coastal defense.
There would be no open battle of one Russian carrier against several US carriers on the open ocean.
Although it’s universally recognized (and, although it’s difficult to know with certainty due to the general atmosphere of fear in German society under Nazi rule, according to Gestapo and SD reports was already recognized by huge portions, perhaps the majority, of German population already at the time) that Nazi plans for Russia were extremely evil.
So it’s a pretty low bar to compare Soviet treatment of Germany to German plans for Russia. And as I wrote, they ethnically cleansed (or at least, had their vassals ethnically cleanse) from Germans most of the German area they occupied.
AK might reply that they then sent some food to Germany while the USSR was starving, but the starvation in Germany (the reason for the shipments) was partly caused by removing the agricultural areas from Germany. I’m also not sure how real those food shipments were in 1946. In Hungary in 1945 the Red Army distributed bread to the starving population, which was widely publicized in propaganda (even in school textbooks there were pictures of Soviet soldiers distributing bread), but it’s now been established that no food was shipped to Hungary in 1945. They simply distributed the bread from Hungarian warehouses (after confiscating what they needed for themselves).
Nazi men made the NSDAP and DNVP the largest political combination in Germany, filled out the ranks of the Reich’s armies and committed the massacres that Hitler’s vision called for. Nazi women worked tirelessly to provide their men with the tools for the job, brutalised foreign slave labourers and raised their offspring to be faithful servants of the Reich and the Fuhrer. Even Nazi children jumped at the chance to join in the Reich’s crimes (refer to the life of Melitta Maschmann, or that incident when Nazi children tortured and murdered escaping Soviet war prisoners).
Hitler gained absolute power because he was the most perfect embodiment of the German character ever to exist. So yes, any average German would have done exactly what Hitler did, were he to get the chance.
Turnabout is fair play and the Nazi population earned a great deal more turnabout than it got.
And now you are going to argue how that nothing the jews have ever done should be held against them.
I don’t like this strategy – it seems like a suicide mission, like the carrier would be bait. There would be less room to maneuver, and it would be easier to find. Russian coastal waters are probably quite hypothermic, but maybe they could beach it, or bring it back into port, if it was hit. But I don’t see the point in it at all, if you can project land-base power to protect the coast.
Though, I think it is an interesting question whether the Arctic coast might become a new soft spot in Russian defenses. It is quite long, and I’m not sure how easy it is to transport men and materials by land, along it. But I suppose, invading forces would have to face the same problems.
I would favor investing in technology. A carrier is a known quantity, but with technology, it may be more difficult to gauge capability, and that can work as its own deterrent.
But I think that the atomic peace will last – at least as it comes to the international relations of major, stable countries. How atomophobic are Europeans in general? They seem to have a growing fear of nuclear power, so they might be even more afraid of nuclear weapons than they were previously. Not sure if that holds true for the East Asians, (Mao-era Chinese rhetoric was not overly atomophobic) who seem to love atomic power, but I don’t anticipate them being aggressive towards Russia.
Increasingly atomophobic, but no one seems to care for the risk of nuclear war any longer. People think that the nuclear peace will hold forever. The more complacency there is, the less likely it is to last, but most people don’t really think about it at all.
Finding warships from space is a dubious enterprise. Geostationary orbit is 22,236 miles above Earth. Completely useless in other words for finding warships.
Polar orbit satellites aren’t much better for warships on the move. Low Earth orbits vary, but 1,300 miles is typical. An effective radar at that altitude would be too large and require too much power, and as a result doesn’t exist. The trajectory of polar orbit satellites is also known.
The USSR fielded ultra low orbit satellites with nuclear reactors (US-A) for temporary radar coverage of critical areas (GIUK gap, bastions, etc.). Nothing comparable is known to exist today.
So finding warships today is a lot like it was in WW2 still. Patrols by aircraft, signals intelligence, monitoring port traffic, deployed lines of submarines listening with hydrophones, etc. What do you think all those Bear bombers are for?
The ultra-long range of various Russian anti-ship missiles is impressive, but not always useful or employable.
Hence why aircraft carriers are inherently more powerful warships than surface combatants. Carriers can perform their own reconnaissance. Aircraft are also more flexible attack platforms than missiles and capable of more missions.
As for attacks on airbases–airbases are very easy to repair. All you need is a bulldozer, or a group of men with shovels, and dirt. Of course you might get lucky and destroy aircraft on the ground.
That’s one option.
It could also simply operate as a fleet-in-being. Stay in a protected bastion simply to tie down many more NATO warships.
Or it could attempt a breakout into the open ocean to operate as a raider. The raiding itself might be successful, and such a breakout would force NATO to scramble massive amounts of naval and air power in an effort to intercept it (which they probably would, judging by what happened with the Kriegsmarine’s capital ship raiders).
No, my idea is that it would be a mobile force along the static defensive line. The satellites would be killed, so the enemy would have no idea where it is. Or maybe occasionally there would be an indication where it would be – they would try to move it closer to the largest concentration of enemy forces.
Don’t forget that most likely the US carrier groups’ strategy would be hit-and-run – they’d try to destroy Russian coastal bases and airfields one by one, and then retreat. The retreat phase is where the Russian carrier group might pursue. (The Russian carrier group consists of a carrier with an air defense air wing, and a number of air defense and anti-ship missile destroyers.)
In the absence of a Russian carrier group, nuclear subs will be the only mobile force able to operate outside of the range of coastal aviation, so after a hit-and-run the Americans won’t have to worry about pursuers. It will also be more difficult to predict Russian strength at any given point – they know the airports, but they cannot be sure whether the carrier is there or not.
Also, the carrier group (with the mighty anti-ship missile destroyers and cruisers) might harass and occasionally hit the American carrier groups amassed to attack just outside the range of Russian coastal aviation (and their missiles). (Provided they discover such a force beforehand.)
US carrier aircraft will also be stealthy soon enough. Not all of them, but I’d imagine the planes attacking Russia on a hit-and-run mission would be.
Or equipment required to repair and maintain the planes. Or they could destroy those planes in the air – which was the Allied strategy in WW2 with their bomber raids. They will be able to replace their losses easier than the Russians, after all. Of course they’d need to accept some losses while doing so, but I bet you they’ll be willing to accept losses in a real war.
There are some low orbit satellites in existence, but I’m genuinely surprised neither the Russians nor the Chinese maintain such a capability.
The blog you proposed to me had this to say about it recently:
https://defense-and-freedom.blogspot.com/2019/04/ship-detection-by-synthetic-aperture.html
I still haven’t read all the blog posts the guy proposed to me in answer to my question, but even if it’s not good enough for fire control, at least the approximate location of the ships (and their movements and directions) could be found easily from some satellites.
Here’s another option:
Sell it to the Chinese – if they would buy. Saves the cost of operating it, and it causes the US to apportion matching resources elsewhere.
They wouldn’t. There were reports they were considering selling the Liaoning (Kuznetsov’s sister ship finished by the Chinese) to maybe Pakistan once their more modern carriers enter service. The Chinese also have the biggest shipbuilding industry in the world, and they are more than capable of building carriers themselves. As a bonus, the Chinese carriers currently in production are already way more modern than the Kuznetsov.
SAR is subject to the same limitations as other forms of radar.
However, since wakes are usually larger than ships then it’s possible that SAR requires less energy (or can be used from a greater distance).
Still skeptical but don’t know enough about radar to say whether or not space SAR would be useful.
I think it’s useful in discovering the fleet. Not so useful for fire control.
That is interesting – looks like they already launched a partial duplicate in 2017, after acquiring the Ukrainian ship in ’98.
Based on state media, seems like they are looking to have 6. I wonder if they will all be jump-ramps with diesel. Better than the surrounding countries, but I don’t think it is a game-changer. If anything, it is an expensive stick to shake at Africa.
Not that I am underestimating them. I think the ability of the US to project power is decreasing.
I agree that this is true of Russia; China I know too little about to comment on. There is a good chance that Russia will redraw the world map a little in the coming decades by reunifying with (or annexing) Belarus, the Donbass, South Ossetia or Abkhazia, but it’s hard to see how this would set off an actual war. We might also see some federal subjects secede from Russia (e.g. Chechnya and Ingushia), but this, I think, will be welcomed by everyone, not least the Russian people.
This hysteria, along with Washington’s frail ego, is my main source of concern. The Russians can be relied on, I think, to accept the loss of a warship or two without starting World War III, but I sometimes fear that the Washington establishment would react to that same act like a narcissist who has had his grandiose self-image shattered — that is, with extreme and irrational rage.
This would be my preference too. Well … unless the military men would convince me that more guns and soldiers is a must if Russia wishes to defend its sovereignty.
Umm, no, the next Chinese carrier will already have an integrated electric propulsion system and feature electromagnetic launch catapults. Then possibly (probably, I’d say) they will switch to nuclear propulsion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_002_aircraft_carrier
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_003_aircraft_carrier
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_aircraft_carrier_programme
Type 003 will probably be larger than the Ford class carriers.
I find this premise a little unrealistic. If all satellites were already knocked out, the carrier groups would be far harder to spot, yes, but it would also be a clear case of total war. The Russians would not just keep their planes in all the usual places and wait for the enemy to strike but would move the planes elsewhere. (In Sweden, for instance, during the cold war, many inland roads were built extra wide so that they could double as makeshift airstrips in times of war. I’m sure other countries did the same.) So … a bunch of cruise missiles destroy some abandoned Russian airbases. Then what? Well, I guess the carrier groups can edge nearer the Russian mainland, but they are now suddenly within the range of countless air groups. How many? They just can’t know. But you suggest that they will push on no matter?
Didn’t Karlin write — or I read it elsewhere — that the Russians are putting a lot of money into beefing up their logistics along the Arctic coast? This would presumably also include military logistics. However that may be, this is obviously something that needs to be done, World War III or not.
Was there ever a previous major conflict where this was true? I can’t think of one, but I’m happy to be proved wrong.
Details seem a bit sketchy, but I guess you can pair clues with ambition. At the very least, I think they would want to be able to launch with similar armament, but probably more.
I am surprised that they are building a nuclear-powered ice-breaker. I wonder if Dalian freezes – doesn’t seem like it would, except perhaps rarely. Seems kind of like a waste, even to test the technology. I wonder if they are saying “Belt and Road” to justify building it.
Used to be said that in the US, 1 highway mile out of 7 had to be straight in order to receive federal funding, the goal being for it to double as an airstrip in nuclear war. I have since heard that it was an urban legend though.
These are easily the lamest “nationalists” ever
https://www.rt.com/news/458921-immortal-regiment-avengers-ukraine/
Planes need fuel and ammunition, not just airstrips.
Anyway, the coastline is a target rich environment, and the targets are mostly static. For example, ports. Port cities are worth attacking, because that’s where the small Russian fleet could retreat or get its ships overhauled or repaired etc. The Americans might simply attack the ports at first, and thus draw out the Russian fighter jets – to force a battle of attrition on them.
I’m not sure there are so many military bases in the Arctic, nor do I think there are highways or even concrete roads to serve as airstrips. An airbase needs to house maintenance crews, there needs to be some equipment, fuel depots, ammunition depots, etc. These might be destroyed. And they may not be so very easy to move around.
My understanding is, a lot of it is maritime routes. Which is difficult to protect without a fleet. And a fleet is difficult to protect without a carrier. American planes from American carriers might launch missiles at Russian ships from afar, from outside the range of Russian coastal aviation.
I don’t understand the question. In each war, there was a good method to fight, and in some wars, there was also an obsolete or ineffectual method. Since there has not been a major naval battle for three quarters of a century now, and there has been very rapid technological development ever since, we don’t know how a major naval battle with present day (or slightly future) technology would look like. It is very likely that of the many ways to improve maritime warfare capabilities (coastal aviation, long range anti-ship missiles, which includes subsonic, supersonic, hypersonic cruise missiles, also quasi-ballistic missiles like the Kinzhal, some launched from ships, others from airplanes, carrier battle groups, carrier aviation in air defense role only, many different kinds of submarines, etc. etc.), a few or perhaps only one will prove vastly more effective than the rest. It’s very likely that some of these methods won’t work at all.
Therefore, it makes little sense to put all your chips on one horse only. Because you have no idea which method works and which doesn’t. (Nor do I.) So maybe only ASM frigates with long-range missiles and the satellites Thorfinnsson talked about need to be developed. Maybe the same, but submarines instead of frigates. Maybe the optimal mix contains both. Maybe the ASM frigates and ASM destroyers combined with air defense destroyers and carriers, but the carriers should only carry an air defense fighter force. Or maybe air defense should be the job of many smaller frigates, too. Maybe the current American concept of a carrier battle group is ideal, and the rest makes little sense.
We don’t know, so how can you say which to choose? The best idea is to keep a little of each, and then, in case of war, you will be guaranteed to have at least some useful assets.
Or you can bet everything on one novel idea, but maybe it won’t work. What then?
Another aspect is that maybe there will be no war at all, but somehow some of these concepts will be found to be absolutely unworkable. Like, you spent all your money on diesel-electric subs, and it turns out that this particular concept has no future at all. Then it will be very expensive to switch to another concept.
On a principle of reciprocity, Russia would have a claim to all territories it could conquer.
The existence of Germany today, is a result of countries it had attacked not behaving reciprocally, and generally including issues like “historical claims” which had been absent from anything that German leadership could care fore.
Sure, and better not to use the word “kindness”, when there is a self-interest interpretation available. Although in the context of Germany’s actions, it was infinite kindness. “Looming Cold War” accelerated the post-war reconstruction process, but there was not any inclination to destroy Germany from the Soviet Union, one way or another. And in the British/American side, even in the most severe Churchill and Roosevelt discussions, they had proposed only to reverse German unification, and return it according to the lines similar to its former separate principalities.
Germany unified today is a far more ideologically/politically normal country, than many people would have imagined on 9th May 1945.
Problems that Germans save too much of their income, coerce other EU states to copy their financial austerity, or naively invite too many third-world immigrants without filtering them intelligently – in the context of past crimes, it is like observing a former serial killer, who has apparently returned to sanity, but then started displaying such slight neurotic symptoms as biting his nails.
Other problems in contemporary German – like the loss of former their artistic and literary genius, and their low birth rates, all had started already before the First World War (blaming them on “occupation authorities” is not possible, when this decline began more than generation before the Second World War). While in the scientific and technical, Germany has fallen from its world dominating level, but is still relatively high.
It is kind of alarming how much cachet Hollywood continues to have in Eastern Europe. For instance, during the Victory Day Parade in Moscow, there was a close-up of Steven Seagal.
I recently looked through volume 10,1 of Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg (published in English as Germany and the Second world war, though unfortunately volume 10 hasn’t been translated yet). The section on the Red army on German territory in 1945 mentions estimates that out-of-control Red army soldiers murdered about 100 000 German civilians in the early months of 1945 (e.g. when someone tried to intervene in their drunken gang rape orgies, or couldn’t come up with the watches they were so keen on collecting). Soviet authorities also deported about 200 000 German civilians for forced labour to the Soviet Union, of whom up to half died there (and similar things of course happened pretty much everywhere the Red army went, e.g. the Baltic states).
Of course it would be inappropriate for Germans to forget that to some extent at least this was a consequence of prior crimes committed by German forces in the Soviet Union. It would also be inappropriate and unfair to smear the entire Red army as a horde of rapists and murderers (the article I mentioned also argued that entire combat arms like tank forces and artillery didn’t participate much in such incidents, in fact often were disturbed by them). But “kindness and generosity of the Russian people”…you can shove that right up your ass, along with similarly obtuse idiocies like “Israelis are far too tolerant of the Arabs whom they dispossessed of their country” or “There’s a language genocide in Latvia!”.
Aside from perhaps nuclear war, this is really the most consequential of all.
Considering it slight neuroticism is meiosis of a high scale.
Sadly, simply dividing up problematic Great Power enemies is less common than one would expect throughout history.
The Romans tried to artificially divide up Macedonia, a plan which ended in total failure.
Charles V and Henry VIII at one point planned to divide France into an English half, Burgundy and a rump state controlled by the Duke of Bourbon.
Louis XV was planning to divide up Austria during the war of the Austrian Succession into several parts, including at least an independent Hungary.
Napoleon also thought of splitting Austria in three (roughly Bohemian, Austrian and Hungarian) before the marriage to an Austrian princess.
Granted several of those failed because the armies lost and the scale of military occupation required was probably impossible in pre-19th century Europe, but I don’t know why it has been so rare, given that it seems like a very logical way of weakening one’s enemies.
I have some sympathy with patriotic Russian militarism, since their parades don’t include hordes of marching queers, as is too often the case now in the US, but, IMO, the issue of Russian generosity is largely moot because:
1.) Stalin was a Georgian
2.) their military-age cohorts were totally devastated by the war and they didn’t have the manpower to commit mass genocide. They had to set up puppet regimes, supported by native auxiliaries, and could not control Yugoslavia or Albania because they did not have the pre-existing supply lines.
3) the US had the A-bomb,
There’s nothing normal at all about German politics and ideology today.
In a lot of ways it’s genuinely crazier than anything seen in Nazi Germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tehran_Conference
Everyone knows there were many cases abuse of the German population – groups of simple, uneducated young, undisciplined, many mentally unstable from war soldiers, whose country has been destroyed. There will also be plenty of sick psychos in such groups, and in a large operation, there will be many things which could not be controlled from above.
But it was not officially accepted, but condemned, and resulted soon in directives of the Supreme Command Heads, condemning indiscipline, including significant punishments, up to executions. Zhukov has immediately issued directives against abuse of the German population in January, which is to say almost immediately – however, later it is reported that not all commanders have communicated this sufficiently to their subordinates.
For example in May 2, the Military Prosecutor can summarize the situation , that the problem of murder and rape has been significantly reduced, but that they unfortunately still record some instances.
“Kindness of the Russian treatment of Germany” – prosecutor reports that “commanders of the formations and the military councils of the armies take serious measures to eliminate examples of disgraceful behavior of their subordinates”.
There is a direct inversion in relation to German directives on these topics. (only Russian source – with links in the bottom of the German directives. https://war-tundra.livejournal.com/3245596.html In English, this does not seem to be published anywhere)
Writing something vulgar about asses and then “obtuse idiocies” in front of three correct sentences, is not a very good argument. Especially, if you introduce two topics you know nothing about, after one which you might know about – it undermines any effect of citing ” volume 10,1 of Das Deutsche”, etc, in the support of the latter.
Even if you believe the lack of filtering by German immigration will have some apocalyptic effect (while I would predict is more that it will be a needless and unpleasant negative drag on a country, rather than apocalypse), it is not anything particular or special to Germany.
The same policies are in Moscow, in Madrid, in Berlin, in Paris, in London, in Washington DC, even in Santiago Chile. Only Japan is perhaps a really “close borders to immigrants” developed or advanced country.
I never claimed the cases of theft, rape and murder were part of an official policy (deportations for forced labour etc. obviously were), I know that eventually harsher discipline was reimposed and the worst abuses ended. Still, in the context of 1945 it’s pretty nonsensical to write of “kindness”.
I looked at your links…most of the documents are about the siege of Leningrad, a few about the massacre at Babi Yar and other Holocaust crimes, well-known German crimes which I never disputed.
More relevant for comparison would be the so-called Kriegsgerichtsbarkeitserlass from May 1941, which in effect destroyed all legal protections for Soviet civilians and allowed Wehrmacht soldiers to kill them on all manner of pretexts. In that sense you may be correct, but then I never intended to deny German crimes in the occupied Soviet Union, or that Soviet values were more “humanistic” than Nazi racism.
I still think you’re remarkably obtuse about certain issues, but it’s probably better to end this discussion.
Sadly, even Japan is starting to crumble on this.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2018/12/04/commentary/japan-commentary/new-immigration-policy-japan/
Thanks to the global victory of “bioleninism” or “cultural Marxism” or “liberalism”–whatever you want to call it–every single country prosperous enough to attract immigrants now seeks immigrants.
This includes even the famous Visegrad countries. Poland for instance is seeking guest workers, and Hungary has its investor visa.
The logic of capitalism is partly to blame, but not solely as evidenced by successful immigration resistance in the first era of globalization (which was far more capitalistic than today) as well as sick Western countries like Germany who actively seek out immigrants known in advance to be criminal welfare parasites.
You are of course correct to point out that this is nothing specific to Germany. It’s a worldwide problem.
Germany’s asylum system (“right to asylum” guaranteed in the basic law) is special, no other country has something that insane. The entire political culture is also completely warped by “antifascism”, with the political spectrum sharply constricted on the right, and an internal security service (Verfassungsschutz – something that also exists in no other “democratic” country as far as I know) used to prevent any change to that.
Sure, the rest of Western Europe is screwed as well, but that’s hardly consolation.
I can’t speak for your neighbors in Europe, but America has something equally insane. All alleged refugees have the right to present themselves at the American border and request asylum, and under American law they have the right to have their claims considered and processed. That is substantially was behind the recent, dramatic deterioration of our Southern border. The border guards are now just releasing illegal aliens into the United States while their claims are processed.
We now also have the crazy phenomenon of substantial elements of our “left” calling for the abolition of the border guards, refusal of entire leftist-controlled states to cooperate with federal immigration authorities, and judges illegally conspiring to suborn immigration laws and protect convicted criminals from deportation by federal authorities.
Germany has more internal craziness in its internal political institutions and domestic political culture as a result of the aftermath of the war, but the problem is general to the West and to some extent all functional countries.
I’d also say that Sweden is as nutty as Germany is.
That does indeed sound pretty similar to the situation in Germany. I still think in theory the German situation might be worse, since “right to asylum” is guaranteed in the Basic law (which can only be changed with a 2/3 parliamentary majority) which has been fetishized as the central object of Verfassungspatriotismus (constitutional patriotism). But in effect those distinctions may not matter much, it’s certainly a general problem throughout Western countries.
I was in Germany last time in 2010. I don’t remember many foreigners seeing then, so at least there is a low starting point before Merkel’s recent change of attitude.
The first time I visited Paris, years before as a child, I thought I was in Africa or the Middle East. I’ll predict now, that Germany will have less problems than France, where the French politics and culture is unreasonable in all directions, and the number of immigrants was much higher since a long time ago.
As for the results of the immigration, it will depend a lot on the nationality of origin. For example, the Hindu immigration in England has a positive reputation.
https://theconversation.com/poll-finds-more-favourable-attitudes-towards-indian-immigrants-than-pakistanis-and-bangladeshis-why-96040
The sad thing, is the problem of immigrants in Western Europe, could be solved by just sensible filtering of them a lot (it’s actually a policy any of us could design), where it should be treated as if each immigrant is applying for Oxford or Cambridge university – there might be 20 applicants for a place, and only the best one is allowed to enter. .
Those asylum laws are from UN conventions which most countries had signed. The area where Germany is not following the rule, is that they should apply only in the first “safe country” the immigrant arrives to or crosses over.
Germany is not next to any dangerous countries, so in strict interpretation of the UN convention, Germany should not have to process any asylum request
Germany had three million Turks and one million Arabs even before 2015.
Germany gets 200 000 new “refugees” each year, nobody ever gets deported, the political establishment is hell-bent on facilitating immigration (see UN global compact for migration), and native birthrates are among the lowest in the world…it’s not difficult to see what this will mean in 20-30 years.
It doesn’t really matter if France is somewhat more advanced on the road to national suicide.
Still makes England less English and makes it harder to reject multiculturalism and mass immigration.
The world immigration situation is inherently going to be very unstable in this century, regardless of ideology.
There are vast wealth differences between countries, so that a developed welfare state gives unemployed people and even prisoners a higher standard of life than doctors and accountants have in third-world countries.
International law is generous on this topic, and both capitalist and communist countries signed treaties like “1951 refugee convention”, that accounts for quite a lot of the problems (at least for the EU – the type of immigration is different in America and Russia).
There are cases which are obviously capitalistic. In 2017 year, over 1% of Haiti’s total population emigrated to Chile on invitation, where they will be guest workers.
On the other hand, there are cases which are a result of international law. Eritreans, Sudanese, Afghans, Syrians, etc, are generally allowed to present their asylum request to the European courts, because of their interpretations of UN 1951 refugee convention, and this is the real bridge across the Mediterranean to the EU.
It could be solved even more simply by just having no permanent non-white immigration or citizenship. Having any at all just provides a wedge.
White people are nice and so feel bad using explicitly racial rhetoric when they’re acquainted with non-white people and this leads to deterioration in attitudes which protect from further immigration. The problem is even worse the better the immigrants are.
Also having ‘good’ immigrants means that they and their children are more likely to enter the ruling class and being ruled by an ethnically distinct elite has bad consequences.
There are a number of problems with “good” immigration from groups which contribute materially to the national economy, are net tax contributors, and do not commit (many) crimes. These include:
• The immigrant group, including its descendants, may not share the political, religious, and social views of the indigenous population (see Audacious Epigone elsewhere on this site for such data in the American context)
• The immigrant group may practice ethnic nepotism, so as its numbers and influence grow it will begin to exclude members of the indigenous population from desirable positions in society and even entire sectors of the economy. It’s very well known that Indians practice ethnic nepotism.
• Social frictions from a difference in customs on the part of the immigrant group from the indigenous population
• And the mother of all problems–miscegenation. The introgression of non-white alleles into our gene pool is undesirable. Clearly Indians and Asians themselves even agree with this based on the fact that many of them spend a lot of money to look like us.
Now, that’s not to say I can present immigration of skilled people from adequate genetic backgrounds that are simply different from ours as solely negative. Clearly there are tradeoffs involved. A cognitive elitist immigration policy certainly has economic advantages.
It’s of course completely true that the global situation today facilitates immigration for a variety of reasons. The most important ones are definitely economic. The low cost of communications combined with large discrepancies in standards of living.
That does not impose on us an obligation to accept it as inevitable. Instead, it imposes an obligation on us to resist.
It is only a matter of political will, enforcing borders is perfectly doable if the elite of a country is committed to it. Japan has had few problems stopping mass immigration until very recently. The real factor across all countries (obviously Western problems have their own problems with Jews and anti-whites generally) is the power of big business and lack of sufficient labour power and class awareness (as well as national consciousness) to counteract it.
Obviously with a time machine, if you could travel to 19th century, there were no Indians in the UK (although UK people were in India), and the discussion of having or not having the existence of brown people in the country, is quite a plausible and even normal conversation.
But by 1930s, there were thousands of Indians in the UK, and in years after British Nationality Act 1948, over 1 million.
From a probability viewpoint, discussing what it will be like without Indians in the UK, is like discussing what kind of wedding ring I should buy for my marriage to Emma Watson, how I should spend money I will win in lottery next year, how I will recover from my injuries after I am hit with lightning twice, and which players I will select for the first team when I become manager of Real Madrid.
Politics is the art of the possible. My political views are already more “right wing” than every native EU person I have heard discussing politics in real life, so this discussion even first requires collapse of present Western European political views (which will probably happen if there was some great economic or military crisis, by which time I would prefer to be in the Cayman Islands or somewhere like that).
Yes there will be dynamic effects, although it’s not necessarily predictable. For example, countries like Sweden and Norway had historically very few immigrants, and they developed very liberal attitudes and idealistic in that era despite (or even partly because of) that. In Belarus, on the other hand, there is little immigration, and people are still conservative and didn’t become some kind of liberal idealists.
I think Germany may have potentially been much healthier if it had never experienced reunification. Probably a political impossibility – though a surprising number of West Germans were against it.
This I think may also true of the Koreas. If they reunify, SK will go even further downhill than it is now and take NK with it.
There were not more than a million Indians in 1948, that is absolutely preposterous. In fact, wikipedia says there were 10,000 in 1930 and 30,000 in 1951. Large scale Indian immigration only started with the arrival of Indians who were expelled from East Africa.
It was still completely possible to have reversed their migration at this point and an overwhelming majority of the public supported doing so (as opinion polls about Enoch Powell showed). The US in the 1920s retroactively stripped thousands of Indians of their citizenship when the Supreme Court determined that they were not white (Aryan conquerors notwithstanding).
The Swedish migration debate was driven by Jews. It actually changed quite late in the context of a hegemonic Western culture supporting migration and opposing nationalism; I don’t think it can be presented as an autochthonous development. Belarus of course was isolated from this culture.
Wouldn’t East Germany have faced the migration problem but even worst when it joined the EU? Although perhaps that has happened within Germany in any case.
East Germany on its own would probably be like the Visegrad countries. There’s no intrinsic reason why it should have been more affected by immigration than them.
The problem is that West Germans are brainwashed beyond belief and dominate the country with their idiotic political culture.
It seems as if it would be much easier and more attractive to move from one part of Germany to another than from Poland to England. On the other hand, East Germany was much richer than even Czechoslovakia which I think had quite limited emigration.
I think East Germany would have been somewhat analogous to Poland. Poorer welfare, so poorer incentives for migrants to move there. Berlin would certainly be much more European today. Perhaps, a little more clannish as a result of surviving communism and having its own body politic. Not that I think Poland is safe – but it would at least be a sort of delaying action.
What effect it would have had on West Germany is harder to say, but I think it would have at least slightly encouraged a sense of nationalism – seeing the dividing line on the map. The hope of reunification held out continuously might have discouraged the pursuit of multiculturalism. Eventually, when the economy of East Germany recovered, there may have been some competitive principle to keep politics a bit saner.
I think you are right that the EU would have been a negative influence. Possibly leading to the same result eventually.
When the Berlin Wall fell that was like crack-cocaine to globalists. I suppose the sledgehammers still would have come out, but it wouldn’t have been the same without reunification, IMO.
There was massive outmigration from East Germany to the west after the 1990 reunification (as there had been before the building of the Berlin wall in 1961).
Large parts of East Germany face a very grim demographic future as a result. And iirc the single state of North-Rhine-Westphalia (centre of CDU cucks and SPD cretins) has more inhabitants than ALL of the former GDR. So East Germany’s political weight in the federal republic is bound to be comparably minor.
Read my comment again – it says in “years after”. The million Indians arrived in years after, as a result of 1948 law.
Aside from that – my point is that removing the Indians from UK, is like discussing my future marriage to Emma Watson. In some alternative universe it might happen, but from the current situation, it’s an unlikely enough scenario
In the countries with very few Jews (like Spain and Sweden), we have populations with very liberal attitudes, that have kind of shocked even moderate people like me (I have Spanish colleagues).
Yet in the places full of Jews (and where even now, Jews are still quite economically dominant at the top), like Belarus, the attitudes of the population are generally conservative, and possibly becoming more conservative.
The explanation that the liberalism of Western Europe is because of Jews, is superficially implausible, and I would only believe it if people presented some kind of falsifiable examples. Generally, I see these views from people with a strong confirmation bias to tie this topic together to a conspiracy theory they find emotionally comforting, and they select certain facts that may or may not be causally very decisive, and dismiss any counter-examples.
What is the real psychological reasons all these people (such as my EU colleagues) have too idealistic and liberal views about unfiltered immigration and third-world nationalities?
For example, I have colleagues at work, who said to me that terrorism is a response to colonialism. I was beginning working at the time of the terrorist attack in Paris, and that is what an EU colleague said to me in the morning after- and he had a sister living in Paris. I couldn’t see a connection of these kind of views to the American influence either, as the same people are very critical of America, and their views don’t align with any majority American view.
I have heard that a lot of municipal sewer systems in East Germany are under stress because they were designed to have more water flow through them.
The same is true though about Pakistanis and other problem minorities, who on the whole have had a clearly detrimental effect on Britain.
Basically, once you have sizeable immigrant communites, you’re in a self-reinforcing process where it’s impossible to effectively argue for immigration restriction, especially on cultural/ethnic grounds, because that would be offensive to one’s “fellow citizens” of immigrant background and could lead to inter-communal tensions. So you have to watch as your society becomes redefined into something different.
In current society of the UK, a removal of the existing millions of brown UK citizens like Indians and even the much more unpopular Pakistanis, is likely in the sense that I will win the lottery.
On the other hand, prevention of future immigration from problematic nationalities, could still be quite plausible in some countries (perhaps even the UK), and could prevent or reduce the main problems.
Geert Wilders and Pim Fortuyn have proposed something like this, and almost became leaders in the Netherlands.
Fortuyn was killed near the start of his political career, and Wilders has never come close to leading a government, and never will.
In large parts of Western Europe the time for a political solution by democratic means probably has passed.
European anti-Americanism is mostly directed at “red-tribe” America, to borrow Scott Alexander’s formulation. “Blue-tribe” American values (neoliberalism) are orthodox values for typical ruling-class individuals in Western Europe, even though they may not recognize these beliefs as obviously “American” in origin.
Not just from a romantic conservative view, but even from inductive rationality, it is sensible to propose that successful nationalities should try to maintain the majority of their genetic composition (in the same way it’s best to maintain the winning formula of a successful drink like Coca Cola).
And like adding water to Coca Cola, adding e,g, 10 million Africans to the Japanese race would not necessarily have positive results.
On the other hand, the idea that tigers and lions are good, but ligers are bad – is obviously irrational. There are miscegenations which are superior to the original – for example, it’s not impossible that the input of Russian ancestry in their ethnogenesis, may have been what sparked the genius of the Ancient Greeks.
I have personally miscegenation of Northern Europe with some – maybe a bit distant – blood from the Middle East (my grandfather was Jewish through his mother), and I’m pretty sure this (even if it’s very small) was just healthy, and like being the opposite of inbred people.
I asked someone about the fire at Notre Dame, whether he thought Muslims might be to blame. He was open to the idea, but simultaneously said something about them being “second-class citizens.” I thought to myself, where does this phrase come from? It is not a natural phrase, but something that has obviously been repeated from the political campaign to give blacks in America the vote, (perhaps it even has an earlier origin in women suffragists?) Repeated for decades, initially way before this person was born.
It is not a phrase that I would use, but there is a separate dialect of politics that has been evolving and changing. Certain people speak it. Others do not.
So, how much of it is brainwashing of susceptible individuals? And how much of it is natural inclination in susceptible individuals? This is the deep philosophical question of our age.
With regard to desirable hybridizations, it might be that Northwest Europeans are too individualistic and altruistic to survive in an era of low-cost international travel and communications.
Slavs, on the other hand, appear to be too aggressive, low-trust, corrupt, etc. to truly succeed at modernity.
Thus the case can be made that the ideal European type would be a hybridization of “aryan” Europeans (i.e. Germans, Dutch, Scandinavians, Britons, etc.) with slavs (not including, of course, trans-Danubian Balkanoid swine).
Barron Trump is therefore the father of the new master race.
https://akns-images.eonline.com/eol_images/Entire_Site/2017512/rs_1024x759-170612155301-1024.-barron-melania-donald-trump-mh-061217.jpg
It is also cheaper to deport people en masse because of modern technology. One day some sufficiently ruthless and powerful government will take advantage of this.
I’ve often thought how ridiculous it is that there are cases when people can’t be deported because their home countries refuse to take them back.
Has no interior minister ever heard of a parachute or a rubber dinghy?
I like the idea of invading and having deportation zones, with A380s landing., rigged out for 1000 passengers.
Also annoying, when they burn their papers, or lie about their point of origin. Answer to that is genetic testing.
The less cooperative should perhaps be sent to a less desirable locations. For example, like Somalia.
American liberal beliefs were also influenced from Europe. (Which did not finish, when French Revolution influenced the ideology of the American founding fathers.)
I know (at the high level) anti-colonialist or ‘postcolonial’ ideas are centered in American universities today, but it had an important French influence, whether from Sartre, Fanon or Foucault.
–
Anyway, the idea that the present form of liberalism is not something that comes from the soul of e.g. Spanish people in this historical era, is an underestimation of how much this politics seems like a reflection of their attitude to life, to their economic level and self-image.
Also, in this influence, people and cultures are not mindless recipients, but choose what part of the foreign culture attracts them. I’m influenced every day by watching and reading American culture, posting on this American forum – but I only absorb the American ideas that I believed already.
For example, in Spain, Woody Allen is very popular, because he somehow matches popular aesthetics there. They also like reading books by Chomsky. Whereas, for Maria Butina, it is American gun culture that she liked. For Surkov, it is Tupac.
American culture is also quite incoherent. Kim Jong-Un can love NBA basketball and Dennis Rodman, but it doesn’t imply he has to believe in American political systems.
A strong country or coalition could simply take over large territories that no one wants to live in and send its unwanted peoples there. I’m thinking Western Sahara or maybe somewhere in the Arctic.
Trump’s children all seem very similar to each other, and quite different from Trump.
They seem to be conformist, healthy looking and very normal seeming people, with an “IQ test score” of probably around 110 (?), and the personality of having a rich father is quite mildly expressed. At least this is the three older ones. His two younger children have not really been interviewed (I failed to find any interview on YouTube)?
No, people are quite mindless. To give a parochial example, I’ve been hearing an increasing amount of Latin American music in China and in Europe. Latin America has no connection to China or Northern Europe, however. The reason it is popular is because of America’s Latinisation and Mestization is becoming reflected in the culture it exports abroad.
Mindlessness is to a degree necessary for socialisation and communal unity and in its right form can be a virtue (and of course the extent varies from culture to culture) but, from peasants to educated people, the worst are the people who sincerely believe themselves to be free.
When I was in Germany I was disturbed by the amount of American music. One of few German songs I heard was actually the cover of a Nena song that I had heard in America (in a language course. – it was like they had no music. Another time I was riding a bike alongside two very pretty girls, and one of them starting singing an insipid American pop song.
IMO, the world would be a vastly better place, if American cultural exports (and probably British) were banned or else limited to the Anglosphere. Probably impossible, I guess.
German situation is also worse, of course, because asylum seekers in Germany are from Muslims places like Syria or Afghanistan, rather than Guatemalan peasants.
My aunt in Moscow once decided to take the metro very early in the morning. She said that she saw so many Tadjiks that she thought she was in Paris.
I apologise, I misread your comment. But in fact the number only reached a million with the immigration of the 1990s in any case.
But it is a fact that the immigration debate in Sweden was led by Jews, even if there were few of them and Spain does not in fact that very liberal attitudes to migration. I have never heard of Jews being an important part of the Belarusian elite before.
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2017/09/23/the-origins-of-swedish-multiculturalism/
But examining the actual processes by which many countries came to allow mass immigration and by which nationalism was destroyed, you will see that Jews played the decisive role vastly disproportionate to their population (even IQ adjusted or whatever). Of course you can see other forces pushing for mass immigration in countries without Jews, like businesses who want cheap labour, but the pattern is very different in such countries like South Korea.
The psychological appeal of such theories is not relevant. I could just as easily say that because you are a Jew you will criticise a theory that makes people think badly about Jews.
Those views are promoted by Jews though obviously and were not common until very very recently; even today most people in Britain are pro-empire. I do not understand how you don’t see the connection with American influence; however anti-American they might purport to be, European liberals are hugely influenced by the liberal American media (e.g. just look at their views on blacks or Trump) and their anti-Americanism is itself just the liberal American elite’s view of right-wing white Americans. Of course, then there are all of the films, TV shows and so on that come from America.
Latin American music (reggaeton) is also popular in Italy because they have the same terrible taste in dance music. I have never really heard it in Northern Europe however, where fast electronic-type dance music is preferred.
This whole idea that American influence is pushing Europe left is very recent.
In the 90s and 2000s, Europeans were extremely proud for being more Leftist than America, more moral and civilized, and disdained America for its right wing militarism.
Hollywood celebrities always threatened to move to Europe if the Right got more powerful, seeing it as more Leftist than America.
And Americans were writing essays at the time explaining the various reasons for why Europe was so much more liberal and left than America.
Now the past year or so I am hearing for the first time that America is actually more Leftist than Europe and is responsible for Europe’s leftism.
This is usually from the same people who think Jews are responsible for changes in Western culture they see as negative.
I think there is a certain kind of person that naturally sees himself as a victim, as a plaything of superior forces, as lacking in agency, and as acted upon rather than changing according to his interior character.
It’s an interesting frame of mind.
Of course, there is some truth to that – we are all influenced by outside events, but to fail to see the role your own actions and agency play in a situation is an enervating mistake and a serious obstacle to self-help.
It is not a question of “Leftism” or “Rightism”, because even European so-called Conservatives are beginning to ape Americans with “muh values/freedumb”, gun rights or American-style Zionist shillery.
As the wise Ziya Gökalp knew, one cannot purify society before one is able to distinguish between what is indigenous and what is foreign.
There’s no contradiction between American influence pushing Europe left and Europe being more left-wing in some ways than America.
Europe receives influence only significantly from American liberal opinion. Hence European views on Bush, Trump and blacks in America are typically those of American liberals. However in America there is a significant right-wing (white) portion of the country with their own media that has no influence whatsoever in Europe. Such people often also have more realistic views of blacks because of actual experience with them. Secondly, Europeans who praise supposedly right-wing countries, for instance Denmark, are thinking of its economic and welfare system rather than its views on social issues.
Hyperborean is also correct that even the influence of American conservatism on European conservatives, although much more limited in its exposure, is bad.
Psychoanalysing people to explain away anti-semitism is similarly a typical Jewish tactic
Hyperborean and Kent,
I am just saying that European leftists becoming more extreme as a result of imitating American leftists is something I have never heard of until extremely recently.
And its striking because it is the exact opposite of the narrative I heard growing up and my whole life until now.
Is it true? It would take effort and time to document.
Since it contradicts the well known fact that America has always been less left than Europe, it’s something that until its persuasively demonstrated I’ll personally take as extremely unlikely.
As for whether its psychologically healthy to have developed a pattern of seeing oneself as primarily shaped by external superior forces and oneself as a passive agent, I can only see that as a form of decadence and learned helplessness.
When the ancient Romans warned against their increasing decadence, they did not focus on the Barbarian threat, but unsparingly described the growing moral corruption and indolence of their own society.
They understood that if they were to resist the external foe, the place to start was the internal corruption.
And that is certainly not to explain away anti-Semitism or the external threat – the Romans didn’t deny barbarians were gathered on the borders.
This (the proportion of deaths) is completely implausible figures, far exceeding the proportion of deaths in captivity of German soldiers.
I have little interest in this discussion, but the fact that the population (the population as such acting on its own initiative and not on the orders of the authorities) showed more generosity to the German prisoners than could be expected given the circumstances, this fact has quite serious confirmation in the sources.
Anti-Americanism really needs to be a core element of any European nationalism. You can’t go on and on about how this is unhealthy or decadent or whatever, this is really crucial.
I am sure the Polish-Intermarium Axis would love this idea – that they can have their cake and eat it as well, but they can’t.
As it concerns the American Leviathan, there can be no naïveté on this issue.
This was recognised by the liberal nationalist Enoch Powell:
Well, I see both Europe and America afflicted by a common disease that has its roots in their common culture – whoever manages to recover first, should definitely set up barriers against the still sick member. (And try and help the other from a distance, behind those barriers, if possible).
I remember reading growing up how right wing Americans needed to isolate themselves from corrupt leftist Europeans.
But I don’t have a problem with Europeans erecting barriers against American influence – the modern disease presents different features in both places. In different ways, each is worse and better than the other.
The problem is when you think this is “enough”, because that’s the main source of the problem. American influence may or may not be a factor, but the main issue is internal corruption, as it was with the Romans.
A healthy organism easily fights off disease. So internal health should be the main goal. Of course, I agree that you also need to protect against and fight disease, so its not like no attention should be paid to external factors.
American Liberals consider as “fact” that George Bush the Lesser – “they hate us for our freedoms”, “establish liberal free market democracy in reactionary backwater”, lover of “the Muslim community”, “most painful moment” of his presidency was a throwaway “racism” accusation by an insignificant negro rapper – was an über-ultra Fascist-Nazi.
Similar situation for Saint Ronnie of California.
This doesn’t make America “right-wing”, it just shows how deranged American Liberals are.
Here is a chart from Denmark:
https://www.dr.dk/images/crop/2016/07/28/1469709316_rep_og_dem.png
Just by looking at the chart Denmark seems very liberal, however the Danish People’s Party (main populist party) and the Social Democrats (has been pandering to anti-immigration policies and tougher on ghetto trash to avoid losing votes) are to the left of the Liberal Alliance, a party that exists solely to push libertarian economic policies.
So yes, if “Rightism” is defined as retarded boomer “conservatism” then Europeans are “left-wing”.
That depends on what the disease is. Low birth rates would have likely still have a been a problem under a triumphant Third Reich or Stalinist Soviet Union stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok but the displacement and mass immigration would not.
It is also easier to purge a clearly foreign element than if people are brainwashed that it is an “organic, natural” part of Who We Are.
But even if America was Karlin’s idealised 1950’s America I would still oppose American cultural domination and the only conceivable manner in which I would not object is if America was so different as to not be America.
Any talk of a “common culture” will merely lead to assimilation into America.
Wouldn’t surprise me if there was some truth to this. A strip of highway and some repurposed barns and you pretty much have an airfield already. Cheap as chips.
They might have been less of a problem in a very pro-natalist, nationalist culture. Evne secular Jews in Israel have much higher birth rates than one would expect, the North Korean fertility rate is about double that of the South.
Yes, but wouldn’t any old building serve this function nearly as well as a hangar? Or no building at all, for that matter, if the weather allows it. And would not Russia anyway have many days’ advance notice before any carrier group came into striking range — enough time to set up some basic infrastructure around the highway airstrips? I seem to remember that it took some two weeks for that carrier group to get from Norfolk, or wherever it lay at anchor, to the eastern Mediterranean last spring during the face-off over the false-flag attack in Syria.
Even if this scenario holds, how would a single Russian carrier make much of a difference here? Would it go one-on-one with the American carrier group?
Sorry for being obtuse — I’m not a military man — but I still don’t see how Russia’s Northern Sea Route would be hard to defend from land if some thought were put into it. It’s basically a narrow corridor with thousands of miles of Russian land running along its southern shore. Looks more like a deathtrap to me.
You make a strong argument here. I was mainly thinking of a country keeping supposed “obsolete” means of warfare at hand “just in case” and then finding out that they were more effective than expected, which is something else altogether. But still, some discernment is surely called for. Russia also needs to consider its civil economy.
It’s not new at all. See Ezra Pound for instance.
It’s even written about in Mein Kampf.
Chatter of this got somewhat suppressed during the Cold War era as a NATO spirit of cooperation was built between the old European right and American Cold Warriors. Heinz Guderian for instance made the preposterous claim that the Waffen SS was the direct precursor of NATO and the very embodiment of the European idea. By the late Cold War the US armed forces were constantly inviting whatever surviving Wehrmacht veterans they could to their meetings, exercises, conferences, etc. and giving them prominent places of pride.
But while all of this was going on the American CIA was secretly influencing European media, art, and intellectual development. The CIA’s grand strategy was not to promote the European right, as it feared it would ultimately reject American influence, but to promote the non-Communist left. Barack Obama’s mother was in fact part of this global operation.
This ultimately fused Anglo-American “rights” based left-liberalism with preexisting European critiques of America. Read Tintin in America for instance to see how Europe’s prewar Catholic right saw and criticized America. You can see in this 1930s-era children’s comic book critiques of American organized crime, capitalism, and its conquest and displacement of the red indians.
By the 1980s or so it had developed into an idealized “Europe” which the American left adored in comparison to Ronald Reagan (who, it is now forgotten, was widely hated by the left on both sides of the Atlantic) and later George W. Bush.
Today many Transatlantic differences have disappeared, so you usually only hear about this “Europe” nonsense from older people. Canada remains talked about as an alternative model, and bizarrely now Australia is often mentioned (in the context of gun control).
Have you given any thought to expanding your Canadian anschluss project to all of the former ‘Anglo’ countries within the British Commonwealth? Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain? Why limit your scope to only Canada?
Very much agree with these last points of yours. To pick but one example, the way I see it, the idea that ethnic homogeneity is inherently bad took root in Sweden’s ruling class some time in the 1970s — on direct American influence. All that happened afterward was basically an afterthought to this sea change. Had we not taken in migrants from the Middle East, say, there is no doubt in my mind that we would have gone for migrants from other trouble spots. Bangladesh, let’s say, or Haiti, or Nigeria. My simple point is that the mental decision to turn Sweden into a racial mini-America came first and that the rest was merely a question of filling out the open slots with whatever ethnic group was deemed the most distressed of the day.
Also like you, I expect this same mental turnaround to hit the Visegrad countries any day now. Their pained histories are not nearly bulwark enough when their young consume American entertainment 24/7.
Gotta start somewhere.
There’s also real friction between American and British conceptions of statehood owing to our Revolution and rejection of monarchy.
That said I also reject New Zealand’s independence and promote its absorption by Australia. Ideally under Fraser Anning, unless someone can figure out how to reanimate the great Joh Bjelke-Petersen.
But yes, the idea of federating all of the Anglo countries is quite attractive. I have no objections to monarchism either (though I do object to the House of Windsor), but most Americans do.
The imperial capital could be in Bermuda perhaps.
The European conception of American multiculturalism was (and still largely is) that Americans do nothing but exploit and abuse non-whites. Even the Nazis made use of the KKK in their propaganda efforts; the Soviets too liked to depict America as a nation of cold, cruel bigots:
America in the 1970s was still beset by race riots and battles over segregation; it was nobody’s model for the merits of a multiracial society. To the contrary, Enoch Powell specifically cited American racial dynamics as a cautionary example. If Europeans embraced multiculturalism it was only with the belief that they could succeed–by virtue of their civilized nature–where the Americans had failed.
That may be true, the 50% figure does seem indeed rather high and seemed somewhat questionable to me as well. I’d have to look into it.
What isn’t in doubt though, that Soviet authorities deported civilian internees for forced labour on dubious pretexts (there’s no way those were all Nazi war criminals or something of the sort).
I admit that this was probably true in many cases, though difficult to quantify. In any case, the post-war food situation in the Soviet Union was of course bad for everyone so in that sense German pows had no reason to complain (one of my grandmother’s brothers who was a pow in the Soviet Union basically admitted that the situation for the civilian Soviet population was very bad as well, and that the Soviet population didn’t behave that badly towards pows given the circumstances).
I got overly emotional in my previous comment and want to apologize for my choice of words.
Wow, Powell was extremely perceptive, disturbing to think that one could already discern the problems with the US back then in such clarity.
What’s the source for that quote? I’d like to read more.
Bermuda, eh? An interesting set of islands, no doubt. The only downside I can see for it posing as the capital of New Thorfinnland is the poor supply of fresh water. Collecting water on rooftops is so…well, third world?…I really don’t know much about it. Have you been there? It looks lovely. I know its considered an important ‘financial hub’ and boasts having the highest GDP in the world. How do they do it?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6b/BDA_Bermuda.jpg/800px-BDA_Bermuda.jpg
Yes, that’s the whole point. European elites completely swallowed the worldview of the American elites that the only reason there are racial problems in America is because of white racism, the legacy of institutions like slavery and segregation and so on.
It was accepted by European elites that non-white people are blameless for all the troubles in America and that the only reason there are any problems is because the ordinary white people haven’t accepted the ideology of the elite universities, media and so on. Once you accept that worldview you’ll consider it obvious that Europe can prove those American elite theories right (and the evil redneck white people wrong) by pre-emptively adopting the whole American elite leftist worldview and then importing masses of non-white people.
Europe has adopted the theoretical model of a happy multiracial society that was developed in American academia and it was indeed supposed to prove that the real world America that resists the designs of liberal elites is all wrong about everything. Europeans in Europe had little experience with multiracial societies so the liberal elites that had adopted American liberal elite ideas could run European countries as experiments in unopposed liberalism for many decades.
I have always been clear about what I think the Western disease is; excessive Enlightenment thinking, excessive abstract rationality, and excessive repression of the natural, imaginative, and religious side of man.
Things like low fertility are just symptoms; things like immigration based on the idea that “man” is universally the same (because considered abstractly man is the only feasible logical category), are just symptoms.
“Leapfrogging” allegiances for non-Enlightenment races and cultures (self-hate) – also just a symptom of adopting excessive Enlightenment thinking.
I am sorry if I gave the impression that I regard Enlightenment thinking as an organic and natural part of European culture. Quite the opposite – it is a rejection of the organic and natural.
The salient point here is rather, that things like multiculturalism and immigration and anti-racism are “organic and natural” developments of Enlightenment thinking – so anyone who uncritically embraces the Enlightenment will develop along these lines, and will be susceptible to being pushed in that direction.
From a purely functional and propogandistic point of view, there may be value in “exteriorizing” previously accepted world views as a device for ridding oneself of them.
One may “foist” them on the Other as a way of declaring one no longer identifies with them.
That can work.
The problem here is, you are focusing on the symptoms and not the underlying disease.
Suggesting America “convinced” you to let in immigrants and become multicultural, for instance, won’t rid you of the underlying mindset – your uncritical embrace of Enlightenment thinking – that is the real cause.
“Assigning blame” only matters in terms of whether it reflects a correct diagnosis of the disease and a sincere desire to slough it off.
I don’t care at all if you “blame” America if it successfully rise you of the disease.
Indeed America is really it’s own civilization – it is very different from Europe. But they have “common roots”, and have developed a similar disease.
Well, I think you have a bit of a point. America was founded on Enlightenment ideals, so in that sense it is indeed more “left” than Europe from its inception.
That’s probably an important point to keep in mind.
In my view, as long as the focus is on curtailing Enlightenment thinking than it is good, and my objection to blaming Jews or Americans – or leftist Europe in the case of 90s Americans – is simply that it focuses on the symptoms and does not diagnose the disease correctly.
And that is what is unfortunate.
Jews can only be persuasive in a culture that has stripped itself of its psychological defenses – irrational biases. A culture that sees unbiased thinking as an ideal has opened itself up to outside influence.
What’s more, “unbiased thinking” carries within itself perverse incentives that will organically develop over time – i.e it is a mere pose.
So even though the Enlightenment developed in Europe and was always influential in Europe without any American assistance, a better “myth” might be that Europe always retained an organic tradition, and it dramatically eroded only under American influence, America being defined as having more fully embraced the Enlightenment (indeed founded on it)
That America’s Asian allies did not develop the Enlightenment diseases shows clearly that one has to be susceptible to it by having previously embraced Enlightenment thinking in an uncritical and enthusiastic fashion to some extent.
At any rate, at this date the point is moot – the development of propaganda myths suitable to local conditions aside, the entire West is converging on a radical embrace of Enlightenment culture.
The disease needs to be clearly diagnosed and spelled out.
Was it? My impression is that modern multicultural ideas are derived mostly from Marx and his disciples. Of course there were and are many American exponents of these ideas but I don’t know how much we really developed them. America at all levels seems historically to have been a quite openly and crudely racist place by global standards: “one-drop rule,” early adoption of eugenics etc were not just the ideas of “rednecks” but rather part of an overarching social policy advocated by our political leaders.
Even within the US you saw more openly racist policies in the “Anglo” parts than in areas with more French (Louisiana) or Spanish influence.
What did Marx have to say about multiculturalism?
There have always been other traditions in the US though; otherwise ex-slaves would never have been given citizenship after the civil war.
Just look at this 1869 cartoon by Thomas Nast:
https://cartoons.osu.edu/digital_albums/thomasnast/uncle_sam.htm
It’s basically already America as a “universal nation”, with not just all manner of Europeans, but also Amerindians, blacks and Chinese united in a common republic.
Or look what Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1845:
as in the old burning of the Temple at Corinth, by the melting and intermixture of silver and gold and other metals a new compound more precious than any, called Corinthian brass, was formed; so in this continent – asylum of all nations — the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles, and Cossacks, and all the European tribes – of the Africans and of the Polynesians — will construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a new literature, which will be as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting-pot of the Dark Ages, or that which earlier emerged from Pelasgic and Etruscan barbarism. ‘La Nature aime les croisements’
Basically indistinguishable from the most extreme mixing propaganda today.
You mean it wasn’t just the Jews?
Oh, that’s a surprise.
I don’t think I’ve ever claimed that “it’s just the Jews”.
I get the impression though that many of your comments somehow seem to be motivated by irritation at the hardcore antisemitism of many Unz review commenters…hilariously enough it seems to cause you to conform to the stereotype of the “subversive Jew”, with all your strange recommendations about what European nationalists should think and do about their predicament.
Kind of like a vicious cycle…
Wikipedia, but it comes ultimately (basically just copies) from the book Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell
By Simon Heffer, which quotes a Guardian interview (?) on 18th October 1982.
Unfortunately, a subscription is needed to access their archives.
I did not mean you, just that you were one of the few who actually bothered to look into European writers and see what they said before Jews became culturally influential.
As for the rest of your comment, an astonishingly stupid remark – but you are trolling me, so for you that’s progress 🙂
Keep up the good work.
I remember last year you were saying we have to keep our heads down and not anger Muslims and other cringeworthy things.
So I appreciate this new combative spirit of yours, which I noticed on your responses to other commenters also. You may develop a spine yet.
It would in likelihood have helped, but there are limits, after all, even North Korea is below replacement level.
Not to say that it couldn’t be done but it is more likely to have been something like 2.2-2.3 rather than 2.9.
But fortunately, in peacetime replacement level is really the only level needed.
America’s South Korean and Taiwanese vassals share many of the same “symptoms” that Europe does.
That can be pirated on Library Genesis.
Thanks, Enoch Powell is a fascinating figure, I might eventually take a closer look at his anti-American views.
That’s harsh 🙁
I was actually kind of semi-serious with my “vicious cycle” comment, not just in relation to you, but on a more general level.
As for me developing a spine, I don’t know…I’m actually increasingly resigned to the state of the world.
Yes, but also more generally about the relationship between universalism and particularism.
I don’t read much HBD stuff at all…I think some of it is true (e.g. differences in average IQ between different populations), but much of it seems rather questionable to me.
My resignation comes more from the general state of the world which seems to be getting ever crazier. I’m still opposed to mass immigration and multiculturalism, but unfortunately much of the right is quite boneheaded and hard to like as well, so that has led to a certain disentchantment.
Marx advocated/predicted the abolition of nation-states and national borders; I think we can logically infer a universalist worldview from that. He also strongly opposed to the slave trade in the US and was a vocal supporter of the Union in the Civil War (according to Christopher Hitchens he was also generally pro-American and more skeptical about Russia, which certainly qualifies as one of the great ironies of history).
Emerson was kind of a fringe thinker even in his own time; I don’t think he represents the views of the average American anymore than Nietzsche represents the views of the average German. I also don’t think Emerson’s view of America was unusual amongst more educated, literary types in any country. Goethe’s poem about America echoes the same sentiments:
America had race slavery until the mid-1800s; we had an extensive patchwork system of de facto and de jure racial segregation for approximately another century. Compared to South and Central America integration of Africans and Native Americans into the social fabric was basically non-existent. We had a system of mandatory eugenic sterilization that was sanctioned by the Supreme Court and admired by the Nazis. Of course there were optimists and radicals; there were also a lot of people who just mouthed platitudes and wishful thinking (a lot of slaveowners claimed to wish and hope for the day that blacks were as capable of civilization as whites). Rhetoric is cheap but in practice, for most of its history, America has been positively medieval in its treatment of ethnic minorities.
It’s not a bad thing. Pop music sounds a lot better when you don’t understand the words in the song, or the words are at least of a foreign language.
Music can even express some beautiful ideas in listener’s minds, but the words can be saying something completely unrelated, stupid, or only interesting to the singer.
In the shop, when there is Russian pop music (for Russian first language people), and you enjoy the music for a few seconds, then the stupidity of the words does not match with the sound.
Whereas with American pop music (for a non English first language people), you hear the music primarily, and only the words if you want to.
That’s an explanation, which probably expresses obsessions of political blogs you read.
But it doesn’t seem very likely. Reggaeton was a original and unique sound a few years ago, for ears which were bored of an American pop sound, so it is inevitable it will become popular.
Also it was most popular in Spain, so it did not enter the world, or at least Europe, via America, but through Spain. Russian who are learning Spanish language, listen to it, for example.
It sounds happier, “tropical” and sometimes romantic. The problem of Reggaeton are the very stupid words in the songs, but this is not a problem for Chinese people.
If Chinese people would make a similarly unique and “addictive” sound, then it would export rapidly. This is the same case where Gangnam Style spread everywhere.
Some nobody on youtube claiming to refute Jared Diamond or what?
LOL, high human capital in the alt-right right there.
If we look at British Nationality Act 1948 which resulted in the Indians, and how I would imagine the theory would go.
If a Jew or Jews supported it – “Jews were instrumental cause” of it, or “created the culture and debate which resulted it”.
“Statistical” procedure in these discussions usually looks like:
If Jews supported it – then Jewish historical process.
If non-Jews supported it – then “exceptions, under Jewish influence”.
When the Jew is in a higher political position (like Prime Minister), then the English supporter of the law, will be their subordinate.
But when the Jew is in the lower position (like non-Prime Minister), the English supporter in the higher position, will be under their influence (perhaps hypnotized by the “shaping of the debate”).
If 95% of supporters of “British Nationality Act 1948” are English and 5% Jews, then it will be a “Jewish law”, etc, as if it was 95% Jewish and 5% English.
You were the person who taught me this, when we were discussing problems of the Crimea War.
In this war, there was a Jewish prime minister of the Britain, so you said it was a Jewish war (I might be mischaracterizing or simplifying). However, I read the topic, and he was the only Jew in the British government and all decisions were had to go through the hundreds of English members of British parliament and House of Lords.
Then you said Second Boer War was Jewish. But I couldn’t see any Jewish government members when I looked on Wikipedia.
So if we look at “British Nationality Act 1948” – the Prime Minister is Clement Attlee.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clement_Attlee
And it was even the British government, that Jews hate. So the extent of Jewish influence on Clement Attlee cannot have been very far.
https://www.jta.org/1967/10/09/archive/clement-attlee-foe-of-zionism-and-israel-dead-at-84
It’s not that simple. My ethnicity is predominantly Russian, with the grandfather of Jewish nationality (from his mother). I know a lot about the Jews from staying in Israel and have “too much knowledge” now in this topic.
Even if I try to believe different theories as an idle game (which I sometimes do so ), I couldn’t myself believe the Jewish conspiracy theory, because I have way too much boring knowledge.
Perhaps if I had a time machine, and returned to being a teenager, I could join these discussions enthusiastically.
It’s a “theory of the universe” for people who have joined the religion, and it has metaphysical aspects.
Emotional value creates the confirmation bias, and even starts the “investigation” in many case (which has the character of confirmation finding, rather than historical explanation).
The reason it’s not what I read in the real history books(Crimea War is Jewish, etc), is because for someone who actually knows the history, there are a thousand facts (not the few ones selected to confirm that theory), and it doesn’t usually create the emotionally comforting for certain readers explanation.
If I want to understand why colleagues from countries like Spain are so liberal (and they are also pro-immigrant)
I ask people here, and the reply is something about Jews.
How would you test this theory?
Superficially it makes little sense. In European countries, where Jews are quite strongly in the elite (Belarus, Ukraine, Russia), then people remain much more conservative in some of these topics (not in the anti-colonialism topic, where they believe the same). These are people from countries a bit mixed up with Jews, who had Jewish classmates, and watch Jews on their television, and in their politics.
Jews are usually more liberal in these countries, but they are mixed up in the elite, and their overall views are much more socially conservative than Western Europeans.
Yet I can talk to a Spanish colleague, which will have never have any connection to the Jews – and their view is supposedly because of Jews?
It’s a classic case of people of discussing with monomaniacs. Also it underestimates the “problem” or extent of the extreme liberalism in these Western European countries.
If Germany is as “crazy” as you said that it could affect your life and create depression when thinking about future prospects, you should plan now a future retirement to somewhere which will probably stay more normal through the whole 21st century, like the German-speaking Switzerland.
Lol – it’s an interesting discussion you stated.
In the USSR, it was the same simplistic, anti-colonialist theories about America. But it doesn’t result in the fanatical “liberalism” of Western Europe today.
Liberalism is not really the right word to describe the attitudes. It seems like a mix of hippy attitudes, inverted racist attitudes, and utopian socialism, which sometimes switches to the opposite in an unstable way (for example, homosexual Foucault supported Islamic Revolution in Iran).
I talked to someone once who has worked in Bermuda. But it is basically extension of UK.
And – although obviously life is good there – demographics will not be popular with Thorfinson as it is majority black people living there.
Do you know what year she begins visiting Paris? (around 1992? – or could she visit earlier?)
My memory was thinking I was in Africa/Middle East, already when I first visited it when I was very young, and I thought this was an adventure at that time.
So it’s been the Africa/Middle East, for many years already.
Well, the mangled mixed Spanish-English lyrics they sing is one clue.
I can’t dispute that, but this seems to me cause for optimism. I would be more worried if there were signs of us being satisfied with a less than insane level of decadence.
That we’re pushing it to the limits means it is going to explode, and can’t last.
I don’t understand the fatalistic attitude towards trends – the one clear thing us that trends don’t last.
Whatever is going on today, will be utterly, utterly different than 30 years from now.