On the Russian Way of War

I.   Don't mention the war

Certain of my readers have asked why I have not written here at length on the present Russo-Ukrainian War. My answer is that we in the nationalist community are not military analysts by profession, and our falling short in the field of military science is evident from many of our writings on the war, most of which lack real depth and evince little knowledge of Russian military history and by extension little knowledge the Russian national character. On top of this, events in the war move quickly, too quickly, for us; by the time an article is published online analysing the latest developments, the war has moved on. To keep readers up to date, one must work as a reporter does and file a news story nearly every day, and journalism of that sort is not our job. 

Our natural instinct is to get to the bottom of the political implications of the war, and one means of doing this is to determine in advance what the outcome of the war will be. Yockey once wrote that Americans see as a kind of sport, and perhaps this explains why it is that so many analyses published by the American dissident Right show a preoccupation with 'winning': who is 'winning' the war at the moment, will the Russian capture of a few city blocks in some Ukrainian podunk town lead to a Russian 'victory'? The trouble with this line of thinking is that wars in the 21st century do not lead to clear-cut outcomes, the Afghanistan War of 2001-2021 being the exception; wars these days are often indecisive. Who 'won' the Nagorno-Karabakh War of 2020? Who won the American-Iraq War that began in 2003 but finished who knows when? 

In order to obtain a more accurate understanding of what actually happens in a war, we must look to the  military capabilities of both the belligerents and assess an army's performance using the criterion of military competence. Such an investigation will reveal more than a recounting of who won and who lost, and in particular, it will reveal which side was qualitatively the better. Napoleon's La Grande Armée lost Waterloo, but no-one would deny - even Napoleon's enemies would not deny - that the Grande Armée was the finest army in Europe at the time, perhaps of all time. Likewise, Germany lost both world wars, and no-one esteems the German Army any the less. When it comes to the present war, then, can we say that the Russian army has performed brilliantly, or at least competently? If not, what does that say about Russia's chance of 'victory'? 

Casualties make a good measure, perhaps the best, of an army's skill, but the difficulty presented to us by an examination of casualties is that casualties are always subject to dispute, especially in the present war. Whereas the American army assiduously keeps records of its casualties, counts its dead, publicises its dead, and makes sure that the remains of its soldiers are repatriated and buried in well-tended graves, the Russian army is completely the opposite, a reverse-mirror image of the American. In the present war, Russian casualties are hidden, not only from foreign observers but from the Russian people themselves; indeed, Russian leaders took some time to acknowledge that there was a war on. The true figures are hidden behind a thicket. But this is nothing new. We are still debating the casualty count for the siege of Verdun a hundred years ago, and it took British historians decades to raise the possibility that their casualties in that war may have exceeded those of the Germans; when Churchill in the 1920s touched upon this discomforting subject, he was howled down. 

Losses in tanks, other vehicles, weapons, equipment, are easier to verify than losses in men; we can count the number of Russian wrecks in Ukraine and note the paucity of Russian tanks and vehicles at this year's May 9 Victory parade in Moscow. From observation we can infer reasonably enough that Russian stocks are running low - and evaluate the Russian army's competence thereby. For even the best armies can experience grievous losses - superior generalship, training, weapons, equipment, military traditions, do not make soldiers bulletproof - but the losses endured by Russia in such a short time, against an army that is not one of the world's finest, really do indicate something important, and that is, the Russian army has not changed much in the past 170 years. The Russian people themselves have not changed much either. The war so far confirms one of the main assertions of racialism and hereditarianism, and that is, people do not change, they do not improve; altering their environment and even their ideology (e.g., communism) will not affect them - you will see no progress, no evolution, no development, in their national and racial character. 

The Marquis de Custine wrote in 1839 that Russia was the only country in the world run by its secret service; that is true then as it is now: old books written on the old Russia do not lie. The past, then, will be our guide if we are to predict the outcome of this war - who will win and who will lose, and what the fate of the Russian people and the Putin regime will be. The history we will be examining here will be the history of Russians and war, and in particular, Russia's military performance, and this is in the war that changed the course of history and that led to the decline and destruction of the West. 

II. A War to End All Wars

The war in Europe that had such irrevocable effects on Western man's destiny took place in the century. Then Germany was caught on a war on two fronts: Russia in the East, England, France, and then finally the USA in the West. Germany lost, but performed admirably well all throughout the war, whether its army was fighting on the offensive or the defensive. The army owed its defensive successes to its elaborate fieldworks and fortifications - as Rommel noted during the war, 'Our recent experiences indicated but one way of keeping casualties down—the deep trench' - and its offensive successes, to its possessing weaponry that was technologically advanced (at least at the start of the war), its deployment of enormous numbers of well-trained officers, and its use of innovative tactics that were to become de rigueur for all the armies of the world. And more than any other army, the German army understood that a fundamental change in war had occurred in the 20th century, and that was this: firepower had replaced marksmanship. The machine gun, the mortar, the grenade, the flamethrower, and above all, the high-accuracy artillery bombardment: all had usurped the rifle and the bayonet. 

The war introduced Europe to the phenomena of death from above, something we have seen plenty of in the present Russo-Ukrainian War (in the opening days of Russia's offensive, a column of Chechens sent to kill Zelensky and his government in Kiev was massacred by drones). This form of warfare is impersonal; a soldier will rarely see the other soldier who kills him. As Montgomery wrote in his memoirs: 

The Germans advanced... and began shelling us heavily.... The fire was so heavy we had to retire as we had not time to entrench ourselves.... We had to advance through a hail of bullets from rifles and machine-guns and through a perfect storm of shrapnel fire.... the whole air seemed full of bullets and bursting shells.... the whole of the rest of the day we were heavily shelled by the Germans.

The war raged all over the world, including the Pacific, where the Japanese went on a rampage fueled by a barely-disguised racial animus, a form of smash and grab raid that stole the white man's colonial possessions. For the purposes of this essay, we shall ignore this theater, as we are concentrating on Russia's performance in the East. All the same, the Eastern theater cannot be isolated from that of the West, especially so because it was on the Western Front that the war was lost for Germany. 

Let us recount the particulars of the war on that Front. Germany invades the Low Countries and occupies the northern half of France; England is forced to retreat from Belgium in a humiliating fashion, but thanks to its skill at public relations (and what Churchill called the 'War of communique'), manages to spin the retreat as a great military triumph; even today Wikipedia calls the British evacuation a 'strategic victory'. The truth is that overall, the British and French military performance in the war left much to be desired, which explains why it is that the British and French today avoid dwelling on it much. Nonetheless, Germany was unable to invade and conquer England, and so the German navy and air force resorted to strategic warfare against the English; Germany attacked English shipping with u-boats and subjected the British to an aerial bombardment (in what became known as the Battle of Britain). The British retaliated in kind with their own 'strategic bombing' of Germany and using its navy to blockade the Continent; the blockade, which was illegal under international law, led to the death by starvation of hundreds of thousands. These efforts were unable to budge the Germans from the Continent,  however, and in compensation the British embarked on a series of hare-brained schemes around the Continent's periphery - the Balkans, East Africa, and the Middle East (England invaded Iraq; the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which saw American and British troops invading  Iraq together, was not the first). 

As a means of improving its military fortunes, England sought to build political alliances, and relationships between nations became pivotal as the war expanded northward and southward of the Continent. The Germans formed an anti-communist alliance with the Finns. Italy, and then Romania, flipped on the Germans and went over to the Allied side, much to Germany's chagrin, and to punish the Italians, the Germans invaded Italy from the north. In the case of Romania, perhaps sections of the Hungarian elite wanted to join Romania in betraying Germany, but Hungary by this point was too tightly bound to Germany to escape. But these alliances did Germany little good, because England managed to forge the most fruitful alliance of all - the one with America - and it was this 'special relationship' that tipped the war in England's favour. 

The joint Anglo-American offensive against Germany began in the realm of ideas. In this period, the mass media acquired for itself enormous power; the era saw, thanks to the media, the rise to fame of what I call the celebrity soldier - Rommel, Montgomery, Patton, MacArthur, von Rundstedt, all of whom fought in the war. Inevitably, the media was put to military use and forged into a weapon. America and England waged war against Germany using propaganda disseminated through the mass media. In the space of a short few years,  thousands of books, pamphlets, propaganda news articles (military censorship was extremely tight) were published; these were all incendiary and defamatory. The leader of Germany was slandered as a vain, capricious, erratic tyrant, given to displays of feminine histrionics; the German soul was dissected in relentless psychological analyses - and found wanting. It is interesting to note, from a modern day perspective, the sheer depth of the animus in these polemics. One has to ask why it is that the American and British never directed the same degree of hatefulness against the traditional enemies of Europe - Russia, Japan, Turkey - in this war and all the wars since. 

This is not to say that Germany had a spotless record. It pursued a counter-insurgency campaign in the countries that it occupied, and it availed itself of draconian methods of collective punishment (but then, the Americans and the British did the same in the colonies). Because of German industry's rapacious appetite for foreign workers, Germany dragooned Europeans as forced labour for the German war effort. Germany's reputation diminished, and not the least because of the wild propaganda stories  - including stories of Germans gassing uncounted numbers in Eastern Europe - circulating. Out of the steady and unceasing diet of anti-German propaganda, a new image of Germany was formed, one that survives to the present day day: the 'Prussian militarist', cruel, unyielding, harsh, authoritarian, clean, neat, efficient, impeccably groomed and dressed, and undeniably skilled in the arts of war. The gentle, artistic, sensitive, poetic German of the 19th century, with his taste for Romantic poetry and philosophy, Kant and Hegel, Beethoven and Wagner - that German vanished. His place was taken by the 'Prussian', who was said to be inspired by philosopher Nietzsche, the military theorist Bernhardi, and the  historian Treitschke. 

The actual Germans who fought in the war were baffled by this image of cold 'Prussian' brute; to judge by his memoirs, the German soldier saw himself a decent, noble, and above all earnest fellow. One could make an interesting digression here and write a monograph on what it is that the German means to the Anglo-Saxon; did he contrive this 'Prussian' German out of some (as the psychoanalysts would put it) 'deep rooted anxiety'? Does the Anglo-Saxon see the 'Prussian' as an 'Oedipal' figure.

The Anglo-Saxons, as the war progressed, became determined to destroy Germany; Germany had to be put down like a mad dog; its leaders were to be put on trial for 'war crimes'. Eventually, they got their wish and Germany was defeated; when America joined the war, it was all over for Germany. America at the time was led by a bespectacled Democrat president who was a progressive, an idealist, and who was what we would call today a simp and a most dangerous one at that - a dangerous fool. Paradoxically enough, we moderns would also call him (to use 4Chan parlance) 'based'. He had strong electoral support in the Deep South, which was segregationist at the time, and his views of the negro that we would today consider to be white nationalist and racialist. One could debate whether or not he was good for America; but certainly one cannot debate that he was bad for Europe. He managed to coax America out of its traditional Isolationism and intervene on the side of the English, the result being the defeat of Germany, the breakup of Eastern Europe, the subsequent European ethnic turmoil, and (as Yockey noted) the strengthening of Europe's enemies. 

For many reasons, the Americans fought much better than the French, the British, and the Italians. The American landing in France had a ripple effect; the Germans were forced to withdraw their forces from the East to counter those of the Americans (and the resurgent British and Commonwealth) in the West. Perceiving the growing American threat, towards the end of the war the Germans launched a surprise counter-offensive against the American and Commonwealth armies with a view to encircling and then destroying them; the planning was carried out in great secrecy, the offensive took the Allies by surprise, and it was executed with the usual German élan. But despite great initial success, which saw the rout of some of the Allied forces and an advance many kilometers deep, it quickly bogged down, partly because of strong American resistance. And now the Germans had shot their bolt; and now the Allies were now able to smash through the German lines with ease. Rapid German disintegration happened elsewhere as well; the German positions collapsed in the Balkans and the north of Italy (the Allies defeated them there with an agglomeration of American, Commonwealth, 'Free' French, and 'Free' Italian forces). 

One of the odder sequels of the war was that America's eyes were opened, at last, to the danger that was Russia. As the war drew to a close, Germany made appeals to European unity - and Western unity - against the menace from the East and against 'Bolshevism'. Eventually those appeals were heard by the Americans and certain of the British, including Churchill. After Germany's defeat, America began a series of military interventions against Russia and at home, it underwent a 'Red Scare'. 

But America could never bear to pull itself away from Russia for too long. It is at this point that we see the beginnings of a pattern in American relations with Russia. America makes friends with Russia, Russia behaves in a barbarous fashion, making America feel misgivings. Finally the extent of the Russian wrongdoing, and its provocative character, forces America to break off its friendship. Russia collapses militarily, politically, economically; America then comes to Russia's aid; America renews its friendship with Russia. And so on, ad infinitum. If after the present Russo-Ukrainian War, Russia collapses, and descends into the abyss, plenty of Americans will be clamouring for relief for Russia - 'The faults of the Putin regime are not the faults of the Russian people' - and inevitably, America will rescue Russia, only to be met with Russian ingratitude. And so the cycle will continue. 

III. The War in the East

This brings us to the East. From a modern perspective, the war on the Eastern Front is much more interesting than the war on the Western, and one of the reasons why is because of the underlying racialism. The French and the Germans disliked one another, but this was a hatred between brothers; as Spengler says, no hatred is deeper than that between brothers. On the other hand, the enmity between the Russians and the Germans was racial, not familial. In the past, the Germans and the Russians had made a marriage of convenience - especially at the time of the partitions of Poland - but by the time of the war, neither had any illusions about the other. A wide gap separated the two. A mutual awareness of racial dissimilarities caused that division. The Germans were accused of harbouring impious racial thoughts against the Russians, and to this day, English and American historians assert that the supposed German 'anti-Slavic' racialism contributed to Germany's defeat; if Germany had not viewed 'The Slavs' as 'subhuman', well, perhaps they would have fared better politically in the occupied Eastern territories. 

We have this from a book written by Anglo-Saxon authors on the Eastern Front: 

The Germans, for their part, saw nothing worth admiring in Russia. Much of this attitude came from centuries-old German racism against Slavs. The Germans saw in the Russians, and Slavs more generally, everything that they despised. The Russians were the polar opposites of Germans: unruly, filthy, and backward in almost every sense. They had failed to take advantage of the massive natural resources of the Russian hinterland and had been badly humbled by an Asian power in war, both inexcusable failings in the eyes of early twentieth-century Germans. If anything, the Slavs were seen as impediments to the modernization and development of Eastern Europe and its incorporation into the European system. 

German disregard for the Russians had serious consequences. The Germans expected that the Russians would be slow to mobilize and inefficient in their use of their military power. German officers were aware of some of the strengths of the Russians, especially the size of their army and the expanse of their territories, but the Germans were not afraid. They presumed that the natural German advantages of efficiency, leadership and industry would allow them to win a war against a gigantic, but clumsy Russia. Most German senior officers, moreover, believed that an offensive war against Russia was preferable to defensive holding operations because a major offensive would put unbearable strains on the Russian state, as the war against Japan had done in 1904 and 1905.

True or not, the above crystallises for us the image of the evil (and efficient) 'Prussian' who is biased against 'The Slavs'. Psychologist that I am, I detect - reading between the lines - the author's sympathy with the 'Prussian' view of the 'Slavs'. 'Unruly, filthy, and backward in almost every sense': could the author be using the 'Germans' as a sort of substitute mouthpiece for his own views of a people he deep down considers to be barbarous and backward? 

In any case, even the authors are forced to acknowledge that the Germans for most of the war used the Russians as a punching bag. I use 'Germans' here loosely; in truth, the Germans of the Reich fought alongside Germans from other countries in Central Europe who were drafted into the German effort; one could say that these soldiers came from a Greater Germany. In addition, other nationalities outside of Germany - and religious faiths (e.g., the Muslim) - went to war for the Germans, and many of these were Slavic. 

The progress of the war in the East is as follows. The Russian Empire is invaded by Germany and Germany's allies; Germany and its comrades sweep into the Russian half of Poland, the Baltics, the Ukraine, and the Caucasus; Russia, in turn, invades the German half of Poland, East Prussia, and Hungary. In an action that causes resentment against Russia that lingers to this day, Russia invades the Baltics with the intention of bringing its former colonies to heel. In typical Russian fashion, the military invasion is preceded by a political operation; Russia avails itself of the same tactics that, in the 21st century, it was to use in Ukraine, the chief of which is the founding of an 'Independent People's Republic' on enemy soil. In this timeline of Russian aggression in the Baltics we discover: 

Founding of the Commune of the Working People of Estonia in Narva, seemingly an independent Estonian Soviet republic

In reality, this was a puppet state of Soviet Russia founded solely for the purpose of portraying the conflict as a civil war. All the while, underground communist agitators were actively undermining the Estonian cause on the home front – something they would continued to do throughout the War of Independence.

Russia is as Russia does; we find in the Independent Estonian Soviet Republic (and the many other 'independent republics' after that) the precursors of the Donetsk and Luhansk 'republics'. 

Russia, then and now, is fighting to retain its empire. The question faced by the Estonians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians, and even Poles during the war is: who do you want as a master - the Germans or the Russians? The 'Slavs' were caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. 

To return to our narrative. Germany ousted the Russians from Ukraine with ease, and then settled down to the task of mobilising Ukraine and exploiting its resources for the German war effort. Opinions are divided as to how good or bad German rule was for Ukraine. The authority John Mosier states that the Germans did good things for Ukraine. But the Germans, even though using the services of Ukrainian collaborators (of the type that Putin today castigates as 'Nazi' and 'Banderist'), aroused resistance, and the Ukrainians began a ferocious partisan war against the Germans. This came to an end only after the setbacks in the Western Theater. Then the Germans pulled up stakes and left the Ukrainians to the tender mercies of the Russians. 

How did the Russians perform militarily against the Germans? To their credit, the Russians, like the British, never wavered for the most part, despite extraordinary losses in men and materiel in battles of encirclement and annihilation. Viewed from a distance, the German effort seemed somewhat pointless, as the Russians, even after suffering a defeat, could trade men for space; that is, they could retreat, and the Germans could advance, but the Russians had plenty of room to fall back to; they could retreat to Moscow, then Siberia, and then Vladivostok if need be. 

And on the offensive, the Russians could get their licks in. No one can doubt the ability of the 'Russian Steamroller' to terrify. (A nationalist comrade of mine recalls the fear he felt for the Ukrainians in the opening days of the 2022 invasion, when the Russians reached all the way to Kiev). In the middle of the war, the Russians launched one well-planned and devastating operation against the Germans in the south; this is the most famous (thanks to Russian publicity) offensive of the war, and it shattered an entire German group. At their best, he Russians could administer a punch that would make their opponent's teeth rattle. 

Little discussed, however, is the simultaneous offensive in the north; this belongs among the worst disasters in Russian military history; it incurred disastrous losses. To convey the character of this botched offensive, we should attend to the words of a German soldier who fought in the battle: 

Towards evening the enemy fire became somewhat quieter, allowing us to ascertain the situation in case of possible deployment in the German positions. At the same time, work columns strove to bring forward ‘Spanish riders’ [pre- assembled barbed wire obstructions] for essential reinforcement and improvement of the partly badly damaged entanglements. By the ghostly light of the constantly fired illumination rounds, I was able to get a view of the field. In any case, I had to accompany my men who were moving forward. It was a grim scene. Entire assault columns lay, or rather seemed to stand, as if they had been so determined to force a breakthrough that the dead still threatened to attack, forming grotesque heaps of corpses. The flickering light of flares gave them the illusion of sinister movement … All of us who saw these dreadful sights were certain that German soldiers could never have been made to suffer en masse like this. All of this could really only be achieved by barbaric training in blind obedience, which eliminated every independent thought. Stifled groans and tormented whimpers came from the macabre faces before us. They were just hopeless struggles against death, as any help merely meant more suffering. The dreadful horror of war clutched at our hearts with its loathsome claws... nobody said a word on the march back to our holding position... everyone was preoccupied with himself – and with thoughts that fled homewards.

If anything, the above quotation understates the carnage wrought. From a historian's perspective, the above account is noteworthy because it illustrates a Russian military tradition; this serf-like obedience - or is it ant-like obedience? - carries on into the conduct of the Russian army in the present war. Wolf Stoner writes of the parallels between the disastrous Russian crossing of the Severskii Donets south of Belgorod in late 1943 and the equally as disastrous crossing of the same river in May 2022. His account is tragi-comic: it both amuses and saddens. And such a recital leads naturally to somber ruminations on the character of the Russian soul. Once again, the truths of racialism and hereditarianism are confirmed. 

IV. The War for Empire

In the above section, the war I have described is WWI, not WWII, and the two quotations were taken from books on the Eastern Front in WWI, The Eastern Front 1914–1920: From Tannenberg to the Russo-Polish War by David Jordan and Michael S Neiberg, and Russia's Last Gasp: The Eastern Front 1916–17 by Prit Buttar. To those familiar with both WWI and WWII, the parallels are striking: for example, Operation Uranus (the encirclement of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad) and the following offensives = the Brusilov Offensive, and Operation Mars (the catastrophic failed offensive against the German Army Groups Center and North outside Moscow and Leningrad) = the Lake Naroch offensive, the aftermath of which is described in the gruesome battlefield description above. 

One key difference between the wars lies in the perception we have of them today, and that is, WWI is generally perceived as more mobile and more fast-moving than WWI. The Western Front in WWI - and much of the Eastern and the Mediterranean - is depicted as 'static', 'trench warfare', a 'war of attrition', in the popular narrative. After the opening months of the war, both the Allied and the Central Powers realised that the other was not going to capitulate soon, and indeed, had no need to capitulate; if forced to retreat, an army could move back a few kilometers and set up a new line; and if it lost men and equipment in a key battle, it could furnish plenty more. The end result was that one thick and immovable wall of troops faced another thick and immovable wall: one could not nip around the enemy's flanks like Napoleon or Frederick the Great, surround the enemy forces, and destroy them in a classical battle of annihilation. Because of these constraints, offensives in WWI are to be judged differently than those in WWII; any offensive that led to an advance of a significant distance (say, 20 kilometers) and with minimal casualties should be considered a great success. The tragedy of the British and French offensives was that they killed many British and French soldiers and accomplished little in the way of ground gained.  

The other key difference is that the Russians won WWII and lost WWI. Even though the Germans and their Allies the Austro-Hungarians and the Turks administered a drubbing to the Russians, they lost regardless. One could conceive of an alternate history of WWII in which the Germans won the war on the Eastern Front and made Stalin sign a humiliating peace treaty and forfeit the Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltics, and the Caucasus; but in this history, the Germans would still go on to lose on the Western Front and the Mediterranean just as they did in WWI. 

While the Russians won WWII and lost WWI, the level of the Russian army's military competence stayed the same throughout the wars and the intervening pre-war period. The same cannot be said of the British and French armies, however. The French and British armies performed poorly in WWI but had high morale, and performed well in WWII but had low morale. At the time of the German offensives in 1940, the French and the British in the Western Front had some excellent soldiers, weapons, and equipment, but crumbled at the first of trouble. The British abandoned Norway, Belgium, France, and then Greece when put under pressure by the Germans, and the French capitulated, and then formed the collaborationist state of Vichy. Whereas, in WWI, France and England fought on and on, despite suffering huge casualties; they never wavered. 

Militarily, Russia stayed the same and politically it stayed the same as well. In the period of the Russian Civil War (really a misnomer, as we shall see), the Russians set to work conquering their lost colonies Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine; they also went to war in East and Central Asia to regain the colonies originally in the 19th century; some of the biggest revolts against the Moscow Bolshevik regime took place in Asia. The objective of Lenin, and then Stalin, was to reconstruct the empire of the Tsars. 

Often the flimsiest of excuses would be used for a causus belli. Russia invaded Finland in 1939 on the justification that the German fascists would use Finland as base from which to attack the USSR - and this barely months after the ink had dried on the Hitler-Stalin Pact. The real motive, of course, lay in Russia's imperialism; ever since Ivan the Terrible's massacre of the inhabitants of the mercantile city-state of Novgorod, the Russians showed a desire to quash, with force and fury, any Russian subjects who show inclinations to sovereignty and independence. In the post-Soviet period, this paradigm carries over into the Chechen Wars and the present Ukrainian War. 

When it comes to Ukraine, we can note the Ukrainian armed forces did succeed in beating the Russian - twice - but that they did so only with the assistance of the Germans and then the Poles. Once Germany and Poland had vacated the battlefield, Russia had an open field. The Ukrainians, in 1917, were as weak as they were in 2014; they had no real army, no strong state, no unified leadership, and they withered in the face of the Russian onslaught, which was both military and political. For the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 1918 followed the same script as the invasion of 2014; the Russian set up an 'Independent People's Republic' on Ukrainian soil (this time in Kharkov) and then went and invaded to 'rescue' the 'separatists' in that 'republic' from the Kiev regime. In The Ukraine: A Submerged Nation (1944) by William Henry Chamberlin, we find: 

The disappearance of a strong central government in Russia [in 1917] favored the growth of Ukrainian nationalism up to the point of separatism. There was a political vacuum, which the Rada [Ukrainian parliament] naturally filled. But the building up of a strong and stable Ukrainian Government in an atmosphere of social chaos, hunger, and economic collapse proved impossible. 

The Soviet Government on December 17, 1917, sent an ultimatum to the Rada, accusing it of “carrying on a two-faced bourgeois policy, concealing itself behind nationalist phrases.” Specifically it demanded that the Rada should stop the passage of anti-Bolshevik military units through the Ukraine, support the Bolshevik effort to put down the hostile forces led by the Don Cossack Ataman Kaledin, and cease disarming Soviet regiments and Red Guards (a Bolshevik workers’ militia) in the Ukraine. Unless these demands were accepted within forty-eight hours, the Soviet Government announced it would consider the Rada “in a state of open war against the Soviet regime in Russia and in the Ukraine.” 

How much this reminds us of Putin's ultimatum to Ukraine and demand for compulsory 'de-Nazification'. Putin was following principles enunciated by Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko: 

According to FM Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet negotiation strategy had three principles:

1. Demand the Maximum. Don’t ask, demand something that has never been yours.

2. Give Ultimatums. Threaten

3. Don’t give an inch in negotiations. Rely on Westerns who will always offer something.

Russia accuses a neighbour of perfidy, makes an ultimatum (no negotiations, no compromise), and then invades. It is easy to imagine that at the time of the first Russo-Ukrainian War, Ukraine and its friends were as paralysed by the Bolshevik ideological offensive as they later were by the Putinist. One's first instinct is to dispute these accusations, and make an argument with the Russian enemy, and deny that one is a bourgeois, a capitalist lackey, a tool of the bourgeoisie, etc; but one gets sucked into quicksand in doing so. 

Unfortunately for Ukraine, it lost the first Russo-Ukrainian War. It did not get to enjoy, like Finland, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, the fruits of independence. The Poles abandoned Ukraine, having become exhausted after its war with Russia, and signed the Treaty of Riga in 1921. As to why the Russians signed a treaty, as usual they were forced to do so only by adverse circumstances. Russia had suffered a military setback - it had just lost the Polish-Russian War - and was facing revolt at home; the peasants were revolting against Moscow in the region of Tambov. (As to what became of these peasants: the Moscow regime used poison gas on them; the peasants were crushed with the usual brutality). Ukraine, then, was doomed, and it entered seventy years of Russian captivity (de Custine called Russia the 'prison of the nations'). The episode of the 1917-21 Russo-Ukrainian War should be studied carefully, as it gives the lie to the new Russian contentions that 'Ukraine is a made-up country' and that 'Lenin created Ukraine'. 

V.  Why the War?

When looking at the history of Russia in the past seventy-five years, we are confronted by two wildly diverging estimates of the power and skill of the Russian army. Any young man who grew up during the Cold War and who took in interest in military affairs respected and feared the Red Army. A hundred movies, TV shows, novels, and works of speculation as to what WWIII would look like assured him that the USSR possessed overwhelming might and that in a conventional war, the East would overcome the West in Europe in the space of a few weeks. Inside the Soviet Army (1984) by Viktor Suvorov has a photo of a massed formation of tanks; in a caption underneath it, Suvorov writes:

Soviet standard: 120 tanks and 250-300 guns to one kilometre of penetration front. Only a neutron bomb can stop them. 

As a corrective to this view, we have the analysts who after the end of the Cold War took a dim view of Russian military capabilities. John Mosier, who writes extensively on the Russian army in WWI and WWII, is scathing. Like a good many good many observers before 2022, I agreed with Suvorov, and after 2022,  with Mosier - as must Putin and other members of the Russian leadership in their heart of hearts by now. But it would seem that, contra Mosier, Putin wildly overestimated the Russian army's abilities before 2022. In February 2022, he and the Russian leadership evidently believed that Russia could defeat, conquer, and occupy a nation of 45 million with a scratch force of less than 200,000 men. 

Why, then, was it that Russia decided to invade Ukraine again and precisely at that moment? To ask that question is to ask what are the underlying causes of war. 

I find a good working hypothesis in the work of the supply-side publicist Jude Thaddeus Wanniski (1936-2005). Being a sort of economic determinist (like Marx) and a neoliberal free-marketeer, he found his answer to the question 'Why war?' in economics. He sketched out a theory that economic tensions, caused by high taxes, bring about the political tensions that can threaten to explode into war. 

The history of Japan in the 1930s and 1940s furnishes us with the classic example that confirms Wanniski's hypothesis. In 1929, the US Senate passed the Smoot-Hawley bill that imposed a tariff of 60% to 80% on virtually all imported goods. Other nations retaliated with their own high tariffs, and to understand how devastating this was to international trade, imagine that tomorrow every sales tax or value-added tax (VAT) or goods and service tax (GST) in your country was raised to 60%; markets would crash, participants in the market (that is, everyone) would cease or slow down their trading, and many would be unable to afford to survive. As goes the individual, so goes the nation. After 1929 Japan was locked out of the world trading system; unable to make its own oil, rubber, wool, wheat, etc., it was forced to raid other countries to obtain these basic goods, all of which are necessary to keep a country alive. In 1941, America, with a view to aggravating Japan, imposed draconian sanctions, compounding Japan's economic difficulties, and inevitably, Japan lashed out. 

Was Russia in 2022 embroiled in a trade war? No, but it suffered from high taxes nonetheless. We must here broaden our definition of the word 'tax'. Inflation can be a tax; if the price of groceries rises by 10% (as it has in every supermarket in Australia), where did that 10% of one's income ago? In a tax - the inflation tax. Likewise, governments can impose a tax on the supply of labour and capital when it forces hundreds of thousands of businesses to close and people to be unemployed - this is what happened in the Covidian years. If we are to cast our minds back to late 2021 and early 2022, we will recognise how brittle the state of affairs was, not only in Australia but in the entire world.  Along with Ukraine, Russia was embroiled in Covidianism, up to its neck in it, in fact, and evidence exists that Putin himself - like a good many boomers - was completely taken in by it. In such a morbid and suffocating atmosphere, a man can become unhinged - as can a nation. That, combined with a deliberately engineered worldwide economic contraction, explains why it is that Russia snapped, and in 4Chan parlance, it 'sperged out'. 

One irony is that the onset of a war in Europe led to the end of the mandates. Another irony is that after the outbreak of war the Russians ended up behaving exactly as German WWII (and WWI) propaganda said they would. The Russians are performing the role assigned to them by that propaganda - the role of barbarians and marauders from 'The East'. This is from a review of a new book The Middle Kingdoms: A New History of Central Europe (2023) by Martyn Rady: 

Rady draws Central Europe to include the lands from Germany to Poland and then south to Slovenia, with some brief excursuses into the Baltic and Ukraine. By doing so, Rady draws one of the key underlying threads of the book, namely that Central Europe's main threats have always come from the east, from the Huns and the Tatars to the Russians. Indeed, Central Europe thus conceived is the bulwark, the Christian antemurale, against the mythical Scythians riding their horses from the Asiatic steppes on their destructive westward raid. Today's Ukraine tragically carries this role as it grinds, at heavy cost to its own people, the Russian military machinery led by a modern-day tsar on another imperial push.

Such themes formed a staple of German propaganda. From a speech by Himmler in 1943: Today there are only these heathen alternatives: Either Germany, the German Wehrmacht and the countries allied with us and thus Europe are victorious, or the inner-Asiatic-Bolshevik wave breaks over the oldest cultural continent from the East, just as destroying and annihilating as this was already the case in Russia itself.

In a sense, Putin is right: any nation to the Russia that resists the onward sweep of Russia is Nazi; Zelensky and the Ukrainians qualify as honorary Nazis. But in all seriousness, Putin's 'Nazism' is far older than Zelensky or even the actual NSDAP; in the same way, Himmler's 'Bolshevism' was far older than Stalin and the actual Communist Party of the Soviet Union. 

After 2022, the European and Russian past came back to haunt us; we saw an instance of what Freud called (in another connection) 'The return of the repressed'. We are forced to confront that past, whether we like it or not, now that Russia has revealed its true face. 

The question I today regard as the most pertinent concerns the political fate of those in the West (both on the Far Left and Far Right) who have invested so heavily in the Putin regime after 2014. Their future depends much on a Russian victory in this war. What will befall them if and when Russia loses the war and the Putin regime collapses? 

On a self-imposed exile from American politics: Trump, Thailand, Covidianism, diet, soap operas, self-help

 I.  Where we are

After the start of 2020, the Covidians in Australia, America, Canada, and elsewhere in the Anglosphere crushed all politics; they plunged us into what Carl Schmitt called the age of 'depoliticisation and neutralisation'. Many of the Far Right comrades in my circle gave up on politics in that dark period - the darkest in Australian history - and few of them show a willingness to take it up again. Perhaps this spread of apathy is a natural phenomenon, one that accompanies growing old and the passage of time, but I think of it as being symptomatic of underlying realities. 

The 2020s differs politically from the 2010s as the 1920s did from the 1910s. The Zeitgeist has changed, and the change has made itself felt in America as well as Australia, and in fact, signs of it first manifested themselves in America. The change is a deterioration, a rot, and America has been infected by it; America has come down with nihilism, and this is a malady that America has exported around the world. Australia would never have taken up Covidianism - lockdowns, shutdowns, compulsory masking, mandates - if America had not done it first; likewise, Australia took up obesity, 'trans rights', 'woke' activism, cancel culture, critical race theory, racial animosity to white people, following America's example. 

The media, on the Left or Right, customarily exaggerates the evils of the world and always seeks to make things seem worse than they are. But even taking that fact into consideration, if we are to judge by news reports, life in America has become unlivable. For a few years now, I have every morning read through a selection of conservative and white nationalist American news sites; on these the pundits deliver nothing but bad news, so much so I have come to call this daily serving the 'bad news bulletin'. A sort of defeatism pervades the American Right, whether it be Center Right or Far Right (the lines between the two are becoming increasingly blurred), and if we are to ask the pundits if a political solution exists to the American problem, the answer more often than not is: no. Their directive is that one must eschew participation in politics and concentrate one's attention on the task of improving one's own lot in life. 

The theme of individual self-fulfillment recurs constantly in the American political (or perhaps anti-political) tradition; Americans understand racial unity - on this subject they are expert - but not national, certainly not political. Americans on the Far Right especially tend to spurn politics and cut themselves off from the mainstream of American society. This is why the American Far Right, over the course of the past forty or fifty years, has stood apart from America. In this tendency one can detect not only aloofness but a sort of puritanism. The Far Right rejects American life and the small pleasures and enjoyments that can be found in American life. Light and dark shades appear in every decade of American history, and in American Far Right discourse, usually the light receives little in the way of emphasis. 

A cheerfulness, confidence in the future, glamour, beauty, pervaded 1980s American pop culture - we see it in TV shows that became wildly successful in that time (e.g. Miami Vice and Bold and the Beautiful) - and contemporaneous American white nationalists such as William Pierce did not like it one bit. To take another example: the lifestyle of the characters in Oliver Stone's Wall Street (1985) seduces and entices - this is the point Stone was trying to make - and the William Pierces and Harold Covingtons rejected it. After repeated exposure to the writings of such men, we begin to suspect that they dislike the world view of Wall Street, Bold and the Beautiful, Santa Barbara, etc., because it is insufficiently bleak and myopic. Perhaps they would have approved more a popular culture and a Zeitgeist in which darkness overcame light. It is true that a dark undertone did exist in the 1980s: the popular culture of the decade reveals a fear, bordering on a pathological obsession, of nuclear war between America and the Soviet Union, between West and East. But while this dark strain marred the eighties, it did not spoil it. In the decade following, darkness became more prevalent in pop culture - see the rise to eminence of goth and grunge - but overall, the tone of the 1990s, the decade of the 'End of History', was self-satisfied and complacent, free of guilt and self-reproach. The dark side, what Freud called the 'Id' and Jung the 'Shadow', reared its ugly head only in the form of the strange, fringe groups of which Pierce's National Alliance was one; these  groups espoused radicalism, apocalyptism, and millenarianism. Considering the matter further, we can conjecture that perhaps the embrace of the millenarian worldview attests to a religiosity in the American soul. America enjoyed a period of economic prosperity in the 1990s, especially towards the end, but free-thinking Americans came to the conclusion that Man does not live by bread alone; and so they turned their backs on the world and thereby placed their worldview squarely in the tradition of Manichean and fringe religious tendencies. Continuing our joruney, and skipping over the following two decades, we come to the 2020s. In this decade so far, there is all dark, no light; and that suits many on the American Far Right just fine. Finally the Far Right is finding itself in tune with the Zeitgeist. 

In this essay I will be looking at America, and America's domestic policy only; I will not be looking at America's foreign relations with, say, Europe, Russia, China, nor with the history of those relations; further, I will not be discussing America's participation in the war - any war, that is, WWI, WWII, the present Russo-Ukrainian War... My reason is as follows: all three of these wars involve Russia, and the Russian question these days is so powerful that it predominates in any essay and has a way of taking over the discussion. Here I do not want attention diverted away from America. Furthermore,  as Roman Skaskiw notes, the American New Left - and now today much of the American dissident Right (see Unz.Org) - subscribes to two theses, the first of which that America never brings forth any good, and the second, that America is responsible for all the evil in the world. Like Skaskiw, I dispute both. The question I am tackling here is, 'Can an American drop out of Far Right politics and still enjoy the good life in America?', and Aristotle's Good Life stands out of reach in the hellish America that New Left propaganda depicts. 

As to why one should drop out of the movement, the answer is that since the start of the decade, the movement has demonstrated its ineffectuality, powerlessness, and weakness; for one, it was crushed by the Covidian juggernaut. In addition, the latest Russo-Ukrainian War (really a re-run of the failed Ukrainian war of independence of 1917 to 1921) has split the movement. No better evidence of that split can be found than in 4Chan/Pol; two competing sub-forums now exist, one anti-Russian and pro-Ukrainian, the other pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian. Given all this, one is compelled to ask if one needs the movement and if one can find a use for it. 

II.  The coup that dare not speak its name

The American malaise extends beyond politics but owes part of its origin to politics, and the facts of American politics today are as follows. In 2020, for the first time in American history, a president was ousted in a coup. It was masterminded by Big Tech, Hollywood, the American Deep State, and the radical Left, all of them working in concert with the Democratic Party. 

Almost overnight, North American politics became Latin American. A comparison must be made between Trump and Peron, a populist with deep support from the Argentinian working-class - the so-called 'demiscados' (shirtless ones), who were the equivalent of Trump's deplorables. Peron, who was condemned by America at the time as a 'dictator' (despite his winning two elections in a row), was ousted in a 1955 coup and forced to flee the country. 

Similarly, we can draw a comparison between Trump and the populist Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. When one assumes the mantle of the populist, one becomes loved by the people and one earns the wrath of the anti-people - the establishment; in populist political scenarios, 'the people' and 'the establishment' act in accordance with their roles, roles that seem almost pre-arranged, and they follow a set script. Predictably, Thaksin was ousted in a military coup in 2006. In exile, he plotted to regain power for his party and he organised for his sister Yingluck Shinawatra to run for prime minister in the elections of 2011. This saw another landslide victory for Thaksin's party, but Yingluck was ousted in the coup of 2014 and forced, like Thaksin, to leave the country. Thai courts tried both in absentia for 'crimes' and found both guilty. 

Thaksin and his party remain popular, and now the question on everyone's lips is whether or not, after the current election, in which Thaksin's daughter Paetongtarn won big, the Royal Thai Army (RTA) will launch another coup. 

How the military might respond is a salient question. The RTA’s interventions over the past 15 years have been aimed at averting the return of the fugitive former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who became resoundingly popular after his election in 2001. Viewed as a threat to the country’s traditional royal establishment, Thaksin was removed from power in a coup in 2006, but the old guard has never quite succeeded in scrubbing away his influence.

After 2006, as Thaksin-aligned parties won repeated elections, the establishment used a variety of underhand legal means, some straying into the absurd, to remove his proxies from office. Eventually, it lost patience and launched another coup in 2014 to remove his sister, Yingluck Shinawatra, from power.

Despite all of these efforts, however, the Pheu Thai Party remains the largest party in the Thai parliament, and the five years of direct military dictatorship that followed the 2014 coup helped radicalize a younger generation of political activists that have taken aim not just at the military’s outsized role in Thai politics, but the monarchical power that stands behind it. True to type, after the youth-focused Future Forward Party scored significant gains in the 2019 election, a court banned it on a technicality. Its successor, the Move Forward Party, is now poised to run in the 2023 election.

In this context, it is therefore perfectly reasonable for journalists to ask how military commanders would react to the return of opposition forces at next year’s election. Whether their answers tell us anything of substance is another question. Indeed, the RTA’s history of interventions in Thai politics ensures that the promises of its commanders are pretty much the opposite of reassuring.

Unlike Peron and Thaksin, Trump has not been forced to flee, but the Mar A Lago raid portends that he might. And Trump may like Thaksin be put on trial for 'crimes'. Already, an unconstitutional impeachment trial in the Senate has been held. 

Up until the end of 2022, it was an open question as to if Trump and the Republicans would be allowed back into power. After the mid-terms, we can answer in the negative. The expertly rigged mid-terms of 2022 show that the Biden junta is not prepared to relinquish power; nor will it make even the slightest concession to Trump's party. 

After the events of 2020 and 2022, America at stands at a crossroads; this is one of the most significant periods in American history, perhaps the most significant since the American Civil War; the Democrats are now, in the words of Rush Limbaugh, in the business of 'abolishing elections'. Surely, then, the American dissident Right should take an interest in American politics? Perhaps it should fight the Democrats and the Left with a view to defeating them? But no: the American Far Right is thoroughly demoralised. See, for example, the slew of articles at Counter-Currents after the mid-terms; these seemed to welcome the American decline or at least acquiesce to it, and blame the Republican 'loss' not on the Left but the Right: 'A Faint Redward Dribble'; 'Why White Nationalists Don't Want a Red Wave'; 'The GOP Deserved to Lose, but Now What?'; 'The Red Ripple Was a Triumph for White Advocates'; 'A Depressing Election' (the title of this Kevin McDonald article has a picture of McDonald's melancholy visage underneath). In contrast, it is conservatives - many of them elderly - who showed fighting spirit, masculine vigour, and a willingness to call a spade a spade. 'Democrats are trying to steal our election, again'; 'America owes Donald Trump a 2nd term to finish the job'; 'Gaslighted: It's clear Democrats just stole another election'. The irony is that twenty years ago, white nationalists relentlessly attacked the boomer Ziocon Joseph Farah, chiding him for his pusillanimity; now the shoe is on the other foot. 

It has become clear that the American Far Right repudiates politics; it has become (in Carl Schmitt's sense) apolitical, it no longer wants to make The Decision, if it ever did. Perhaps if we were to travel back in time to a hundred and sixty years ago, we would find, during the outbreak of the American Civil War, discontented and misanthropic intellectuals who insisted that both sides (the Union and Confederacy) were qualitatively the same - perhaps both were controlled by the Jews or Masons or Illuminati or whoever; ergo, neither represented the true interests of the white man; ergo, these intellectuals were not obliged to choose between Jefferson and Lincoln. 

The American Far Right - and much of the Center Right - has abandoned the political; it fights on the field of culture. What can we say about that culture in the present decade? That it has been infected by a nihilism, as has been stated before; so what can be done to alleviate it? Would the re-election of Trump help? Another Trump term would see an improvement in American life, and on this I agree with the pro-Trump conservatives; but after performance of the Republicans in the mid-terms, a Democratic victory in 2024 seems likely, as does the margin of that victory exceeding that of 2020. In the last presidential election, Biden won 81 million votes, more votes than any presidential candidate in history. We can surmise that were the brain-damaged and cognitively challenged Fetterman, who 'won' the Senatorial race in Pennsylvania, to run for the Presidency in 2024, he would 'win' with not 81 but somewhere in the region of a 100 million votes. 

Trump would be blamed for the loss, even if were not on the ticket (and he was not on the ticket in 2022 mid-terms); but it matters not if Trump were dead or exiled to Mars. The Republican candidate, whoever he may be, is being set up to lose.

One prognostication is that the Democratic Party stands to stay in power for the remainder of the century, and this in part because the American Right has ceded all the ground to the American Left. A dark future looms ahead, one that many Americans, paradoxically enough, seem to relish. In the not-so-distant past, Americans exhibited many admirable personality traits, and one of them being an attitude - a 'can-do' attitude. This American optimism and determination achieved many extraordinary feats, and Trump belongs to that older generation of Americans who lived that ethos; these Americans would look at a problem and declare at once that it could be solved with a little American ingenuity. But for all his troubles, Trump is almost universally reviled on the American Right, especially by the many white nationalists and mainstream conservatives who seem to take a perverse pleasure in America's decline.

III.  The way of the 'normie'

Given these gloomy predictions, it would make sense for the American individual concerned with his own self-preservation to get out of politics, altogether. And who knows, perhaps he could find inner freedom and satisfaction as a 'normie'. Dropping out of politics, he could become an average apolitical citizen. 

That would seem a wise course of action on the assumption the 'normie' perspective is the most wise, at least more wise than that of the dissident Rightist. This thesis has been propounded relentlessly by the liberals and the antifascists over the course of the past thirty years. The enemies of the Far Right will accuse anyone who takes up nationalist, racialist, anti-Semitic ideas, and even anyone who counsels even a mild immigration restrictionism, of cutting himself from good, normal, decent, human society. By adopting Far Right beliefs, he makes himself irrational, and he stands at risk of destroying himself and others. 

When first encountered, the thesis is appealing, especially to the Far Right activist who feels burned out after many years of fruitless service in the movement. Apparently it seems confirmed by his everyday experience. But now, three years after 2020 and the onset of Covidianism, the thesis has been blown of the water. The 'normies', so commonsensical, so full of everyday salt of the earth wisdom, so moderate, so sane - have all revealed themselves to be the cranks, the crazy ones, the freaks. 

Covidianism originated in communist China. The Chinese communists were the first to introduce cultism into modern politics, and to devise techniques of 'thought reform' or 'washing of the brain' (brainwashing). Following the Chinese example, the Australian political establishment (which includes doctors, politicians, journalists, police) turned cities such as Melbourne and Sydney into vast POW camps; and the residents were treated much like the American POWs in Chinese prison camps during the Korean War. Cults seek to remold a person, and one of the means of doing this is to make the abnormal normal. Behaviour that from any rational point of view which seems insane - behaviour such as wearing a filthy bacteria-ridden mask over one's face most hours of the day in the name of 'health' and 'avoiding infection' - becomes the dominant norm. It is the person outside the cult, the non-devotee, who is framed as the abnormal and crazy one, and peer-pressure and shaming, among other tried and true cult techniques, are used to bring him to heel. The member of the Scientologists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Moonies, etc., believes he is rational and in full possession of his faculties; it is you, the non-believer, who is hiding from the truth, and it is you who is the deviate. 

Cultism cannot be maintained for long, however. Those who allowed themselves to be swayed by the Covidians, those who complied with the social distancing, the forced masking, the contact tracing, the endless and self-defeating Covid tests, the 'checking in' to visit a grocery store, the placing oneself under house arrest, the 'working remotely' (because offices were so 'unsafe'), the internment in concentration camps of people who 'tested positive', the mandates, and the persecution of the 'unvaccinated'; all of them were warring against nature. And this was a war they could not win. 

One has to ask why it is that they started the war in the first place. The answer is that the 'normie' is not so wise and moderate as first assumed. Covidianism revealed the darkness, irrationality, and self-destructiveness in his soul. 

Such knowledge breeds contempt. Before 2020, I believed that the 'normie', at least when he was gathered in a mass, possessed some form of nous, self-directedness, motive power. I also believed that if he was sufficiently angered and outraged, particularly by the exposure of a truth that had been hidden from him, he would revolt. But I was mistaken. Supposing that, in a surprising volte-face, the establishment admitted that it had sought to deliberately poison millions of people by foisting the clot shots upon them: what would the reaction of the 'normie' be? Would he revolt, assemble a pitchfork mob, descend upon Fauci and Gates, and lynch them? I do not think so: the 'normie' would probably yawn, shrug his shoulders, and go about his business. Like Nietzsche's Last Man, he would blink.

III.  In search of well-being

For the first three years of the 2020s, the West was obsessed by health. It put absolute security, absolute safety (from infection with Covid) before all else; this disproportionate concern made people unbalanced. One could not share a bus or train carriage, or walk into an office, for fear of being infected by others; one could not go out one's business without a wearing a mask and standing three feet away from others at all times. And the irony is that millions endangered their health in the pursuit of health. 

A preoccupation with safety and self-preservation and an aversion to risk and danger is associated with the feminine, and one detect in Covidianism, and all cults, the womanly. And women hanker after security more than anything else. Many observers ask why it is that an indoctrinated member of a cult cannot simply walk out the door of the cult compound; why it is that he cannot extricate himself from the cult's grip. The answer is that in him a need for absolute security has been inculcated; the world outside the cult has been made to seem a dangerous place and freedom, threatening. 

This is not to say that one should not value one's health. Many of the refuseniks who turned down the 'vaccine' did so because they wanted to preserve their health; they sought to avoid any of the sickness and even fatality associated with the 'vaccine'. This concern outweighed the admission to a bar or restaurant, the diminution of one's social status, the retention of one's job. 

Health, well-being, the body, athleticism, vitality, aestheticism - all these are linked. One asks why it is that so many cities in America, Australia, and elsewhere in the Anglosphere, are so ugly; why the lives lived in them are so sub-optimal. The Great Replacement, of course, bears responsibility for bringing this state of affairs about, as does the architectural design of our cities - the American economist Nathan Lewis has made a convincing argument that cities are designed for cars and not for us. As for the inhabitants of these cities, well, today they tend more often than not to look unhealthy and unhappy. The reason for that (and it is one overlooked by nationalist and racialist polemicists) is simple: diet. Western man has, for the past seventy years or so, been overdosing on protein, fats, cholesterol, food acid (of the sort found in animals), and sulfur (also found in great quantities in mostly animals and animal products such as eggs). The carnivore can consume, digest, and excrete this offal with ease, and metabolise it, that is, turn it into energy, and do it all  without harming itself; but Man, not being a carnivore, cannot. Because of the food he eats, Western man is afflicted by a number of ailments which could easily be avoided: heart disease, diabetes, atherosclerosis, strokes, cancer. 

Something we notice most of all these days is obesity. Western man is more overweight than ever; one is shocked, when one looks at photographs of Australians and Americans forty to fifty years ago, to see how slender they once were. 

The subject of what a man eats does not fit into an essay on politics; or so one would think. Oswald Spengler disagrees. In Spengler's Decline-, we are told that the philosophy of a Culture, along with its politics, art, mathematics, undergoes changes as it nears the end of a Culture's life. One symptom of change is that the philosophers who built grandiose systems - philosophers such as Kant and Hegel - pass out of fashion. The thinkers who succeed such men in the Culture's progression now educate, instruct, legislate; they teach men how to live their lives. The Culture enters the age of what Spengler calls 'unmathematical philosophy'. In the Western Culture the men who dominate this epoch are Nietzsche, Wagner, Schopenhauer, Ibsen. The 'unmathematical' intellectuals  contemplate matters that were once regarded as mundane, and one of these is the question of correct diet. 

The Western (or Faustian) Culture has moved past the age of unmathematical philosophy, the high point of the philosophy having been reached around 150 years ago; we have now entered an epoch of 'Degradation of abstract thinking into professional lecture-room philosophy' and 'Compendium literature'. The history of the second half of the 20th century shows this to be true. In the end, the university reclaimed Sartre and Heidegger, the last two of the unmathematical philosophers, and made them safe, and as Colin Wilson notes, by the end of the century, Nietzsche - hitherto the most dangerous of modern philosophers - had become as respectable as Kant or Hegel. Even so, the episode of unmathematical philosophy, brief as it was, does give me a precedent for the explorations of apparently trivial questions of living. 

If one takes the apolitical path and devotes oneself to the pursuit of freedom and self-actualisation, one usually immerses oneself in works of religion, philosophy, self-help, mysticism, New Age. Great as these are, they draw an incomplete picture, and they give an incomplete guide to living. One may follow the wisdom contained in the works of these schools of thought, one may gain great insight into the riddles of the universe, one may arrive at The Truth; but none of it will do any good if one is overweight, if one is suffering from a multitude of ailments, if one's body is breaking down. A physical deterioration leads to a mental and emotional. Any survey will reveal that most people who fall prey to vice eat am unsatisfactory diet, and the primary reason why they indulge in alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, is because their bodies are being deprived of vital nutrients. 

How then does one assure oneself of a sound body and thereby a sound mind? For European man, the answer is to return to what has been his traditional diet of the past four hundred years, and that is: potatoes and bread. A vegan diet - or as I prefer to call it, plant-based diet (something that sounds much less frightening) - constitutes the reverse of the 'keto' diet: a diet of potatoes, rice, lentils, split peas, corn, chickpeas, etc., is characterised by high levels of fiber and carbohydrate and low levels of fat and protein. If European man were to adopt the diet, he would return to form and eat what he has normally eaten for the past few hundred years. He would stop gorging himself on animals and animal products, which were once regarded as rarities and luxuries. And as a result, his health problems would be solved. 

Veganism alone will not cure all man's ills, however. One can be vegan and unhealthy; earlier this year I saw in an Australian country town a grossly overweight young woman wearing a t-shirt that read 'Happy fat vegan'. Soy products combined with fake meat and dairy (usually both of these these are composed of soy) most likely caused her condition, as did no doubt copious quantities of the liquid fat that is vegetable oil, something that seems to be in everything these days, even bread.

IV. In search of the past

So far we have been concerned with Aristotle's notion of the Good Life. Is such a life still possible in America today? Was there a time in recent American history when people lived and lived well? 

During the lockdowns and riots of 2020, a poster on Counter-Currents remarked that his friends and relatives were retreating into the past to escape the present. They would seek entertainment - and reassurance - by watching episodes of old American TV shows such as Dawson's Creek and The X-Files. I understood this impulse of theirs, for in that year and the next two, I pulled off my own escape into the pop culture past; while working from home, I let hundreds of hours of a sixty-year-old American daytime TV soap play in the background. To keep up with the action, I would look up now from my desk and see what was happening on the TV screen; this is how one is meant to watch daytime TV soaps - not with one's full attention. (One could call it not overhearing, but over-watching).  

The show became one of my favourites. I was particularly taken with the episodes of the 2000s; these had been put together by someone with an artist's eye. The soft and muted colours of the bedspreads, lampshades, wall paintings, stained wooden panels, were carefully coordinated. The sense of style impressed. The men's clothes pleased the eye; men's blazers, jeans, leather jackets, t-shirts, were of a cut that flattered the male figure irrespective of the wearer's age and size. The women's clothes registered, too, with the exception of one item fashionable at the time, this being a Lindsay Lohan-style blouse that looked like a cross between a chemisole and a maternity dress. In general, the characters looked good and lived well; they led better lives than I and millions of others did in 2020. One may object that this is TV and therefore it is a fantasy that bears no resemblance to real life, but I disagree; I myself owned and wore the same jackets, shirts, jumpers that the actors wore; unfortunately, these clothes grew old and tatty, as they always do, and I threw them out. So I see this TV show as being true to life. And watching it twenty years after, it seemed like a dream life. In particular, I was touched by one scene where two male friends, wearing svelte jeans and jackets, were enjoying a beer together in a bar that had techno music thumping in the background (the 2000s gave rise to good dance music); this was a pleasure forbidden to me and millions of others, because in 2020 bars and restaurants were closed down, and then reopened - but only for the 'vaccinated'. 

Am I making out that the 2000s was a golden era? Certainly, it was not - not politically, anyway - but Americans, to judge by the TV shows and commercials of the time, seemed to live Aristotle's Good Life. Now they live in a Pajama Nation. The decade following the 2000s seems cheap and impoverished in comparison, something that can be attributed to the adverse economic circumstances following the 2008 financial collapse. But one cannot blame the markets entirely: fashion, culture, and aesthetics in the 2010s did not improve even after the brief economic revival under Trump. In the 2010s, it was as though Americans made the choice to live sub-par lives. It is no coincidence that in the 2010s all the daytime TV soaps in America were either canceled or deprived of the lavish funding that they had enjoyed in the decades prior. One can argue that these were sound business decisions - the popularity of print media and free to air TV was fading at the time - but all the same, Americans could have afforded to bolster these confections and bagatelles, which received far more by way of investment in the 1970s and early 1980s, when the American economy had hit rock bottom (and when, paradoxically enough, Americans had been more cheerful).  

In the 2010s, one sees the ghost of a more prosperous past in Lifetime and Hallmark movies. The Hallmark and Lifetime channels churn out by the dozen what were once called 'women's pictures' that go straight to TV. Clearly, an audience - a female American audience - exists for these (but not, apparently, for daytime TV soaps anymore). These productions are usually set in middle America, and watching them brings to mind the America of twenty to thirty years ago. The men and women characters (usually played by former soap actors) are predominately white and always look clean, healthy, and well-groomed; the leading men are often handsome, the leading women beautiful; the homes they live in look clean and prosperous (for one, the kitchen surfaces always gleam). Evidently the makers of these shows are portraying how decent working-class and middle-class Americans live - or want to live. 

This ideal, which is perhaps only a fantasy, appears elsewhere in the Anglosphere. During the lockdown years, thousands of Australians who lived in Sydney and Melbourne sought to emigrate to rural and regional Australia, and as a result, house prices in those areas shot up to record highs. It is reasonable to assume that these Australians were leaving the city for the country to regain a lost purity and innocence; and perhaps they too wanted to live like Americans in a Hallmark or Lifetime movie. 

Perhaps they were chasing a dream. America manufactures dreams and exports them all over the globe. Baudrillard explores the American world of myth and fantasy in his Amerique (1986), a chronicle of his road trip in the early eighties through America. This is his most readable work, and one feels the urge, after reading it, to hit the road and drive through American desert highways and drink whiskey in motels. It could be that after such a tour one will come away disappointed - in the words of the movie poster for Easy Rider (1969), 'A man went looking for America... And couldn't find it anywhere'. But illusion matters more than reality, at least to Baudrillard. 

Truth does come into it as well; the reason why the soap opera subculture attracted a huge following is that the daytime TV soap genre reflects life. The soap is concerned with the feminine and the maternal; the heroine undertakes a journey through life marked by stops along the way, and these stops are romance, sex, marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, child-rearing. If the character is popular enough, she be the bride at an extravagant wedding (a soap staple) and wear a beautiful wedding dress. The female characters are always shown to be enjoying these events, and why not: they get to wear exquisite clothes. To judge by these weddings, American women's formal wear is eye-catching, even ostentatious, and men's is sombre, muted; men's clothes are always black or gray. Indeed, only in the 2000s could men in the West display plumage: the splendid colours and patterns on the men's shirts of the time gave a man a means of expressing his aesthetic sensibilities. 

The soap subculture is feminine, to be sure, and watching  soaps, I learned a great many new things about women; for the first time I heard about Lamaze exercises and something called 'spotting'. My friends ask why it is that I like the genre; my answer is that one cannot subsist entirely on manly fare - war movies and war documentaries, for example - and that one needs a balanced diet. And in addition, the soap genre, twenty years ago, showed us some of the best sides of American life. 

V.  NEETs and a conclusion

Today many Americans do not need to be enjoined to an escape from the past. They are already doing it. Something that I have noticed over the years is that the bookish American men who are students of military history are interested - one could even say obsessed - by the subject of the American Civil War. And if you draw them into a discussion, you will see them exhibit an amazing erudition. Why the interest? Because the story of the American Civil War, and the events leading up to it, and the aftermath of the War, is a story that is American. And I will leave it at that; there is no need to speak here of 'implicit whiteness' and the like. 

An American could spend a lifetime studying this period of American history and beyond, and profit greatly as a result. He could delve further - into the history of Europe and the white race - and rely upon even mainstream and respectable authors for this task, as the authors at least until fifty years ago are by the standards of today quite conservative. Through his researches, the American will learn the salutary fact that American history did not begin with WWII and the 'Civil Rights Struggle'; and that American history is refreshingly free of political correctness and 'pozzedness', at least before the mid-20th century, which represents a change of course. 

Research into philosophy, religion, New Age, self-help, will likewise broaden his horizons and develop his spirit. But (and here is the point of this article) any quest for spiritual self-fulfilment, for self-actualisation, is doomed to fail if one is physically unwell. Feelings of fatigue, and of being old, sick, worn-out, and of being pessimistic towards one's prospects - all these indicate that the body is not functioning at the peak of its capacity. Most of us ought to start the day feeling clear-headed and strong, but many of us do not. That can be attributed, much of the time, to vice. Lassitude, irritation, headaches, fatigue, can come from over-indulgence from the night before; perhaps one has embarked on a Mad Men-style debauch and smoked a great many cigarettes and drank a great deal of alcohol; perhaps one has wasted precious night time hours by staying up late and browsing online pornography; and to cap it off, perhaps one, in order to boost one's energies the following morning, drinks the first coffee of the day - certainly this blast of caffeine revives, but afterwards, it enervates. Vice is always to be enjoyed now and paid for later. 

The vices mentioned above are harmless in comparison with the vices that are sweeping America today - e.g., the consumption of Fentanyl - but they take their toll on one's mental and physical soundness all the same. Americans understand the dangers of vice - after all, they did ban the drinking of alcohol for ten years, and America is the only Western nation (to my knowledge) to have done so - as did the Covidians; this is why during the lockdown years the Covidians encouraged people to indulge themselves and their weaknesses as much as possible.   

But all the clean living and exercise in the world will fail to produce the desired outcomes - health, strength, a confident attitude towards one's life and future - if one indulges in the wrong food; e.g. if one eats a greasy pizza for lunch, steak and fries for dinner, eggs and bacon for breakfast. Even food devoid of any trace of animal products can do harm: what if one's preferred meals are vegan pizza and soy steak? Teetotalism alone does not guarantee perfect health. 

If the right food is consumed, one over time enters a state of well-being and serenity. The digestive system, for instance, will improve. It will begin to function normally, and one's body begins to run like a smooth, well-oiled machine. Cybernetics then ensures a steady flow of positive feedback to the brain. One gets high, high on life. 

This puts one in condition, in form. By training the body, one is training the mind, and so an American who wishes to embark on a spiritual emigration from America is prepared for his journey. As to where he goes - it could be into the past, or into the worlds of Eastern religion, New Age, German philosophy. 

In 2016, Dr Nicholas Eberstadt published Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis. In a recent interview, he describes in detail the phenomenon of men who have dropped out of the workforce and who are now doing absolutely nothing. 

I think over on the other side of the ocean, they call it NEET, N-E-E-T, neither employed or in education or training. If we look at that group, which is not a small group, well over 6 million, they basically don’t do civil society. Almost no time invested in either worship, or volunteering, or charity work. Although you might think they have practically nothing but time on their hands, they do surprisingly little help around the house with other people, other family members, or with housework, a lot less than employed women with kids, who are more or less the most time-scarce, time-poor people in America. They don’t even get out of the house that much. They’re getting out of the house less and less according to their self-reporting. What they do is they spent a lot of time in front of screens. Now, these clunky surveys won’t tell us what they’re watching or what sorts of devices they’re watching, but they’re reporting, spending about 2000 hours a year in front of screens. Now, for many people, that’s like a full-time job. And when we bear in mind that other reports indicate that about half of these men say that they’re taking pain medication every day... I mean, not necessarily prescription or illicit, over-the-counter, maybe in some cases, but half of them are taking pain medication every day. We’ve got this vision not just of people spending all day playing World of Warcraft or Call of Duty. They’re doing it stoned, and it’s a kind of picture of life in limbo in purgatory. It’s miserable, and certainly, these are not the sorts of skills that are going to get you back into the workforce. They’re going to make you much more likely A, a long-termer, and B, possibly a candidate for deaths of despair.

In another interview, Eberstadt explains: 

We’re not supposed to talk in value terms, at least in many parts of polite society these days, but it is apparent, it is manifestly apparent, it’s screaming out at us, the evidence of our senses, that people who are not connected to work or to their families or to their faiths or to their communities are not engaged in leisure. They’re not boning up on their Schopenhauer. As I say, they’re, in so many case, in trainer courses for deaths of despair. We’ve had this simultaneous explosion of wealth and explosion of misery in our society that can’t be explained unless we take a look at morals, values, and personal ethos.

I will not here evaluate Eberstadt's thinking, but I will say this: by all means, the drop-out men described above ought to be studying Schopenhauer. We Generation Xers and Millenial do not have much time left and so we must use it wisely. A study of Schopenhauer - or the American Civil War, or anything from the 19th century for that matter - takes us away from the ugly, vulgar, self-destructive world that is the 2020s.