Political Captagon: on the Far Right and Far Left’s addiction to Assadism in the 2010s

 

I.    Introduction: Why write on Syria? 

For decades, men of our political persuasion have paid scant attention to Syrian politics. We were not that concerned, because Syrians are Arab and for the most part Muslim; and Syria belongs to what Spengler calls the Magian Culture – the civilisation that first sprang up in the Middle East and one that is primarily Jewish, Muslim, and Christian – whereas we belong to the Faustian or Western or Occidental Culture. We are mostly concerned with our own destiny, for our worldview is particularist, not universal, and it does not pretend to apply in all times and all places; and the amount of our emotional investment in any war involving Syria matches that of any war involving the Congo. Contemplating the possibility of war between America and Russia, Yockey writes in 1949 that ‘Europe is no more interested in this projected war than in a struggle between two negro tribes in the Sudan’.

That indifference vanished in the 2010s. Following the Arab Spring uprisings, a number of Arab rulers – most of whom had been in power for decades – were forced to stand down or make concessions, and in the three most backward of the Arab states – Libya, Egypt, and Syria – the rulers attempted to brutally suppress the uprisings; and in two out the three, the rulers dug in, refusing any concessions and preferring instead to plunge their countries into civil war. But whereas the Libyan War ended after a few months, the Syrian War ended after thirteen years, and whereas the West felt no compunction towards the ouster of Ghaddafi, it felt squeamish towards an ouster of Assad. And so, Assad lingered throughout the 2010s, and in a bizarre turn of events, wound up becoming a hero to certain prominent sections of the Far Right and the Far Left; many of those on the political fringes – including some of my comrades in good standing – became heavily invested in the survival of the Assad regime.

At this point I will digress and stop to remark upon the Syria after Assad’s ouster. I want the new Syria to do well, for entirely selfish reasons that I shall soon relate; and to the friends of the new Syria – and many of those friends disagree with my politics – I recommend but one course of action. I will detail it in the below paragraph, which should be skipped by those who want to read about the politics of the 2010s.

In 2025, Syria can extricate itself from its difficulties if it straightens out its money. A weak currency means a weak State, and monetary disorder leads to political disorder, and conversely; for how many regimes and how many empires have perished because of debased currencies, and how many civil wars have been fomented by inflation, currency weakness, and economic turmoil? Syria’s haphazard monetary regimen contributed both to the fall of Assad and to the sectarian and ethnic conflicts of 2025; and given that, the central bank of the new Syria must end fluctuations. The Central Bank of Syria ought to adopt a currency board arrangement, in which the pound is fixed to the euro at the rate of, say, £SYP15,000 to €EUR1, and in its day-to-day operations, the currency board would work as follows. If you present €EUR1 to the Syrian Central Bank, you get £SYP15,000 in exchange, and vice versa, with the Syrian Central Bank adding or subtracting pounds in circulation with a view to maintaining the fixed rate. For the intellectual underpinnings of this arrangement, read this Wall Street Journal editorial from fifty years ago, one that draws upon the ideas of Nobel-winning economist Robert Mundell (the architect of the euro) and Art Laffer (of Laffer curve fame); it justifies fixed exchange rates and by extension currency boards. I will forestall objections by pointing out that Syria already labours under a fixed exchange rate regime: the value of one pound in Homs, for instance, equals the value of one pound in Daraa; by taking up a currency board, Syria will only be doing what it already does, but more effectively. And such are the advantages of fixed exchange rates that all the Levant is best advised to adopt a common currency, and Turkey, Lebanon, and Syria ought to dispense with (what Mundell would have called) their junk currencies. But such a wish, for now, is a pipe dream.

To return to Alt-Right politics. Up until 2011, our side of politics largely ignored any happenings in Syria; and after 2011, it took an interest. That occurred for two reasons. The first was that the Assad regime launched a well-crafted and brilliantly executed propaganda campaign that portrayed Assad as a moderate Muslim and Arab leader, one who had been tasked with protecting Christians and minority Muslim sects such as the Alawites, whom in the Assadist narrative were being persecuted. The second reason was that, as often happens to a country embroiled in a civil war, Syria was partitioned, like Poland in the 18^th century; other powers who were stronger and more cohesive intervened; Turkey, Iran, the US, Russia, and the newly formed Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL) all took their cut; and as to why this carving up mattered to the Far Right and Far Left, we need look to Russia, which in 2015 threw its weight behind the Assad regime; thanks in no small part to Russian arms, Assad in the second half of the war saved his rump state, the political centers of which were located in Damascus and the coastal province Latakia; and in the eyes of the Far Right – and Left – Assad had been anointed by Putin, and that counted. In the 2010s, one on the Alt-Right or Left could have devised complex intellectual arguments on behalf of the Russian intervention, and one could have justified support for Russia by declaring that Russia was anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist, or whatever; but in the last analysis, what mattered to the Far Right and Far Left was that the Putin regime conveyed strength; brute force carried the day.

An eventful year, 2015 saw significant developments. In the Republican primaries, Trump declared that the US should team up with Assad, ‘destroy ISIS’, and make friends with Russia. Trump was not departing all that much from the establishment line, for Trump’s doctrine hardly differed from Obama’s: the Obama administration, by 2015, wanted to crush ISIS, and to that end, it supported the Kurds, who were to be used as a club to beat ISIS into submission. The anti-Assad rebels were not to be selected for such a purpose; for these rebels were routinely castigated as ‘jihadis’, and many of the Western elite looked down their noses at these bearded, scruffy, and narrow-minded insurgents; and many sections of the Far Left favoured the Kurds because the Kurds were progressive, the ‘jihadis’ reactionary.

Also in 2015, the Trump campaign closely watched events in Europe, events that were exploited by Trump with great success. Merkel brought over a million Muslim refugees, mostly male, mostly of fighting age, and mostly Syrian. Merkel did so out of ill will: she transported these men into Germany to cause as much inconvenience, pain, and misery to the Germans as possible. She succeeded, and within a short time, Syrian man won notoriety. The Syrian refugees, who numbered in the millions, had already become a thorny political problem in Turkey; and if Syrians behaved badly in Turkey, a Muslim nation, one could only imagine how they would behave in Germany.

               

Why would Merkel and other members of the European power elite make such a decision, one that would lead to such disastrous consequences, consequences that could be easily foreseen? The answer is simple: hatred. Suppose that some misanthropic mayor of a small town in America’s Pacific Northwest had decided to release 200 starving grizzlies: he would be acting in the spirit of malice, clearly enough. But in his own mind, he was only doing what was right; for his compatriots deserved to be punished; the townsfolk needed to be scourged. And as to what motivated him, perhaps it was religion and a belief that he was meting out divine justice. Regardless, the mayor knew how to cover his tracks, and he urged the townsfolk to accept the aggressive and marauding bears; he remonstrated with his constituents to place the welfare of beasts of prey, starving, needy, and aggressive, above their own. In the same spirit, Merkel made the slogan ‘Wir schaffen das!’ (‘We can do it!’). To understand the mentality, we must delve deep into Merkel’s lizard-like brain, and after returning from our exploration of the depths, we shall conclude that the Merkels saw Syrians not as human beings but as pawns on a chessboard, and as walking bioweapons.

               

Merkel’s million-man invasion put Syrians on the map, and not in the manner that the advocates of a free Syria would like. And of course, the Far Left was not disturbed by the violence – even the sexual violence – of Syrian man in the slightest. The reluctance to condemn can be proven by asking the Marxist: are there any circumstances, any whatsoever, in which these men should be deported? Each time, the Marxist will answer: none.

               

Thanks to Merkel, those of our political persuasion were forced to confront Syria; but even if Merkel’s million-man invasion had not occurred, would a study of Syrian and Middle Eastern politics have been worth it? I argue that the answer is yes. An acquaintance with Syria, the Syrian question, and ‘Third World’ politics, benefits us, for it can supply interesting perspectives. Take, for example, the phenomenon of Syria’s prisons. The Assads imprisoned tens of thousands, and these political prisoners were held in jails that were among the worst in the Middle East. Up until 2024, this state of affairs was considered by the prisoners and their relatives to be immutable; but within the space of a few days in December 2024, the structure was transformed, negated. One day, a jailer represents the mighty Syrian state; the next, he is some random fellow who owns a key to a room with some people locked inside. After Assad fled Syria, the jailer fled his jail, and the rebels broke down the doors and freed the prisoners, some of whom had been locked up for decades (and some of the women prisoners, raped by guards, had given birth to children who were now teenagers). A political scientist could write a thesis on the change of status and loss of legitimacy of the jailer, and the thesis would raise serious philosophical questions: is legitimacy real, or is it the product of a fiction, a sort of game played between the ruler and the ruled?

               

When discussing these subjects, we are stepping outside the confines of white nationalism, dissident Rightism, ‘Neo-Nazism’, etc.; but sooner or later, we must return to the subject of race. And it is here we shall begin.

 

II.           The Levant, the Arab character, and ‘Arab socialism’

 

So, who are the Arabs, and in particular, the Arabs of the Levant – what is their culture, what are their customs, values, practices, ways of going about things?

As part of a fact-finding mission, you can watch this 15-part documentary on the Lebanese civil war, in which prominent Lebanese, Jordanian, Palestinian, and Syrian personalities – many of them big names in Levantine politics – are interviewed and combat footage is featured. From this remarkable piece of history, we can deduce a number of truths.

One of these truths is that the Levantine Arab shows two faces. As we can see from the documentary, the Levantine expresses himself warmly, floridly – the Arabs are a theatrical people – and with a degree of grandiloquence; and that attracts Westerners. In the 1970s and 1980s, many left-leaning Westerners were drawn in; for Arab political activists, even the guerrillas, insurgents, and terrorists, always do a splendid job selling themselves.

   

On the other side of the ledger, when sifting through the footage we find a different Levantine, one who is instrumentalist, rationalist, cruel, and ruthless; one who thinks nothing of exterminating an entire family because it belongs to a different faith or different sect within a faith. When, in the documentary, the Levantine admits to crimes, the atmosphere turns cold, and we are shaken awake. The Arab warmth, fellow-feeling, and sentimentalism disappears, and the Western viewer is disconcerted by the sudden shift – by the turn to a brutal frankness and an indifference to suffering.

The Levantine mentality pits ‘us’ against ‘the world’ – but who is the ‘us’? In Lebanon, it is the powerful families – the Jumblatt, Gemayel, Chamoun clans, each led by a charismatic patriarch – who dominate Lebanese state and society. The same model is replicated in Syria, where powerful families stand at the head of religious and ethnic communities. Like those of our pious European forefathers five hundred years ago, religious and national groupings abide by Carl Schmitt’s Friend / Enemy distinction: that is, they constitute themselves as political units.

The two attributes – the elevating of charismatic leaders and the forming of political units along sectarian lines – make up a composite. The third attribute can be found whenever one community interacts with the other, and that attribute is a gift for intrigue. The Arab politician, whether he be a guerilla leader, a religious leader, or the leader of a state, excels in deal-making, treachery, and back-stabbing; and in the quest for power, Levantine politicians, being political in the Schmittian sense, always turn to war as the last and first resort. Carefully and over time, the Levantine political actor builds up a militia, and to strengthen it and himself, he builds relationships with foreigners. He never considers himself above making alliances with foreign powers; going back at least forty to fifty years, Levantine militia leaders have entreated the Soviet Union, the Iran of the Mullahs, the Iraq of Saddam and Ba’ath, etc.; which is why, in the second half of the Syrian Civil War, we were presented with the spectacle of one Syrian army wholly controlled by Turks, another by Americans, another by Iranians and Russians, and so forth. Perhaps only ISIS and Al-Nusra / HTS stood for a truly sovereign Syria.

               

All the above characterises the political side of the Levantine aptly enough but does little to convey the Levantine’s physiognomy. The members of all High Cultures, according to Spengler, moved, spoke, gestured, in ways that were peculiar to their Culture: they run, swim, dance, fight, etc., in a unique fashion, and unique expressions alight upon their countenances. But because all High Cultures at some point – usually after 2000 or 2500 years – perish, the historian in nearly every instance will never experience the peoples of a Culture as a living reality; the ancient Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Peruvians, Romans and Greeks vanished, leaving behind nothing but monuments and ruins. And as for the ancient Chinese and Indians, who is to say that they and the inhabitants of today’s China and India are the one and same people?

               

Fortunately for the purposes of study, the Muslims, Jews, and Christians who belonged to the Magian Culture are still with us; Spengler believed that the Magian Culture’s decline and dissolution were comparatively recent; an insufficient amount of time had passed for the remnant peoples of the Culture – the fellahin – to disperse like dust in the wind. The consequence is that we can see, thanks to the mediums of film and TV, how the Levantine deports himself in his natural habitat.

               

A handful of instances, recorded on TV news, give us insight. Recall from the Lebanese civil war documentary the Palestinian soldiers who were standing in uniform at the Beirut docks, at the time of the PLO’s expulsion from Lebanon; the scruffy, ill-dressed, bearded men, trying to put a brave face on it, treated the event as a celebration and fired their Kalashnikov rifles in the air, thereby wasting precious ammunition. And then, forty-two years later, we were treated to the scenes of the jubilant Syrian populace cavorting and dancing in the street, the Syrian women ululating, after the Assad regime was overthrown. The two spectacles accentuate the differences in conduct and bearing of the Arabs and the Germans, particularly the Germans of the old Reich (Second and Third); and they prove the falsity of the equivalence, so beloved by American conservatives, of the Arabs – especially the Arabs who belong to Hamas and other jihadi organisations – with the ‘Nazis’.

               

Equally enlightening is the TV footage of that other Levantine people – the Israeli Jews. As an amateur ethnologist, I am captivated whenever Israelis appear; the differences in physiognomy between them and Europeans become readily apparent, as do the differences in motion; when the Israeli Jews dance their Jewish dances (in celebration, for instance, of returned Israeli hostages), and clap hands, sing, bounce up and down, gesticulate, they deport themselves in a most un-Western manner, which is to say, they caper like the Levantines that they are.

               

In this context, Israel matters for reasons geopolitical as well as racial. It is the presence of the Jewish State that helped create our attitude towards Syria; otherwise, little exists in Syria to attract us. A peripheral theater in WWII, it along with Lebanon was invaded by the British, the Australians, and the Free French in 1941. In 1946, Syria won its independence from the French, but its elected government – a rarity in the Middle East – was overthrown in a military coup in 1949, and after that, Syria went through more coups than an African republic.

In this period, a legend was born: the legend of Germans (former ‘Nazis’) taking refuge in the Arab post-colonial states and plotting with Arab governments to destroy Israel. You can read about the myth in The Beast Reawakens: Fascism's Resurgence from Hitler's Spymasters to Today's Neo-Nazi Groups and Right-Wing Extremists (1997) by Martin E. Lee, who was a liberal antifascist (the book reads as though it were written by some hack at the Southern Poverty Law Centre). One man more than any other bears responsibility for loosing this conspiracy theory upon the world, and that is the late British airport novelist Frederick Forsyth, whose The Odessa File (1972) undammed a flood of imitations.

             

But as Hitler and the Third Reich moved further away in time, great ideological changes occurred, in both Syria and Germany.

After the 1963 coup in Syria, Ba’athists took power. The Ba’athist ideology, one of Arab nationalism and Arab socialism, was conceived by Arab intellectuals in the 1930s, whom had been at least partially influenced by the example of National Socialist Germany. I would not make too much of this – we must not fuse, as many American conservatives do, the ideology of the Arabs and ideology of the ‘Nazis’; for Hitler’s influence in the first half of the 20^th century was as inescapable as Napoleon’s in the first half of the 19^th; and in the first few years after 1945, the influence lingered; Yockey writes in The Enemy of Europe (1953): ‘After the Second World War, the opponents of the Hero [Hitler] of that War were still dominated by his compelling personality’ and ‘Either they took up his ideas and declared them their own, or they continued to fight against him’; Yockey asserts, ‘Of a new Idea, independent of that Hero, there was not a trace’.

Yockey died in 1960; had he lived until the end of the 1960s, he would have recognised that the mood had shifted. After Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 Arab Israeli war, Nassar’s star had fallen, and Arafat’s – and that of the PLO fedayeen – had risen. In 1966, a palace coup in Syria had steered Ba’athist rulers closer to the Far Left; the old Arab nationalist faction of Ba’athism was usurped, a new ‘Neo-Ba’athist’ faction, heavily influenced by Lenin and Mao, taking its place. In 1970, after yet another palace coup, Hafez al-Assad seized power, and he transformed the ideology of Syrian Ba’ath into something called Assadism. One year later, Nixon abolished the gold standard and the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, and with disastrous consequences; and so, the tumultuous decade that was the 1970s began.

               

At this turning point, we see a 20^th century divided into halves, the divide being summed up by the contrast of Arafat and Nasser. 

The suave and debonair Nasser, who dresses like a man of the 1940s and 1950s, is set off against the scruffy and bearded Arafat, who wears combat fatigues – like Fidel Castro or Che Guevara – and the keffiyeh, which is today worn by pro-Palestinian demonstrators the world over. Clearly, the ‘Nazis’ belong to the first half of the century, the Nasser half, whereas the children of the ‘Nazis’ – the members of the pro-Palestinian Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang, for instance – belong to the second, the Arafat half. It is the visual, the aesthetic, that determines the difference. By the late 1970s, the Palestinians and certain elements of the New Left had become associated with international terrorism; and the seventies terrorist, perhaps following the theory of Guy Debord and the Situationists, sought to make a spectacle of himself, projecting his theatrical feats and crimes through the media across vast distances, as the British literary critic John Sullivan points out; the terrorist, Sullivan observed, had accomplished what Heidegger called ‘de-severance’, that is, a shortening of the distance between himself and others, the stunt being performed by electronic means.

               

What happened to Syria in this period? After the 1970 coup, Hafez had in effect crowned himself king; and for all intents and purposes, Syria, Libya, and Egypt had become monarchies.

Superficially, Syria was treading a ‘left’ path; it took on the mantle of repressive and progressive states such as communist Cuba, North Korea, and Romania; it became more and more isolated, like North Korea – a hermit kingdom, but a hermit kingdom of the Arab world. And in another significant development, one most pertinent to the Syria of forty years later, Syria under Assad militarised to an extent that was unusual for a poor Arab and Muslim country. To give one example: in order to shoot down Israeli jets, Syria and Egypt acquired enormous quantities of anti-air missiles in the lead-up to the 1973 Arab Israeli war, the stockpiles exceeding those of NATO and the Warsaw Pact; the Levant had become the most militarised place on Earth.

After its defeat – which was a narrow one – in the 1973 war, Syria was embroiled in Arab crises; Lebanon was splitting apart at the seams, engulfed in sectarian violence; and so, the rulers of Lebanon invited the Syrians in.

The Lebanese crisis broke out at the same time as the capitalist crisis. By 1973, markets belatedly recognised that the US’ departure from gold was permanent, not temporary, and so collapsed; and inflation overtook the world. The inflation led to an extraordinary rise in commodity prices (including oil prices) and the enrichment of the Arabs of the Gulf states. In movies, TV shows, and novels, Arabs were portrayed as greedy gougers with too much money, and as men of great power who were backwards, sexually depraved, cruel, and worst of all, infected by anti-Semitism (whatever ‘Semitism’ is). In Western popular culture, the Arabs of the Gulf and the Levant were depicted as loathsome, and the Jews of Israel as brave, indomitable.

By the early 1980s, the image of Israel and the Jews had changed, as had the relations between the economies of the West and the Middle East. In a stunning reversal, commodity prices, including gold and oil, fell and fell hard; and the countries that made a living out of exporting commodities – countries such as Chile and Australia – suffered the most. The effect of the deflation was compounded in Third World countries, especially those that made a living out of selling oil; and as a result of economic strain, Iran and Iraq went to war. In Lebanon, the civil war took a turn for the worse, and the Maronite Christian government invited Israel into Lebanon in the hope that the Israelis would extirpate the Palestinians, rout the Syrians, and entrench the Maronites. In Lebanon in 1982, Syria and Israel fought their last conventional battle, and Israel won after a brief fight; and afterwards, military victory turned into political defeat.

Even though the Arabs committed most of the notorious atrocities – the Sabra-Chatila massacre, for instance – of the Lebanon war, Israel’s wanton and destructive campaign, including the siege of Beirut, led to left-wing world opinion turning against the Jewish State. Arab terrorism of the spectacular variety continued into the mid-eighties, but the symbolic character that was the jet-setting, jet-hijacking terrorist, who had a romantic and horrifying aura, gradually faded out of consciousness and went the way of disco and bellbottoms. And a new image of Israel sprang up: Israel the cruel, Israel the strong, Israel the occupier, Israel the oppressor – Israel, always lavishly equipped with the latest in US weapons and equipment gratis.

Or perhaps that unstinting US military aid and diplomatic support did cost Israel something: increased scrutiny. In the meantime, Hafez al-Assad’s Syria lived on in the dark. A Muslim Brotherhood revolt shook Hafez’ hold on power in the early eighties, and Hafez punished the rebels of the city of Hama by turning Hama into rubble and massacring thousands? tens of thousands? of its inhabitants without the world, for the most part, noticing and condemning.

By 1990, the Lebanon civil war had ended, and by 1993 – after the signing of the Oslo Accords – an uneasy peace reigned in the Levant, for in the West, economic conditions had improved, and the beneficial effects made themselves felt worldwide. The gold / US dollar price stopped bounding up and down, and for the next two decades it stayed within a more or less fixed band; and the US stock market staged a remarkable recovery. By the late eighties, communism in the US – and in other Western countries – had shrivelled up and all but breathed its last.

Appropriately enough, Hafez al-Assad – that Cold War relic – died at the start of the 21^st century. Power passed on to his son, and now Ba’athism, ‘Arab socialism’, would face its biggest challenge.

 

III.          The Syrian Autumn, 9/11, The Arab Spring, and the Syrian Civil War

 

Wrongly, as it turned out, many believed that Bashar, the new ruler, would reform Syria and do so because of his youth and his cosmopolitan, ‘Europeanised’ outlook. A new age dawned – the ‘Syrian Autumn’, which was precursor to the ‘Arab Spring’.

             

To understand this false dawn, one must understand the zeitgeist, which shall explain why it is that the West – and the Syrians – were taken in by the fresh and youthful Assad.

I have long argued that to know an epoch, you must know its popular culture. For example, if you want to know the 2000s, watch 2000s television – particularly American daytime television (for in this period, as America went, so the world went). In these productions, Americans are clean, well-dressed, smart, well-groomed, stylish; admittedly, some Americans who are obese put in a showing now and then (and oddly enough, Syria, like the US, had become one of the most obese countries in the world); but by and large, most Americans made the effort to look healthy and attractive. And the décor of their homes, cafés, restaurants, and bars pleases the eye; Americans lived well; you detect an air of crispness and stylishness; to grasp it, compare TV shows of the 2000s to those of the 1970s, which was the ‘decade that taste forgot’.

               

Hafez belonged to the 1970s, and Bashar to the 2000s – or so it seemed.

 

Bashar, who speaks French and English and has a British-born wife, was said to have "inspired hopes" for reform, and a "Damascus Spring" of intense political and social debate took place from July 2000 to August 2001.[18] The period was characterized by the emergence of numerous political forums or salons where groups of like minded people met in private houses to debate political and social issues. The phenomenon of salons spread rapidly in Damascus and to a lesser extent in other cities. Political activists, such as, Riad Seif, Haitham al-Maleh, Kamal al-Labwani, Riyad al-Turk, and Aref Dalila were important in mobilizing the movement.[19] The most famous of the forums were the Riad Seif Forum and the Jamal al-Atassi Forum. The Damascus Spring ended in August 2001 with the arrest and imprisonment of ten leading activists who had called for democratic elections and a campaign of civil disobedience.[20]

 

The ‘Damascus Spring’ ended on a sour note, but one could not fault the Syrian liberals for holding high hopes. In the early 2000s, the main American capital markets – the DJIA and the S&P 500 – were situated on the tail-end of the late nineties economic boom, an expansion that had been unprecedented. In the Levant at the turn of the century, the American success of the 1990s reinforced the lesson, partly drawn from Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ thesis, that any socialism whatsoever – even Arab socialism – needed to be abandoned. And so, in this spirit, it was hoped by the modernisers that Bashar would usher in ‘free-market reforms’; and economic liberalism leads to political liberalism, or so the argument goes.

               

Then 9/11 happened. Overnight, US geopolitics changed.

When assessing this era, we on the dissident Right can say that Bush 45, when responding to 9/11, made two mistakes.

The first of these was to refrain from doing a Trump and failing to introduce – right after 9/11, when the time was perfect for it – a ban on all Muslims entering the US. Hardly any American of consequence would have opposed such a ban, but Bush 45 failed to strike while the iron was hot; and paradoxically, Muslim immigration only increased after 9/11.

Bush made a second mistake by invading Afghanistan and Iraq. One could understand why the US invaded Afghanistan; for Bush, along with most of the world, believed that Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda perpetrated 9/11. At the time, I and many others on the dissident Right were unconvinced; but we could not explain incontrovertibly what had happened and who the guilty parties were; and besides which, we inhabited the fringes, and our opinions carried no weight. In the weeks after 9/11, Americans were adrift; reeling in shock, America, on the eve of the invasion of Afghanistan, found itself in the same position as Austria-Hungary after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife. We will recall that after the assassination, Serbia refused Austria-Hungary’s demands, which were quite reasonable, and the result was that Austria-Hungary invaded. Like the Serbs in 1914, the Taliban in 2001 proved to be intractable; the Taliban refused to hand Bin Laden over, for the Taliban valued loyalty to Bin Laden, a fellow jihadist, above the well-being of Afghanis; and so, the US invaded.

               

In the weeks after 9/11, America enjoyed the world’s sympathy, a sympathy that Bush squandered. As the 2000s progressed, the Taliban and then the Iraqi Ba’athists became folk heroes to the anti-war Left and Right, and Bush the world’s most hated man. In the first weeks after 9/11, Assad saw a political opportunity and exploited it:

 

During a state visit by British Prime Minister Tony Blair to Syria in October 2001, Bashar publicly condemned the United States invasion of Afghanistan in a joint press conference, stating that "[w]e cannot accept what we see every day on our television screens – the killing of innocent civilians. There are hundreds dying every day." Assad also praised Palestinian militant groups as "freedom fighters" and criticised Israel and the Western world during the conference. British officials subsequently described Assad's political views as being more conciliatory in private, claiming that he criticised the September 11 attacks and accepted the legitimacy of the State of Israel.[77]

 

Bashar fitted into the third of Bush’s biggest mistakes: the pursuit of a ‘War on Terror’ without clear objectives and the prosecution of the war using methods that would tarnish the US’ reputation.

 

Following the September 11 attacks and during the early stages of the US-led war on terror, "Syria had emerged as one of the CIA's most effective intelligence allies in the fight against al-Qaeda,"[78] with "the quality and quantity of information from Syria [having] exceeded the Agency's expectations."[78] Syria closely cooperated with the CIA's detention and interrogation program of people deemed "illegal enemy combatants"; Syrian prisons were a major site of extraordinary rendition by the CIA of alleged al-Qaeda members where they were tortured by Syrian interrogators on behalf of the CIA.[79][80][81] According to a 2013 report by the Open Society Foundations, Syria was one of the "most common destinations for rendered suspects" under the CIA's program.[82]

 

We can say ‘Homo homini lupus’ – ‘Man is a wolf to man’ – and paraphrase: ‘Arab is a wolf to Arab’. Assad, along with Ghaddafi and Putin, managed to play all sides off against the other; and the three adopted the pose of the progressive, the friend of the Arabs, the champion of the Third World against Western imperialism, colonialism, racism, etc.

These conflicts – between the West and the Muslim world, the West and the Arabs – revived the Far Left. The Stop the War marches and the activism against Israel accomplished little; but to the Far Left, the agitation served as a shot in the arm.

              

Left-wing activism was directed against US foreign policy – what of the domestic? US capital markets started the decade strong, and then declined, in real terms – that is, terms adjusted for inflation, which by the end of the decade had increased dramatically. In 2000, gold cost $USD250 an ounce; in 2008, $USD1000. By the late 2000s, the US dollar was losing value, as was many a loan portfolio held by many a bank; and markets sagged as lenders began to realise that borrowers, because of deteriorating economic circumstances, would be unable to repay loans. And suddenly and without warning, the inflation came to an end: towards the end of 2008, the dollar appreciated, commodity prices (including the gold price) fell and fell hard, and a deflationary episode ensued, one resembling that of the early 1980s; and almost overnight, liquidity dried up, and banks were unable to repay borrowings from other banks. Hence the global financial crisis, which affected not only America but Syria. The world financial crisis, in conjunction with a Syrian drought, pushed Syria to the brink and helped turn the populace against the Assad regime.

               

I now come to the Arab Spring, and I will preface my comments by pointing out that when dealing with it, we are dealing with certain elements that are unquantifiable. The Arabs had put up with the Ghaddafis, the Mubaraks, the Assads, for a long time, and had experienced a great deal of economic hardship; but they had never cracked – until 2011. What drove them to this point? Furthermore, at what juncture does a ‘revolutionary’ leader such as Ghaddafi pass from being ‘young’ and ‘fresh’ to ‘old’ and ‘sclerotic’? How and when does a leader become a symbol of stagnation and decadence? Political science cannot answer.  

               

With that in mind, let us narrate how the Arab Spring played out in Syria. If you want a recounting of the first few weeks, turn to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which provides this timeline. Given that the Syrian War went on for the thirteen years, I will not reproduce Britannica’s summary; it is enough to say that the Arab Spring presented all the rulers of the Levant – Assad included – with a dilemma. You are faced with a rebellious populace, and if you want to hang on to power, you need to accommodate. But being the men that they were, the Mubaraks, Assads, Ghaddafis, lacked the ability. Assad responded to the protests by sending in the SAA (Syrian Arab Army). And as could be expected, the SAA shot up ‘soft’ targets: it used machine guns, mortars, tank cannons, and artillery against crowds of civilians, crowds that were much like the crowds of Palestinians queuing outside aid centres in Gaza in 2025, the crowds that were shot and shelled by the Israeli army. Consequently, the Syrian civil protest became militarised. And China and Russia made that possible: for they saw how the US and Europe, equipped with UN Security Council resolutions, had acted against Ghaddafi, and they made sure to stymie any efforts to oust Assad.

In 2025, the war is a historical curio, meaning that we may discount its importance; but we should understand that, at the time, many on the Far Left – and the Far Right – took it seriously.

Those on the ‘extremes’ of politics interpreted the war in two ways. The first school of thought believed that the protests and the riots against Assad were a contrivance – the work of the CIA, Mossad, and the Soros Foundation – and it opined that the Syrian masses were puppets dancing on a string, puppets manipulated by masters in Tel Aviv and Washington, DC.

In opposition to this view, some on the Far Left welcomed the Arab Spring, venerated its martyrs (including the boy Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, who was tortured to death by Assad’s security forces), and saw in the Arab Spring an Incipient Arab revolution, one that would perhaps turn communist. This faction of the Left understood it was being divisive, but it pressed on regardless, because Marxism of any sort thrives on division; siding against Assad and the ‘anti-imperialists’ (that is, Iran, Russia, and China) invigorated the faction; and the Syrian war, which dragged on without, apparently, an end, gave it plenty of fuel.  

In the 2010s, the Syrian war provided much fodder because the war was not resolved: for the West did not want to resolve it. The Libyan civil war finished quickly, thanks to Western intervention, and it finished before the West had time to take stock of the Libyan rebels; in the dramatic days of 2011, the Western powers assumed – vaguely, hopefully – that the rebels were aligned with them ideologically – that the rebels wanted liberal democracy and free and fair democratic elections, held in the best Jimmy Carter-approved tradition. Events proceeded at such a dizzying pace that the West could be forgiven for failing to gauge the rebels accurately; but in the case of the Syrian war, Western policy makers and intellectuals – including Marxist intellectuals – had more time to take the measure of the ideological content of the Syrian revolution. And the West did not like what it saw. True, the anti-Assad Syrians, perhaps influenced by libertarian and anarchist theory, carried out a decentralised and grass-roots rebellion; but all the same, the rebels who came to fore adhered to Islam and a coarse jihadi brand of Islam at that. For the first time, distinctions were drawn by opinion makers in the West between good and bad Islamic sects; Assad belonged to the Alawite sect, and that made Assad, in the words of Mike Enoch, the most ‘civilised’ actor in the conflict. Prominent thinkers on the Far Right and Far Left agreed on the importance of being ‘civilised’, as did the US, UK, and European political establishments, which grudgingly supplied some rebel groups – the ‘decent’, ‘vetted’ ones – but not nearly enough; the Kurds, who were suitably progressive, reaped the lion’s share.

Looking back on the war, we can make a number of observations about the Levantines. One observation is that Levantines possess a genius for forming small but active fighting organisations: in the course of the Syrian war, we encounter a bewildering alphabet soup of miniature armies, forming, splitting, and re-forming, and even a Syrian keeps track of it all with difficulty. The Levantine jihadist who formed a new organisation was entering a crowded and competitive market; and the question he posed to himself was, ‘How can I distinguish myself from my rivals?’. From its first appearance, ISIS overcame the hurdle of market differentiation in a startling and effective way.

Another observation that arises is that Syria is composed of multifarious groups that deeply dislike one another, and this phenomenon gives the lie, perhaps, to any notions of Syrian unity and nationalism. We see it in the vitriolic discourse on social media after the fall of the Assad regime; the Alawites, the Druze, the Kurds, etc., are locked in combat, and none of them appear to want Syria as such to do well. It goes without saying that these tensions were exacerbated in the 2010s; Assad, fighting for his survival, turned Syria into a sectarian state; but Assad did not invent these contradictions – they dwelled underneath the surface well before the war, and after the war, they broke out into the open.

In the course of the war, we in the West were instructed by Assad and his Russian sponsors in the differences between good and bad Islam, good and bad jihadism; Hezbollah, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and pro-Assad Islamist militias (drawn from various Islamic countries) were considered good, and ISIS and anti-Assadist Islamists bad. This had consequences: Hezbollah helped the Russians, Iranians, and the SAA lay waste to towns and cities, and by doing so, Hezbollah damaged its reputation irreparably. In 2006, Hezbollah had fought Israel to a standstill and had become heroes in the eyes of the Arabs; but after 2011, Hezbollah set to work repressing the Arab Spring and the anti-Assad rebellion, and earned the enmity of the Arabs who had come to see Assad as a pariah.

This brings us to some of the peculiarities of the war that may be of interest to the political scientist who prioritises technical elements. In the battle for Syria and Lebanon in WWII, a front line separated the two belligerents, as was standard; and in the battle for Syria in the 21^st century war, we see not neat front lines but blobs that appear, expand, and contract behind enemy lines, sometimes adjacent even to Damascus. The ebb and flow recalls that of the insurgent wars of the 20^th century, but in Syria, the belligerents battled not for the possession of ‘hearts and minds’ but for the possession of cities – charming old cities, the oldest in the world – and the highways connecting them.

 

End of Part I.

Bootcut and Low Rise: Race, Nationalism, Holocaust Revisionism, and Men's Fashion in the 2000s

I.

 

I read Angelo Plume's journey through the history of the past 14 years with great interest, not only because his impressions of the 2020s and the 2010s mirror my own, but because his journey ends at the same destination that many people in the movement have found themselves at: at the end of the line. In keeping with most ideological polemics written by those in the movement today, Plume's essay takes a negative and pessimistic view of the present and the future, and while that view is not one that I disagree with entirely, it is one that ought to raise the question, 'How on earth do you expect it to attract a following?'.

 

If we are to look to the history of politics since the beginning of recorded time, we see that no political movement has won power with the message that life is bad today, that life will be worse tomorrow, and that there are no answers. Experience shows that politics relies on simplicity and that it seeks simple solutions to difficult problems. Take Marxism, for example: life in Europe in the 19th century in the works of Marx is portrayed as hell on Earth; but fortunately, the way Marx tells it, the answer lies close to hand, and the misery of the working class will be resolved in the fashion of a 19th century comic opera or melodramatic novel; that is, there will be a happy ending. Today, the communist movement lacks that certainty, but so does the 'Alt Right' or dissident Right or white nationalist movement.

 

Some in the white nationalist movement project apocalyptic, millenarian, chiliastic futures, but others are smart enough to know that Western man has lived through the 'end times' many times - just look at European man at the time of medieval Europe - and they know that eschatology has every time come to naught. In any case, I do not think that apocalypticism, the breakdown of civilisation, and a reversion to Darwin’s 'survival of the fittest' accord with human nature; if we ever did see the breakdown of civilisation, and the end of electricity, gas, running water, sanitation, shopping malls, and supermarkets, then women would make sure that men had all these up and running again in no time. It is women's nagging men that drove men to devise these luxuries in the first place.

 

To return to Plume: Plume's problem relates to what we moderns call the 'standard of living', the 'quality of life', and what Aristotle called the 'Good Life'; and the doctrine of vitalism, associated with Nietzsche and Shaw, comes into it as well.

 

To explain how it is that these doctrines relate to the present, I will point to today's media. Every day, I check the news. And unlike my boomer parents, I do not read newspapers; instead, I look at websites. On my morning reading list can be found over two dozen conservative sites and under ten dissident Right sites. They serve up a diet of endless bad news, so much so that I have taken to calling my morning news the 'bad news bulletin'. Are the journalists writing this news portraying real life? No, says Nietzsche: no individual can sum up the value of Life with a capital 'L'. These journalists are portraying life as they see it, however, and that puts me in a difficult position. When reading the bad news bulletin, I do not disagree with the facts as presented, but I do ask myself, do the facts entail that life in the Anglosphere as these journalists see it is worth living? Judging by the articles, the answer often is no. The writers will make the rejoinder: 'No, what I have written for this week's column does not sum up my attitudes towards Life; when you read me, you caught me on a bad day'. Besides which (and this is the conservative writer speaking), 'All of America's problems will be resolved once we re-elect Trump'. My response is: perhaps, perhaps not, but it seems singularly unwise to stake the future of your country and the future of yourself on the election of one man.

 

Having said that, the coming to power of a distinguished leader can mark a turn towards the Good Life. Hitler was once quoted as saying - and I cannot find the origin of the quotation - 'We National Socialists have proved that Germans can live, and live well, without the Jews, and this is the hardest blow we have struck against them'. That quotation, if genuine, shows that Hitler valued 'living well', Aristotle's Good Life; and in part it explains the continuing appeal of German National Socialism eight decades later.

 

We can think of other societies and nations in other historical epochs that valued the Good Life, and among these is the Roman. For centuries, the Romans lived lives of refinement, as we have seen from their architecture, their houses, their clothes. Not every Roman approached the standards of the Roman upper class, of course, but any falling short hardly mattered; it was only the overall standard that mattered.

 

So, when considering overall standards, the question we in the West in 2024 ought to ask is this: is there any time in the recent history that we have overall, like the Romans, followed a certain standard that entailed the Good Life? And if we are no longer abiding by that standard, why? And surely any obstacles that stand in the way of our reaching the Good Life can be overcome - any difficulties smoothed over, ameliorated, if not resolved altogether, by politics?

 

The inspiration for this essay came to me in the lockdown years, when to pass the time, I watched past episodes of a long running daytime American NBC TV drama. In one episode from 2006, two of the heroes were sitting in a bar drinking a beer while ‘deep house’ music blared in the background. Both characters were played by men who were in their fifties but who looked young for their age and who had not let themselves go to seed. They were reasonably well-groomed and were dressed in the casual clothes (including the bootcut jeans) that were fashionable at the time. And I saw in later episodes that the two men's wives were equally as well-dressed and groomed; that the two couples lived in middle-class homes; and that the homes were well-furnished, clean, and full of light and air. Now, all this sounds unremarkable, and so it is; but you must consider that at the time I was viewing the show, simple pleasures such as drinking with friends in a bar were denied to me. And because of the closure of barbers, hairdressers, beauty salons, gyms, and retail clothing outlets at the time, it was quite easy for one to enter a state of dishevelment and hence self-degradation, the outcome sought after by our Covidian masters, who would arrest you if you had the temerity to walk outdoors without wearing a surgical mask. So, I envied these characters on my TV screen, and I wondered at the fact that once - in the America of 2006 - living the Good Life was the norm. For people in the years 2020 to 2022 had become quite deranged, and even though I liked to think in those years that I was holding myself aloof from the madness, gradually the madness came to infect even me, and like them, I began to lose touch with reality; but ironically, my contact with it was restored by my watching an old American TV show.

 

After the experience, I set myself the task of coming up with answers to two questions: what is normal? and what is the Good Life?

 

II.

 

The politics of the 1990s has been written about many times, and most of the writings revolve around the themes of the 'End of History' and the 'End of Politics', as we see in this Travis LeBlanc piece here. In America in the nineties, Far Right politics travelled along the same road as mainstream politics; both preached the doctrine of the 'End of Ideology' and 'End of Politics'. The white nationalist movement, the militia movement, the survivalist movement, all eschewed politics and participation in civic life, and the members of these movements isolated themselves in compounds and camps, the most famous being William Pierce's compound in rural Virginia, there to await the end of the world, which would occur in the year 2000 perhaps. 

 

On the Continent, the decade saw the slow rise of Far-Right populism. Interesting possibilities presented themselves after the reunification of Germany, and liberal observers feared a resurgence of German nationalism, but they need not have bothered, because whatever 'Neo-Nazi' movement there was in reunified Germany was overtaken by the skinhead movement, which was as apolitical as could be.

 

Far more interesting a subject than nineties politics or the lack thereof is how people lived. Were white people better off in the nineties? We could give the rote answer that our dissident Right ideology compels us to give, which is yes, the residents of the Anglosphere were far better off because while the Great Replacement was occurring in that decade, it had not yet picked up steam; in the case of Australia, the annual intake of immigrants would not reach the hundreds of thousands until the following decade.

 

On the other hand, one answer to our question, and one stock standard white nationalist answer, would be no. The Dukes, Metzgers, Pierces, would point to Jewish power, which to them seemed especially pronounced in the nineties. Even worse was the fact that little awareness of the Jewish question and the question of Jewish power and influence existed. For one thing, the Internet was barely in its infancy, and hardly any respectable person had heard of Holocaust Revisionism, much less accessed forbidden works online; in those days, if you wanted to read a book by a nationalist or a Revisionist, you had to write overseas to some publisher of forbidden books. The result was that in the nineties the proponents of Holocaust Exterminationism and anti-Nazism had free rein. The Jewish party line on anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, the National Socialists, the events of WWII, the founding of the State of Israel were spread all over the culture. The Holocaust and WWII stories had gotten their start in the seventies and eighties and became reached their peak in the nineties; most likely the turning point was the release of Schindler's List (1993), which at the time was acclaimed by all and sundry as a moving and truthful account of Hitler's persecution and extermination of the Jews.

 

But let us put these dissident Right views to one side for the moment. If we are to evaluate how good white people had it in the nineties, we must consider how they lived. And when I look at that period objectively, I must admit that were I transported to it in a time machine and made to relive it, I would most likely be bored and frustrated. For one, I would be forced to live without modern conveniences such as the smartphone and high-speed broadband Internet, both of which we today take for granted. These luxuries, especially the Internet, have become necessities, and they are no longer luxuries; we can no longer imagine a life without them any more than we can imagine it without electricity and hot and cold running water.

 

How do we transport ourselves mentally to such archaic times? To gauge a bygone epoch, your best course is to watch its TV. If you look up '1990s men's fashions' or '2000s men's fashions' in a search engine, the results will bring up photo after photo of garishly attired rap and boy band performers; you simply will not be able to find pictures of what ordinary men wore. It is only TV that can return you to your past. During lockdown, my positive experience of revisiting the past through watching old TV shows prompted me to obtain compilations of late-nineties episodes of a popular daytime American ABC TV drama; and in these were included all the advertisements that accompanied each broadcast. This complete package, to me, proved to be revelatory; watching the TV shows and the ads from a bygone age is the closest thing we have to time travel; when you see an actor wearing a particular article of clothing, all of a sudden a vivid memory can thrust itself up into the forefront of your consciousness; you are reminded of owning that shirt or that raincoat with that exact colour and that exact pattern. In addition, the advertising brings back memories when it promotes the popular TV shows and movies of the time: when watching the ads for these, you remember with a jolt that you had seen that TV show in your living room and that movie in the cinema at the nearby mall. (Back in those days, you had to visit a cinema if you wanted to see a new movie, and you frequently did want to see that movie; for movies were more popular and significant then than they are now).

 

A sociologist would find the advertisements to be of interest because they give an insight into American life. The ads hawk the usual products - snack food, medicines, household cleaning liquids, toothpaste, etc. - and, to my surprise, medicines, remedies, hygienic items, and enhancers for everything that takes place below the belt. The brutally frank treatment of intimate subjects blows out of the water the notion that Americans are prudish about their bodily functions.

 

In the current year, we are a little wiser, and we can say that most of the worst of the afflictions suffered by everyday Americans in the nineties - afflictions such as heartburn and constipation - came about because of the American diet, which is atrocious. And the subject of diet brings us to another staple of American life in the nineties: the fat man. In the eighties, most male actors, even the middle-aged ones, looked thin, and alarmingly so. The overweight actor, e.g., John Candy, was a rarity and usually a comic figure. But by the nineties, all that had changed. We saw more and more of the chubby character, in TV shows, movies, and advertisements; first we saw him as a background character, then as a lead. Towards the end of the decade, the balding, overweight, middle-aged, usually wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a pair of baggy shorts, came to epitomise the American male. He is a pathetic and comic figure, and he is a slave to his appetites, a plump buffoon who dances ecstatically at the thought of eating a box of Pop Tarts or a Rice Krispie bar.

 

The countervailing force is the stock-standard nineties action hero - the muscle man who usually wears a trench coat and a mullet. The latter signified the hero's strength, power, and virility. Nowadays, it seems gauche. And so did most of nineties men's fashion, which wanted to revive some of the worst items of fifties men's fashion, e.g. the big, loose, and baggy suit. Perhaps the nineties man liked the baggy suit because it hung on his frame comfortably, and perhaps he disliked the eighties suit because it clung tight; eighties suits were made for skinny and runty men.

 

The nineties mimicked the fashion of the fifties but forgoed the staidness of the fifties. A word that springs to mind when contemplating the popular culture of the nineties is: disorder. An underlying zaniness and freneticism, a furious energy, exists, and when you are on the receiving end of it for hours and hours, it becomes intolerable. In the nineties, if I wanted to get away from it all, I would go bushwalking with my friends, because in the tranquillity of the bush, I would be completely isolated from nineties pop culture, politics, and civilisation.

 

A conservative and harmonious side to American pop culture at the time does exist. In certain of the TV ads, we see American life being depicted as a life of comfort, ease, and serenity. See this commercial for Folger's coffee, starring country singer Randy Travis. He wakes up in the morning on his tour bus, looking improbably well-groomed and good-tempered; not for him the early morning dishevelment and hangover. Naturally enough, the beaming Travers, wearing a mullet and resplendent in a pristine white t-shirt and a pair of tight jeans, bursts into song, and he sings the praises of the Folgers brand; and you the viewer cannot help but find the music pleasing and reassuring. I am tempted to call this commercial and the hundreds of others like it implicitly white, perhaps even explicitly white, because the advertising men, knowing their market, wanted the audience to associate the product with whiteness and Americanism. And on that level, the ad men succeeded.

 

III.

 

I, like millions of other non-Americans in the Anglosphere, once found American popular culture to be seductive and enticing; now I do not. And today many popular culture afficionados who are devotees of American movies, TV shows, and comic books agree with me.

 

Some blame the politicisation of pop culture that occurred in the 2010s. The narrative goes that Hollywood and other mass producers of American popular culture had in the 2010s been infected with the new creed of Social Justice; that Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) infiltrated the American entertainment establishment and turned it 'woke'; that, using the same methods of communist infiltrators, the SJWs snuck into the great institutions and subverted them.

 

I am in broad agreement with the critics of SJWism, and one would be foolish to deny their thesis. After all, it is confirmed every day by the latest announcement in the entertainment news that a white character from a beloved franchise is being turned black, that he is being replaced by a female, that he is being turned into a homosexual, and so forth. The SJWs now parody themselves, and worse, they behaved in such a flagrantly provocative fashion that they have drawn attention to themselves - the attention of the entire world. As such, they have made American pop culture a laughingstock.

 

But what strikes me as being most important is that popular culture no longer entertains as it once did; it no longer approaches the old standard. The American entertainment industry in the old days worked like a factory, pumping out a product of a certain quality that the world came to respect. Take for example Hollywood in the years of the Silver Age, when it worked under the now maligned studio system; it churned out movies every year that were often A-grade, sometimes B-grade, but never C-grade. Audiences came to expect their entertainment to be somewhat dull but always robust; they could count on the studios to serve a meal that was satisfying and nutritious. My father, a boomer, once confessed to me that he never refused to see a Clint Eastwood movie because, in his words, 'You know what you're going to get'. But now, the rug has pulled out from under that faithful audience, and the media / entertainment complex turns out a shoddy product.

 

Thanks to the Internet, today the longtime fans of a franchise can assemble on a message board and immediately comment on a new instalment. They tend to dissect it, and they strive to work out where it went wrong and how it could have been made right. One YouTube commentator came to my attention when he suggested a brilliant fix for the movie, The Force Awakens (2015), a flawed movie that was the first instance of 'Disney Star Wars', 'SJW Star Wars'. This way the fans write better stories than the screenwriters themselves; the screenwriters, who are generally incompetent, almost have their job done for them. Fans of a franchise will take it more seriously than the writers, directors, and producers who work on it. This close attention to past and present of a franchise is needed, because the studios today seem largely indifferent. A strange apathy pervades the media and entertainment complex, and this is conjoined with a lack of professional standards and pride in one's work. My reaction whenever I encounter a shoddy instalment is to ask myself: how difficult it could be to devise a piece of escapism that is up to the standards that we all held to only two decades ago? In those days, the men who wrote the movies, comic books, and TV shows, produced decent work with little effort. But today any delivering of a good piece of work strains the capacity of we moderns, thus proving the dictum that a good artist will make the act of creation seem easy, a bad one will make it seem hard.

 

IV.

 

When remembering the decade that followed the nineties, most of us would prefer not to remember it at all; it is a decade most of us would prefer to forget. Bush, 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, the War on Terror: many good things may have happened in the 1960s, for instance, but no good thing happened in the 2000s - that is the consensus.

 

What of the politics; what was it in the 2000s that benefited the dissident Right? Unquestionably, the growth of the Internet proved to be a boon; it facilitated the spread of racialism, Holocaust Revisionism, WWII revisionism, Far Right nationalism, across the West - a spread that Jewry, liberals, the Left, the Antifa were powerless to stop. Activists of the dissident Right could now communicate with ease, through message boards, mailing lists, email, and social media. Old-time hands such as William Pierce, who had been part of the movement since the 1960s, took to the new media like ducks to water, and his incendiary American Dissident Voices talks were broadcast on Internet radio every Saturday every week of the year. And those who were new to dissident Right ideas could now devour the classics online; you could read Francis Parker Yockey's Imperium (1948), Pierce's The Turner Diaries (1978), George Lincoln Rockwell's This Time the World (1961), and the key works of Holocaust Revisionism, in addition to a great many other forbidden books.

 

The idea of a decentralised network that facilitated the untrammelled free flow of information outraged Jewish organisations such as the ADL and AIPAC, and if we are to look closely at the 2000s, we can discern in it the beginnings of the end of the conventional narrative of WWII, the Holocaust, and National Socialism - the narrative touted by organised Jewish groups, American conservatives, American leftists, and all the other political groupings. Hard as it is to believe today, YouTube hosted clips that explained to viewers 'How to spot a Jew'; in a crash-course in Jew-spotting, the viewer's attention would be directed to aspects of Jewish physiognomy, including the famous Jewish nose.

 

After the advent of the modern Internet, the attention span of youth shortened, for modern youth is not given to reading; it prefers sound bites, short film clips, and memes. But even though these fragments possessed little by way of written information, they sufficed enough to shatter the belief in the Holocaust. Belief in Hitler's gas chambers slowly and almost imperceptibly became 'uncool', and over the course of years only the fuddy-duddies, the boomers who read their morning newspapers religiously and beheld Holocaust epics such as Sophies Choice (1982) and Schindler's List (1993) in rapt wonder, held fast to the Holocaust tale. Jewish organisations such as the ADL and AIPAC looked at these trends with an unease and disquiet, an anxiety that grew into a panic when they realised that punitive measures against Revisionists such as Ernst Zündel were not working; how to stamp out the unbelief?

 

Because the Holocaust is nothing but the Jewish religion. As we know from the Bible, the idea of a Holocaust, a burnt sacrifice to Yahweh, a burnt sacrifice that is in the words of the Bible of a 'sweet savour to the Lord', forms the cornerstone of Judaism. Cain murders Abel for this reason: Abel offered up dead animals to Yahweh, and Abel's offering met with Yahweh's acceptance, Cain's offering did not; for Cain offered crops to Yahweh, who, not being a vegan, wanted animals instead; and so, Cain grew jealous of Abel and killed him. The account of the offering to Yahweh, and the stipulation of the right sort of offering, lays the foundation for all the Jewish history that came thereafter. A denial of the supreme efficacy of burnt sacrifice, whether that sacrifice be of animals or human beings, flies in the face of Jewish belief, and it is tantamount to heresy. 

 

To clarify: 'Holocaust' means 'burnt offering to God'; the word 'Holocaust' appears 13 times in the apocryphal books of the Bible, and 'burnt offering’ 243 times in the Old Testament. After the Bible comes the Talmud, which is a lengthy commentary on the Old Testament; and in it can be found the prophecy that six million Jews will be put to death in giant ovens by the non-Jews, all as a sacrifice to Yahweh who will, as part of his end of the bargain, restore to Jewry the lost State of Israel. By a miracle, the six million, according to the prophecy, will be resurrected, and the survivors of the Holocaust will go on to reclaim the land promised by Yahweh to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Thus, the covenant between Jewry and Yahweh will be fulfilled.

 

Judaism = Zionism = Holocaustism. Once we understand this, we can understand the fury of Jewry, the extreme anger of Jews, directed towards Ernst Zündel, Germar Rudolf, and Robert Faurisson. These men were persecuted mercilessly because of religion: viewed from a higher plane, the struggle between the political minions of organised Jewry and the Revisionists reproduces a religious conflict; a secular Zionism does not exist.

 

But that struggle, a metaphysical one, takes place at a level far above that of the consciousness of the 'normie'; the 'normie' could not give a tinker's cuss about either Holocaust Revisionism or Holocaust Exterminationism. So far as the 2000s is concerned, I am more interested in the 'normie' consciousness than the Jewish: so, I ask the question, how did people live?

 

V.

 

This article, which features many photos, covers some of the deliberately awful fashion choices made by the characters in the quintessential nineties TV show Seinfeld (1989-1998). Deliberately vacuous, blithe, complacent, and postmodern, Seinfeld, which proudly billed itself as the 'Show about nothing', embodies the nineties spirit. The article highlights some of the more grotesque of the men's apparel of that period, and perhaps by emphasising the abnormal, it neglects the normal; that is, if we are to pay too much attention to some of the weird and attention-grabbing pieces of men's clothing, we will overlook the day-to-day outfits worn by Jerry, George, Kramer, Newman, and the other male characters. And these day-to-day outfits were representative of the time: I argue that Seinfeld is typical nineties fashion and nineties aesthetic. I also argue that, going by Seinfeld, nineties menswear - and nineties men's style in general - is to be summed up as: functional but ugly.

 

Something that stands out is the typical nineties men's shirt worn by Jerry Seinfeld; it is a billowing and flowing affair, the sleeves slowly inflating like hot-air balloons before terminating in tight cuffs. It resembles the classic pirate's shirt (worn by Prince and other eighties stars) but without the frills at the front, and it recalls the shirt worn by the men of the Californian hippie and counter-culture folk in the late sixties, e.g., the men of Californian bands such as the Mamas and Papas.

 

Seinfeld, a comedy, prefers light to neutral colours, but most TV shows and movies of the nineties were dramas and inclined to the gothic and the Romantic. As such, fashionable women used makeup that made their faces look pale. In the time of the nineties, the makers of film and TV dramas wanted the dark as much as possible, and they filmed in shadow, the result being that the dramas looked as though they had been filmed in a cave or gothic mansion. In accordance with the dark and dingy atmosphere, actresses often were clothed to look frumpy and dowdy.

 

Why did artists make these choices? If we are to take up the method of the economist or the sociologist, we can trace the gloom or the optimism of a certain epoch back to that epoch's degree of economic expansion or contraction. Art that uses bright colours and tones matches a period of growth; art that uses dark colours and tones matches a period of recession. In other words, economics determines art, culture, life. But that model, which is a simple and reductionist one, does not fit the nineties. To ascertain this, let us make use of one measure that I have touched upon in previous articles: the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) divided by the price of the gold. Without going into detail, the DJIA is the most important stock market index of the 20th century, and to determine the Dow’s worth at a single point of time, we should use gold, which is the only true measure of an object's worth. If we assess how much the DJIA was worth in terms of gold throughout nineties, we will discover the following. In January 1990, the DJIA was worth 6.31 ounces of gold; in December 1999, the DJIA was worth an astounding 40.62 ounces. Never had the DJIA attained such a height and never since.

 

Some observers contend that the nineties ended not in December 1999 but in September 2001, the month of the 9/11 attack, because often the spirit of a decade will carry over a few months or even a few years into a following decade. For example, the argument could be made that the fifties ended, and the sixties began, at one crossroads: the month of JFK’s assassination.  

 

So, if we are to identify the end point of the nineties as being September 2001, what was the DJIA's worth in gold in that month? The answer is: 31.22 ounces.  Compared to today's, the value of the Dow then is extraordinary. I leave it to the reader to look up today's gold Dow for himself.

 

We should note that these valuations of the DJIA being worth ten, twenty, thirty, or forty ounces of gold reflect an estimate by investors of the future worth of America's capital stock. In their assessments, the markets are always looking ahead; they are not interested in the past; they are not even interested in the present; they are discounting to the present, that is, calculating the future worth of an asset and comparing it to the present worth. Accordingly, to judge by the absurdly high valuations made in the nineties, the future looked bright indeed.

 

So why then was the popular culture of America, and the Western world, so gloomy, weird, and gothic? Hazarding a guess, I surmise that the cultural arbiters of the nineties were reacting to the norms of the eighties; if we are to look back to the eighties, we remember that its colours were bright and pastel and that its spirit was relentlessly, even maniacally, optimistic. If you want an example of the eighties Zeitgeist, listen to one-hit wonder John Parr's St Elmo's Fire (Man in Motion). But the producers of culture in the nineties decided that as great as the decade of the eighties was, it had to be rejected and cast out.

 

This is the only explanation I can offer for the dark turn that the culture took. I remember reading a nineties music magazine and coming across an interview with the Jewish rock band Kiss; the lead singer Gene Simmons complained that the grunge bands took a too gloomy view of life. He agreed that yes, a band's first album could be expected to reflect gloomy tendencies, but after a band had gotten that first album out of the way, if a band experienced success, it should drop the affectations of doom and gloom. Simmons said, 'I don't understand these grunge bands: the economy is doing great, and they have all the p*ssy they want, so what is there to complain about?'.

 

VI.

 

I am not deprecating the pop culture of the nineties, because for the most part it sought to entertain, and that is laudable. When I am looking on YouTube at some of the best TV shows and popular songs from the decade, I feel, as many others do, exaltation, the cultural productions of the decade at their finest stand for pleasure, beauty, and life. The entertainment industry felt obliged to deliver something that was gratifying and pleasing, but that contradicts the ethic of the present age. Today's artists want to deliver something that is politically edifying, and the politics are always of the Left. And even when they are not being political, they want to deliver something that is not attractive but repulsive. Perhaps today's entertainers are motivated by the same desire as the practitioners of the Expressionist school of art a hundred years ago: both groups want to smear the world, tarnish it, make it hideous, and sap the will to live.

 

Having said that, with the passage of time come different views. In the 2000s, I thought that the reality show Jackass (2000-2007) was the most degenerate show on television. The show chronicled mad and self-destructive 'stunts', and the worst of these, in my view, was a dive by one of the Jackass 'performers' into a pool of sewage. When watching that episode, I thought to myself that America had reached the same level of depravity as Germany in the Weimar age. Twenty years on, I no longer feel the same response. The makers of Jackass wanted to shock, but today I can think of something worse than puerile shock effects, and that is the production of a piece of entertainment - whether it be a TV drama, a movie, a popular song, or whatever - that leaves us feeling flat and dull, demoralised, depressed.

 

When we are weighing up Jackass and other cultural confections of the 2000s, we must acknowledge the truth that in every epoch are to be found aspects of the good and the bad. For white men, especially Europeans, the worst decade of the 20th century was undoubtedly the 1940s. And even Americans, the winners of the war, spent time in misery after the war was over. The post-war gloominess gave birth to the film noir genre of American movies, a genre became famous all around the world, and copied, and finally, parodied. Looking back on the 1940s, I can say that I am glad that I did not live in it, and many of my contemporaries would agree. But can something good be said for the 1940s, especially the 1940s of the film-noir period? Yes, and that is this: the men and women dressed extremely well. Even at their lowest ebb, whites retained a sense of style. In the Anglosphere at least, that perhaps would have compensated for the post-war unemployment, inflation, rationing (which in the UK lasted for years after the war), recession, and so forth.

 

In summing up a particular epoch, we must acknowledge complexities, and again, that entails the acknowledgement of the existence of both the good and the evil. For now, when it comes to the 2000s, let us focus on the good.

 

As a starting point, look at men's fashion. A brief survey of a TV series such as Seinfeld reveals that there are two basic male body types, both of which were dressed in clothes that were in keeping with the spirit of the age. The tall, skinny, gangly Jerry Seinfeld body type opted for billowing shirts, tight pants, and belts with a large buckle; this fashion, as noted before, resembled the fashion of the 1960s; Jerry Seinfeld, when wearing his typical garb, looks like one of the frontmen of the Mamas and Papas. As a sort of contrast to Jerry, we are presented with the short to medium height male who is often overweight and who has a pugnacious temperament; think of the actor who plays Seinfeld's father. The type prefers mock 1950s clothing of a sort that is usually best suited for warm weather (Seinfeld's father lives in Florida).

 

All that disappeared on the 1st of January 2000. As soon as the 1990s finished, the style changed, and it is remarkable how quickly, judging by the TV shows and commercials that were broadcast in January 2000, the change took place.

 

It was as though a new edict came down as if from high, and that was this: you must, whether you be male or female, look good. When watching my favourite 2000s American TV dramas during lockdown, I was struck by how almost everything on the screen was chosen for its pleasantness and aesthetic appeal; every piece of decor, every couch, lampshade, bedspread, cushion, pot plant, was used in the same way that an Impressionist painter used colours on a canvas. The artistic choices blended in a harmonious whole, and the whole was pretty. And speaking of tones, the foremost of these were gold, bronze, and copper. The skilful use of these produced a pleasing and soothing effect that was to cross over from TV and into real life. In the cafés and bars that I frequented, one would see stained wooden floorboards and wall panels, purple or red painted walls, dimmed lights, and framed posters that were copies of posters from the Europe - usually France - of the 1920s. All of it conveyed stylishness, good taste, and evoked a distant and fondly remembered past. The same aesthetic impressed itself upon the interiors of upper-class houses, apartments, cafés, restaurants, bars that we saw on American TV. The stylistic choices sent a message understood by all, even if only subconsciously, and the message was this: it is permissible to relax, to let go, to enjoy yourself in pleasant surroundings.

 

Wearing nice clothes formed part of the new sensibility. What is notable is that men's fashion came to the forefront; we can speak of a new awareness of the value of men’s dressing well. The man's vintage tee made a comeback; manufacturers in the 2000s produced t-shirts that were in their design inspired by the t-shirts of the 1970s; these were conscious recreations the t-shirts that would have been worn at a Rolling Stones concert in 1973. The designs were of a cut that emphasised the good side of the male physique and made the wearer seem slim and healthy. Generally, the designs were flattering and could even transform a man; a good outfit would make a fat man appear thin and an old man appear young. For the hundred years prior, men's clothes had been dour and restrained, and perhaps that came about because of American influence - American men's fashion was influenced by America's Puritan and Yankee heritage - but now the stringency and restraint of the past was dispensed with; now the bright colours and pleasing designs of men's shirts allowed a man to preen himself like a peacock.

 

The new sensibility could be detected in the popularity of the reality show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (2003-2007). The premise of the show was that five homosexual hairdressers, fashion experts, interior decorators, et al., would call upon an unwitting man of normal (that is heterosexual) proclivities; they would then rebuild his life from scratch; they would give him a makeover and the interiors of his house a makeover as well. Usually after the makeover, the man's marriage would improve, or if he was single, his romantic prospects would improve, and this was because – and so the argument went - the makeover had given the man a new lease on life. One could dismiss it all at as homosexual propaganda, and so it was, but the intentions were benign; the show's producer averred that the heterosexual man following the advice of the Queer Eye gang would make him so attractive to women that he would need to 'beat them off with a stick'.

 

The show's underlying message, one that was never openly expressed, was a racialist one. It was this: white man, enjoy yourself, enjoy your wealth, enjoy your life, make use of your white privilege. I would watch the show every week with my housemate, and both of us would be impressed by the transformation of the straight guy by the end of the episode; but my housemate reflected that the good life depicted in the show lay outside the bounds of possibility for the both of us; after all, the recipients of the Queer Eye makeovers were comparatively wealthy and established; they were, and I quote my housemate, 'cashed up 30 year olds'.

 

Nowadays we can laugh at the quaintness of it all. But at the time, I took Queer Eye seriously. It served as a wakeup call for me and hundreds of thousands of other male viewers. For years, I had neglected my diet, my clothes, my hair, my skin, my home. The last of these, when I compared it to the post-makeover homes in Queer Eye, was dirty, messy, and ugly. I had let it go in much the same way that I had let my hair, clothes, and every other element of my physical existence go. Acknowledging my shortcomings, I resolved henceforth to turn over a new leaf. My friends, who at the time seemed far more sophisticated than me, perceived my desire for self-improvement, and they gave me advice. They could not recommend good choices on interior decorating, but they could steer me on the way towards good choices in clothes and diet. In retrospect, I was retracing the path of the men of previous epochs – of men at the time of the Renaissance, for instance, or at the time of the Roman Empire - who had made the conscious decision to live life and live it well.

 

But if we want an example of that good living, we need not go back as far as the Renaissance. As we can see from one of the best TV shows of the 2000s, Mad Men (2007-2015), American males in the 1960s paid an extraordinary amount of attention to their appearance; they went to the barber, had pedicures, and wore suits and casual clothes that were elegant and slim fitting. It was not until the 1970s that men began dressing like bums; then they let standards slip, and chaos reigned.

 

Contrasting against one another in the photo below are two sets of protesters; one group is protesting the Vietnam War in the late 1960s, and the other is protesting the Israeli-Palestinian War of 2024. When you look closely, the men in the former group wear smart casual clothes, and the trousers, jeans, jackets, blazers, shirts, give evidence of good taste. Particularly striking is the fact that in this group men all chose good footwear. As for the fashion choices of the other group of protestors, the less said, the better.

 

As for women's fashion in the 2000s, there is not much to say. Women, unlike men, have always bestowed a high value upon looking good; they have always paid scrupulous attention to clothes, hair and skin care, and what other women are wearing. Having said that, an examination of the magazines, TV shows, movies, of the 2000s will reveal that women did seem a little more well turned out in the 2000s than in the 1990s, and for one women's casual wear had much improved. But one ubiquitous article of women's clothing elicits controversy, and that is the halter top, which was to the 2000s what the mini skirt was to the 1960s. I call the halter top the Lindsay Lohan maternity dress, for it does look like a sort of maternity dress and it should be associated with 2000s fashion icons such as Lohan. On a well-proportioned and healthy woman, the halter top looked good; on an obese woman, it looked bad. And another significant fashion challenge to woman was presented by the popularity of low rise jeans. A slender woman with wide hips and a flat stomach would look good in them, but the wearing of them took work, because staying slim in the 21st century took work. Fortunately for men, men's clothes had an almost magical slimming effect: a vintage tee and a pair of close-fitting bootcut jeans would make a man look as skinny as a member of Led Zeppelin.

 

As to what put an end to 2000s stylishness, the answer is obvious: the financial crisis of 2008 and the election of Barack Obama. Spengler writes that in the history of the Western or Faustian Culture, the transition from one epoch to another always takes place with great drama. The 21st century, so far, demonstrates this. The nineties came to an end on September 11, 2001; the 2000s came to an end with the financial meltdown of late 2008 and early 2009; the 2010s came to an end with the onset of the Covidian monstrosity in March 2020.

 

But let us dig deeper. It is true that fashions, tastes, appetites, ways of doing things, pass, and pass with the shifting sands of time. Who, after all, remembers the Emo subculture of the 2000s?

Emoism flourished for a time and then disappeared, going the way of disco in the 1970s. By the 2010s, Emoism was usurped by Hipsterism. History, Spengler writes, is irrational, and none of its shifts come about as a product of design: its mutations are as random as the bubbles that form and burst in boiling water. But I think that the ceasing of the 2000s-era style and beauty occurred because of a conscious decision - by women. Simply put, looking like Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Avril Lavigne, and Jennifer Love Hewitt every single day was asking too much. Women in the 2010s found it far easier to take on a new persona: the frumpy, overweight, tattooed, blue haired Social Justice Warrior female with the horn-rimmed glasses. And men, too, in the new decade took the less demanding route, and ceased shaving and waxing themselves; following the way of the Hipster, which is the way of a quasi-Beatnik, they grew more hirsute. Statistics show that sales of men's razor blades plunged in the 2010s.

 

VII.

 

I wrote before that the economist or sociologist believes that economics determines art, culture, life. We live in a time that pays too much attention to the economic and the monetary, and it is natural when we look back at the 2000s and see how well people lived - or appeared to live - that we will assume that all these sleek, gleaming, happy people must have lived in a time of great prosperity; we surmise that the presence of money entails the good life, and that the absence of money entails the bad.

 

This hypothesis was disproved by the 2000s. In the first half of the decade, US markets did well, much better than they do today; but in the second half, which was Bush 45's second term, markets fell and fell hard. In February 2005, the month after Bush's second inauguration, the Gold DJIA stood at a respectable 25.43 ounces; but by February 2009, it had fallen to 7.42 ounces, and it had further to fall - by August 2011, it had fallen to 6.36 ounces. It goes without saying that all the other markets around the world, including the Australian, followed the same trajectory. Worldwide, the gains that had accumulated since 1990 had been wiped out in a replay of the crash of 1929 and the crash of 1973. What made the 2000s crash unique was that markets descended to the bottom slowly. If we are to trace the descent of the gold DJIA, we see that it moves like a tobogganist riding slowly and gently downhill. And so, at the time, one could ignore the weakening until it became impossible to ignore.

 

While the commodities, finance, and real estate sectors boomed - as these sectors often do in a time of inflation and depreciating currencies - none of the other sectors did; the expansion benefited the few, not the many. And yet, with only a small outlay, a woman could dress like Lindsay Lohan or Hilary Duff, mimic their hairstyles, use their brands of wax and moisturiser. Likewise, a male could buy a decent wardrobe quite easily, lose weight, use skin cream, get a decent haircut... Nothing prevented him from vacuuming his apartment and investing in new couch cushions, lampshades, and bedspreads. The good life, the easy life, was within reach. After all, did men in the 2000s experience the same penury and hardships, the same scrimping, saving, and rationing, as their grandfathers and great-grandfathers in the 1930s and 1940s? No, they did not. Materially, they lived in better circumstances, and potentially, they could afford to try different ways of living. A man makes choices every day when he decides to shave himself and shine his shoes, and in the 2000s, he could decide to put some grease in his hair and pull on a pair of Robert Plant jeans and don a smart blazer. He need not do these things, but in the 2000s, he operated under a set of rules, a paradigm, that in effect forced him to do these things. The same pattern compelled TV producers; if they were to set out to write and shoot a drama, they should do their utmost to make the clothes, actors, sets, look beautiful and not plain and ugly.

 

In contrast, today's media and entertainment fails to do its job, and it no longer makes a product that is aesthetically pleasing; that so much we have established. What is surprising and alarming is that the media and entertainment complex no longer wants to do its job. In the old days, people became involved in entertainment and the arts because they wanted to make a living doing something that they loved, and they wanted to become part of an artistic tradition that they honoured and revered. As a youth, I wanted to work in movies or theatre or literature or comic books, but I lacked the talent, opportunity, and drive, and now I thank my lucky stars that I did. What intelligent person would want to work in today's Hollywood? Imagine the self-loathing of the 'creatives' who are forced to labour on Disney's Star Wars.

 

The SJWs who have infiltrated the media and entertainment complex have been accused of hating whites, hating the Western Culture, and so forth. But not everyone who works in the field is a seasoned political activist who is striving to achieve 'representation' for 'LGBTQ+ folks' and 'People of Colour' (POC), although it may seem that way. I think apathy more than anything else explains Western Man's turn away from beauty and style. And in a way, this is more concerning; for feelings of numbness and indifference are worse than feelings of hatred and Nietzschean ressentiment.

 

VIII.

 

At the risk of stretching a metaphor, we can outline a difference between the worldviews, Weltanschauungen, that are inclined like capitalist economies to either expansion or contraction. We see the division when we look at the 2000s and the 2010s and how people deported themselves. It goes without saying that not every young woman in the 2000s dressed like Lindsay Lohan and not every young woman in the 2010s dressed like a pink-haired, overweight, bespectacled SJW; but as it was in the days of the Roman Empire at its height, what matters when gauging the style, mores, ethos of a period is the overall standard. And so, when looking at representative samples, we can say that the fashion and aesthetics of the 2010s mark a step down. When comparing the 2000s to the 2010s, we conclude that in the one decade morale expanded, in the other, it contracted; in one it grew, the in the other it declined. It is no coincidence that the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon appeared when it did; America gave birth to it at the time of the weak economic recovery in the Obama years; and because of their limited economic prospects and their myopic world view, young Americans felt an instant attraction towards it.

 

One irony presented by the young's newfound affiliation with the Left is that Americans were more better off in 2011 than they were in 1981; but perhaps this is not an irony when we consider that in the early 1980s, America was situated on the upward curve of the slope of economic expansion, and in the early 2010s, on the downward. But individual choice does matter, and economics is not everything. Western Man chose to ditch metrosexualism for hipsterism; he chose to grow a beard, wear rimmed glasses, don a flannel lumberjack shirt, and allow his belly to bloat - perhaps all that craft beer was to blame - and become hairy.

 

The political controversies of the 2010s are still with us, the main difference being that they have changed their aspect; we see different emphases and weightings. I do not want to discuss these here at length, because that would detract from my purpose, but suffice to say that the two most controversial ideologies, Zionism and Russkiye Mir, both of which turn up in our news feeds now more than ever, do fit into the expansion versus contraction model.

 

What is interesting is that American conservatives tout both ideologies every day, and that both these ideologies run counter to the natural American conservative tendency towards growth, expansion, enterprise, the spirit of can-do, the American Way. Americans on the Right like these things, which is why they like leaders such as Reagan and Trump, leaders who are indefatigable optimists. So, it is strange that, when considering the ultimately self-destructive tendencies of Russkiye Mir, conservatives regarded Speaker Johnson's forcing through of the passage of funding for the Ukrainian war effort as the ultimate betrayal; and that they took a dim view of further funding. A Breitbart headline reads: 'Show me the money!!! - Never enough $$$ for 4-eva war - Zelensky reveals US and Ukraine 'working' on scheme for 10 years of military aid'. Of course, Putin's efforts to keep Russia’s war going '4-eva' are never disparaged.

 

 

And then we come to dear little Israel. American conservatives treated the pro-Palestinian protestor encampments at American universities as a national emergency; the colleges must be cleansed of this 'anti-Semitic' vermin; Jewish students must feel safe; the Western Journal thunders, 'Let Jews Carry Guns'; to paraphrase Samuel Roth, 'Jews must live'.

 

We must ask, how do the ideologies of Zionism and Russkiye Mir advance and improve life? Russia reduces Ukrainian towns to rubble and makes the land as desolate as the plains of Mordor. Ukrainians are not elevated thereby. As for Israel and Zionism, Americans - especially American boomers - like to pat themselves on the back for being on the 'right side of history': the 'Nazis' were 'evil' for 'gassing the Jews', ergo, the Americans who fought against them were 'good'. But it is possible that the WWII Holocaust story is false, and in any case, it does not help; it does not, to borrow from the jargon of economists, add value.

 

The American boomer conservative Ward Clark writes that the pro-Palestinian demonstrators are 'useful idiots who are protesting in favor of violent, misogynistic, racist Bronze-Age barbarians'. I chortled when I read this, and I asked to myself if Mr Clark had ever read the Bible, which is full of 'violent, misogynistic, racist Bronze-Age barbarians', the problem for the likes of Mr Clark being that the 'barbarians' in question are Jewish. Animal sacrifices, burnt offerings, sacrifices of human beings to Yahweh - which is what the Holocaust story is all about - are barbaric and atavistic. A butcher's manual, the Book of Leviticus instructs, in scrupulous and exacting detail, how to kill, prepare, and burn animals for sacrifice to Yahweh. One must ask, how does obeisance to strange, backward, and dark rituals advance the welfare of the American people? In the Jewish tradition, sacrifices of animals - and children - are made in exchange for tangible benefits. Jewry won the State of Israel in 1948 in exchange for the sacrifice to Yahweh of the six million; and what did Americans get? Did the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 boost American economic growth, did it assure Americans a higher standard of living...

 

But if we speak too long about Jewry, Israel, and Zionism, we run the risk of digressing. To close our discussion of the topic, let us look at some of the books of the Prophets - Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Hosea - and mull over the threats that they contain; Yahweh, speaking through his mouthpieces the prophets, promises violence, desolation, famine, despair to both the Jewish people who have betrayed him; he even threatens to rape the Jewish women. In the last of books of the Old Testament, Yahweh wills the destruction of the twin kingdoms of Judah and Israel because he wants to punish the Jewish people; and the last books chronicle only Jewish defeat and failure.

 

Inspecting the final book of the Old Testament, the Book of Malachi, Steve Wells records the final utterance by Yahweh: 'The Old Testament ends fittingly with these words: "Lest I come and smite the earth with a curse"'. One cannot say that Judaism is an ideology of expansion; rather, it is an ideology of contraction. And prolonged exposure to it lowers a man's vital energies; the man who takes it up is turning away from the Life Force.

 

IX.

 

Throughout I have been using the language of Nietzsche and Shaw. Nietzschean and Shavian rhetoric broods and mediates upon the themes of life denial and world rejection; but perhaps this mode of thinking, which was most famous over a hundred years ago, fails to match the ethos of the modern age. A postmodernist would ask, what is life, what is the world? Perhaps these do not exist; instead, we only have 'codes', 'signs'.

 

Postmodernism here counts because one of the foremost of the postmodernists, Baudrillard, writes on the same subjects that I am discussing: movies, advertising, fashion, beauty, clothes, diet, fitness. He accords the same importance to these as I do; and these, according to Baudrillard, in the modern age have taken on a religious dimension.

 

In the consumer package, there is one object finer, more precious and more dazzling than any other--and even more laden with connotations than the automobile, in spite of the fact that that encapsulates them all. That object is the BODY. Its `rediscovery', in a spirit of physical and sexual liberation, after a millennial age of puritanism; its omnipresence (specifically the omnipresence of the female body, a fact we shall have to try to explain) in advertising, fashion and mass culture; the hygienic, dietetic, therapeutic cult which surrounds it, the obsession with youth, elegance, virility/femininity, treatments and regimes, and the sacrificial practices attaching to it all bear witness to the fact that the body has today become an object of salvation. It has literally taken over that moral and ideological function from the soul.

 

Unremitting propaganda reminds us that, in the words of the old hymn, we have only one body and it has to be saved. [Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (1970]

 

The above was written over fifty years ago but could have been written today. Baudrillard made a reputation for himself as being one of the worldliest and up to date of the French thinkers; after all, he was the only one to admit to watching television. His contemporaries, men such as Foucault and Derrida, gave the appearance of wanting to shut television and cars, aspects of the modern world, out. Baudrillard does not celebrate the phenomena of the modern world, and as we can infer from the tone of the above passage, he takes a dim view of them. But that view is belied by the passivity and acceptance that we detect between the lines; and these traits of Baudrillard’s make themselves felt more and more in the books written after Consumer Society. And indeed, what the devil is wrong with beautiful models and fast cars? In 1970, and even more so in 2024, are these not 'Life', 'The World', and is it not the case that the turning against these is the turning against 'Life', 'The World'...

 

The phenomena considered by Baudrillard are still with us, and we can still squeeze some enjoyment out of them, and so on that point I disagree with the pessimistic, life-denying American conservatives and white nationalists. But to extract the maximum value out of the modern world and all its despairs and joys, we must increasingly look towards the past, even towards a past that is quite recent, e.g., the past of twenty years ago, the past of the 2000s. That past shows us the way towards the Good Life.