The Intellectual Case For Trump

Posted on March 31, 2016 by Luke Ford

Mytheos Holt writes: I’m no white nationalist (in fact, being Jewish, I’m pretty sure I’m disqualified), and I regard the ideology with just as much disgust as I do every other form of radical identity politics. That being said, I do have a fairly unique ability to answer this question, and with apologies to Lloyd Bentsen, it can be summed up this way: I know white nationalism. A white nationalist was a friend of mine. Trump is no white nationalist.

If he’s president, there might well be fewer of them. Why? Well, if you’ll indulge me in just a little more autobiographical navel-gazing, you’ll find out.

I once met a young woman whom I will call Sylvia, after her favorite poet, Sylvia Plath. At the time, Sylvia had been raised as a member of an infamous white nationalist organization. And I do mean “infamous.” These weren’t the comparatively well-mannered sorts that attend conferences led by Richard Spencer. These were the sorts of people who probably get raided by the FBI.

Where I met her was probably the last place you might expect to find white nationalists, closeted or otherwise. Now since I am, as already established, Jewish, this obviously made me initially regard the girl with something less than charity. I was almost afraid to speak to her.

That is, until I actually did speak to her, in the company of another friend, who had made it his personal mission to deconvert her from her ideology, a task with which I agreed to help, mostly out of morbid intellectual curiosity. When we first spoke to her, Sylvia was fairly careful with her words, and obviously seemed to realize she wasn’t among company who’d take kindly to open admiration of Adolf Hitler. She was, however, more than happy to enthuse about Pat Buchanan, VDare, and restricting immigration.

Now, at the time, I was fresh off having argued for the Gang of Eight bill until I was proverbially blue in the face, so when Sylvia started talking about immigration, I obviously pounced on this as a first opportunity to break down her worldview. I’m fairly certain that all I managed to do was scare her, though she did actually put up a far better fight than any white nationalist has a right to, probably because, despite her sheltered upbringing, she was off-the-charts brilliant. This instantly registered with me, and was later confirmed when she later revealed she’d learned a new language in only two weeks.

Over the coming weeks, I continued to send out feelers and message and speak with her online, keeping my ethnic heritage a secret at first so I could probe her ideology without sending up alarm bells. After a while, she got used to me, and we bonded over our mutual love of H.P. Lovecraft and dark internet humor. As a result, she began to open up about her more risqué beliefs. So, this time with more gentle prodding, I started to make her doubt what she’d been taught.

Of course, at some point I had to reveal that I am a Jew. Needless to say, this shocked her, not least of all because apparently her people train their children to recognize Jewish heritage in someone’s features, yet I had registered as pure Aryan. The realization that “they can look like us,” to use her words, set off something of a minor existential crisis for her, but I’m pleased to report that she got over it, and that my ethnic revelation actually made her open up more to me rather than less.

When Two Worlds Collide

That’s because what shocked her even more than my Jewishness was that I’d known she was a white nationalist and still willingly engaged with her like a human being and an equal. From someone who belonged to a group that she’d assumed held nothing but contempt and malice for people like her, this was the last thing she expected. The feeling was mutual on my end.

After that revelation, gently poking holes in her worldview was out of the question, as I’d just metaphorically sent a cannonball straight through its foundation. What happened instead was that, with the scales lifted from both our eyes about the other’s decency and humanity, we started dissecting the other’s culture as it actually existed rather than how we’d been taught to believe it did. To make a very long story short, she came away understanding that my people weren’t intentionally hurting her people, and I came away with an appreciation for how much, and how unfairly, her people really were hurting.

I say “unfairly” for multiple reasons: firstly, because people as brilliant as Sylvia is do not deserve to be written off as incurable white trash. Giving everybody the opportunity to succeed means everybody, even people who were raised in ways we find troubling. One doesn’t have to be willing to offer blanket pardons to the Aryan Brotherhood to see that someone who was merely raised with bad ideas is not necessarily a lost cause, no matter how repellent those ideas are. In fact, lifting people like Sylvia out of circumstances where they think white nationalism is the only solution seems like Americanism at its finest, not a betrayal of the idea.

The other reason I say the pain experienced by Sylvia’s community is unfair is because when you strip away the swastikas, imitation Hugo Boss uniforms, and Klan hoods, there are things that even rabid, clannish white nationalist society does better than our own. Ironically, given their loathing of other cultures, the biggest one is bilingual education.

One of the odder things I learned was that Sylvia and every other child in her community had to learn to speak German and English, and achieved total fluency in both by their teens. I’m from California, and our own education system wishes it were that good. We don’t have to excuse, or even tolerate, the massive amounts of bad behavior such people engage in to learn from the few decent things they do. After all, just because Mussolini made the trains run on time doesn’t mean punctuality in public transit is itself bad, no matter how hard the DC Metro system pretends.

Ultimately, the biggest reason the pain that drove Sylvia’s family and so many like them into the arms of white nationalism is unfair is a pain that I, as a Jew, can empathize with. After all, once many Jews turned to communism as a way of trying to get political rights they didn’t think they could get any other way, and as a way of lashing out at a society that unfairly disdained them and their culture.

Even though this ideological shift made many people hate Jews more, at least the communists were trying to do something. Only that kind of desperation can make a radical ideology like white nationalism attractive.

Nationalism Is Backlash to Hatred of Western Culture
This brings me to the first and, arguably, the most important lesson that Sylvia taught me about what drives people into the arms of white nationalism: that urge comes not from economic dispossession, nor spiritual dispossession, but cultural dispossession.

No, I don’t mean the sort of “where has my country gone” ignorance that I and my fellow coastal cosmopolitans like to mock over cocktails. I mean the sorts of people who are attracted to white nationalism are people whose own communities have been hollowed out by economic and cultural forces beyond their control, and who are now adrift in a society they perceive to be universally hostile to their heritage for no good reason.

That heritage, as white nationalists in America see it, is the heritage of Western civilization. If you wonder what that means (which is reasonable), let me spell it out: It means historically Western European cultural norms. Specifically, norms like respect for agents of the law, aspirational pride in work, willingness to accept the consequences of one’s actions, disdain for laziness and welfarism, and reproductive responsibility (i.e., not having children you can’t afford to keep).

They respect these norms not merely because these are what their own communities follow, but also because they think these norms make constitutional government, liberty, and classical republicanism possible. If you have to pick between the two, defend the norms every day, since temporary cessations of liberty will naturally recover if they’re still in place, whereas the institutions without the norms will become meaningless: the Constitution will become a pointless scrap of paper to which people pay only lip service, and constitutional government will become bureaucracy hiding behind the fig leaf of a separation of powers.

Posted in Nationalism | Comments Off on The Intellectual Case For Trump

The Trump Doctrine: Peace Through Strength

Posted on March 31, 2016 by Luke Ford

Professor Peter Navarro writes: Those who insist Donald Trump has no foreign policy are simply not listening. The “Trump Doctrine” is a page right out of Ronald Reagan’s playbook: peace through economic and military strength.

Trump knows the key to keeping America safe in an increasingly dangerous world is to “make America great again” through economic renewal. America must have the fiscal firepower to end Pentagon’s budget sequestration in order to fund the military the U.S. needs for adequate defense. Cutting the corporate tax rate and cracking down on unfair trade practices to increase America’s GDP growth rate are just as demonstrative of national might as the F-35…

Trump recognizes Vladimir Putin for the clever, ruthless, charismatic leader that he is. Putin has run strategic circles around both America and its NATO allies when it comes to Russia’s military intervention in Crimea, Ukraine, Syria, and former Socialist Republics like Georgia and Latvia.

Putin recognizes Trump as a strong and fearless leader who will draw clear red lines in Europe and the Middle East that Putin dare not cross. This is a far better and safer situation for America than a status quo Russia policy that leads from behind and inspires far more contempt from Putin than respect…

In laying out his Trump Doctrine, Trump has assiduously avoided surrounding himself with a large circle of advisors. He has done so because he has “off the record” access to a broad distributed network of experts around the world—as well as an inner circle that stays out of the limelight. From his own detailed foreign policy research over many years—required due diligence to conduct business globally—Trump has developed a strong aversion to the kind of “nation building” that dragged America into wasted and protracted wars in God-forsaken killing fields like Iraq and Afghanistan. Accordingly, Trump has promised the American people – he will not be shedding the blood of any American soldier either in vain or under the vanity banner of American Exceptionalism. This is how Trump is in tune with the American public that is both tired of war and ready for the new era of prosperity that will usher in peace founded on true American power.

Posted in Donald Trump | Comments Off on The Trump Doctrine: Peace Through Strength

The Desert Fox

Posted on March 30, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comment: British Army veteran author Desmond Morris wrote The Desert Fox whose cinema adaptation starred James Mason in the title role. The book and film are utterly apologetic, flattering portraits of Rommel that are completely and deliberately ignorant of the actual Rommel. During and immediately after the war it served the British to portray Rommel as an exceptionally capable and decent foe, as this helped the British to magnify the efforts and achievements of the British Army in the Western Desert campaigns (the British called them the Western Desert campaigns because they were fought west of the British power center in Egypt/Suez); the British Army in the Western Desert performed sketchily, at best, and did not gain the upper hand until the Royal Navy had interdicted Rommel’s Mediterranean supply line and the UK and U.S. had bolstered the British Eighth Army with an increasing flow of war materiel. Rommel was actually a consummate brown-nose flatterer of Hitler, not least because Rommel was a Swabian, seen in the Wehrmacht as a social-climbing provincial upstart, who was jealous of the easier promotion and favors lavished on Prussian old boys’ club members of the Wehrmacht. In popular material one of the best assessments of Rommel’s character, up to the conclusion of the Nazi invasion of France, appears in Len Deighton’s book Blitzkrieg.

Rommel was a sound, temperamentally aggressive, somewhat above average field general, not an exceptionally brilliant one. Most people are unaware that his German Afrika Korps units were vastly outnumbered by the Italian Army troops under his command and most of which, considering their supply from the Italian mainland was indifferent at best, gave a good account of themselves under German theater leadership. The war in the Western Desert went back & forth for almost three years, chiefly because it was a series of campaigns dependent upon supply whose provision alternately and variously favored the Axis and the British forces. In this seesaw campaigning Rommel enjoyed the slight advantage imparted by his aggressiveness which prompted him to attack many a time at which he was nigh bereft of armor and logistic support; in this the sluggishness and ineptitude of the British Army also played a significant part (which helps to explain the postwar British accolades to Rommel’s acumen: the more formidable one’s foe, the more glorious one’s achievements against him). Ultimately, Rommel lost in North Africa because the Royal Navy succeeded in keeping the British Army’s supply lines open while, with the RAF, increasingly interdicting the Axis Mediterranean supply line.

Both fiction and non-fiction books and films about WWII range widely in their treatment of the various combatants, yet in these offerings there are trends which tend to follow the shifting, prevailing postwar zeitgeist.

The Homerian precursor of special operations forces is, of course, the Trojan Horse. Before Industrial Revolution technology made them possible and today ubiquitous, special operations did not flourish, chiefly because special operations depend, at first on rapid mobility and later also on portable instantaneous communications. In pre-Industrial Revolution eras mobility was limited to infantry marches and cavalry scouting, and communication depended on runners, mounted messengers, and line-of-sight signalling. Motor vehicles, self-propelled warships and small craft, submarines, aircraft, and wireless made special operations possible and practicable.

* One gets a very good sense of Rommel’s combat instincts in his early book, “Infanterie Greift An.” He won the coveted Pour le Merite in World War I due to his extreme personal daring on the attack.

Rommel tended to do very well on the attack (or counterattack) if the opponent had the least bit of nerves. He tended to do poorly when he ran into determined and capable opponent who would bait him. According to F.W. von Mellenthin (who was a staff officer under Rommel in Africa and subsequently wrote “Panzer Battles”) writes at length about Rommel’s casual refusal to acknowledge or take into account dire supply situations and running men and machines into the ground to maintain the momentum of attacks… which worked very well if the enemy panicked. But if they didn’t and carefully gave ground without breaking, Rommel would run into trouble just as his men and machines approached the collapse point (in one particular situation, as the momentum of his attacks petered out and the British refused to retreat, he had something like a dozen or so operational tanks left in the whole of Panzerarmee Afrika).

* Think about how Rommel might have performed had he been on the American side with massive air support and supplies. He was almost always handicapped by Germany’s inability to fully support his effort in North Africa.

* His task was to keep Africa from falling, and to tie down as many British divisions as possible, all with minimal casualties.

While no doubt he did tie down a number of well-equipped and trained British divisions, he suffered huge casualties and stretched out his positions so badly that when the American invasion of the Maghreb came, he couldn’t quickly help there.

As a commander of the whole Axis army in Africa, it was his job to take into account the supply situation (which he totally failed to do) as well as the overall strategic situation (the fact that his army might be needed in the Maghreb as well).

He thought he had the chance to win the world war in North Africa (totally delusional), and this caused him to disregard both the orders given to him and ordinary common sense.

* A great commander adjusts his goals to his means and does not foolishly try to adjust his means to his goals. In Rommel’s case, he oftentimes just ignored the fact that most of fuel from Europe was consumed on the way to the battle front on that poorly maintained west-east highway from a port much too behind his lines… which did not matter if Rommel could induce panic on his brittle opponent by appearing quickly unexpectedly. When the British 8the Army finally had a commander with some backbone, the fate of Rommel’s men in North Africa was sealed.

The hackneyed saying that amateurs study strategy while professionals study logistics does have some truth.

Instead of dashing to the front for personal glory, if Rommel had actually worked politically to secure elimination of British air-naval bases in the Med and concentrated on restoring the capacity of ports he captured, he’d have been in a far better shape.

* Rommel attacked knowing he could not be supplied. He was reckless, gambling he could capture British supplies and he was considered so by the German General Staff. Once he met a opponent who did not panic under pressure, called his bluff, was willing to grind him down, he lost his army completely.

* Even strategically his pursuit of Cairo was foolish. The British didn’t depend on Suez (in fact, the Med was mostly closed to British shipping anyway), and even if he could have captured Cairo, he would have had to retreat to West Libya (and eventually to Tunis) after the November 1942 invasion of Algiers anyway. From a strategic point of view, he should have taken into consideration both the vulnerability of Algiers (even without an American invasion, the French forces there could have simply joined de Gaulle) and the total uselessness of capturing Egypt.

His campaign looked impressive, but eventually it proved a huge waste of manpower and resources. As I wrote, he was a great divisional (and below that level) commander, an above average corps commander, and way in over his head as the commander of the Axis army in Africa.

* In evaluating Erwin Rommel it would be well to remember that his adversaries were reading all of his communications in real time, yet he still surprised them and won substantial victories against considerable odds.

* To what extent was the problem you describe attributable to Erwin Rommel as commander of the Afrika Korps, and to what extent was it the fault of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht for even sending three German divisions to North Africa in the first place? As I see it, the Germans had two good choices: (1) concede the Mediterranean theater, leaving the Italians to cope as best they could, while the Germans concentrated on the USSR; or (2) make it, and not the USSR, the major theater, with the objective of cutting British communications entirely in the Mediterranean (e.g., capturing Malta) and forcing British ships to and from India to take the long voyage around the Cape of Good Hope, while putting a maximum effort into U-boat interdiction efforts. They chose option 3: send just enough forces to keep the Italians from collapsing. That wasn’t Rommel’s fault. In a position of strategic inferiority, a commander can either elect a tenacious, grudging defense (e.g., Kesselring’s Italian strategy), or a calculated-risk offensive. Robert E. Lee chose the latter strategy in the American Civil War, as did Rommel in North Africa. It offered a chance (admittedly a very long chance, in either case) of decisive victory. The other strategy simply aims at a delayed defeat. Rommel’s reputation is on solid ground.

* There wasn’t a lot of interest in films about Thermopylae, but 300 was a massive hit. People want compelling movies. And there are certainly compelling stories of German forces fighting long odds during the war. If one were not afraid of the political and even legal repercussions, one could make some very compelling films about German forces in the war.

* Depicting Nazis as clowns distorts history and makes a mockery about what our troops faced. It took the combined might of the USSR, UK, USA and others over 4 years to defeat the Nazis. Incompetent clowns wouldn’t have been so hard to defeat.

* “We can now report — based on interviews with former Mossad officers and with Israelis who have access to the Mossad’s archived secrets from half a century ago — …”

Mossad officers & Israelis? Seriously?
I cannot think of a more unreliable source for just about anything.

Pure pulp fiction from top to bottom. If it smells, looks, & reads ridiculous then it is ridiculous.

“By way of deception, thou shalt do war.”
– Mossad

* Every morning, I walk by a picture of my wife’s grandfather in full Wehrmacht regalia hanging on the wall. No, I don’t give a salute.

Anyway – the documented truth is that the man who still silently stands watch over my crumbling old ranch in an old photograph, well cared for but faded, was a blue collar kid from a dinky ass Heimat who went and did his patriotic chore. The only people he killed were, actually, Russians. War. Well, War never changes, Cucky, and the men, especially young ones, will fight for their family, neighborhood, town, state, race, and nation. The flag, well, it doesn’t really matter. Men will follow a leader, because he is leader. This has been true since Horatio stood and the bridge and, like all verities, will be true long after the internet shuts down and the world that was is gone.

And the fact that Hollywood, run by Eskimos with their 8 bazjillion words for f*cking host cultures over, now seems fit to to produce Frankfurt school propaganda that misrepresents facts as the actual guys who fought the war on the Allied side actually remembered them should give you some god damn pause to think that maybe, just maybe, it’s not, like the photo on the wall, black and white.

* I predict that Nazis will come to be regarded as heroic by much of our population when the US becomes well over half non-European, because they will be seen as resistance fighters standing up against Anglo/Zionist hegemony, and their ideology will be seen as something worth emulating.

Call it a crazy theory, but non-whites are a lot less bothered by Hitler than Europeans and Jews. Chinese, for example, are not really bothered by Nazis. What really gets them going is the Opium War and the like, and that wasn’t started by Germans…

What a lot of American elites and PC types don’t understand is that much of the rest of the world sees US as we see the Nazis, so anyone who fought us earns some respect and even sympathy in an “enemy of an enemy” sort of way.

* Additionally once the Morgenthau Plan was leaked I could easily see patriotic Germans fighting to ensure Germany did not have to endure its provisions. Even if you weren’t a Nazi, you still wouldn’t want Germany to be subjected to the Morgenthau Plan.

First, it was obvious to anybody that a German victory would be good for Germany. I know there’s a lot of hand-wringing about how dark and terrible it would’ve been for Germans to be under the swastika banner, but truly, the Gestapo would’ve been not much worse than the present PC regime (they rarely executed or even arrested Germans who avoided explicit anti-regime activity, and even less so during times of peace), so it was obvious for German patriots in 1939 or 1940 that they should help the regime if they wish good for Germany.

After 1941 it didn’t change, but after that Hitler turned truly genocidal, and one can argue that from a moral point of view self-interest (or ethnic self-interest) should’ve been overridden by moral considerations. However, in 1941 Hitler’s war against Stalin also started, so anyone working on the defeat of Hitler was also explicitly working to help Stalin. (Arguably that was the case even in 1940, because Stalin would’ve used the opportunity to grab for himself what he could.) Now even our friend the commentator Jack D acknowledged that Stalin might have been as evil as Hitler or even more so. Especially with the limited information people had at the time, and the human propensity to believe worse things about an outgroup (like the Soviets) then an ingroup (the Germans themselves). So after 1941 for a German patriot it would have been arguably a duty to help Hitler against Stalin. And certainly many non-Nazi patriots did think so.

I truly find it bizarre how German patriots of the time are now retrospectively expected to work for the ruin of their own nation based on the (even in retrospect highly questionable) notion that Hitler’s victory would have led to more mass murder than Stalin’s victory.

(Stalin’s victory led to Mao’s victory and hence later even Pol Pot’s victory – Mao wouldn’t have killed 60 million Chinese, nor Pol Pot, nor the Vietnamese commies etc. would have killed their millions. Would Hitler have killed more than 60 million after his victory, in addition to the ones he killed anyway? Maybe, but it’s pure speculation.)

* The Morgenthau’s idea of not allowing the Germans to have any sharp metal objects was impractical (in part because of the Cold War) so instead the US kept Germany under military occupation for 50 years and allowed it to start chipping away at our auto industry. If nothing else, blowing up all the steel mills would have been a lot cheaper for us.

What the Russian had in mind for the Germans (and what they actually did) was a hell of a lot worse than the Morgenthau Plan but this did not stop them from winning in the east so I’m not sure the stuff about 30 divisions was really true. Morale will only get you so far without material.

* Franco knew that he owed his position to MI6 (see my comment earlier in this thread). The British persuaded him to keep out of the war. Franco was a monarchist at heart and intended (as he ultimately did) to restore the monarchy. Alfonso XIII was married to Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg, the youngest granddaughter of Queen Victoria, and first cousin to George V.

Franco admired his queen and on one occasion when she reviewed his troops after a battle in Spanish Morocco, he presented her with a large basket of roses adorned with the severed heads of three Moorish rebels, recalling a legendary episode of the Reconquista. What the queen thought of this romantic gesture is not recorded.

Between the debt he owed British intelligence, and the connection between the Spanish and British royal families, Franco had reasons to cultivate the good will of the British.

Characterizing Franco as a “fascist” is not quite accurate. He less resembled Mussolini, an atheist whose fascism was derived from socialism and syndicalism, than the Austrian Engelbert Dollfuss, who was a traditionalist Catholic authoritarian.

* On March 15, 1940 Himmler stated: “All Polish specialists will be exploited in our military-industrial complex. Later, all Poles will disappear from this world. It is imperative that the great German nation considers the elimination of all Polish people as its chief task.”

(a) we know that Hitler had no compunction about committing genocide, (b)the Slavs were designated as untermenschen and (c) Lebensraum wouldn’t be Lebensraum if someone else was living there.

* In case anyone gets overly sentimental about Nazi Germany, a few figures:

Soviet POWs who died at the hands of the Nazis: Approx 3 million plus, with around 2 million of the deaths occurring in the Winter of ’41-’42 alone.

Jews: 5 million plus

European civilians killed in Nazi “reprisal” operations: Approx 700,000 (with Belarus alone accounting for around 300,000)

Soviet citizens starved to death during the siege of Leningrad: 670,000 plus

And, if the Nazis had actually managed to win in the East, the death toll would have been higher still:

The Hunger Plan: The planned diversion of “surplus” Ukrainian food supplies to the Reich. It was estimated that that would have entailed the mass starvation of around 30 million people.

Generalplan Ost: The mass ethnic cleansing of the Slavic East. If fully implemented, this would have meant a death toll in the neighborhood of 50 million.

* Best movie to be made for that would probably be the Kriegsmarine’s Baltic evacuation operation, which as a ‘miracle’ easily blows Dunkirk out of the water. Several times as many people evacuated over a longer distance against a much stronger opposition with far fewer naval resources than the British had.

Plenty of heroism along with terrible tragedy. Just about all of the most lethal ship sinkings in history occurred when overloaded liners got torpedoed in the icy Baltic by Soviet submarines.

* Mass murdering regimes have the habit of slowing down the mass murder part after the death of the founding dictator. Not always, but usually. The USSR didn’t do that after the death of Lenin, but after the death of Stalin they stopped the mass murder almost completely. In China the same thing happened after the death of Mao. Vietnam got less murderous after 1986. Pol Pot’s regime got destroyed.

* I read years ago that to much of the world (Middle East, Asia, Latin America) Hitler is only seen as the man who lost WW II, rather than the most evil man who ever lived.

The writer’s point was Americans don’t know this.

* I’ve read that German net assessors before the war hoped that Italy stayed neutral. They believed, quite reasonably as it turned out, that Italy’s Mediteranean ambitons would be a distraction to the major German war effort, which was in the east. There was no German encouragement for Italy to declare war on France and Italy did so only after France had been defeated by German forces. At the end of the war both sides claimed victory in the Italian campaign and for precisely the same reason: We tied down lots of your troops you could have better used elsewhere.

Where would those British forces “tied down” in the Mediterranean have been used between 1941 and 1943? A cross-channel invasion, even one involving the 8th Army, would have been very difficult before 1944. The entire Mediterranean effort was a total distraction from the German point of view. I suppose one could fault Rommel for giving the German OKW the idea that the Mediterranean was important by his early victories there.

* I don’t believe the Nazis ever discovered America’s greatest strategic secret: that Saudi Arabia was brimming over with oil. An all out drive for the Persian Gulf might have allowed Germany to hang on, but I don’t think it ever occurred to them.

* You could make a fantastic movie about German pilot Hans Ulrich Rudel. He flew a Stuka dive-bomber equipped with a 37mm cannon, with which he took out Soviet tanks. He also took out a Soviet destroyer. After his plane was shot down, he made a spectacular escape from behind Soviet lines. He continued to fly in combat after he lost his lower leg to a 12.7-mm bullet. Hitler awarded him the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords, and Diamonds. Problem for Hollywood is that he was an unrepentant Nazi.

From Wikipedia:

Hans-Ulrich Rudel (2 July 1916 – 18 December 1982) was a German Luftwaffe military aviator during World War II, a ground-attack pilot credited with the destruction of 519 tanks, 1 battleship, 1 cruiser, 1 destroyer and 70 landing craft. He also claimed 9 aerial victories, and the destruction of more than 800 vehicles of all types, over 150 artillery, anti-tank and anti-aircraft positions, 4 armored trains, and numerous bridges and supply lines.[Note 1] He flew 2,530 ground-attack missions all over the Eastern Front, usually flying the Junkers Ju 87 “Stuka” dive bomber, and 430 missions flying the Focke-Wulf Fw 190.

* You could make a great movie based on the memoir Samurai, written by the Japanese ace Saburo Sakai. It’s a great read. Sakai became a very popular guest at reunions of US pilots who had fought in the Pacific.

Posted in Germany, Nazi, War | Comments Off on The Desert Fox

Who Owns History?

Posted on March 30, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times that “‘Hamilton’ is, among other things, about who owns history, who gets to be in charge of the narrative.”

I don’t think I’ve ever read or heard anything about the narrative like this in public. I know people discuss it on blogs like this. But it is brought up in a negative manner and attributed to the diabolical elite who control it. And those of us discussing the so called narrative are usually dismissed as conspiracy types.

This guy however appears to doing a touchdown dance on the rest of us. He openly acknowledges the narrative and its use in pushing his worldview. I guess we are no longer conspiracy theorists.

* In practice, Broadway casting is race-neutral except for roles where whites are excluded. For example, Charles Schultz was miffed, IIRC, when a black actor was cast as one of the Peanuts characters on Broadway, but that was explained as race neutral casting.

Another example, when Aida was on Broadway, the title role went to a black actress in the original cast (although the other two leads went to whites), and in subsequent castings Aida was black.

I think the cast of the Lion King might be all black.

But, yeah: I’m not sure how it’s helpful to ban specifying race in the casting calls if they’re not going to hire actors of their disfavored races anyway.

* Just a few weeks ago, President Obama also called attention to the symbolic import of the show’s casting choices, saying, “With a cast as diverse as America itself…”

In Obama’s shallow, hate-filled mind, a cast that mostly excludes white people is a cast as diverse as America itself.

Broadway, of course, should be perfectly free to cast people of whatever race they want, but only if they leave producers of shows meant to have white casts free to cast white people. There was a big kerfuffle when the producers of The Hobbit asked for extras to be white, so Peter Jackson wound up throwing in a few colored people in the Lake Town scenes in that movie, meant to be set in a (mythological) ancient Britain. Then they insist on filling other shows set in ancient England (“Merlin”) with “diverse” folk, and they even cast a black woman to play an English queen in The Hollow Crown series of Shakespearean plays.

Posted in America, Diversity | Comments Off on Who Owns History?

Who Is The Alt-Right?

Posted on March 30, 2016 by Luke Ford

In the light of Breitbart’s big essay on the Alt-Right, here is my list of the most important people of the Alt-Right in rough order of importance:

* Steve Sailer
* Jared Taylor
* Kevin MacDonald
* Richard Spencer
* F. Roger Devlin
* Greg Johnson
* William Johnson
* Tom Sunic
* David Duke
* Daily Stormer
* Heartiste
* Gregory Hood
* Stefan Molyneaux
* Don Black

Honorary Associates:

* Richard Lynn
* Paul Gottfried

According to Wikipedia:

The alt-right (sometimes referred to as alt-conservatism) is an umbrella term for the designation of right-wing ideologies in the United States presented as an alternative to mainstream conservatism in its national politics.[1][2][3] The alt-right has been described as a movement unified by support for Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump,[1][4][5] opposition to multiculturalism and immigration, opposition to feminism, and rejection of egalitarianism.[1][6] Although there is no official ideology associated with the alt-right, some have said the alt-right includes beliefs such as neoreaction, monarchism, nativism, populism, business nationalism, and identitarianism.[1][2][7]

Since 2010 the term was been popularized by Richard Spencer’s website Alternative Right; critics identified it as a movement in 2015, and it was criticized by Republican strategist Rick Wilson in January 2016 on MSNBC, during a discussion of his opposition to candidate Donald Trump.[1][4][8] In this period of time, the membership of the alt-right is demographically younger than mainstream conservatism.

The term “alternative right” or “alt-right” was used sporadically in 2008.[9] and 2009[10][11] It has been used more frequently since self-described “identitarian” Richard B. Spencer founded Alternative Right in 2010, a journal described by neoconservative Tim Mak as “sexist and racist”,[12] and by the Southern Poverty Law Center as far right and racially focused.[13] Jeet Heer of The New Republic identifies the alt-right as having ideological origins among paleoconservatives.

The alt-right includes beliefs such as neoreaction, monarchism, nativism, populism, national capitalism, identitarianism, white nationalism, antisemitism, racialism, white supremacism and American secessionism.[1][2] Commonalities shared across the otherwise loosely defined alt-right include disdain for mainstream politics, strong support for the Donald Trump presidential campaign, 2016, and anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist views.[5][15][16] Adherents view mainstream conservatives with ridicule and have been credited for originating and using the term “cuckservative”,[1][2] a neologistic epithet described by some as racist.[17] Sources such as Newsday and the Cornell Review note the alt-right’s strong opposition to both legal and illegal immigration, and their hardline stance on the European migrant crisis of 2015–2016.[5][7] Ethan Chiel, writing for Fusion, has described members of the alt-right as “identity-obsessed”.[18] Members of the alt-right use social media and the internet to organize and share their beliefs, particularly on the /pol/ of image boards such as 4chan and 8chan.

In 2010, Greg Johnson, then-editor of The Occidental Quarterly, wrote a positive review related to Spencer’s launch of Alternative Right, explaining why he believed it filled a gap in mainstream conservatism:

“I hope that Alternative Right will attract the brightest young conservatives and libertarians and expose them to far broader intellectual horizons, including race realism, White Nationalism, the European New Right, the Conservative Revolution, Traditionalism, neo-paganism, agrarianism, Third Positionism, anti-feminism, and right-wing anti-capitalists, ecologists, bioregionalists, and small-is-beautiful types.”[20]

In a 2015 article in Buzzfeed, reporter Rosie Gray describes the alt-right as “white supremacy perfectly tailored for our times”, sayiing that it uses “aggressive rhetoric and outright racial and anti-Semitic slurs”, and notes that it has “more in common with European far-right movements than American ones.” Gray notes that the alt-right is largely based online, and supports Donald Trump’s candidacy while benefiting from his coattails. Gray quotes a prominent alt-right figure, 52-year-old vlogger Paul Ramsey, as saying that the alt-right are not neo-Nazis. But some hold similar beliefs, such as Holocaust denial, which they also identify as historical revisionism.[1] Proponents are said to use culture jamming and memes to promote their ideas. Some adherents refer to themselves as identitarian, and criticize National Review and William F. Buckley for not openly supporting white nationalism or similar ideologies.[21] Professor George Hawley of the University of Alabama noted that the alt-right may pose a greater threat to progressivism than the mainstream conservative movement.[22]

The alt-right has been praised by Benjamin Welton of The Weekly Standard, who described the group as a “highly heterogeneous force” that refuses to “concede the moral high ground to the left”.[2] Although some conservatives have welcomed the alt-right, others on the mainstream right and left[7] have attacked the movement as racist or hateful, particularly given the alt-right’s overt hostility towards mainstream conservatism and the Republican party in general.[1][2] National Review, for example, attacked the alt-right as “wanna-be fascists … tweeting from their mom’s basement” and bemoaned their entry into the national political conversation.[19] Another National Review writer, Jay Nordlinger, attacked the alt-right for their use of gallows humor, social Darwinism, artistic homoeroticism, and accused them of embracing Nietzscheanism in place of Christian values.[23] Some sources have connected the alt-right and Gamergate, such as through Milo Yiannopoulos.[2][24][25]

Michael Dougherty writing in The Week describes the alt-right as radical working-class white people who are dismayed by globalization and contemptuous of “permanent members of the political class”.[26] However, Rick Wilson, an opponent of Donald Trump, rejected this distinction, calling the alt-right “crazy … childless single men who masturbate to anime,” and who have “plenty of Hitler iconography in their Twitter icons.”[27][28] Similarly, Cathy Young writing in Newsday called the alt-right “a nest of anti-Semitism” inhabited by “white supremacists” who regularly use “repulsive bigotry”.[7] Likewise, Chris Hayes on All In with Chris Hayes described the “alt right” as a euphemistic term for “essentially modern day white supremacy.

From Breitbart:

There are many things that separate the alternative right from old-school racist skinheads (to whom they are often idiotically compared), but one thing stands out above all else: intelligence. Skinheads, by and large, are low-information, low-IQ thugs driven by the thrill of violence and tribal hatred. The alternative right are a much smarter group of people — which perhaps suggests why the Left hates them so much. They’re dangerously bright.

The origins of the alternative right can be found in thinkers as diverse as Oswald Spengler, H.L Mencken, Julius Evola, Sam Francis, and the paleoconservative movement that rallied around the presidential campaigns of Pat Buchanan. The French New Right also serve as a source of inspiration for many leaders of the alt-right.

The media empire of the modern-day alternative right coalesced around Richard Spencer during his editorship of Taki’s Magazine. In 2010, Spencer founded AlternativeRight.com, which would become a center of alt-right thought.

Alongside other nodes like Steve Sailer’s blog, VDARE and American Renaissance, AlternativeRight.com became a gathering point for an eclectic mix of renegades who objected to the established political consensus in some form or another. All of these websites have been accused of racism.

Steve Sailer, meanwhile, helped spark the “human biodiversity” movement, a group of bloggers and researchers who strode eagerly into the minefield of scientific race differences — in a much less measured tone than former New York Times science editor Nicholas Wade.

Isolationists, pro-Russians and ex-Ron Paul supporters frustrated with continued neoconservative domination of the Republican party were also drawn to the alt-right, who are almost as likely as the anti-war left to object to overseas entanglements.

Elsewhere on the internet, another fearsomely intelligent group of thinkers prepared to assault the secular religions of the establishment: the neoreactionaries, also known as #NRx.

Neoreactionaries appeared quite by accident, growing from debates on LessWrong.com, a community blog set up by Silicon Valley machine intelligence researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky. The purpose of the blog was to explore ways to apply the latest research on cognitive science to overcome human bias, including bias in political thought and philosophy.

LessWrong urged its community members to think like machines rather than humans. Contributors were encouraged to strip away self-censorship, concern for one’s social standing, concern for other people’s feelings, and any other inhibitors to rational thought. It’s not hard to see how a group of heretical, piety-destroying thinkers emerged from this environment — nor how their rational approach might clash with the feelings-first mentality of much contemporary journalism and even academic writing.

Led by philosopher Nick Land and computer scientist Curtis Yarvin, this group began a gleeful demolition of the age-old biases of western political discourse. Liberalism, democracy and egalitarianism were all put under the microscope of the neoreactionaries, who found them wanting.

Liberal democracy, they argued, had no better a historical track record than monarchy, while egalitarianism flew in the face of every piece of research on hereditary intelligence. Asking people to see each other as human beings rather than members of a demographic in-group, meanwhile, ignored every piece of research on tribal psychology.

While they can certainly be accused of being overly-eager to bridge the gap between fact and value (the truth of tribal psychology doesn’t necessarily mean we should embrace or encourage it), these were the first shoots of a new conservative ideology — one that many were waiting for…

For natural conservatives, culture, not economic efficiency, is the paramount value. More specifically, they value the greatest cultural expressions of their tribe. Their perfect society does not necessarily produce a soaring GDP, but it does produce symphonies, basilicas and Old Masters. The natural conservative tendency within the alt-right points to these apotheoses of western European culture and declares them valuable and worth preserving and protecting.

Needless to say, natural conservatives’ concern with the flourishing of their own culture comes up against an intractable nemesis in the regressive left, which is currently intent on tearing down statues of Cecil Rhodes and Queen Victoria in the UK, and erasing the name of Woodrow Wilson from Princeton in the U.S. These attempts to scrub western history of its great figures are particularly galling to the alt-right, who in addition to the preservation of western culture, care deeply about heroes and heroic virtues.

This follows decades in which left-wingers on campus sought to remove the study of “dead white males” from the focus of western history and literature curricula. An establishment conservative might be mildly irked by such behaviour as they switch between the State of the Union and the business channels, but to a natural conservative, such cultural vandalism may just be their highest priority.

In fairness, many establishment conservatives aren’t keen on this stuff either — but the alt-right would argue that they’re too afraid of being called “racist” to seriously fight against it. Which is why they haven’t. Certainly, the rise of Donald Trump, perhaps the first truly cultural candidate for President since Buchanan, suggests grassroots appetite for more robust protection of the western European and American way of life.

Alt-righters describe establishment conservatives who care more about the free market than preserving western culture, and who are happy to endanger the latter with mass immigration where it serves the purposes of big business, as “cuckservatives.”

Halting, or drastically slowing, immigration is a major priority for the alt-right. While eschewing bigotry on a personal level, the movement is frightened by the prospect of demographic displacement represented by immigration.

The alt-right do not hold a utopian view of the human condition: just as they are inclined to prioritise the interests of their tribe, they recognise that other groups – Mexicans, African-Americans or Muslims – are likely to do the same. As communities become comprised of different peoples, the culture and politics of those communities become an expression of their constituent peoples.

You’ll often encounter doomsday rhetoric in alt-right online communities: that’s because many of them instinctively feel that once large enough and ethnically distinct enough groups are brought together, they will inevitably come to blows. In short, they doubt that full “integration” is ever possible. If it is, it won’t be successful in the “kumbaya” sense. Border walls are a much safer option.

The alt-right’s intellectuals would also argue that culture is inseparable from race. The alt-right believe that some degree of separation between peoples is necessary for a culture to be preserved. A Mosque next to an English street full of houses bearing the flag of St. George, according to alt-righters, is neither an English street nor a Muslim street — separation is necessary for distinctiveness.

Some alt-righters make a more subtle argument. They say that when different groups are brought together, the common culture starts to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Instead of mosques or English houses, you get atheism and stucco.

Ironically, it’s a position that has much in common with leftist opposition to so-called “cultural appropriation,” a similarity openly acknowledged by the alt-right.

It’s arguable that natural conservatives haven’t had real political representation for decades. Since the 1980s, establishment Republicans have obsessed over economics and foreign policy, fiercely defending the Reagan-Thatcher economic consensus at home and neoconservative interventionism abroad. In matters of culture and morality, the issues that natural conservatives really care about, all territory has been ceded to the Left, which now controls the academy, the entertainment industry and the press.

For those who believe in the late Andrew Breitbart’s dictum that politics is downstream from culture, the number of writers, political candidates and media personalities who actually believe that culture is the most important battleground can be dispiriting. (Though Milo is trying his best.)

Natural liberals, who instinctively enjoy diversity and are happy with radical social change – so long as it’s in an egalitarian direction – are now represented by both sides of the political establishment. Natural conservatives, meanwhile, have been slowly abandoned by Republicans — and other conservative parties in other countries. Having lost faith in their former representatives, they now turn to new ones — Donald Trump and the alternative right.

Posted in Alt Right, Steve Sailer | Comments Off on Who Is The Alt-Right?