Perfectionland: Notes on Nihon

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I wasn’t in Japan for long – only five days – but it was enough to appreciate the essence of the place. The country, as I had expected to discover, is a marvel; remarkable, thrilling, inspiring and blessed with so many natural advantages that it leaves one feeling furiously envious. The people I met were beautiful and ultra-civilised – if also slightly robotic. The climate was milder than I expected (having previously visited unbearably humid South Korea). The natural environment (and especially the trees) I found dazzlingly attractive. And though I am not a ‘weeaboo’ by any stretch of the imagination, I did come away with a newfound appreciation for manga and J-Pop (especially the bizarre girl-group AKB48 – seriously look them up).

I have, of course, always understood the Western fetish for East Asia and for Japan in particular. The appeal of homogenous, orderly and affluent societies to those stranded in multiculturalised urban jungles is perfectly obvious. Japan is a dream of faultlessness; a magical perfectionland, where the girls are thin and pretty, the IQs are through the roof and crime and disorder are almost entirely absent. Who could fail to be attracted to that?

It is revealing that many of the leading luminaries of the Western far-right have had personal experience of Japan. The current leader of the white nationalist British National Party (BNP) Adam Walker, for example, spent many years  there teaching English to children. Jared Taylor, leader of the neo-segregationist website American Renaissance, also spent many years living in the country and speaks the language fluently. This makes a lot of sense to me.

A Western citizen exposed to Japan for a considerable period of time will inevitably come to resent the fact that his or her own country has gone down such a different, self-destructive path. Why can’t England be like Japan? Why can’t London be like Tokyo? Exposure to Japan can by itself turn a liberal into a reactionary.

Of course, there is no new shift in policy available to us that can make England into Japan or London into Tokyo, and any effort to bring such changes about will be a failure (and a bloody one at that). This is because Japan has dodged the bullet of decline for reasons that are inherently Japanese.

First, Japan has always been insular. Indeed, prior to the Meiji restoration, Japan maintained the strictest policy of cultural isolation in human history, even at times forbidding its citizenry the right to leave the archipelago on pain of death. Second, Japanese people are, on average, smarter than Europeans by two to three IQ points. This is not an insignificant difference and it has real-world consequences. Finally, Japanese men have lower levels of testosterone than Europeans, meaning that libertinism, crimes of aggression (and increasingly even reproduction) are much rarer there than in other parts of the world.

Given that Europeans cannot become Japanese simply by changing national policy, those who (like Jared Taylor and Adam Walker) dream of importing Japanese advantages into the West are sadly deluded. The best we can do is envy them quietly and try not to get too depressed.

D, LDN

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Why the Alt-Right is Too Alt for Me

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Internet subcultures are so often exaggerated in scale and importance by the mainstream – offline – media that most reasonable folk tend instinctively to dismiss reports of their influence as hyperbole. Such was the case when Hillary Clinton devoted almost an entire speech to warning America of the insidious agenda of the ‘alt-right’, an internet coalition of racists, misogynists and Islamophobes allegedly in cahoots with the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump.

Strangely, and unlike so many cyber phenomena reported in the media, the tribe to which Ms Clinton referred is notable for being very real, or at least very widespread. Though there is no single agenda or set of principles agreed upon by the alt-right, there is certainly a general Weltanschauung strong and clear enough to gravitate like-minded people towards it. This worldview is well-described in the following YouTube comment taken from under a video of the Clinton speech: “We (the alt-right) are anti neo-libs. That is the only reason we are alternative. Neo-libs/cons have been the conservative mainstream since 9/11. We are a backlash against that. Neo-cons are not real right.”

By ‘neo-libs’ and ‘neo-cons’ (Neoliberals and Neoconservatives) the commenter is likely referring to a consensus known elsewhere as the ‘New World Order’, the 1%, or (vaguely) as ‘Zionism’.

Rumours of a ‘New World Order’ have gained currency on the right-wing fringe in recent years

These labels, although having little to do with each other in fact, are used as synonyms for the force that is actively shrinking the world into a liberal, multi-racial, multi-cultural free-trade zone, in yet another word – the force and ideology of globalisation.

The idea that conservatives should be pro-globalisation is actually a very recent one. Traditionally, as the alt-right notes, right-wing political thinkers have been strongly nativist and culturally protectionist. The shift in conservative thought, beginning during the Reagan-Thatcher era, to laissez faire globalism is attributed retrospectively to the influence of non-native forces, often (predictably) to that of the Jews (sometimes referred to in euphemism as ‘capitalists’/’big business’/’bankers’/’the banks’).

The alt-right wishes to return the conservative movement to where it was before that transition; before economics became more important as a right-wing principle than blood, soil and culture; that is, before paleo became neo.

The alt-right has no single birthplace, but there are nevertheless a few websites and forums indelibly associated with it. Prime among these sites is the Japanese-cultural forum 4chan and in particular the /pol/ (politically incorrect) messageboard. Here, a right-wing political consensus has become entrenched, often (but not always) expressed with dark humour, that has subsequently bled out into the wider internet universe, evidenced by the broad use of memes like Pepe the Frog as well as words and phrases like ‘degenerate’ and ‘dindu-nuffin’ (the latter invention being used to refer sarcastically to African-American criminality).

The English-language messageboard 4chan is commonly associated with the alt-right

The alt-right is connected to, but distinct from, the ‘Dark Enlightenment’ phenomenon I have written about previously. Unlike the latter, the alt-right is more realistic and less philosophical. While the Dark Enlightenment recommends absurd initiatives like the abolition of democracy and the return of divinely-appointed’ Kings, the alt-right prefers to concern itself with more achievable and substantial ideas, such as the abolition of third-world (non-white) immigration, building an opposition to political Islam and degrading the influence of certain varieties of feminism. This down-to-earth-ness is a large part of the reason the alt-right, unlike the Dark Enlightenment, has become a force to be reckoned with.

I have no idea whether this site would or should be considered part of the alt-right blogosphere. I only know that it has never been so described – and certainly not by me. I am, in my estimation, far too moderate, too much of a bleeding heart, to integrate smoothly into that crowd.

Though I recognise that races exist, I have never been a racist or a racial nationalist. Though I accept that certain varieties of feminism have inflicted great damage upon Western civilisation, I am not opposed to the idea of sexual equality, nor dismissive of the disadvantages women still face around the world on account of their being female. Though I recognise that he has joined the right side of the Syrian civil war and made constructive and wise comments about the bombing of Libya, I do not support or make excuses for the authoritarian, anti-democratic administration of Vladimir Putin. And so on…  The alt-right is simply too alt for me.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is beloved by many on the alt-right

Is the movement as dangerous as Hillary Clinton is making out? The answer depends almost entirely on who is asking the question. If you’re a white, Christian, heterosexual male resident in the Western World, then the risk this movement presents to you is minimal. If, however, you are Jewish, homosexual, black, south Asian or atheist, I would be very cautious about taking the movement to heart.

There are decidedly ugly currents within the alt-right that are not adequately represented by its spokespeople. Milo Yiannopoulos, a Jewish-Greek homosexual, may well be regarded as the crown prince of the movement at present, but it does not follow that the general masses huddled under its banner agree with his lifestyle or look kindly upon his ethnicity. On the contrary, more often than not, the alt-right foot-soldier is loudly hostile to both Jews and homosexuality. If you require evidence of that, just spend an hour or two browsing the /pol/ board on 4chan yourself.

Anti-Semitism in particular runs through the alt-right like colours run through a stick of seaside rock. It is both below and behind it, providing a vital support to the worldview espoused by its adherents. The West is being taken over by foreign elements, they agree, because a hostile elite is conspiring against the natives. One need not refer to the hostile elite explicitly. Innuendo will do. Innuendo did the job in the thirties, too (sorry, Godwin).

A variant of the anti-Semitic ‘happy merchant’ meme

I do admit that the alt-right is correct on some very important issues. On Islam, for example, the movement is reliably clear-headed and refreshingly consistent. On the virtues of a Trump administration, too, the movement is providing a much-needed counter-force to the almost universally anti-Trump mainstream media. The problem is the movement doesn’t seem to possess any kind of intellectual brake. It swerves habitually all over the place, sometimes finding itself on a main road and sometimes blindly ploughing through a field. This youthful unpredictability might make hopping on-board an attractive prospect for political thrill-seekers, but not for anyone else.

I suppose, if we must manufacture labels for ourselves, I am more of an alt-liberal than an alt-rightist. And I am not alone in that. There must be millions of people like me, scattered around the political spectrum, living unhappily in temporary ideological accommodation. It is high time we had a real home to go to.

D, LDN

Beck Vs. Trump – The Death of Abstract Patriotism

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As you may have heard, conservative commentators Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity aren’t getting along with each other at the moment. Over the past few days, the two men have used their respective soapboxes to trade well-mannered – but cutting – pot-shots, all the more surprising for the fact the two were once close personal and ideological friends.

At the root of this newfound animosity lies the 2016 election and specifically the nomination and candidacy of Donald J. Trump,

Hannity, an employee of the Fox News Network, has thrown his lot behind Donald Trump’s presidential bid with great enthusiasm, becoming over time the most reliably pro-Trump voice on the mainstream media.

Glenn Beck, a former employee of the Fox News Network, has, by stark contrast, reacted to Trump’s nomination with damp-eyed despair and tremulous unease. On his popular ‘Blaze’ media network, Beck has repeatedly refused to endorse the businessman (despite considerable pressure from his subscribers) and argued passionately and consistently that Trump represents a grave threat to American stability and democracy, perhaps even greater than that posed by Hillary Clinton herself.

Glenn Beck’s Blaze network has been one of the few conservative broadcasters to oppose Trump following his nomination

This disagreement between Beck and Hannity (and by extension between Beck and Trump) represents in microcosm a much larger philosophical cleavage in the American conservative movement.

As must be clear to even the most casual political observer, Donald Trump is not a ‘conservative’ of the traditional American style – or at least not of the modern American style. True, he supports a strong military and emphasises patriotism and law and order, but he also opposes (or treats with suspicion) the growth of economic globalism and the concept and ideology of American foreign policy. True, he celebrates the record of past Republican greats like Ronald Reagan and Abraham Lincoln, but he also trashes the record of recent Republican leaders like George W. Bush.

Trump is not a tribal Republican, or a tribal conservative. With his notion of ‘America First’, he is a self-conscious throwback to the old, pre-World War 2 American right-wing; the school of thought which argued that America is, for all its greatness, a country like any other country; that America is exceptional, but not so exceptional that it is duty-bound to make itself representative of the variety of the world.

Trump is also a much less religiously-minded candidate than recent conservative leaders. Though professedly a Christian, he does not make frequent references to his faith and nor does he frame his policies with religious language or support them with religious explanation.

Most importantly of all, Trump would appear to agree with the Old Right idea that America has an original and organic culture, distinct from and superior to those of other Western countries, which must be protected from the transformative effects of mass immigration.

Pro-Trump posters often feature Old-Right or ‘nativist’ language.

Glenn Beck represents a very different breed of reactionary, as opposed to Trump’s way of thinking as can be imagined. A self-described constitutionalist and religious fundamentalist, Beck elevates only the most abstract and intangible aspects of America, prioritising concepts like faith, freedom and flag over real-world issues like demographics, economics and jobs. Beck adheres to and celebrates a philosophical-spiritual conception of America, while Trump bases his patriotism more-or-less in reality.

The United States has always been in some ways an experiment. Numerous eminent figures, from Thomas Paine and Ralph Waldo Emerson to Ronald Reagan and Christopher Hitchens, have discussed America as a concept and ideology as well as a flesh and blood nation. This is quite unique, globally considered. Nobody discusses (seriously at least) the idea of Austria, the concept of Algeria, or the meaning of Burkina Faso. America is different. It can be (and often is) thrown into the abstract.

America is ‘freedom’. America is an ‘experiment in self-government by the people’. America is the ‘material form of the constitution – and thus of the enlightenment which produced it’. And so on. These lofty philosophical conceptions of America have dominated its politics for centuries.

As an article on the right-wing website RedState put it: “The United States is a unique animal. Not only is it a country, but it’s also an idea. People around the world don’t just dream of coming to America, they dream of becoming Americans. Many have and continue to risk their lives to do so. It’s one thing to risk your life escaping the Soviet Union, Communist China or even Communist Cuba. Those people were or are running from something, trying to go anywhere else. It’s another thing altogether to risk one’s life to come to a place… And that place is more often than not, America…America is somewhat unique in the history of mankind – or at least in the last 2,000 years. People may dream of moving to Paris for the romance and the food, but they don’t dream of becoming a Frenchman… One almost has to go back to the Roman Empire to find something similar to the idea of America. There, outsiders not only dreamed of living in Rome, they also dreamed of becoming Roman… and could do so. The idea of becoming a Roman citizen actually meant something beyond just living in the Empire or being subject to its laws.”

The United States Constitution

Trump represents, perhaps more than anything else, a dramatic deviation from this way of thinking.

Trump sharpens America, with everything he says, into something tangible and worldly. He considers America with reference to how it has been and can be, as opposed to how it might be on some ethereal, philosophical plane of thought. He is a realist – and like all realists he is inevitably accused by his opponents of being ‘crude’ and ‘simplistic’. America, for Trump, is not an academic thesis. It is a community of living, breathing human beings. Those who (like this blogger) possess a degree in politics and economics dislike this idea precisely because it isn’t something you need a degree in politics and economics to understand.

As the reader will recall, during the primary contest for the Republican nomination, Trump’s only real rival was Texas Senator Ted Cruz, a man who had been, prior to Trump’s lightning ascendency, the favoured choice of the party’s grassroots. Cruz represents, even more than Beck, a patriot of America at its most intangible. His political rallies during the primary season were hardly political rallies at all. They were more like Baptist conventions or prayer meetings. Cruz talked about salvation and virtue more than he talked about tax and immigration. He referenced the aspirations of the constitution more than he referenced the aspirations of the voters themselves. He spoke almost exclusively about America as idea. And the voters were fine with that, but only until Trump offered something more down-to-earth.

Texas senator Ted Cruz speaking at a political rally in 2015

The US constitution that Cruz and Beck so adore is a fine set of principles. Let there be no confusion about that. It is not, however, a piece of holy script which should, in every case, over-rule the lessons of empirical reality. It is also unhealthy (and rather sinister) to experience or suggest an emotional response to it. Glenn Beck has been known to cry when talking of the constitution. He has spoken favourably of writers like W. Cleo Skousen, a Mormon fundamentalist who implied in his bestselling work ‘The 5000 Year Leap’ that the constitution was a perfect, divinely authored document, almost as infallible as the Bible itself. This is fanatical thinking. It is madness. And it is no wonder in this sense that Beck backed Cruz, with all his lip-trembling devotion to America as sentiment, as philosophy, as spiritual idea.

Trump, like Samuel Huntingdon before him, understands that America is not an abstraction, unresponsive to changes in worldly reality, but a material something, as vulnerable to worldly forces as any other material something. Unlike the idea of America, the reality of America will not necessarily be the same thing if the people are replaced over time by mass immigration. As Herder proposed, a nation’s culture is the product of its people, not the other way around. The changing situation on the ground in America matters immensely as to what is to become of America.

Slowly but surely, and despite a long tradition of supposing otherwise, Americans are coming to regard their country as something real, substantial, mortal and delicate. Even if Trump goes on to lose in November, that genie will not easily be forced back into the bottle.

D, LDN.

Is Ethno-Masochism Real?

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Ethno-masochism seems to be the word of the moment on the political right. On sites like Vdare, Amren, 4chan and various independent blogs, the charge is being deployed against virtually everyone in the political mainstream (or at least as far as they relate to questions of Islam and immigration).

Etymologically it requires little explanation. Simply put, ethno-masochism describes the masochism of one race in its dealings with another race. In America, the relationship in question is almost always that between White Europeans and Black Africans, whereas in Europe, it more often concerns that between Whites and the jumble of Islamic boat people who have graced our shores in recent decades.

The unifying component is the White race; specifically, the idea that White people are uniquely and unnaturally submissive to other racial groups.

While the slur is often deployed as a pure insult, unaccompanied by any proof or detail, some have attempted to provide the label with a scientific context. Jared Taylor, for example, the gentlemanly leader of American Renaissance – both the largest and most respected White nationalist organisation in the United States – has alleged that White Europeans are possessed by what he calls a ‘pathological altruism’ – an evolutionary disposition that compels the sufferer to root for the underdog, seek out justice and fairness wherever it may be said to be lacking.

According to Taylor, and many of his fellows at Amren, this disposition originally developed because it was useful to traditional European societies – but now, with those societies increasingly multi-culturalised, the compulsion represents a classic case of evolutionary misfiring. What developed as a means of ensuring European prosperity, now directs itself blindly at non-Europeans.

How accurate is this? I’m not sure. But I must say that – in frank contrast with the prevailing sociological orthodoxies – I have always found minority groups to be more racist, tribal and anti-egalitarian than White people. Despite all the talk of ‘White devils’ and White bigotry/privilege’, no other racial group has progressed so far in the direction of post-racialism than White Europeans.

Put a Kurd in the same room as a Turk; put a Persian in the same room as an Arab; put a Dominican in the same room as a Haitian; put a Kenyan in the same room as a Somalian; put a Japanese in the same room as a Korean, and you will witness the most ugly, primitive, frothing hatred that can be imagined. If you put an average White in a room with any of the aforementioned races, little will occur beyond awkwardness.

Rather than being masochistic, Whites are simply more advanced than other races on the issue of racial difference. After the second world war, having grown tired of biological conflict, White countries chose to disarm themselves of racial notions, fully expecting other races to do the same. But they didn’t. They still haven’t. Thus the perceived disparity.

Theories of racial ‘masochism’ (or sadism) are unnecessary, I believe. White people should simply insist that their universalism be replicated in kind. By this simple demand, the racial grievance industry would be made ideologically and intellectually bankrupt.

D, LDN

Islamic State and Overwhelming Force.

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“Will you station police-officers at every henroost; and keep them watching and cruising incessantly to and fro over the Parish, in the unwholesome dark, at enormous expense, with almost no effect: or will you not try rather to discover where the fox’s den is, and kill the fox?” – Thomas Carlyle.

I’ve just come across an article (published on World Net Daily) advocating the use of tactical nuclear weapons against the very much Islamic State. The author of the piece – Larry Klayman – justifies his position thus…

“If we really want to destroy ISIS” he writes “…and set an example for other radical Muslims and the Putins of the world to fear us and leave us in peace, we must use the tools that can do this. Put simply, we should employ tactical nuclear weapons to wipe out the enemy. We cannot worry that Islamic civilians will be killed in the process. In the end this strategy, as was true of the Japanese in World War II, saves not just American but Muslim lives as well.”

I don’t know much about Mr Klayman or his background. If he is a Christian (as he implies elsewhere in the article) he ought to be thoroughly ashamed of himself. There are Christians in ISIS controlled territory (some of whom descend from the earliest generations of the church) desperately struggling to survive, desperate to ensure their faith stays alive in the cradle of its first vitality. To drop a nuclear weapon on that kind of situation (or even to advocate it) is the lowest Talibanic barbarism.

Still, I will agree with Klayman that drastic measures need to be considered. And while nuclear weapons are clearly too large and clumsy to achieve a moral end, there are other high-yield, non-radioactive weapons that might fit the bill.

The Massive Ordnance Air Blast device (or MOAB – to give it its mock-biblical acronym) has an explosive power exact to 11 tons of TNT.  Properly deployed, the weapon can flatten a neighbourhood, a strategic headquarters or a spread out training camp, all the while leaving surrounding areas perfectly in tact. These bombs have rarely been used in modern combat, if at all, since the conditions that would recommend their use have never before arisen. They have now.

I believe that ISIS represents the first post-WWII conflict in which very intense firepower can play a constructive (if you’ll allow that phrase in this context) and effective role. Innocent people are crying out to us for relief, and we are plainly failing to supply it.

It is clear to any reasonable person that simply fighting the tentacles of ISIS when they choose to unfurl is a foolish game, and one that fails to yield any lasting reward. Bombs of high explosive power dropped on known regime headquarters (which can be exactly ascertained by satellites) is the only way to substantially degrade the potential of ISIS to wage war. Nuclear weapons will only kill the citizens we wish to protect. Light, conventional weapons (JDAMS and the like) are pin pricks. There is a happy middle-ground to be occupied if we develop the moral courage to do so.

As to a general strategy, we should make be making placing greater emphasis on local anti-ISIS forces. While Islamic State has yet to openly threaten the Israelis, a photo-shopped propaganda picture released last month shows a column of ISIS trucks advancing towards the walls of Jerusalem. It is painfully obvious that ISIS fosters genocidal ambitions towards the Jewish State and so pre-emptive air raids by Israel would surely be greeted by the world as both justified and heroic.

To repeat my core argument, we cannot win by simply reacting to ISIS movements and fighting battles at the time and location of their choosing. The headquarters of ISIS must be attacked with overwhelming force. As Mr Klayman was right to say, we cannot be obsessively concerned with civilian casualties when such people are being randomly killed anyway.

Let’s fight ISIS – and fight like we want to win.

D, LDN.

Could Islamic State Kill Islam?

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For the first time in a blue moon, Anglo-American liberals are telling the truth. Islamic State (or ISIS) are increasingly unpopular with ordinary Muslims. Although few can doubt that the actions of the terror regime are explicitly rooted in Quranic text, the exotic barbarism and random flashes of violence employed by its fighters are rarely endorsed by anyone outside of its own ranks. A swelling number of Muslim regimes (themselves backward and detestable in separate ways) are calling for the annihilation of the Caliphate, with some even looking to the infidel West for help in doing so.

The bigger picture here is fascinating. I’m starting to wonder if the very public cruelties of ISIS are causing a quiet crisis of identity for hundreds of millions of mildly devout believers. Magnifying the most extreme implication of this, I’m starting to wonder if ISIS may prove to be Islam’s fatal wound.

Islamic State is the Quran in action. That point is very important to understand. When you read the Quran, you are reading the basis for the blood-soaked terror currently engulfing Syria and Iraq. If you believe the text is endorsed by heaven, you are silently condoning the same slaughter. Now, I don’t believe that the majority of Muslims are stupid or lacking in humanity. Most of them are ordinary people, often very good-natured people, who have simply been brought up in a climate of ritualised stupidity. Given the deep roots of their cultural heritage, it was always going to take something frightful and extreme to make them question it. Has that ‘something’ now entered the stage of history?

Recall that Communism, as a philosophy and as an aspiration, declined greatly in the latter half of the Twentieth century. Most scholars agree that this process had something to do with the discovery (by historians and statisticians) of the Biblical-scale famines and state genocides of the first half of that century – events that were previously only rumors (deniable rumors). When faced with the realities of the Gulag even the most hard-hearted card-carrier began to wonder if his system of thought stood on faulty ground.

As ISIS continues to expose the consequences of applied Islam, even Saudi Arabia (the ideological source of many ISIS doctrines) finds itself swerving into panicked hypocrisy. Last month it was announced by Saudi officials that the Kingdom will be building a multi-million dollar wall spanning the entirety of its northern border to lessen the threat of an ISIS invasion.

The state of Jordan, after one of its pilots was murdered in the most bestial manner, has sworn to mobilise its military to crush the Islamic State. Egypt, having witnessed the spread of ISIS to neighbouring Libya, has brutally crushed Islamist forces within its own territory. In Tunisia, after Islamic State blew up a tourist destination in the capital city, the local population exploded in horrified shame and patriotic anger. Even Iran is warming to the West (and vice versa) as both powers seek to contain the same barbarism.

As someone who monitors these things, I have personally seen the membership of atheist groups rooted in Muslim countries swell in recent months. The citizenry of countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Morocco, Bangladesh, Qatar, Bahrain and Algeria are increasingly aware of how fragile Islam makes their prized social peace and growing economic fortunes.

Has Islamic State – organised to promote and expand the domain of Islam – sent the religion into its death-spiral?

Food for thought.

D, LDN.

Are Terror Groups Becoming More Powerful Than Nation-States?

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The terrorist ‘rebel’ forces of Syria, who – even if combined – number less than 25,000 men, have fought the million-man army of the Syrian State to a bloody stalemate. Despite the thousands of tanks, APCs, missiles, chemical warheads, fighter-bomber jets, and trained soldiers at Assad’s command, he has failed to prevent massive swathes of his nation falling into the hands of a rugged, relatively disorganised opposition.

In Iraq, another terror group, ISIS, has held its ground against the US, Saudi and Jordanian air forces, the Iraqi army, and various Kurdish paramilitaries.

And finally, in Ukraine, the pro-Russian separatist militias of the Donetsk People’s Republic have held off the armed forces of NATO-backed Western Ukraine whose ranks, even accounting for Russian counter-measures, dwarf the resources and technologies of the opposing side.

What does this tell us about our world?

For me, it raises the vitally important question as to whether the power of terror groups are evolving to a state of parity with national armies. It certainly seems that way, looking at the evidence.

Much of the improvement in guerrilla warfare over the past ten years is due to the development of one particular weapon – the mobile anti-tank missile. Once so large, they had to be hauled about on wheels, modern variants of these weapons are so small they can be carried like a rucksack.

It is a well-grounded fact that anti-tank missiles are cheaper to produce and more efficient in operation than the vehicles they destroy. If they are effectively designed and accurately deployed, 1000 anti-tank missiles can theoretically go against 1000 tanks and triumph.

The Israelis don’t need to be told this. Their brief and unsuccessful war against Lebanon in 2006 is judged in retrospect to be a Hezbollah military victory (a military victory, I emphasise, not an abstract ‘ideological’ or ‘moral’ victory – a military victory by Hezbollah over the Israeli army).  How did the Lebanese movement achieve this? In the main, it was via anti-tank missiles, the latest, most upgraded type used by the Russian military. Hezbollah is rumoured to possess many thousands more.

To understand this requires counter-intuitive reasoning. We naturally assume that a huge, hulking Israeli tank is more likely to triumph over a single Shia terrorist, however well he is armed. But that’s not what happened on many occasions.

It is suspected that the Syrian state has passed more varieties of Russian equipment on to Hezbollah since the beginning of the Syrian implosion. This fact, along with the ghost of the 2006 war, goes some way to explain why Israel has not displayed enthusiasm for a rematch.

By way of conclusion, there is no reason, no reason at all, why a terror group cannot triumph over a modern nation state, and we are seeing them do so in many parts of the world today. That these groups are often only 10 or 20 thousand man strong, should give us all cause for concern, especially at a time when Muslims flow into Europe by the million.

D, LDN.

Notes on ‘Ride the Tiger’ (by Julius Evola).

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I’ve been reading philosophy since I was 15 years old. Since my teenage years, my favourite writer has been Friedrich Nietzsche, the predominant poet of the German language and (in my view) the greatest thinker of the last 500 years. But for the last decade or so, I’ve tended to neglect philosophy in favour of history and politics. My degree is in Politics and Economics. I am a political blogger and we all live in a uniquely politicised era.

Julius Evola’s ‘Ride the Tiger’ is the first work of philosophy to distract my attention in many years. You may remember that this blog is named as a refutation of Evola – whose work ‘Revolt against the Modern World’ advocated a rebellion against industrial development.

That book, commonly regarded as his masterpiece, is garbage. ‘Ride the Tiger’ on the other hand, continues to fascinate me. At its heart, this book (described by some reviewers as a self-help book for fascists) ponders the right way for a person of intellectual and spiritual depth to survive an age of stupidity, dissolution and over-democratisation.

To try and allow the reader to learn this ‘correct’ way, Evola takes issue confronts Nietzsche directly by reforming the philosopher’s classical dichotomy of ‘Dionysian’ against ‘Apollonian’.

In case you are unfamiliar with that dichotomy, I’ll try to briefly explain it here.

For Nietzsche, to be ‘Dionysian’ is to live in slack obedience to reaction and emotion; that is, to follow the impulses of pure physiology and worldliness; to live, as it were, without rationalisation (Dionysus, incidentally, was the Greek God of intoxication and wine). Nietzsche often suggests more explicitly in his later work that the reader choose ‘life’ over ‘thought’ and his noted thought experiment imagining an ‘Eternal Recurrence of the same” is designed to provoke this way of thinking in the reader. ISIS and al-Qaeda for example, pursue a life of unrestrained impulse and barbarity. In this way, they are far closer to the Nietzschean ideal than many of his Western readers would care to admit.

The Apollonian spirit, by contrast, is an attitude to life and art that rationalises and ‘stands back’ from existence; one that refuses to follow impulse and places greater value on the mind and the realm of intellect. This is undoubtedly closer to the spirit of the modern age than the former concept, given that we are encouraged to sublimate our instincts into the pursuit of rational goals (wealth creation, civility, security etc…).

In Ride the Tiger, Evola suggests a fusion of both concepts – the construction of what he called Dionysian Apollonism. As this name would suggest, Evola advises us to take inspiration from both philosophies. We should live in a way that honours our nature and innate drives, but in a way that allows us to navigate our way through modern society.

Evola rejects the barbaric as infeasible and self-destructive. He suggests instead the pursuit of primeval goals in a disguise of civility. This is what ‘Ride the Tiger’ is chiefly concerned with.

The title of the book is derived from a Hindu parable. There are many variations on it, but the basic gist is as follows: Imagine a tiger is charging at you at great speed… Your first impulse might be to fight or ‘take on’ the beast. But if you do this, you will surely lose, since the beast is more powerful than you are. However, if you manage to leap on the back of the tiger and ride it, you may be able to harness its energy and strength for your own ends.

For Evola, the tiger is modern industrial society, something he hated with a terrible passion but which he conceded was too strong to oppose. Rather than commit suicide by attempting a futile revolution against it, we should instead try to play by its rules, integrate into its system, but all the while stay faithful to higher and more transcendent concepts.

I understand and concede that Evola’s philosophy is esoteric and strange and also that the Italian was a confused anti-Semite and political fascist. But this short, strange and beguiling work has the potential to haunt the thinking of the reader long after he/she has closed it.

D, LDN.

The Cartoon World of the Anti-Semite.

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When Germany fell into the deep psychosis of Hitlerism, its people were led to identify Slavs and Jews as the greatest enemies of Western culture. The Jews, they were told, were a canny collective mobilising dull-witted East-European muscle in a struggle against the Aryan race. They heard this. They believed this. And in the course of the Second World War, a fourth of Poles, a Fifth of Russians and a third of Jews were murdered for no reason other than this misbegotten idea.

These ideas have not gone away; they have only become modified. The Slavs are now forgiven for their heritage and are sought as allies for the cause. In the West and the world of Islam, open loathing for the Jewish race is as ubiquitous as ever.

The absurd image above is signed ‘Ben Garrison’ but only parts of it were drawn by him. In Garrison’s original, the caricatures referred to big government and the ‘New World Order’. Online pranksters (mostly from the website 4chan) added the Semitic embellishments, as they have done to numerous other works by the same cartoonist.

This has meaning by itself. The anti-Semitism of the modern world has become so entwined with popular mistrust of authority that the labels can be exchanged for one another and yet retain the same effect. Across the world, Jews are held responsible for the banking collapse, the decline of White birth-rates, false-flag terrorism, Islamophobia, Black immigration, homosexuality and AIDS. Even when such theories lead to self-contradiction (funding both homosexuality and AIDS?) the pace is maintained. Accuracy is not the point. Accuracy spoils the high of racist thinking.

Hatred of Israel and Zionism are no longer features exclusive to the international Left. The nativist Libertarian movement is also beginning to lose its love for the Jewish State. The Rand/Ron Paul school of insular cowardice views Israel as a whining child sucking the US into pointless wars. They do not countenance the fact that Israel is actually an early-warning system of the most reliable kind.

As Muslims continue to dominate the capital cities of Europe, anti-Zionism is morphing into a centre-ground position here too. Ed Miliband’s Labour Party has declared a willingness to recognise the hallucinatory ‘State of Palestine’, a move with potentially severe existential consequences for our friends in Jerusalem. David Cameron, an allegedly conservative leader, promised to abstain on the vote. UKIP don’t seem to care one way or another.

Outside of the mainstream, the same hatred is growing more elaborate with the passage of time. The most successful anti-Jewish theory of modern times holds that Jews are actively seeking to promote miscegenation (race-mixing) between Whites and non-White peoples in order to lower the IQ of Whites and make them easier to control. The ways they are said to achieve this include the proliferation of interracial pornography (a near-obsession of biological nationalists) and by the normalisation of multiracial society in Hollywood films.

That’s right: Whereas the ‘sheeple’ might deem the inclusion of a black character in an otherwise homogenous sitcom as good-natured political correctness, for anti-Semites, it is a conscious evolutionary strategy: Brainwash White kids into thinking that having a black friend is normal and socially acceptable at school, and thus make it more likely that they will date outside of their race later in life.

I wish I could tell you that these ideas are limited to the Middle-East, but that would be a lie. They are well-established and are being forwarded along the highways and byways of the internet at an ever-increasing pace.

The counter-jihad blogger ‘Cheradenine’ (formerly of IslamVersusEurope) has endorsed the theories of Kevin Macdonald – only a slight refinement of the ideas described above – and now describes Jews as every bit an enemy of the West as Muslims.

There is obviously no evidence for these claims. Anti-Semites inhabit a cartoon world of conspiracy, cigar smoke and invisible ink. The source of their mistrust is most likely an envy of Jewish intelligence and a lack of appetite for learning the details of reality.

But we can never take it for granted that they will remain on the fringes of this increasingly crazy world.

D, LDN.