Indeed, the “Regime” believes that ordinary white citizens and working-class people are the problem—not jihadists, Pakistani groomers, rampaging Muslim mobs, “undocumented” refugees, Palestinian demonstrators, or foreign criminal gangs. Heritage citizens are, apparently, the greatest threat to the status quo, purveyors of “disinformation,” by which the social and political elite mean what Steve Sailer in an important book has called “Noticing”—that is, seeing what is happening around one and to the culture by using common sense and honest observation.Thus, to say what you have noticed—and suffered—is to be guilty of disinformation, racism, bigotry or hate speech. To look the reality of immigrant and refugee violence in the face, to confront visibly corrupt two-tier policing, media duplicity, and Regime hypocrisy, and to describe it accurately is to be tarred by the state as a far-right extremist, a hooligan, a fascist or a white supremacist.
The British government has decided to release a lot of violent criminals from prison in order to free up prison spaces for ordinary people of this sort. Five hundred prison spaces are more of a threat than a real capacity to beat the issue: if the people rise up in their millions, that won't be a drop in the bucket. So, the government is cracking down on disapproved speech, even just a remark on Facebook or X, and they aren't alone. They are afraid of their own people far more than anything else.
We all remember the way the Canadian trucker convoy was targeted in Canada -- in a manner later found unconstitutional by its courts -- to the tune of freezing the accounts of people who donated, even though the cause to which they donated was not a terrorists group but a 501(c)3 charity lawfully formed under Canadian laws. They arrested and put into solitary confinement a preacher who gave an inspiring benediction to that convoy -- hardly an act of violence. They did this because they realized that the ordinary people involved in the trucker movement could shut down Canada's economy if they chose, and they feared their own ordinary citizens more than they do anything else.
Nor is our own government immune. This piece at Hot Air helpfully summarizes several of the recent affronts that have come to light, including the VP nominee declaring that there is "no right to free speech" if the speech is deemed hateful or misinformation by the government; placing Tulsi Gabbard, who served her country faithfully when called up by the National Guard (not to put too fine a point on it), under a terrorist air watch that has her followed by armed men onto airplanes; the security state burying any discussion of its failures (we hope they were failures!) leading to Trump's almost-assassination; a swing state announcing that it won't be prepared to count votes on election day, and that its expected changing vote totals "are not evidence" of cheating; and many more. Our media has taken to declaring that there 'is no evidence' on many controversial issues, rather than exploring the evidence for different propositions in order to help readers get to a good judgment. It has accepted a duty to oppose with hostility one side on this election, while doing everything it can to support the establishment side.
What's with all this 'fortification'? It suggests that our establishment is likewise motivated by a fear, not of criminals or terrorists or invasions across the border, and certainly not of Islam, but of ordinary Americans. What sins are they trying to hide from our eyes that justifies such fear? What do they tremble to think we will learn if the levers of control pass out of their hands?
It's possible to have more than one enemy at a time.
ReplyDeleteTrue, but some enemies have to be fought. The opening example of the massacre in Pakistan is horrific, but it will be a long time before it seems reasonable to me to go over there to try to fix it.
DeleteAlso, there are tactical considerations. Where possible it is often better to defeat in detail rather than fighting on multiple fronts. Sometimes you don’t get to choose, but if you can there’s a lot to be said for it.
I've been thinking about a related topic, and ran across some bits from Aristotle's Politics. In Book 5 he talks about the rise of tyrants and how they maintain power.
ReplyDeleteSince I've been reading up on Marx, this stood out:
"Moreover, in those days, when cities were not large, the people dwelt in the fields, busy at their work; and their chiefs, if they possessed any military talent, seized the opportunity, and winning the confidence of the masses by professing their hatred of the wealthy, they succeeded in obtaining the tyranny. Thus at Athens Peisistratus led a faction against the men of the plain, and Theagenes at Megara slaughtered the cattle of the wealthy, which he found by the river side, where they had put them to graze in land not their own. Dionysius, again, was thought worthy of the tyranny because he denounced Daphnaeus and the rich; his enmity to the notables won for him the confidence of the people."
Apropos of attacks on the 2nd Amendment:
"[to maintain his power] the tyrant should lop off those who are too high; he must put to death men of spirit; he must not allow common meals, clubs, education, and the like; he must be upon his guard against anything which is likely to inspire either courage or confidence among his subjects"
Arms do tend to inspire confidence in the subjects.
Another way of achieving this might be through capturing the institutions; if the only opinions allowed at meals, clubs, schools, etc., is support for the tyrant, that probably works as well.
For our current surveillance era:
"A tyrant should also endeavor to know what each of his subjects says or does, and should employ spies, like the 'female detectives' at Syracuse, and the eavesdroppers whom Hiero was in the habit of sending to any place of resort or meeting; for the fear of informers prevents people from speaking their minds, and if they do, they are more easily found out."
Taxes, debt, and inflation:
"Also he should impoverish his subjects; he thus provides against the maintenance of a guard by the citizen and the people, having to keep hard at work, are prevented from conspiring."
Going easy on criminals:
"Hence tyrants are always fond of bad men, because they love to be flattered, but no man who has the spirit of a freeman in him will lower himself by flattery; good men love others, or at any rate do not flatter them. Moreover, the bad are useful for bad purposes; 'nail knocks out nail,' as the proverb says."
And guns, liberty in general, and immigration:
"It is characteristic of a tyrant to dislike every one who has dignity or independence; he wants to be alone in his glory, but any one who claims a like dignity or asserts his independence encroaches upon his prerogative, and is hated by him as an enemy to his power. Another mark of a tyrant is that he likes foreigners better than citizens, and lives with them and invites them to his table; for the one are enemies, but the Others enter into no rivalry with him."
Of course, foreigners have no loyalty to the citizens, and so are good to use against them. This is where I think the discussion of Islam and our enemies comes in.
Aristotle's summary of tyrannical methods is also worth noting:
ReplyDelete"Such are the notes of the tyrant and the arts by which he preserves his power; there is no wickedness too great for him. All that we have said may be summed up under three heads, which answer to the three aims of the tyrant. These are, (1) the humiliation of his subjects; he knows that a mean-spirited man will not conspire against anybody; (2) the creation of mistrust among them; for a tyrant is not overthrown until men begin to have confidence in one another; and this is the reason why tyrants are at war with the good; they are under the idea that their power is endangered by them, not only because they would not be ruled despotically but also because they are loyal to one another, and to other men, and do not inform against one another or against other men; (3) the tyrant desires that his subjects shall be incapable of action, for no one attempts what is impossible, and they will not attempt to overthrow a tyranny, if they are powerless. Under these three heads the whole policy of a tyrant may be summed up, and to one or other of them all his ideas may be referred: (1) he sows distrust among his subjects; (2) he takes away their power; (3) he humbles them."
It’s interesting, Tom, because I have also been seeing the discussion of tyranny in Aristotle cited by left leaning academics I know as a warning against Trump. It might be worth digging deeper into that, although there’s no guarantee that the methods used would hold consistently over so long a time, given especially the degree of technological change.
ReplyDeleteHe does say a lot about demagogues and tyranny, which the left claims Trump is. (In all of this, I feel the need to append "As you well know" because, well, you know.)
ReplyDeleteOn the technology, although it's simplistic, I tend to assume people remain the same, but technology speeds things up and makes them easier. Take the spies, for example. Back in Aristotle's day, you had to send spies close enough to hear. Technology today lets us hear from far away via radio -- things are faster and easier, but the job still has to be done. I dunno. What are your thoughts on the role of technology here?
(I say it's simplistic because there are exceptions. Sometimes it actually is easier and faster doing something the old fashioned way than the new fangled technological way.)
ReplyDeleteAfter sleeping on it, I'm even more curious how you see tech change playing into this. I suspect my comments on it don't address what you're thinking of.
ReplyDeleteAristotle also has something to say about diversity:
ReplyDelete"Another cause of revolution is difference of races which do not at once acquire a common spirit; for a state is not the growth of a day, any more than it grows out of a multitude brought together by accident. Hence the reception of strangers in colonies, either at the time of their foundation or afterwards, has generally produced revolution; for example, the Achaeans who joined the Troezenians in the foundation of Sybaris, becoming later the more numerous, expelled them; hence the curse fell upon Sybaris. At Thurii the Sybarites quarrelled with their fellow-colonists; thinking that the land belonged to them, they wanted too much of it and were driven out. At Byzantium the new colonists were detected in a conspiracy, and were expelled by force of arms; the people of Antissa, who had received the Chian exiles, fought with them, and drove them out; and the Zancleans, after having received the Samians, were driven by them out of their own city. The citizens of Apollonia on the Euxine, after the introduction of a fresh body of colonists, had a revolution; the Syracusans, after the expulsion of their tyrants, having admitted strangers and mercenaries to the rights of citizenship, quarrelled and came to blows; the people of Amphipolis, having received Chalcidian colonists, were nearly all expelled by them."
I suspect 'races' is not the best translation here and that 'ethnicities' with it's strong cultural implications that may or may not include race would be better in context.
Speaking of which, in Capital, Marx also recognized the deleterious effects of mass immigration on the British working class and the workers' ability to negotiate with the capitalists. He doesn't seem to have opposed mass immigration on these grounds, however, but rather to have seen it as part of the nature of industrial capitalism. That said, I'm only partway through my study of the book, so maybe he'll say more later on in it.
ReplyDeleteLenin (and the writers he was cribbing from) have a lot more to say about the ways in which the capitalist societies of their day interact with the wider world in order to extend and preserve capitalism. By that point they were all wondering why Marx's vision of inevitable revolution hadn't come to pass, and trying to explain it. Their basic approach was to explain that imperialism allowed capitalism access to much bigger reserves of raw materials and labor, lowering the strains on the core capitalist societies at the cost of spreading the problems of capitalism worldwide.
DeleteI don't think that analysis holds, but that's basically the Marxist account of it. The immigration from the Empire (now informal, because it didn't prove necessary to maintain a military empire in order to extract materials and labor, and it's cheaper this way) helps the bourgeoise hold the proletariat down by diluting their wages and creating ethnic divisions that can be exploited to keep the proletariat from realizing their common interests (i.e., socialist revolution).
Lenin thought capitalism was in its final stage in his youth; by now we'd be in something like 'Advanced Post-Quasi-Imperial Late-State Final Capitalism.'
I suspect 'races' is not the best translation here and that 'ethnicities' with it's strong cultural implications that may or may not include race would be better in context.
ReplyDeleteThe word is a form of genos -- if you will tell me the exact reference I can look up which form -- which doesn't mean 'race' but does mean something like 'a group of families that exist together.'
If you'll recall the beginning of the book, Aristotle explains politics in terms of families that live nearby one another having to develop a system of working with each other. Within the family, the natural authority of the family rules; the father figure or mother figure directs those who grew up sustained by their support, and feel indebted to it. When different families need to work together, they need some guarantee that they'll be treated fairly. This is the root of the idea of political equality, i.e., that regardless of which family you come from, you'll be treated the same by the group (gens once it's been translated into Latin, because the Romans used a similar organizing concept in the early days).
Note that this equality is dependent on coming from within the gens; it doesn't apply to foreigners or other outsiders. It's not 1776 equality, where God is creating it by bestowing it on everyone equally. It's equality among our team, where we will treat you fairly because you treat us fairly as part of this system we built for ourselves.
And that, by the way, is analogous to the concept of 'frith' that I have a whole section of the sidebar devoted to; most of that was written before my doctoral studies, and based on Germanic rather than Greek or Roman forms.
ReplyDeleteI'll try to assemble a more complete post on Aristotle and tyranny, and how that relates to our contemporary political discussion.
ReplyDeleteI'll be very interested to read that.
ReplyDeleteI went back and read the frith section, but it seems some key parts of the discussion were had in the comments, which have since gone missing. So, I started to reconstruct what I could of it but had to put it aside because my study of Marx had a deadline at the time.
The word is a form of genos ... which doesn't mean 'race' but does mean something like 'a group of families that exist together.'
ReplyDeleteYeah, our society's current use of the term 'race' as related primarily to skin color is quite different. Black people might be from very different parts of Africa and share no kinship at all, but they're all black. White people might be Rus or Celtic or whatever and share no kinship, but they're all white. Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans see each other as very different, but here in American they're all Asian. It really has little to do with kinship and more to do with treating appearances as more important than substance.
I believe this meaning developed in the long 19th century and doubt the ancient Greeks had a term for it. For that matter, I kind of doubt anyone had a term for it until the 18th century.
It's a bit earlier, but the 19th century is when the concept was taken seriously by the emerging sciences, which tried several schema of how 'the races' emerged along color lines. None of them made any sense, and after a sufficient number of tries these proto-scientists admitted it and began to give up on the concept. Popular culture still clings to the root idea.
DeleteThe origin is really the early Modern age or late Renaissance, when Portugal had captured the west African trade lanes from the Arabs and found that west Africans were hungry for goods but had mostly only war-captured slaves to trade. The problem was that slavery had been eliminated from Europe, over a very long time and with great effort, by the Catholic Church. A new account of why it was ok to enslave this kind of person was needed, and the obvious physical difference of black skin and very different facial features was used to suggest that this was a 'lesser race' of men, one closer to the beasts (proto-Darwin!), that needed and would benefit from the guidance and ownership of higher beings in a similar way to how dogs prosper from being kept as pets or working animals instead of being turned loose in the wild.
Well, that's a long discussion, but for the scientists it wasn't actually about color; that just became the shorthand for Caucasoid, Mongoloid, etc. I'm curious, why do you call them "proto-scientists"? But then, the question of what is science is one I'm starting to think a lot about.
ReplyDeleteI don't really want to discuss it at length, but that's what I mean by making numerous stabs at trying to sophisticate the model. It began with, "Well, these men are black, so we can treat them differently," as the Portuguese sailors captured trade routes. As the Age of Exploration went on, sailors began to report that there were also men who looked a little bit yellow way out East; and men in America who looked red; so you have a basic model of race-as-color. It doesn't work, though: they also found black men in Australia, who didn't seem much like the ones from Africa.
DeleteSo you get proto-scientific attempts to classify and track this in a way that explains. You get those terms you mention and many other schema, but none of them really work.
As for science, the ancient sense of science was "a unified field of study." This is why Aristotle spends so much time at the start of the Metaphysics asking whether it can really be a science, given that it seems to be the study of everything rather than the study of something. As you know he finally answers that question to his own satisfaction by saying that it is the study of a thing, "being qua being," or what it is to be.
Science in the modern sense is characterized by what we call "the scientific method," which includes hypothesis, experiment, and repeatability. Hypotheses can be falsified but never fully affirmed. Thus, scientific theories are just hypothesis that haven't been falsified in numerous repeated experiments with different approaches; they're still open to rejection.
You can see these ethnographers of the 19th century sort-of doing that, making hypotheses and trying them out, then falsifying them one by one. It's at least proto-scientific, because they do accept falsification and move on to try to frame a new hypothesis to explain the pre-accepted conclusion. I don't think it becomes fully scientific until they begin to admit the null hypothesis, another feature of the scientific method: that the effect they are studying, race, just doesn't exist.
Likewise, I'm not interested in discussing the history of race at length here. I was just curious about your definitions of science.
ReplyDeleteI used to be an enemy of Islam or Islamic JIhad, up until I realized that NATO was behind Islamic terror, plus mossad and cia. Now NATO has me as an enemy, and I have already implemented many ways to destroy this ruling qabal. Though they are helping me a lot with their fumbling.
ReplyDeleteSo Islam, will now be supported by my Full Divine Power, whereas before we were trying to terminate them. After all, I was the one who thought up the idea of a siege to starve the Palestinian "terrorists" way back before I became enlightened and a prophet.