Monday, May 02, 2011

Preparing for Ragnarök

The Fjordman Report

The noted blogger Fjordman is filing this report via Gates of Vienna.
For a complete Fjordman blogography, see The Fjordman Files. There is also a multi-index listing here.



Predicting the future is a difficult exercise.

The City of God was written by Augustine of Hippo soon after the city of Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in AD 410. This shocked him and his contemporaries, yet he apparently did not understand that he was watching the death of an entire civilization. Augustine himself died while the Vandals were about to sack his city.

The Scottish economist Adam Smith published his The Wealth of Nations in 1776 during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, yet he did not see this world-historical transformation coming. Augustine and Smith were both very smart men, but even they could not foresee the near future or understand the full force of changes that was underway in their own lifetimes. Individuals who were much cleverer than I have been spectacularly wrong about the future. There is a very substantial risk that I will make the same mistake now, but I’ll try.

Augustine of Hippo: The City of God

I have increasingly come to suspect that Western civilization is not merely under threat, but that it is in fact already dead. It probably died many years ago; we just didn’t notice at the time. The West is currently in such an advanced state of decline that a collapse of sorts can no longer be avoided. The established momentum is too great, and the ruling oligarchs are not even trying to hit the brakes. A collapse will happen. It is only a question of how we deal with this, and whether we manage to carve out a good-sized homeland for our people afterwards.

I believe that the European Union will disintegrate within the coming generation, that the USA in its present form will not survive his century and that we will be facing a full structural, political, ideological and economic crisis within the coming generation followed by serious social and ethnic strife. While the twentieth century was the bloodiest century in human history so far, I fear that the twenty-first century will eventually surpass it, if for no other reason than the world is much more populous than it was in 1914 or 1939.

EU Skull Dragon

As Jacques Barzun, the French-born American teacher, author and historian of ideas, puts it in From Dawn to Decadence, “How a revolution erupts from a commonplace event — tidal wave from a ripple — is cause for endless astonishment. Neither Luther in 1517 nor the men who gathered at Versailles in 1789 intended at first what they produced at last. Even less did the Russian Liberals who made the revolution of 1917 foresee what followed. All were as ignorant as everybody else of how much was about to be destroyed. Nor could they guess what feverish feelings, what strange behavior ensue when revolution, great or short-lived, is in the air.” Mr. Barzun also reminds us that “When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent. The term is not a slur; it is a technical label. A decadent culture offers opportunities chiefly to the satirist.” The West today is clearly decadent.

The Russian-born author Alexander Boot was a philology graduate of Moscow University under the Communist system during the Cold War and lectured on English and American literature before getting into trouble with the KGB, the secret police of the Soviet Union. He emigrated to the West in 1973, only to discover that the West he admired and was seeking no longer existed. This inspired a life-long quest for an explanation, some of it detailed in his book How the West Was Lost. He sees Western history as a prolonged internal struggle between two different beings which he calls Modman and Westman. Saint Paul was a Greco-Roman Christian and the first Westman. Modman saw himself as close to divine; Jesus Christ, God as man, had been replaced by Modman as God, but the old God had to die first.

'How the West Was Lost' by Alexander BootHe believes that non-European immigrants serve as a protected class used as a battering ram by the ruling elites to systematically smash and demolish the nation-states of the white West. Laws against “racism” are therefore not meant to punish criminal acts, but rather to intimidate any opposition among Europeans by always keeping whites fearful and mentally on the defensive. “They are on the books to reassert the power of the state to control not just the citizens’ actions but, more important, their thoughts.” Boot warns that “A state capable of prosecuting one person for his thoughts is equally capable of prosecuting thousands, and will predictably do so when it has consolidated its power enough to get away with any outrage.” For this reason, the author predicts that “more and more people in Western Europe and North America will be sent to prison not for something they have done, but for something they have said.”

Alexander Boot’s basic conclusion is that the West is dead, but as a Christian man he believes in resurrection and in the possibility of a life after death. Perhaps that is not a bad summary.

According to the French writer Guillaume Faye, for the first time humanity as a whole is threatened by a cataclysmic crisis that is likely to begin in the decade before 2020 — a crisis provoked by degradation of the ecosystems and geopolitical contests for scarce resources like agricultural land, oil, and above all water; by the fragility of an international economic order based on speculation and the massive indebtedness of democratic states; by the return of epidemics; by the rise of terrorism and nuclear proliferation; by the growing aggressiveness of Islam’s world offensive; and by the dramatic ageing of European populations, whose below replacement-level birth rates are confronted with rapidly growing masses of young people in the dysfunctional countries of the global South, coupled with mass migrations to the North.

This convergence of catastrophes will mark the transition from one era to another. The USA will most likely cease to be the leading world power by mid-century, perhaps cease to exist at all in its present form. The global center of power will then move back to Eurasia, where it has almost always been previously. The strongest power will probably be China or what Faye calls “Euro-Siberia” — a federated alliance between the peoples of Europe plus Russia. He doesn’t think this is literally the end of the world, merely the end of the world as we know it. Something new may arise from these events, since Europe is a civilization of metamorphosis.

Euro-Siberia

Faye predicts two possibilities for European civilization over the coming century: regeneration based on a resurgence of ancestral values, or else disappearance. Europe, especially the western half of the Continent, is currently being invaded. This is coupled with an incredible masochism on the part of Europeans themselves. Only a terrifying crisis can awaken them, and war is the most merciless of selective forces; a people that abandons its will to power inevitably perishes. A “mental AIDS,” a virus of nihilism, has severely weakened their natural defenses. Consequently, Europeans have succumbed to self-extinction. The primary symptom of this is “xenophilia,” a systematic preference for the Other over the Self.

The current advanced state of decadence owes much to the secularization of Christian charity and its modern egalitarian offshoot, human rights. In the widest possible sense it was the same civilizational genius that gave the world the concepts of universal gravitation and universal human rights. After the unprecedented successes of the Scientific Revolution, post-Enlightenment Europeans fell so much in love with the power of their own ideas that they ultimately came to define their very existence as one big idea, hence the concept of an “idea nation” or “proposition nation” was born. The leaders of this were the Americans and the French, whose Revolutions in the late 1700s came to view their countries as universal republics. This ideal was not and could not be implemented at that time, but two centuries later, coupled with the rise of global communications, it won out over ethnic identification.

Faye believes that Europe now faces a danger unparalleled in its history and refuses to see it. It has been colonized by peoples from the South. This non-European invasion began in the 1960s and was largely self-engendered, by politicians contaminated with Marxist ideas, by an employer class greedy for cheap labor, and by Utopian humanitarian ideals or misplaced post-colonial guilt. Illegal immigrants/foreign colonizers are very rarely repatriated, but receive lavish social welfare benefits handed out to them by anti-white forces in control of the state:

A race war is foreseeable now in several European countries, a subterranean war that will be far more destructive than ‘terrorism.’ The White population is being displaced, a sort of genocide is being carried out against it with the complicity or the abstention of the ruling class, the media, and the politicians, for the ideology these collaborating elites uphold is infused with a pathological hatred of their own people and a morbid passion for miscegenation. The state’s utopian plan for ‘republican integration’ has nevertheless failed because it assumed peaceful coexistence between foreigners and natives, non-Whites and Whites, was possible in a single territory. Our rulers haven’t read Aristotle, who taught that no city can possibly be democratic and orderly if it isn’t ethnically homogeneous… European societies today are devolving into an unmanageable ethnic chaos.

He believes that a rebirth of European civilization in a different form is possible, but not inevitable. Whether or not this transformation takes place depends upon to what extent Europeans manage to restore healthy societies while drawing upon their historical memory, rather than having Islamic values imposed upon them. He thinks they should adopt a policy of Europe First. Others take care of their own problems, first and foremost. Whites must learn to do the same. It is their future existence that is under threat, not that of Africans or Pakistanis:

The twenty-first century will be a century of iron and storms. It will not resemble those harmonious futures predicted up to the 1970s. It will not be the global village prophesied by Marshall MacLuhan in 1966, or Bill Gates’ planetary network, or Francis Fukuyama’s end of history: a liberal global civilization directed by a universal state. It will be a century of competing peoples and ethnic identities. And paradoxically, the victorious peoples will be those that remain faithful to, or return to, ancestral values and realities — which are biological, cultural, ethical, social, and spiritual — and that at the same time will master technoscience. The twenty-first century will be the one in which European civilization, Promethean and tragic but eminently fragile, will undergo a metamorphosis or enter its irremediable twilight.

American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations thesis from the 1990s has been accused of simplification, but he should be credited with placing the significance of ethno-cultural blocs on the radar of global politics. He is also right in pointing out that this era is characterized by a West with declining influence. The tectonic plates of global power are shifting. Future historians may label this age “the retreat of the Western world order.” The West is no longer strong enough to carry the rest of the world on its shoulders. We will face generations of turmoil until a new equilibrium is found. These massive changes and the perceived weakness of a civilization that has been dominant globally for centuries could very well ignite a new world war. Multiculturalism and the inability or unwillingness of Western nations to uphold their borders from foreign infiltration is viewed by others as an invitation for attack and a signal that the West is weak and ripe for conquest.

This century may well be dominated by a resurgence of ethno-cultural blocs. Europeans need to break with the “presentism” in which they are currently sunk and learn to see themselves again (as do many others) as a “long-living people,” bearers of a great past and hopefully a great future, too. The mental revolution needed to bring about this change in European attitudes is only possible through a gigantic crisis, a violent shock, which is already on its way. The present system is founded on a belief in miracles and a myth of indefinite progress. It is bound to collapse, but we should remember that history is open-ended and presents many unexpected twists and turns. Opportunities will arise. We need to be able to grasp them.

I’ve been trying to think centuries ahead about what is needed for European survival. The bottom line is: We need our own territories again, our own countries. History has shown us, for instance in Latin America or in parts of Central Asia, that once the European genetic percentage drops below a certain threshold, the resulting population neither looks nor acts like Europeans. Experience also tells us that if two or more different populations inhabit the same land, they will eventually mix. In combination, this means that the only way European civilization can flourish in the long run is if we have large territories specifically dedicated for people who are overwhelmingly of demographic European stock. In those cases where this has been lost it needs to be reestablished. Ideas matter, but culture primarily follows genes.

Tzotzil children

All nations around the world try to maintain their ethnicity. Only in white majority Western countries do the authorities wage a deliberate demographic and cultural war against the majority population. This is evil, and Europeans have every right to defend themselves against evil policies. Whites have shown the ability to create societies and social systems that transcend the narrow confines of clan, tribe and ethnic nepotism. This is in many ways a great character trait, but it can also be our Achilles’ heel if it is weaponized and turned against us. We must recognize that we are unusual, and that our values are far from universally shared.

White Westerners have given other peoples, including actively hostile tribes, the tools needed to multiply beyond their native capacity, the transportation needed to travel to our countries, the human rights legislation needed to settle here and the welfare states needed to exploit us.

This situation is intensified by the fact that globalization of communications and transportation, ironically to a large extent created by Western inventions, puts severe pressure on our nations in ways which were unthinkable a few generations ago. When the Christian Gospels were written down at the end of the first century AD, the population of the Roman Empire was perhaps 60 million people. This is less than the annual population growth in the early twenty-first century. In other words: The global population grows by more than another Roman Empire every single year. Our system wasn’t designed to cope with such numbers.

The various cultures and religions of the world have experienced time in different ways. We are most accustomed to a linear system deriving from the Judeo-Christian tradition, which sees a clear progression from the creation of the world through a long series of events to a last time, a Day of Judgment and an end to all history. Modern science also tends to start with a universe created at a specific point in time, the “Big Bang,” although its end is yet uncertain.

As Parkes states in Gods and Men — The Origins of Western Culture, “The most significant feature of the Jewish heritage, however, was its view of history. Other ancient peoples had believed in a golden age, but had always located it in the past at the beginning of time. Israel alone looked forward to a golden age in the future and interpreted history as a meaningful and progressive movement toward this Messianic consummation. Originating in tribalistic loyalty, and reflecting the determination of a weak people to retain its identity in spite of conquest and enslavement, the Messianic hope was given universal scope by the prophets and became the end toward which all earthly events were moving. In various manifestations, religious and secular, spiritual and materialistic, it became one of those dynamic social myths which give meaning and direction to human life and which have more influence on human action than any rational philosophy. Unless its importance is understood, the development not merely of the Jewish people but also of the whole Western world becomes unintelligible.”

Ragnarök (“Doom of the Gods” or “Judgment of the Powers”), the end of the world as we know it, will mean the death of the main god Odin and his son Thor. This is described in the Icelandic Völuspá (“Prophecy of the Seeress [Völva]”), the first poem of the Poetic Edda and one of our most important sources to Norse mythology, although it was written down in the Christian era. Odin will meet his end against the giant wolf Fenrir. Thor will fight against Jörmungandr (Mighty-snake), a giant sea creature known as the Midgard Serpent that bites itself on its own tail and surrounds the human world, called Midgard or the Middle Earth. Thor will fight heroically and vanquish the beast, but after walking nine steps he will fall dead from its venom. Yet after all this destruction and moral chaos has ended, a new world will arise from the sea. Some of the gods will survive, as will two humans who will then repeople the Earth.
Jörmungandr

While Ragnarök is the end of the world as we know it, it is not “the end of history” in the Judeo-Christian sense. A new world will arise from its ashes. Our goal should be to sow seeds that can grow into strong trees bearing fine fruits in the future. Whether this post-catastrophic culture — which will most likely have a different mythology and maybe a different concept of morality to go with it compared to what we have now — will be a revived version of Western civilization or an entirely new version of European civilization I do not know, but I tend to suspect the latter. It is hard to predict such things, but a crucial challenge will no doubt be to break with the mentality of “progress” towards “equality,” since a toxic combination of these two concepts is burying us under dangerous and biologically unsustainable egalitarian ideals.

The coming crash will at the very least lead to an ideological-political paradigm shift and the rise of a new mythology to replace the post-WWII “suicide paradigm” of misunderstood anti-Nazism and deranged altruism. At worst, the discontinuity will be so long and severe that what emerges on the other side will be a completely new civilization, another generation of European civilization, just like what emerged during the Middle Ages was a different civilization from that of Greco-Roman Antiquity. The transition between the first and second generations of European civilization took centuries. History generally moves faster now than it did back then, but I suspect such a transition will nevertheless take several generations.

How a new civilization would look like I do not know. Medieval Europeans used different elements of the Greco-Roman legacy creatively and added innovations on top of this. Generation Two of European civilization contained within itself aspects of Generation One, but also had elements of sharp discontinuity. This will probably be the case next time, too.

As Geoffrey Parker reminds us in The Cambridge History of Warfare, the overall aim of Western strategy “almost always remained the total defeat and destruction of the enemy, and this contrasted starkly with the military practice of many other societies.” He highlights the combination of technological innovation and discipline as key traits of the Western military tradition. It is not true that Europeans are particularly ethnocentric; if anything, it is the total lack of ethnocentrism that constitutes our greatest problem today. However, it is true that in addition to being great explorers, artists and scientists we have also been great warriors when circumstances have called for this. This particular cultural trait is, admittedly, very well hidden in our age of decadence, betrayal and suicidal tolerance, but it can be brought back.

Charles Martel

We will most likely enter a prolonged period of great turbulence and upheaval; the bubble of welfare state “cradle-to grave security” is about to burst. This process will be painful, but necessary, and is in any case more or less inevitable by now. In 1911 Western Europeans still ruled much of the world. In 2011 we don’t even rule the suburbs in our own major cities, and some learned observers seriously predict the end of European civilization altogether.

This also implies that for the first time in centuries we are the underdogs. There are many historical examples, from the Persian invasions of ancient times to the Muslim invasions later, where Europeans have performed at our best when we have been the underdogs. Perhaps we can do the same once the Multicultural madness retreats. We need to make sure, though, that those who have championed the toxic ideas of Multiculturalism and mass immigration of alien tribes disappear with it. If that happens, we can give our descendants a fresh start and lay the foundations for a new Renaissance, where European civilization can flourish once more.

22 comments:

Lawrence said...

The established momentum is too great, and the ruling oligarchs are not even trying to hit the brakes.

While the twentieth century was the bloodiest century in human history so far, I fear that the twenty-first century will eventually surpass it, if for no other reason than the world is much more populous than it was in 1914 or 1939.


And, it appears the ruling establishments are actually stomping on the gas, seemingly because they actually think they are doing the right thing.

As far as your prediction of the coming century being bloodier than the last, not too far of a stretch, since history does tend to repeat itself, and this has been the trend of mankind for as long as we've been tracking these kinds of things.

Very scare for a lot of people, and makes some look to ever increasing establishment controls to get things "under control", yet history also repeats that more government control never leads to stable peace. It generally always leads to a corrupt leadership wresting power and doing even more damage.

Crazy thing, tragic even, how history always repeats itself that way.

... I could offer my explanations for this, but this probably isn't the venue for that discussion.

Lawrence said...

"After the unprecedented successes of the Scientific Revolution, post-Enlightenment Europeans fell so much in love with the power of their own ideas that they ultimately came to define their very existence as one big idea, hence the concept of an “idea nation” or “proposition nation” was born."

And within this revolution of big ideas, we have striven to become our own gods.

One of the main reasons Islamists hate our modern culture so much.

In Hoc Signo Vinces† said...

In hoc signo vinces†

Brave men must have the moral courage and advocate what a future European golden age will look like, more importantley they must spell out exactly what necessary "evils" will have to be enacted to that end.

oldschooltwentysix said...

Excellent piece. We have sown the seeds of our destruction because of our unique principles.

This is the main thrust from a practical level, to me:

Whites have shown the ability to create societies and social systems that transcend the narrow confines of clan, tribe and ethnic nepotism. This is in many ways a great character trait, but it can also be our Achilles’ heel if it is weaponized and turned against us. We must recognize that we are unusual, and that our values are far from universally shared.

Though I prefer Westerners to Whites.

This is not to say that others are incapable to adopt Western values, nust that history and the effects of Western technology have so accelerated things that the means to create conflict between competing ideas is maximized, and there is no chance for cultures to peaceably meld.

Thanks for sharing this piece.

Vortac said...

Nature abhors long-term prosperity. Long-term prosperity creates an artificial bubble in which natural selection is no longer possible and therefore evolution is severely hampered, perhaps even reversed. Therefore, human brain is very likely pre-programmed to act highly irrational during such periods, which in turn destroys the prosperity and the very supersociety which created it. Ultimately, natural selection is brought back leading in turn to a more advanced species/society.

This process has started in the West decades ago and is now reaching its peak with disastrous PC MC paradigm. Interestingly, similar processes are well-known in successful insect supersocieties (like bee hives and anthills) which also collapse and disappear under the burden of their own success. One day, humans will be able to remove this evolutionary constraint through science and genetic engineering, but to reach that step we are bound to go through another mess.

Rollory said...

"Ragnarok ... will mean the death of the main god Odin and his son Thor."

Uhhhh? I am positive I read somewhere that Thor SURVIVES - that he's the only one of the gods to do so.

Anyway I agree with the "by 2020" timing. Karl Denninger at market-ticker.org has discussed in some detail how, even if the existing budget of the USA stays roughly the same - ie, doesn't get any worse, doesn't further increase the deficits - 20% of the federal budget will be spent just on interest payments on the debt by that point. This is not something mathematically workable. The Medicare and Social Security promises are going to be broken. The government is either going to desperately try to paper over the problem by inflating the currency - which will not work, as there is no wage-price spiral; it just means Americans get as hungry as Egyptians already have - or are forced to stop pumping free money into the zombie banks, which in turn results in a deflationary collapse. Point is, the money is the only thing sustaining the current system. It is the foundation keeping everything else in place. Take it away, the entire house of cards starts tumbling - starting with the inner cities.

painlord2k@gmail.com said...

I would call your attention to this news:
Ny Teknik tested the energy catalyzer

This is not the first test and these were watched by experts in their field, so it is very improbable they were all fooled.

If this work out, from next October we will see the starting of the collapse of Oil based Economies. The major asset of these countries is their oil. If it is devalued, they are broken much more than they are now.

In unrelated news, the Polywell Fusion research financed by the US Navy is going on as the WB8 is working as expected. If all work as expected, they will start building a pilot plant of 100 MW.

China, India and Russia are not backing from their plans for new fission plants from now to 2020.

If the economies of the M.E. tank as it is probable they will do, they will be not able to finance Da'Wa, their military and security forces. And, like they say: "no money, no singing service"

Rollory said...

Electrical energy isn't the issue. There's plenty of energy. The USA has enough coal to burn for centuries to come (although extracting the thorium from it is a better use). France and Japan are nuclear already. If the desire existed, the West could've built a network of solar power satellites, directing the energy via tightbeamed microwaves to surface stations, decades ago - Jerry Pournelle did the numbers on that and proved it workable back in the 1970s.

The problem is people, who are refusing to make the decision to survive. Finding new sources of electrical energy will not change the fundamental inertia.

painlord2k@gmail.com said...

@Rollory
I understood and don't think cheap energy will help much in saving the EU or the US from going broke.

But it will cause many enemies to go broke also, only faster. Without oil money they will not be able to finance aggressions as they are now.

What will enable is Seasteading and other ways to create new independent communities outside of the existing framework.
This open opportunities that people could be able to exploit and thrive in the process.
This because the technology allow decentralized, in the case of e-cat very decentralized, power production.

As Europeans, we are fast and early adopters of any new technology that could be useful. This make us stronger and more adaptable than our enemies.

Richard said...

We are probably entering a Dark Age, one that will be a brutal as the last one is thought to have been but really wasn't. I believe that some form of Western Civilization will arise from the ashes but it will take a long time and I also believe that scientific advancement will continue during the Dark Age. Technology will aid the brutality that will fill most if not all of the world.

jeppo said...

Ironically enough, I'm not enough of an optimist to believe in a coming "collapse" scenario. Instead we'll probably just continue to decline steadily and inexorably, our societies becoming poorer, more indebted, more violent, less united and less free.

A complete collapse would at least offer the promise of rebirth, but I don't think that we're going to get that chance. Instead, we're going to have to deal with the world more-or-less as it is now, and fight a desperate rearguard action against the powers-that-be in order to save whatever's left of Western Civilization.

The problem with Guillaume Faye's proposed Euro-Siberian federation is the inclusion of Russia. With its low birthrates and high deathrates, its already huge and mainly Muslim non-European population, and its long, mostly unguarded borders, there is almost no chance that Russia will survive this century as a white-majority nation.

In fact, in all likelihood no nation anywhere outside of Europe will still be white-majority by the year 2100. The US won't make it to 2040, Canada and New Zealand might last a couple decades more, and Australia will probably be the last to fall, but well before the end of the century. Argentina and Uruguay have signed away their sovereignty to the South American Union, so their dwindling white populations will be subsumed in that new mestizo/mulatto superstate.

Only Europe can possibly survive the Third World immivasion, so why would they want to hitch their wagon to a dying, soon-to-be-nonwhite Russia? I believe that Russia should be brought into the major pan-Western organizations like NATO and the OECD, but mainly to balance the influence of the US, leaving white Christian Europe as the core of a great northern alliance.

Faye is also wrong to completely dismiss the EU. The present-day EU may be an anti-white, PC-MC bureaucratic mess, but so is every other Western organization, nation, state, province, district, county, city, town and probably even village. Either we overthrow the ruling ideology of Western suicide at all levels of government, or we're finished as a people, period. Getting rid of the EU would only leave us weaker and more divided, and the underlying ideological problems would remain.

The EU is at least 90% white, and the 40 nations of Europe as a whole are probably closer to 95%. Only a strong and united Europe can wrest the leadership of the dying West from the Anti-White Empire, aka the USA, and defend white interests in a world full of hostile behemoths like China, India and the OIC.

Dating back to its formation as the EEC in the 1950s, the main institutional problem of the EU has been French political domination. The EEC was (and is) like a Greater France, with the politically weak former Axis powers of West Germany and Italy deferring to France, with its proposition nation ethos, its all-encompassing bureaucratic nature, and worst of all, its dream of Afro-Arab Empire.

Starting with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the balance of power within the EU has been moving from France to Germany. With every expansion eastward of the EU and the euro, Germany gets stronger while France loses power and influence. Germany is still basically an ethnostate rather than a proposition nation, is much less bureaucratic and more entrepreneurial than France, has no former empire (or imperial subjects), no Mediterranean coastline, and is much friendlier with the English-speaking nations and Israel rather than Africa and the Arab world. As German power waxes and French power wanes within the EU, it can only be beneficial to the chances of long-term survival of a white Christian Europe.

A German-dominated EU within a NATO that includes Russia is a much better idea than Faye's Euro-Siberian federation IMO. Of course it doesn't guarantee the survival of white people in their ancestral homeland, for that we have the uphill task of overthrowing the entire ruling PC-MC ideology. But at least it's a realistic, doable plan, not a pie-in-the-sky fantasy.

Dymphna said...

A frequent reader of GoV, a small business owner, sent this email comment:

D.,
i was reading Fjordman's essay... (I only have to read him once through. He doesn't talk over my head like you do).

There is a comment in it that reminds me of the liquor laws in my town, of all things. This is the comment:


Laws against “racism” are therefore not meant to punish criminal acts, but rather to intimidate any opposition among Europeans by always keeping whites fearful and mentally on the defensive.

The reason this caught my attention is that, if a minor comes into my store, grabs a bottle and runs out, the police won't do anything. "It is a
misdemeanor so don't bother us." Yet these same police will, with overtime money mind you, come around to see if I will sell to a minor [they] send into my store. If I did this it would be a felony.

In either case it would end up with a minor in possession of alcohol...but all they are after is to fine me, to keep me "fearful and mentally on the defensive".


Note: the Baron used to write payroll and inventory programs for a small business owner who had three convenience stores which sold beer and wine (in VA, hard liquor is sold in state-run stores. Yeah, it's a tax-eater of a proposition). This man had a hard time w/ the local ABC (Alcohol and Beverage Commission) bureaucrats. They loved to set up similar sting operations. Gummint is a big-time waste).

Anonymous said...

Great post from Fjordman.

One of the things that bothers me most is that I won't live long enough to see how the story ends.

cumpa_29 said...

I agree that the West is dying. In fact, I think that we are witnessing the end of History itself. The collapse of our civilization has coincided with the creation of an interdependant world uniting all peoples, and a renewed rise of Islam (which is the misinterpretations, mistakes, and outright evil in Judaism rejected or corrected by Jesus, turned into a universal religion under Mohammad). The elites of the rest of the world will prove as spineless as ours, and in the end, the world will "convert" to Islam pretending its some kind of friggin' miracle. Cowardice and a desperate desire for global order and prosperity will fuel the apparent victory of an unholy lie. Truth-loving folks of all backgrounds will end up seeing eye to eye, and will be "hated by all nations" for simply standing up to the blasphemous farce.
And then the trumpets will blow....

Dymphna said...

As a partial counterpoint, here is a recent essay by André Glucksman:

The End of Fatalism

“...Europe’s historical itinerary shows us that revolution can lead anywhere: to a republic’s common good or to terror, conquest, and war. At the same moment that Mubarak was stepping down in Cairo, Tehran celebrated the 32nd anniversary of its Islamic Revolution with a festival featuring hangings and savagely tortured bodies. Egypt is not—God forbid—Khomenei’s Iran, nor is it Lenin’s Russia, nor Germany under National Socialism. It will become whatever it is made to be—by its youth eager to breathe free, by its Muslim Brotherhood, by its hesitant and disassembled army, and by its rich and poor, still separated by light-years.

[...]

it took France two centuries to make the transition from repeated revolutions to a democratic and secular republic. It might take just as long for the Russians and the Chinese, if they ever complete the journey. Even the United States, which sometimes sees itself as having reached political felicity in ten years, actually struggled for much longer, going through a terrible civil war and a long struggle for civil rights—two full centuries of trampling out the vintage of the grapes of wrath"...

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Jeppo's view, that it will simply be a long, slow decline, certainly is borne out by what happened with Rome. Violence here and there, but no catacylsmic discontinuity, at least none from this distant perspective...

... yet when I try to piece together what happened in that far-flung Roman outpost now known as "England", I'm always left holding a map with a few lines of "Roman" roads. It's tantalizing...

---------
Also in City Journal
, there's a book review of "A History of Fragments", whose essay header says: Daniel T. Rodgers documents the intellectual upheavals of the late twentieth century.

“The age was 'fractured,' Rodgers argues, because the certainties of the postwar period—relative economic stability and the dominance of culture by mainline institutions (including the WASP establishment) and of politics by what Arthur Schlesinger called 'the vital center'—were broken. New intellectual and political terms emerged. One heard less about society, history, and power and more about individuals, contingency, and choice. The importance of monolithic economic institutions, including large corporations, gave way to notions of flexible and instantly acting markets. History seemed to accelerate, opening a multitude of almost instantaneously accessible possibilities...."

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As Fjordman says, we simply can't SEE far enough to make predictions with any degree of certainty. I'd add This: we can't even guess what's going to happen tomorrow.

It's especially true on an unconscious level for those Americans who woke up on 9/12/2001 to find themselves in a new world. Our minds revert, willingly or not, to that fathomless blue September sky in NYC on September 11th...

And the news, with wars and rumors of wars, brings us tidings anew. Japan's destruction, OBL's "sudden" death...so immediately previously calm people begin to look beneath the rocks for answers to "why now?"

Obviously, we've become so cynical - and with good reason - that we see the puppet strings and hands moving the bodies and chairs around.

As more than one person on Facebook has asked: is this just a way for Obama to get out of that sucking quagmire??

Who, in our lifetime, will ever tell?

The only sane people left are rapidly transforming into paranoids. The rest are watching ESPN. No wonder it's Obama's favorite pasttime.

Palaeologus said...

A timely and thought provoking article. However, I wouldn’t be so eager to ascribe completely to the claim that “culture follows genes”. Let me be sarcastic now. If that were true than the best way for the self-preservation of European gene pool would undoubtedly be mass conversion to Islam. As it is often mention, all of the native European ethnic groups are experiencing stark fall in their birth rates, all except two – Muslim Albanians and those blondish Slavic Bosniacs. Did these two European ethne discover the secret for genetic prosperity and territorial expansion in Islam? Would that be the right way for the other European tribes to follow in order to preserve their genes? After all, genes are the only thing that matters, Christians or Muslims, Buddhists or atheists, people of European genetic stock would always think and act as Europeans even if clad in burqas and bowing five times a day toward a picturesque town in Arabia. Right? I doubt the author of the text or anyone else here would agree with this, and thus we must admit that genes are not the sole or even the most important defining factor for our Way. It is obviously more complex than such a crude simplification. I couldn’t see how we could be happy to see Norwegians, Welsh, Poles, Serbs, Germans genetically multiplying if the price for it being conversion to Islam. Would such a scenario count in any meaningful way as “preservation of Europe”?

Takuan Seiyo said...

I aver that we CAN predict the future with a reasonable degree of validity. Not next week, not even next year, but 10, 20, 30 years forward. For instance demography is destiny. The destiny of the United States is set by its 34% nonwhite ratio, inexorably growing to 50% sometime in the 2040s. Maybe not precisely in 2042, as demographers say, but that’s not important. It is also a certainty that the American economy has been looted by the Bankster-Fed-Crony Gummint cabal. A reasonably sober, well-read person could have predicted in 2006 (and I did in a publication in 2007) what would happen in ten years or so. As Jim Quinn wrote at Zero Hedge: “This entire sordid chapter in the history of the American empire from 2008 until the imminent collapse, sometime before 2015, will leave future historians dumbfounded at the utter insanity and foolishness of the decisions that were made during the death throes of the empire.”

It is a certainty that the U.S. is finished as a great, rich country, and probably as a country too. What cannot be predicted is whether out of the whole bog of madness and corruption will arise something else, with a more hopeful future if not the same footprint, demographics or coin of the realm. Like with Pascal’s wager, it behooves us to believe that there will be such a Phoenix rising.

The future of Europe is much harder to predict. While the dissolving element-- Muslim immigration -- is far more acidic than its U.S. counterpart, Europe is still 90%+ European. It may go either way. It may even invert in such a way that its Eastern/Central nations that still retained their traditions, sanity, and self-defense mechanisms due to having been frozen and preserved in a communist locker for 45 years will become the head, and the psychologically decayed and ethnically frayed West will become the rump.

Rollory said...

"it took France two centuries to make the transition from repeated revolutions to a democratic and secular republic"

As if the transition is one-way, that "democratic and secular republic" is an end-state, a stable state, and a state to be desired, not an intermediate step in a disastrous devolution.

His assumptions are showing.

"Americans who woke up on 9/12/2001 to find themselves in a new world"

This is the biggest myth of all.

NOTHING CHANGED.

The entire Iraq adventure was fundamentally Clintonian in its half-assedness. We did not lay down the law, take all the oil for ourselves to defray our costs, and give the Iraqis the choice of liberal Islam, conversion to Christianity, or concentration camps. THAT would have been a victory that might endure. American foreign policy from Bush one ending the Gulf War early through Clinton, Bush, and Obama remains the same course. Moldbug's argument that the State Department is the true center of government may be overblown but there certainly is experimental evidence in favor. The problem was Saudi-funded Islam. Islam is what has declared war. The solution is to treat Muslims as enemies in war, and to actually fight the war with an eye to instilling in all Muslims everywhere the idea that, regardless of what the Koran says, Allah is subordinate to the American military. That's what the Romans did with the Jews, and why "redde caesari" was made Christian law. We still haven't done that. The USA still thinks it can do this on the cheap, without disturbing the consumption economy.

"If that were true than the best way for the self-preservation of European gene pool would undoubtedly be mass conversion to Islam"

The problem is that Islam is "good" in that sense only in the short term, and only in a non-technological environment. Islam is in a bubble of its own, just as much as the West is.

ANTI-ISLAMIST said...

QUOTE:

Welcome to Eurabia

"We are living through the self-extinction of the European civilization that shaped the age we live in. In his new bestselling book “Civilization,” renowned Harvard historian Niall Ferguson writes: “If the Muslim population of the UK were to continue growing at an annual rate of 6.7% (as it did between 2004 and 2008,) its share of the total UK population would rise from just under 4% in 2008 to 8% in 2020, to 15% in 2030 and to 28% in 2040, finally passing 50%in 2050.”

The most frightening figures are in Europe. Some of the biggest increases in Europe’s Muslim population in absolute numbers over the next 20 years are expected to occur in the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Germany.

The Muslim populations in Italy and Sweden are projected to “more than double in size.” Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, President of the Italian Episcopal Conference, warned about Italy’s “slow demographic suicide” and Italian Father Piero Gheddo, a doyen of Vatican’s missionaries, warned that “Europe will be dominated by Islam in the space of a few generations.”

The Economist, a publication far from anti-Islamic ideas, spoke of Rotterdam as a “Eurabian nightmare.” This nightmare is threatening the Jews too. Anti-Semitism in Western Europe last year was “the worst since World War II”, according to the Jewish Agency."
- - - - - -
Giulio Meotti:
Welcome to Eurabia: As Muslim population mushrooms, we may be seeing last days of Europe as we know it

DB said...

Those of us having studied game management know of a principle called 'the 'j'-shaped curve'. Populations of animals tend to follow this curve whenever the usual predators have disappeared. You can google it.

Take it or leave it. Humans are animals. The Mississippian culture in 13th century America experienced that which appears unstoppably approaching modern civilization.

laine said...

"Europeans have succumbed to self-extinction. The primary symptom of this is “xenophilia,” a systematic preference for the Other over the Self(...)
Whites have shown the ability to create societies and social systems that transcend the narrow confines of clan, tribe and ethnic nepotism. This is in many ways a great character trait, but it can also be our Achilles’ heel if it is weaponized and turned against us. We must recognize that we are unusual, and that our values are far from universally shared.

White Westerners have given other peoples, including actively hostile tribes, the tools needed to multiply beyond their native capacity, the transportation needed to travel to our countries, the human rights legislation needed to settle here and the welfare states needed to exploit us".

In other words, white Europeans have evolved to a higher level than any of the multicultures now polluting and diluting us. We are defenseless against even naked barbarism like Islam because the white conscience is hyper developed compared to black, yellow, red etc. We can no longer even segregate from the parasites in self defense much less kill them. In fact, white Libs would rather be dead than (falsely) called racist so they keep the gates open to the enemy.

What is coming is a new Dark Ages with a ruthless Chinese master and massive die offs of non-
whites starting in Africa. The Chinese will let them die instead of feeding them and will step over the bodies to harvest Africa's resources.

SAVANT said...

I'm not optimistic and I believe with good reason. I've posted the full rationale here http://irishsavant.blogspot.com/2010/08/im-with-pessimists.html (sorry - html tags not working for me) but in essence my argument is that we in the west have uncomplainingly accepted such invasion and disposession over the last 50 years that we've lost the ablity to revolt.