The Coup Economy

 

 

I.

 

Trump won 2020, and that is easy enough to prove.

 

The re-election of a president in the United States is achieved by different means than the re-election of a prime minister in Canada, the UK, Australia, and other countries of the Anglosphere; for the electoral victory of an American presidential candidate of the incumbent party is determined by certain of the American states and, in addition, by the change in the incumbent party's popular vote. Given that, if we are to look at the 30 presidential elections that took place from 1900 to 2016, we can use a simple formula to determine which candidate won.

 

To understand the rule, we need to go back nearly a hundred years, when the pattern was set in the 1928 presidential election; in that year, Herbert Hoover, who became the Republican presidential candidate after Calvin Coolidge declined to run for re-election, won in a landslide, and the party’s popular vote was greater than that of 1924. In the electoral college count, Hoover won 444 electoral college votes to Alfred 'Al' Smith's 87, and of the states that Hoover won, three of them - Ohio, Florida, and Iowa - would prove to be the most decisive in future years. After 1928, the principle became this: if the presidential candidate of the incumbent party wins the three states of Florida, Ohio, and Iowa, and if the incumbent party increases its popular vote, then the candidate wins. The principle holds true in the re-election of Roosevelt in 1936, Eisenhower in 1956, Johnson in 1964, Nixon in 1972, Reagan in 1984, Clinton in 1996, and Bush 43 in 2004.

 

Nixon's narrow loss in 1960 may be the exception that proves the rule: after all, he did win Ohio, Florida, and Iowa. But the numbers from election to election differed: when measuring the Republican popular vote of 1960 against that of 1956, we see a slight drop. In 1960, the electorate felt little enthusiasm towards either candidate and hardly seemed to favour one above the other; in the popular vote, Kennedy beat Nixon by less than 120,000 votes. But this is typical: administrations rarely win a third term, because after two terms, they become stale and worn out. Like the 2000 race, the 1960 was dull and listless, the two candidates bland and mediocre.

 

Supposing, then, that we knew nothing about the past 31 US presidential elections except for two pieces of information - which candidate of the incumbent party seeking re-election won the states of Ohio, Florida, and Iowa, and which candidate of the incumbent party increased or reduced the party's popular vote. Working off these two pieces, we must conclude that Trump won 2020. He won Ohio, Florida, and Iowa; and his popular vote increased by 12 million - the largest increase in American history.

 

But Biden was inaugurated. Why? We only need cast our minds back to the peculiar circumstances of 2020. The entire world - or rather, the elite of the world - was gunning for the Americans who voted for Trump in 2016. The re-election of Trump could not be permitted. And so, we learned in the days and weeks of counting after election night that Biden - a senile incompetent and a nasty old man lacking in charm - was the most popular American presidential candidate of all time, winning more votes than Roosevelt or Reagan. And we learned that manufacturing votes and falsifying election results is not against the law. The police, the courts, the secret police (that is, the FBI), and the Department of Justice itself - all did nothing, for the elite sections of the American state had turned against Trump. But when a head of state is deposed by an elite stratum that is lacking in popular support - that, by definition, is a coup d'état. Biden was selected, not elected; he was installed. Thirty or forty years ago, Americans would have called such a constitutional arrangement a 'dictatorship', Americans being always quick to condemn such things, and in the times gone past, a country that prevented 'free and fair' elections and permitted a 'dictatorship' to exist would have been subject to American sanctions - and perhaps even American bombing, if the sanctions were not working.

 

2024, then, is no ordinary election. After nearly four years that have been marked by a lack of what Bush 43 would have called 'freedom', the American electorate must decide whether power is to be retained by the Biden junta or relinquished. And what makes 2024 even more different is the turning of American politics towards what Carl Schmitt called the political. A distinction is now made between the friend and the enemy. Trump and the 74 million Americans who voted for him in 2020 have become the enemy - the inner enemy. Schmitt's disciple Yockey writes in Imperium (1948):

 

This organic right to determine the inner enemy is not always exercised in the same manner. It may be open: arrest, sudden attack, shooting down at home, butchery in the streets. It may be concealed: drawing up of punitive laws general in their terms but applying in fact only to one group. It may be purely formless, but nonetheless real: the ruler may attack verbally the individual or group in question. Such a declaration may be used only to intimidate, or it may be a method of bringing about assassination [italics mine]. It may be economic pressure — such a tactic is naturally the favorite of Liberals. A “blacklist” or boycott may destroy the group or individual.

 

It matters not that the US Constitution makes no room for the political. Yockey, an American and a lawyer, understood that the American Constitution does not stand in the way:

 

It goes without saying that the exercise of such a right has no connection whatever with any written “constitution” which purports verbally to distribute the public power in a political unit. Such a “constitution” may forbid such a declaration of inner enemy, but units with such constitutions have never hesitated in need, and have often invoked such procedure independently of need.

 

All of this could have been avoided. In 2017, Trump and the Republicans failed to take advantage of the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, an opportunity that could have been exploited: the Republicans could have rammed through draconian legislation that would have secured future elections. Postal votes, early voting, voting machines, same-day registration, and the Democrat Party practice of extending the counting of votes for days, weeks, months on end - all could have been banned, and voter ID and a clean-up of the electoral rolls could have been rigorously enforced. The stamping of serial numbers on ballots could have been made compulsory, and to ensure maximum attendance, election day could have been made a nationwide public holiday. Such laws would have brought elections in America in line with those of the First World; indeed, even some Third World nations – Thailand, for instance – have surpassed America when it comes to enforcing elections that are free, fair, and transparent in the best classical liberal tradition. Properly applied, electoral reforms would have guaranteed a second Trump term, and on that point, even the respectable conservative or centrist would agree.

 

We can contemplate the road not taken. In an alternative timeline, Trump takes up a second term in 2021, and towards the end of 2024, does what Biden should have done in 2019, which is, shuffle off into retirement. After Trump's departure, the 2024 election would have been a bland and colourless affair, much like the 1960 and 2000 elections. Perhaps the two candidates would have been DeSantis and Newsom.

 

But let us return to the present. The irony is that through their actions, the Democrats have almost ensured a third Trump electoral win and a second Trump term, but this second term, of course, is not a given; possibly, the Democratic Party will follow the example of Maduro in Venezuela in 2024 and use trickery, fraud, and force to 're-elect' the candidate of the incumbent party. But the difference is that the Chavez-Maduro regime has been in charge of Venezuela for a quarter of a century, and it has had plenty of time to practice; whereas some freedom still exists in America, and unlike the Maduro and Putin regimes, the Biden regime has not won complete ascendancy. More importantly, the mood of the American nation has changed since 2020.

 

But let us suppose that, even though the national mood has changed, Americans are willing to let the Democratic Party get away with it again. According to the polls, the election will be close, and this is precisely what the Democrats want - a result that approaches a tie. Perhaps the presidency will be decided by a single state - Pennsylvania, for example - and only after days, weeks, months, of counting ballots. In this scenario, which is the optimum one for the Democrats, all the newly counted Pennsylvanian ballots will favour Harris; America and the world will be astounded by how popular Harris is as a candidate. Trump will ‘lose’, and respectable conservatives will plead with Republicans to accept the election results. Wiseacres on the Right will tut-tut and say that Trump would have won if only he would have followed their advice; Trump ran a poor campaign, and they would have done so much better. Trump pandered to minorities and liberals excessively, and Trump ignored the white American working-class…

 

As we know, in 2020 the Democrats pulled off the above trick in not one state but five, and they got away with it because the American people let them get away with it. Even though it is true that in 2024 the ground has shifted, the Democratic Party still possesses great advantages, of which I can name three. The first Democratic asset is the media, which is completely owned by the Democratic Party - or is it the other way around? (Rush Limbaugh often wondered aloud: is the media a wing of the Democratic Party or is the Democratic Party a wing of the media?). The second advantage is the Democratic Party's ability to falsify election results, and the third is the informal right of veto, which is used to strike down any president not to the liking of the Democrat / media complex. In most political systems, including the American, rights of veto are traditionally accorded to the minority by the majority out of a sense of fair play, but over the course of the past eight years, we have been treated to the spectacle of a minority abusing that right. And even outside America, we can find instances of the same abuse. Thailand's Constitutional Court, which represents the monarchy and the army, reserves for itself the right to oust elected governments, dissolve political parties, and ban ministers – even prime ministers - from politics.

 

But in other respects, going into 2024 the Democratic Party is seriously disadvantaged. The most grievous burden is the ideological vacuousness of the Biden-Harris regime or the clique that stands behind the regime. The clique is comprised of journalists, washed-up Hollywood celebrities, respectable conservatives, disgruntled academics, and misanthropes of the sort that attempted to assassinate Trump twice. Ideologically, the clique stands on neither the Left nor the Right, and none of the members hold to any real intellectual and moral convictions: all that drives them is hatred of one man.

 

The irrationality and emotionalism of the anti-Trumpers has not prevented the anti-Trump movement from building a political theory, however. The first point of the new doctrine is that the 2020 coup was not a coup; the second, that the coup was 'democracy', as is the right of the minority to veto a choice made by the majority; the third, that anyone who opposed the coup, as Trump did in the dying days of his first term, was endangering ‘democracy’; and the fourth, that the outcome of the 2020 coup - the installation of the Biden-Harris regime – binds the American people and lasts forever and ever, like a marriage vow. It is not subject to revision, and questioning it has now become in the eyes of the media a crime in itself.

 

We can understand why it is that the anti-Trump clique so firmly insists that there was nothing untoward about the 2020 election: to admit to wrongdoing would be to undermine the legitimacy of the Biden regime. It stands to reason that they will not bend on this point, and even if God Himself to come down from the heavens and reel off the true number of votes for Biden and Trump in Fulton County, Georgia, they would still not bend. But this obstinacy places them in an unusual and difficult position. Those who are familiar with the history of England in the 17th century and America in the 19th know that an extreme obduracy and unwillingness to compromise can lead to civil war. To an extraordinary degree, attitudes hardened in the Trump years, and it was in this time that American journalists entered the realm of what Schmitt calls the political; they stopped being journalists and started being politicians.

When one is confronted by the political, one is tempted to respond in kind. What the Bidenites have done to others can be done to them, once the shoe is on the other foot - as they are beginning to realise.

 

When mulling over all this, I see that I could write two essays. One would be political, the other would avoid the political - that is, it would instead talk about inflation, interest rates, the stock market, taxes, and growth in GDP.

 

I think a discussion of the political economy is far more needed now, because even if Trump succeeds in overcoming his Schmittian enemy, he will still need to patch up a country that is in a shambles: that is, he will need to shift from a wartime presidency to a peacetime. Lincoln won the Civil War, but the victory left the country in ruins. Long after the end of the war, America returned to prosperity and became a great power only after two crucial steps were taken: the wartime income tax was abolished in 1873, and the US dollar was fixed to gold - at the pre-war rate of $USD20.67 an ounce - in 1879. These measures ushered in the Gilded Age, the American counterpart of the European Belle Époque. To judge by Trump’s recent statements, we can glean that Trump wants to return not to the monetary policy of the Gilded Age but to the fiscal: Trump has declared several times that the income tax ought to be abolished and that tariffs be relied upon to generate revenue. This shows that Trump is thinking ahead, that he is looking past his possible inauguration. But he is best advised to pay attention to the monetary as well as the fiscal policy of the Gilded Age, because the increase in inflation and decrease in value of the US dollar against gold may prove to be his undoing, even after all his enemies are vanquished.

 

II.

 

For thousands of years, gold has performed three main functions. It has served as a medium of exchange, allowing the easy summing up of the worth of one good that is to be exchanged for another good, and it has served as a unit of account – for example, the value of a nuclear submarine or a packet of cigarettes can be measured as a fraction or a multiple of an ounce of gold. Closely related to these two functions is a third: gold works as a store of value. Gold never loses value, which is why it has been used as money for thousands of years. Daily the dollar price of an ounce of gold goes up and down - mostly up these days - but these shifts mark the fall or rise in value of the dollar against gold, not the other way around. Gold is the constant and the dollar is the variable. During the Civil War, America floated the dollar, and the dollar gold price doubled, shooting up to $USD40 an ounce: the dollar had lost value against gold, that is, it had devalued. When America returned to gold fourteen years after the end of the war, the gold-dollar price revalued, and went back to the pre-war parity of $USD20.67 an ounce. There it stayed, until Roosevelt devalued the dollar in 1933: after the devaluation, it took $USD35 to buy one ounce. The motive behind the devaluation was that in the midst of the Great Depression, Roosevelt wanted a weaker currency and higher prices. Forty years later, another president devalued for much the same reason. In 1970, gold cost $USD35 an ounce, and in 1980, nine years after Nixon had broken up Bretton Woods and taken America off the gold standard, gold cost $USD850 an ounce. And as could be expected, by 1980 American inflation had reached levels not seen since the Civil War.

 

The supply-sider John Tamny has written an article imploring the next president to pay attention to the gold signal. In 2020, Tamny notes, only $USD1700 was needed to buy one ounce of gold, and in 2024, over $USD2700 is needed. Most of the depreciation occurred in mid to late 2024; at the start of the year, gold cost $USD2000 an ounce, and the way the dollar is heading, we may be soon looking back at early 2024 as the good old days.  

 

As to why the dollar has lost value, Tamny blames lack of demand. Like the value of any other commodity, the value of the dollar increases or falls with excess demand and supply, and if the amount of dollars in circulation exceeds the appetite for dollars, then the value of the dollar will fall. Tamny speculates that the demand for dollars has slackened because of the threat of international turmoil - the threat of a war with Iran, Russia, China - or because of Trump’s tariff policy, which Tamny believes is destructive.

 

Fortunately, this monetary problem can be solved easily. The Federal Reserve needs to sell things, like bonds for instance, and when it receives payment for a sale of, say, $USD100 million worth of bonds, it should take that $USD100 million and dispose of it. The Federal Reserve should destroy money - much like Superman setting fire to piles of currency with his heat vision - until the US dollar regains its value and falls back to $USD2000 an ounce.

 

 

It is only then that the prices of commodities will decline. At the moment, they have reached a two-year high:

 

 

III.

 

But wait, are not the American stock market indexes - the DJIA, the NASDAQ, the S&P 500 - hitting record highs? Yes, but we are seeing (to use economist's jargon) nominal increases and not real: we must adjust the gains for inflation, which is to say, we must divide the indexes by the price of an ounce of gold.

 

The chart of the DJIA divided by an ounce of gold tells a sad story: the gold Dow has declined to its lowest level since 2020:

 

 

Scrutinising it, we see that the decline started around February 2024, which is when the gold dollar price began its rapid climb to $USD2700 an ounce. If we peer closely, we see a tiny rally - nothing more than a brief spurt - in July, when Biden dropped out of the race, and after that, the gold Dow resumed its descent.

 

If a Trump presidency meant good things for the market, we could expect the gold Dow to shoot up as the likelihood of a second Trump term increased, but this has not happened. Having said that, I predict that if the Biden-Harris regime is shown the door in November, then the market will rally - it will stage a relief rally - because while the market feels lukewarm towards Trump, it despises Biden-Harris. But whether the relief rally turns into a bull market remains to be seen. So far, November 2024 looks promising: if you examine the chart carefully, you will see an uptick.

 

In order to understand the market’s ambivalence towards Trump, we must look to the America of a hundred years ago, when the Republican Party won three successive presidential elections on a platform of curtailing immigration, keeping the dollar fixed to gold, and cutting taxes (the top rate of income tax was reduced from 77% to 25%). Fifty years later, Republicans had abandoned two planks of the platform: Nixon had hiked taxes and taken America - and the world - off gold. The injurious effects of the latter compounded those of the former: inflation pushed Americans into higher and higher tax brackets, because the income tax schedule was sharply progressive. By the eighties, it became clear that the sensible thing to do would be to cut taxes and fix the dollar to gold once again; Reagan, following the same course of the Republicans of the 1920s, cut taxes nearly to the same extent as Calvin Coolidge, but he never restored the gold standard, even though anecdotal evidence suggests that he was amenable to a restoration. Today, any talk of returning to a gold standard and fixed exchange rates is derided by journalists and economists alike as quackery.

 

After Reagan, the supply-siders had won the argument – in the Republican Party at least – on fiscal policy but had lost on monetary policy. And this is where Trump steps in. A Republican throwback, Trump sympathises with the Republicans of a hundred years ago who favoured high tariffs. To his credit, he is willing to go along with the 1920s Republican party line on taxes, and he agrees enthusiastically with the party line on immigration, but when it comes to the party line on gold and fixed exchange rates, he is indifferent. If anything, he seems to be of a mind that a weak dollar will boost exports. This is an old dogma that will not die, and like a good many such dogmas, it is immune to disproof. None of the advocates of a weak currency think to look at the evidence; the export industries of Venezuela and Zimbabwe, for instance, hardly benefited from weak, if not worthless, currencies.

 

So, if the market were to score the two presidential candidates of this year’s election, it would grade Harris as being bad – extremely bad – on taxes, fair to medium on tariffs, and bad on money; it would grade Trump as good on taxes, bad on tariffs, and bad on money. The market needs to perform what the statisticians call weighting: does bad tariff policy outweigh good fiscal policy?

 

The matter is further complicated by the introduction of taxes that are not traditionally considered to be taxes: the residents of Springfield, Ohio, and Aurora, Colorado, are labouring under the immigrant tax or what I call the Great Replacement tax; the Haitian immigrants – or more accurately, the Haitian invaders – dwelling in Springfield do not ‘create jobs’ and ‘boost economic growth’; they are a net drain. Economics is meant to improve life, but the free-market liberals who tout immigration and the Great Replacement have lost sight of that, and canny politician that he is, Trump has not lost sight. The success of Trump – or Roosevelt, for that matter – shows how the American electorate can favour a candidate who is bad, even appallingly bad, on fiscal and monetary policy but good or at the least passable on everything else. The electorate, like the market, performs its own complex calculations, and after a lengthy ratiocination, spits out a verdict that is simple and binary, a yes or a no.

 

IV.

 

In 2024, Trump may win the election but may not be allowed to take up the presidency once more. After 2020, we understand how this could happen, but the question is, how do we know in advance which candidate will win the election? The polling in the state of Ohio tells us. Ohio is unique in that in most elections, the candidate who wins Ohio wins the presidency. This is true of 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016 – and for 28 out of the 30 elections from 1900 to 2016. The exceptions were 1960, a peculiar election discussed above, and 1944. In the latter, Roosevelt won his usual electoral college landslide, winning 432 electoral college votes to 99, so one could not characterise it as close like 1960 or 2000; 1944 remains an anomaly. In every election except for 1944 and 1960, Ohio has served its purpose as the ultimate bellwether state, and perhaps because Ohioans are more average-American than most Americans. On election eve in 2024, all the polling indicates that Trump will take Ohio easily, like he did in 2016 and 2020. Under normal ‘democratic’ conditions, America would be contemplating another Trump term.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Way of the Bugman

 

I.  Introducing the Bugman

Beginning in 2020, the Covidians revived a science I call applied or practical political psychology. Of all the ideologies on the Left, Maoism went furthest in applying political psychology, Maoism being the ideology that gave us 'thought reform' and the 'washing of the brain', and this was pertinent to Covidianism, because starting its life in China, Covidianism used many of the brainwashing techniques of Maoism. Cults, too, avail themselves of the same techniques, and both Maoism and cultism operate on the same principle, which is: Change a man's thoughts, change a man. Over the course of three years, we saw the principle put into practice across the globe, and the result of the Covidians' employing it was that millions of people allowed themselves to be persuaded that masking could 'stop the spread'; that lockdowns, shutdowns, forced closure of businesses, forced unemployment, contact tracing, etc., were all necessary to combat the virus; and that the 'vaccines' were 'safe and effective'. Those caught up in the mass hysteria were cajoled by the media, the 'health professionals', the politicians, and the promptings of their own consciences. Most important of all, the last of these was worked to the utmost in a typical cult-like fashion. Cult leaders seeking to indoctrinate a person appeal to his conscience and exploit his natural tendency to persuade and monitor himself. The conscience, when the leader's manipulating it is attended with success, helps the leader tighten his grip on the minds of his followers, and eventually the directed conscience places the recruit under the leader's complete control. After the first round of brainwashing takes hold, the recruit becomes a devotee, and he remains so on his own initiative and without external compulsion. One consequence is that even if he is taken out of the cult environment - to be sent on canvasing and hawking missions, for example - he can be trusted to return to it. Physically he can leave the cult, mentally he cannot. 

One can use methods of auto-suggestion for purposes that are not sinister and destructive; indeed, one can use them to improve one's life. But doing so takes one away from politics, as we shall see. 

The principle of 'Changing a man thoughts, changing a man' is put to beneficial use in pop psychology and self-help; there, the right thoughts can overcome any obstacle, and in the doctrine of Norman Vincent Peale and Mary Baker G. Eddy, a thing cannot be evil, only thinking makes it so. Such a view is far removed from all politics. For in politics, the world is always incomplete, lacking, and while the world exists in this state of privation, it is bad, even evil. To complete it and make it whole, something external is needed - something only the politician can bring about. In order to make the world better again, a politician may propose a Bolshevik revolution, a Greater East Asian Prosperity Sphere, a Third Reich. Today we regard these goals as vague and ethereal, but at the time politicians promulgated them, they were always within reach; that is, they were feasible. And as a matter of course, the canny politician understands the usefulness of practicable ideals. He will posit simple, discrete, achievable objectives, knowing that if he demands the impossible from his followers, they will desert him. (For that reason, the crusade against global warming will eventually fail, seeing that the end goal of reducing carbon emissions and then stopping them altogether can never be achieved). His realism means that Political Man differs from Self-Help Man. It means he differs from New Age Man as well, 'New Age Man' being the type who follows a Rudolf Steiner or Helena Blavatsky. A spiritual thinker, New Age Man desires to comprehend the nature of reality from the vantage point of mysticism. Moreover, he strives to accept reality without qualm. In other words, he wants to make peace with the world as it is. Nothing could be more unpolitical. 

This topic brings us to another unpolitical type: the Bugman. The Bugman is a subset of the 'normie', and like the normie, he approves of the existing social, political,  and consumerist order. When it comes to politics, the Bugman may hold political opinions that he regards as non-conformist, but at bottom these are only commonplaces and half-baked notions. Fundamentally he agrees with the existing order, and this agreement makes him apolitical. 

During the lockdown years, I became fascinated by the Bugman. In the first year, I believed - mistakenly, as it  turned out - that the indignities heaped upon the  normie population would cause it to revolt. And in that time of turmoil, even a Bugman could show revolutionary gumption. But over the course of three years, the Bugman followed the diktats of the Covidians unquestioningly and took all the outrages in stride. In 2020, only one thing excited him: the release of Cyberpunk 2077. 

I must admit that in those years, I envied the Bugman, especially the Bugman who enjoyed his leisure after being made unemployed by the lockdowns and shutdowns. To be laid off from one's job, and then to while away one's time sitting on a couch, smoking dope, eating junk food, playing 'vidya' games: that seemed to me to be a pleasant life, albeit not a virtuous one. 

Moreover, I envied the Bugman's naivete. The contentedness of the Bugman neared the state of those characters in The Matrix (1999) who chose forgetfulness and oblivion over knowledge and truth. In the movie, the 'red pill' gives knowledge and the 'blue pill' takes it away, and those who swallow the blue pill are made as innocent as Adam and Eve before the Fall. 

The question to be considered here is whether or not political psychology holds true for the Bug Man. Does the Bugman confirm the hypothesis of the Maoists, the cultists, and the Christian Scientists in its essentials, that is, does the Bug Man's innocence and passivity come about from his ideas? If so, this brings up the possibility that we ourselves can become Bugmen. To do so, we need only change our ideas to match his. 

II. The Politics of Anti-Politics

I mentioned the game Cyberpunk 2077 because its subject matter does bear upon politics: one of the reasons why I never became a fully-fledged 'National Socialist' or white nationalist was because I liked the cyberpunk genre too much. The denizens of Blade Runner (1982) live in a dark, smooty, grimy Los Angeles in the year of the future 2019, and the futuristic and grim milieu befits the central theme of cyberpunk, which is 'High tech, low life'. In keeping with the anti-natural tendencies of the genre, many characters are cyborgs or (in the case of Blade Runner) artificially-grown human beings, that is, homonculi. Cyberpunk shares a theme with postmodernism, and that is the distancing and isolating of man from nature. Urban living, modern thinking, perception, thought, language - all of these form a wall between man and the natural world, man and the absolute truth, man and the spiritual. As such, white nationalism, Neo-Nazism, and blood and soil ideology must by definition repudiate cyberpunk. Blade Runner is un-völkisch. But as someone who has seen Blade Runner a dozen times and will probably watch it a dozen times more, my response is: so much the worse for völkischness. 

In a time when the term had not yet been invented, I was once a Bugman. In my youth, I was dissatisfied with my own life but well-satisfied with life at large, by which I mean the prevailing political, cultural, and economic order, an order to which no alternative existed, the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc having collapsed a few years before. In that period, I may have disliked certain political parties, journalists, intellectuals, and opinion-makers, and disliked them intensely; but I never questioned the existing order's underlying precepts, rules, and assumptions. In the same way, one may become aggravated by other drivers when caught in a traffic jam, but such a judgment, which takes place during an instance of a temporary and fleeting emotion, does not entail one's rejecting cars and driving in general. The driver abides by the rules of the game, and so does the Bugman. And like the Bugman, when it came to politics, I prided myself on my political insight and sophistication, but I held opinions that were only a confused heaping of fashionable Left and Right ideas, neither of which I committed to. In the last analysis, I was, just like the Bug Man, apolitical. 

The question is whether or not apoliticism is itself political in a covert and subterranean fashion. It may be that, perversely, the act of choosing not to choose constitutes an political ideology in itself. Carl Schmitt thought so: see Political Romanticism (1919). 

This intellectual attitude of mine, which was akin to political romanticism, was reinforced by my reading a textbook on the contemporary postmodern age. The book was divided up into three parts: the first was written on art history, the second on the French post-structuralist thinkers (Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Lyotard, Baudrillard, et al.), and the third on postmodern culture and life. The third section struck a chord with me. It resonated, because it held up a mirror to my life. The author here made mention of Blade Runner, Robocop, Silence of the Lambs, Total Recall, and other famous films of the period, and also Nike sneakers, Madonna (then in her 'Vogue' phase), virtual reality, Disneyland, McDonalds, karaoke. The author deplored all of it, but I found his depiction of modern popular culture, capitalism, and postmodernism to be wonderful: it captured the essence of what it was that made life worth living. For every weekend, me and my friends would pile into a car, commute to the city, and drive around without pause, and on those trips, I felt a tremendous sensation of freedom; I understood what it was like for an Eastern European who had lived in a communist country for forty years and who all of a sudden was allowed out to travel and shop in the West. In those fast-paced, frenetic years, I spent long hours at the nightclub, the shopping mall, the fast food restaurant, the petrol station, and the 24/7 convenience store, and I treated all these abodes as though they were sacred, that is, houses of worship.  

My exalted feelings in response to this 'capitalist' and 'postmodern' existence may have only been a preference of mine: they may have been only feelings, and as such, merely subjective. But perhaps they owed their origin to a distinct intellectual idea. The ideas of Thomas Hardy, which are gloomy, fatalist, and pessimistic, hold much in common with those of Schopenhauer. Even though it is uncertain whether Hardy had ever read Schopenhauer, it is certain that Schopenhauer could have supplied the intellectual justification for Hardy. In the nineties, I asked myself if there was a philosopher who could give a voice and a name to the feelings that I had - feelings that were as positive as Hardy's were negative. 

At first I thought that I had found that philosopher in Baudrillard. Of all the French thinkers, he seem to be the one who was most in touch with the present - what academics called 'modernity'. He did own a television set after all. Unlike him, other French intellectuals seemed mired in the first half of the 20th century, when modernism held sway; witness their obsession with Freud and Joyce. 

Something that could be said in the favour of the French post-structuralists was that all of them repudiated Marx; they held to an anti-Marxism that bordered on anti-communism. The anti-Marxism was symptomatic of the political struggle in French intellectual circles of the sixties and seventies. Then, Marxism rode high, and the post-structuralists sought to prove their intellectual superiority to it. They wanted to make their own thought distinct, and in hindsight, they chose wisely, for after the fall of communism, the Marxists were left looking foolish. 

On closer examination, Baudrillard turned out to be something of a disappointment. In the first half of his career, he wrote on the subjects of consumerism, shopping malls, TV advertising, consumer credit. All these formed part of the experience of someone living in the modern world, and Baudrillard's according these subjects importance gave his thought an air of timeliness and immediacy. But at root, Baudrillard disdained consumerism, he considered it fake and unreal, and he sought after the more honest, pure, natural. In the second half of his career, his work lost clarity. As could be expected from a French thinker, he obscured and mystified. Much has been written on the French intellectual's habit of putting up walls of verbiage, and putting up these walls is what Baudrillard did. Some critics suggest that these walls were built in order to mask Baudrillard's true political opinions. Like the Bugman, Baudrillard's attitude is one of passivity and assent, and perhaps deep down Baudrillard really did approve of the existing order. When he is forced to confront it, he feigns helplessness and passivity; it is all so terrible, but what can one do. 

I moved on from Baudrillard and looked to conservative thinkers such as Hayek. If one affirms capitalism, consumerism, surely one is affirming the market order Hayek speaks of? And in turn, if one does so, one is surely classifying oneself as a neoliberal or (to use the American term) libertarian. But I resisted designating myself as such, and while I recognised the greatness of Hayek's endeavour, I saw Hayek himself as something of a relic. He was a man who belonged to the era of the eighties, that is, of Reagan, Thatcher, the New Right, and the Cold War. 

A prominent conservative thinker of post-Cold War era was Francis Fukuyama, the author of 'The End of History?' (1989) and The End of History and the Last Man (1992), both, unusually enough, conservative and at the same time nihilistic (the 'Last Man' is taken from Nietzsche's Zarathustra). Fukuyama was influenced by the Russian thinker Alexandre Kojève. Years after I first came across a mention of Kojève, I stumbled on Jan-Werner Müller's adequate summarising of Kojève's ideas in A Dangerous Mind. Carl Schmitt in Post War European Thought (2003). My subsequent exploring of the twists and turns of Kojève's thought led me to a paradox worthy of Fukuyama. This was the hypothesis that what I had affirmed in the carefree years of my youth was not capitalism but communism; the truth was that I had been a Marxist. 

III. Kojève

Kojève called himself a Marxist and even a Stalinist, and he was joking, but only half-joking. When the body of his work is considered as a whole, we are tempted to discount his so-called Marxism as a mere instance of his typical Kojèvean irony and facetiousness.  But we would be mistaken to do so. The truth of the matter is that he did promote Marxism, but that he departed from the orthodox interpretations of Marx. 

Before the nineties, this Marxism could have been dismissed as  the doctrine of a dilettante, but after nineties, it could not. For intellectuals had established unorthodox Marxism as the reigning orthodoxy in the last remaining Marxist superpower in the world - China. 

After the death of Mao, the Chinese turned away from Soviet-style Marxism. Whether or not this reflected an expediency, or a growing influence of 'capitalist roaders' in the Chinese Communist Party, or a recognition that Soviet methods simply did not work, or all three, one cannot say. What we do know is that by the late seventies and early eighties the Chinese communist intellectuals were forced to devise, and devise quickly, apologia for Deng Xiaoping's new course. In their attempts to do so,  they undertook the task of squaring the circle. Capitalist and communist policy were being implemented at the same time. How could one argue that this was Marxist?  

The effort led to the re-examining of the now-dusty and moldy works of Marx and Engels; the Chinese intellectuals scoured these in a search for different path to socialism, one that did not terminate in the Russian model. The discussions of what the Chinese call the 'initial stage of socialism' make for some interesting reading, if one finds Marxism interesting, and certain passages of the Wiki summary are striking. One intellectual puts forward the notion that the new Chinese version of Marxism contradicts orthodox Marxism when it suggests that 'History was unilinear rather than multilinear'. 'The problem facing the CPC [the Chinese Communist Party] was that a unilinear view of history meant that China could not adopt socialism because [China] had skipped the capitalist mode of production, but a multilinear view meant that China did not need to adopt socialism because it was not a specific "stage in human evolution"'. 

This implies that a non-socialist country such as China may still qualify either as socialist or as being on the road to socialism. Kojève concluded likewise. 

Marx and Engels wrote their main works in the mid to late nineteenth century, and their writings often seem more bound to that particular time more than the writings of other thinkers of that period; if these works could be said to have an odour - and Nietzsche believe that certain writings had a distinctive 'smell' - then they are redolent of the antiques store. The opponent of Marx must Marx's portrayal of Victorian-era capitalism and in order to use it against Marx, he must choose between two avenues of attack.

The first is that Marxism was not only wrong and it had always been wrong; nothing Marx writes of factory conditions, for example, is true. Conservatives such as Hayek take this route, and this type of anti-Marxist is inclined to revisionism: 'Was 19th century England as bad as Marx said it was?'. 

The second is that Marxism was once right. Marx did describe the social and economic conditions of his time accurately, he was right, but the caveat is that he was right for his time only. This line recommends itself to the anti-Marxist taking it because it presents him with one singular advantage, which is that a good many Marxists agree with him. After WWII, the intellectuals of the Frankfurt School and the New Left asked how it was that Marxism could still hold true. Had not Western Europe moved beyond the Victorian-era smoke-stack capitalism and the attendant phenomena of children being chained to workbenches? Most certainly it had. And so one asks how it is that in such a Europe that Marxist revolution is possible. 

Kojève looks to the same questions in one of the most famous of his post-war lectures, 'Colonialism from a European perspective', which was held at a business club in Düsseldorf in 1957. 

Without naming them, Kojève dismisses the Lenins, Trotskys, Maos, as 'Romantics' who 'distorted the Marxist theories in order to apply them to noncapitalist relations, i.e., precisely to economic systems Marx did not have in view'. This touches upon a salient point, one that is brought up by many a non-Marxist. Communism took root only in agrarian, semi-capitalist, and semi-feudal countries such as Russia and China; industralised countries such as Germany and England resisted its blandishments. But Marx devised his theories precisely for the industrialised countries. This is a leak in Marxist theory, and one that Marxists beginning with Lenin attempted to patch up. 

Kojève proceeds with the 'Marx was true, but true only for his time' line of argument. Expanding upon it, he makes an extraordinary assertion: the greatest Marxist of the 20th century was Henry Ford. 

[The capitalists] rebuilt capitalism in a Marxist way. 

To put it briefly, the capitalists saw exactly the same thing as Marx saw and said although independently of him, and with some delay. Namely, that capitalism can neither progress, nor even exist, if the 'surplus value' produced through industrial technologies is not divided between the capitalist minority and the working majority. In other words, the post-Marxist capitalists understood that the modern, highly industralised capitalism of mass production not only permits, but also requires, a constant increase in the income (and of the standard of living) of the working masses. And they behaved accordingly. 

In brief, the capitalists did exactly what they ought to have done according to Marxist theory in order to make the 'social revolution' impossible, i.e., unnecessary. This 'Marxist' reconstruction of the original capitalism was accomplished more or less anonymously. But, as always, there was a great ideologue here, too. He was called Henry Ford. And thus we can say that Ford was the only great, authentic Marxist of the 20th century. 

Those who lived in the West after 1991 and who shared in its prosperity and comforts were living in societies that were post-Marxist in two ways. The first of these was that we who lived in those societies lived in a world in which there was no Soviet communism; the second, that after the reforms by the likes of Ford, we lived in a political, social, and economic order that had deliberately forestalled the Marxist revolution. 

IV. America as communist

None of the above quite captures the spirit of the post-1991 age, however. 

Marxism traditionally concerns itself with capitalism that has gone wrong, never with capitalism gone right. To use the jargon of economists, it is contraction that preoccupies the Marxists, not growth. Now, Western countries such as Australia and America experienced  contraction in the early nineties, as did the countries of the former Eastern bloc, and the post-communist countries experienced the worst of it after their abrupt shifting-over from communism to capitalism. In Yugoslavia, the currency became worthless, and the resulting economic disruption brought about break-up and war. But unlike the Easterner, the fortunate Westerner in that period could know poverty and at the same time good living; poverty did not bar the way to the enjoying of the fruits of consumerism. 

When we think of consumerism and growth, we think of America; the country seems to embody both. Kojève agreed. In a famous passage in Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, we find:

One can even say that, from a certain point of view, the United States has already attained the final stage of Marxist "communism," seeing that, practically, all the members of a "classless society" can from now on appropriate for themselves everything that seems good to them, without thereby working any more than their heart dictates. 

Now, several voyages of comparison made (between 1948 and 1958) to the United States and the U.S.S.R. gave me the impression that if the Americans give the appearance of rich Sino-Soviets, it is because the Russians and the Chinese are only Americans who are still poor but are rapidly proceeding to get richer. I was led to conclude from this that the "American way of life" was the type of life specific to the post-historical period, the actual presence of the United States in the World prefiguring the "eternal present" future of all of humanity.

What Kojève is referring to in the last sentence is his notion of the end of history: there shall be no history after a certain point, that is, no great historical events, and thereafter humanity will continue to live in time but not in history. That living will be for the day and not the morrow. 

Derrida attempts to clarify the passage in Specters of Marx (1994). 

Why and how was Kojève able to think that the United States had already reached the "final stage" of "Marxist 'communism'"? What did he think he perceived there, what did he want to perceive there? Answer: the appropriation, in abundance, of everything that can respond to need or desire, the cancellation of the gap between desire and need suspends any excess, any disadjustment, in particular in work. It is not at all surprising that this end of the disadjustment (of the being "out of joint") "prefigures [an] eternal present". 

Derrida here is florid and French, that is, typically Derrida. But we get his meaning. 'The end of disadjustment' implies an end of conflict and the reaching of a resolution. Thereafter, one can appropriate 'in abundance', of everything that can respond to need or desire'; 'the gap between desire and need' has been cancelled. 

Derrida has put his finger on what capitalism is and paradoxically, what communism is. For this abundance, this growth, this 'cancellation of the gap', was promised to us by Marx and the Marxists of the first half of the 20th century. We find these themes in the writings of Lenin and Trotsky, and even of Stalin and Khrushchev. In the form given to it by Kojève, the communist idea may have won me over in my youth. Perhaps, had I encountered it, I would have declared myself to be a communist. 

V.  In conclusion: Hegel and Christian Science

The idea of the reconciliation and the unity of opposites stands at the center of Hegel's philosophy, and I will explain it in non-philosophical language and how it bears on the subject of the discussion. 

In our reading of Hegel, we see that his account of the self, or consciousness, or soul, is a narrative proceeding through stages. In the narrative's first half, the inner self and the outer world stand opposed to one another. That is to say, one is dissatisfied with the world because it does not live up to one's expectations, it does not conform to the ideal one may have of it. But then a change takes place, and the situation improves. Suddenly - and the transition can be quite abrupt - the outer world and the inner become the one and same. One's fond imaginings become reality; the world of one's heart's desire, and the world as it really is, become identical. Thus, the 'gap is canceled'. This is Hegel's Absolute Idea. 

How did the improvement come about? From Hegel, we can deduce two answers, one contradicting the other. The first is that the outer world was brought closer to one's heart's desire by a deliberate effort: one worked to make the ideal real. The second is that perhaps the reality of the outer world matched the ideal of one's inner all along: the outer world does not need any improvement, it has already met one's heart's desire, it already stands there complete and perfect. And we fail to recognise its completeness because our consciousness is defective. Here Hegel begins to sound like Peale and Eddy. 

Now, as stated at the outset, Positive Thinking does not sit well with the politically-minded. In particular, it meets with a violent reaction from the Marxists, who are a perpetually dissatisfied people. To repeat, the political activist is someone who wants something that is not there, that is, he wants something that is missing; he detects a privation in the world and he wants ameliorate it. And the more radical he is, the more completion he wants. He invites his audience to inspect the existing state of affairs and find it wanting, which is why he often meets with the accusation that he wants to induce a state of discontent. 

Usually in the narrative put forth by the rabble rouser a fix can be achieved through a simple means: a vote for Trump, a Marxist revolution. But if the remedy is not close to hand, then one is made to feel discontented and for nothing. One then arrives at the sad truth that lofty goals cannot be attained in this world, only in the next. When the normie realises that he has been backed into such a corner, he drops out of politics, and after the experience, he is a little wiser and a little more discontented than before. 

Under the direction of the demagogue, the masses are to turn away from what little sources of satisfaction there in their lives, and they become worse off as a result. The normie then rues his dabbling in politics and his allowing himself to be seduced by what Spengler calls 'subverters, rhetors, and fantastics'. Perhaps he would have benefited from the ideas of Peale and Eddy. 

The standard objection to Peale and Eddy is that evil does exist in the world and that it exists objectively; it is not a trick played upon oneself by one's own mind. But Peale and Eddy, and Hegel before them, were striving for a mystical insight that is detached from everyday perception. The man who secures the insight stands far above. His view of human existence is (in language of cinematography) a bird's eye view as opposed to a worm's eye. In one of his most famous poems ('Lapis Lazuli', written in 1936), Yeats, after climbing to the top of a summit from which he looks down upon on mankind, acquires the bird's eye view. 

One has to ask if the political activist today can stand on that plane; if the activist can reach that mystical objectivity; and to reach it, if he must be made of the same stuff as a Taoist sage or a Buddhist monk. 

To arrive at an answer, we need understanding of what it is that distinguishes the right-wing mind from the left-wing, seeing that we are on the Right, and that we must know our own politics, for inability to know it could stand in the way of our apprehending the truth, which is  what Hegel calls the Absolute Idea. 

The conservatives who claim that radical leftists are mentally ill (that is, insane - 'mental illness' being a euphemism for insanity) are correct: discontent lies at the heart of the leftist's being, and this is a discontent that makes him unhinged, a discontent that will always be there, a discontent that will always finds it justification in whatever the ideology he comes across. 

Unlike the man of the Left, the man of the Right started off his life as contented, not discontented, and he was fortunate enough to experience only recently a way of life that was good and proper. The life in that past compares favourably to life in the present, for at some point in the recent past society took a wrong turn; now life gets worse every year. Henceforth the rightist devotes himself to the task of stopping the rot and preserving what is good, true, and sane. 

The thought of almost every radical rightist from Hitler to Trump progresses in such a manner. In the time of his innocence, the intelligent and distinguished man who has not yet entered politics may lean towards a nationalism and patriotism that are mundane and everyday. His opinions may be so widely shared, and so ordinary and commonsensical, such that he may define himself not as a radical or a conservative but as a moderate; he may incline towards liberalism, even socialism. But then a catastrophic event intervenes, the old certainties vanish, and the world as he knows it is turned upside down. But while it changed, he stayed the same. And by his clinging to what was once previously regarded as the norm, he is abominated as a reactionary. The Left considers him to be dangerous. 

He could be either Hitler or Trump: Hitler once knew a Vienna that was supreme and good before the catastrophe, Trump once knew a Manhattan. In the first half of the essay, I lauded the past like a Hitler or a Trump would have, and it would be easy to build a conservative, even reactionary, position upon that past, setting off the good past against the bad present. This conservatism would point out the undeniable truth that the West of twenty and thirty years ago compares most favourably against the West of 2023. 

Such a position would be right-wing and reactionary; at the same time, it would be something of an evasion. For the likes of Hegel, Eddy, and Peale reached a mystical objectivity that looms far above the populism of a Hitler or a Trump. 

When faced with a choice between those two perspectives, to which one should we ourselves strive towards: the mystical or the political? Our first instinct is to respond, the political. This is because we find it difficult to escape the prosaic and the everyday; we lack the detachment of a Hegel, who wrote the Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807) when the French and Prussian armies were coming to blows in Jena a few kilometres away. 

Of course, the privations experienced by Europeans in the Hegel's exceed those of ours. Everyday wisdom says: compare and contrast the bad times against the good, and count your blessings. But platitudes miss the point. According to his interpreters Koyré and Kojève, Hegel understood that a fundamental change had occurred at the turn of the 19th century, a change which, in Kojève's view, was for the better. And its beneficial effects were such that they would not have disappeared one to two hundred years later; that is, they would not have been negated by Biden, transsexuals, Black Lives Matter, wokeness, inflation, Covidianism, LGBTism, and race-swapping Disney movies. 

The detachment of Hegel approaches that of a Buddhist sage, and clinging it to it through circumstances as adverse as those endured by Hegel requires determination and grit; we can infer that Hegel himself practised a daily mental self-discipline and made a habit of shutting out of his consciousness the Napoleonic Era's cholera, starvation, economic disruption, and corpses. 

As profound as it was, the truth of Hegel did not differ overly much from the truth of the Bugman. But whereas Hegel came to that truth by means of logic, the Bugman came to it by dint of his existence. The Bugman  understands Hegel's Absolute Idea only instinctively, and he cannot put it into intellectual form. 

We have, then, come full circle, and if we are to take the Bugman as an exemplar, we must follow Bugman law. We must live according to his precepts. And what are these? Sit on one's couch, play 'vidya', eat junk food, and smoke dope.  Live the life that I did thirty years ago: frequent the convenience store, the fast-food restaurant, the shopping mall, the comic book shop, and treat those places as sacred sites.   

An alternative to the Bug Man does exist, that alternative being the political in Carl Schmitt's sense. Reading between the lines in Kojève, we almost detect Kojève and Schmitt, who were good friends, exchanging views. Here one thinker who is apolitical confronts another who is political. 

In the present, the Apolitical Man stands on top; but Political Man, long suppressed, may erupt to the surface. For now, he stands in abeyance, and if we are to decide between the two, we must come down in favour of the Apolitical. When taking all the evidence of the past three years into consideration, we must render the verdict that the Political has not delivered, and that our hankering after it has caused unneeded mental strife, friction, and turmoil. In order to ameliorate our condition, we must seek something else. And perhaps that something else is the way of the Bugman. 

A Farewell to Normiedom? On the 1990s, the End of History, American White Nationalism and German Neo-Nazism

 I. 

Before Christmas, I commiserated with some of my friends in the movement and swapped stories about life under the lockdowns and mandates. I raised eyebrows when I declared that the past two years were perhaps the worst in Australian history. My argument was that one could point to, say, the Great Depression as being on the face of it a worse time, but even the Great Depression did not deprive one of freedom - the freedom to enjoy small pleasures and be a normal human being. Back then, if one could afford it, one could smoke and drink in a bar without a capacity limit, for instance - a bar in which one did not have to 'check in' with a QR code, present a 'digital passport' to the publican, or wear a surgical mask... When I put it this way, my friends agreed.

Given that we on the Far Right are living in a time of great crisis, we should be expected to scent an opportunity in it; surely we should be excited over our prospects? One cause for optimism is that many of those attending the Freedom marches are 'normies' who had been 'red-pilled' by recent events. But the evidence suggests to me that the answer to the above question is no: for at present the Far Right seems demoralised and despondent. 

And as to why, I think the answer lies in the fact that politics often disappoints - Far Right politics especially - but up until now the Far Right activist could always escape any discouragement and disappointment and seek passage from the 'red-pilled' world to the 'blue-pilled', from the world of radical Right politics to the world of 'normiedom'. But after 2020 that avenue has been closed off; the gateway to 'normiedom' has been shut, perhaps permanently. And perhaps, once the Covidians are through with them, the 'normies' will have been done way with altogether. 

II.

Usually around this time of year, I re-read Yockey's Imperium (1948), and I re-read this work, a profoundly spiritual one, so as to renew my faith. But this year I feel a reluctance to read it: I feel that it belongs to a past age - the age of dramatic politics - and that the difference between the past age and the present has become too large to ignore.

Imperium was written in 1947, and the 1940s, perhaps Europe's most tragic decade in a millenia, saw a great deal of drama. Some politicians (such as Stalin) seem to thrive in such a dramatic environment: they have an endless appetite for crises, confrontations, wars; for their politics is the politics of what Carl Schmitt calls the exception. 

After Stalin's death, the leadership of the Soviet Union and the communist world was handed to Khrushchev, a much duller man than Stalin - certainly a less confrontational one - and by the middle of the 1950s the countries of the Eastern and Western bloc had settled down to the task of peaceful economic development. They sought to rebuild their countries, many of which had been laid waste to by deprivation and war. But Mao rejected any politics of compromise and conciliation and he stood as an odd man out: privately the other communist heads of state were appalled by his extremism and immoderation. For in that period, non-dramatic politics held sway and Western leaders followed the same path as Khrushchev. The result of it was that, when one looks back on history the East and West in the 1950s, one spies at once on its surface a patina of dullness - even if one takes all the Cold War hysteria, nuclear-saber rattling, wars in the former Western colonies, etc., into account. Daniel Bell drew a similar conclusion in his The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (1960): the sharp opposition between Left and Right had been muted; the politics of confrontation had been replaced by the politics of technocracy. 

It took time, but even Yockey came to acknowledge the truth of Bell's thesis. He had spent most of the decade building a post-war fascist international with links to the non-aligned regimes of the Third World - an international like that depicted in Frederick Forsyth's  far-fetched novel The Odessa File (1972). WWII veterans filled the ranks of these European organisations which perhaps in truth were nothing more than old soldiers' clubs. The members belonged to another time and one can intuit a recognition of this fact - at least at the subconscious level - in Yockey's writings as the decade drew to a close. His last essay, 'The World in Flames: An Estimate of the World Situation' (1960), does not exhibit as nearly as much a sense of self-assurance and grandeur as Imperium; Yockey here hovers at the edge of great world events; he is an onlooker, not a participant. In its undertone of ironic detachment I find an anticipation of postmodernism. And indeed, a connection exists between the sleepy 1950s and the postmodern 1990s - both of them decidedly dull decades from a political standpoint - and this explains in part why it was that the postmodernists alternatively paid homage and made fun of the 1950s.  

Yockey felt out of place in the 1950s and hated it. Nowadays we in the movement view the 1950s in a different light. Many white nationalists, race realists, immigration skeptics, et al., do not understand Yockey's objection to the America of the 1950s, for example: they see the America of that time as a white man's paradise and that decade as a golden age. To the white nationalist, statistics bear both these contentions out. William Pierce often remarked in his radio talks that America in 1950 was 90% white - something to be proud of. The Americans in this time kept both immigrants and negroes under wraps, and while it is true that desegregation began in earnest in the 1950s, many of the great cities in the north of America were majority white and remained so for the next two decades. 

Another reason for the divergence between the views of Yockey and the white nationalists is that the white nationalists show a pronounced tendency to laud the past at the expense of the present. In a review of the film House of Gucci (2021), Trevor Lynch writes that the film is a 'Meticulous, nostalgia-infused reconstruction of another era, this time the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, a time that seems impossibly glamorous, wholesome, and white compared with the present'. It is at this point that Pierce would take exception to Lynch; Pierce depicts America in the era of the 'Late 1970s to the mid-1990s' as a dystopian hellscape (he published the Turner Diaries, the ultimate dystopian novel, in 1978) but was forever waxing lyrical over the greatness and whiteness of America in the 1950s: a decade can be one white nationalist's hell and another's heaven. 

I agree with Lynch and disagree with Pierce. In part, this is because at the time of writing I would prefer to live in any decade except for the 2020s - I would even be prepared to travel back in time and live in the 1940s: one, I imagine, could live a good life then, provided one was able to dodge all the bombs and bullets. But the main source of my disagreement with Pierce is because I have for the past few months been watching episodes of a famous American daytime TV soap from the time of the late 1990s, and this delving into the recent past - even if it is a mythical and fantastical past - has prompted me to ask myself what possibly could have been wrong with the 1990s. An objective view of the decade would reveal in that decade we had it all. 

III. 

Unlike the 2020s, the 1990s were characterised by an absence of politics. Electoral politics was relegated to the background: the three presidential elections in that time (1993, 1996, 2000 (the 1990s as a decade came to an end, in my judgment, on September 11, 2001)) were dull affairs, and more or less, you could take or leave mainstream politics - it did not interfere with your life in any appreciable manner. 

This state of affairs came about because of the collapse of the Left in the years 1989 to 1991. For hundreds of years, the Right had functioned as a response, a reaction, to the Left; but with the disappearance of the Left came the disappearance of the Right. And that in turn led to the cessation of the political. 

After the end of the Soviet Union thirty years ago, the Left was decimated. The old school communist parties (including the Australian) were wound up for the most part. As for the other sectors of the Left - the anarchists and antifa - they lived at the fringes of society: there was no mainstream acceptance or even awareness of them. And as for Black Lives Matter, social justice warriors (SJWs), 'woke' capital - they did not exist. So: thirty years ago we lived in a world which was blessedly free (mostly) of leftism. 

But a serpent did dwell in this garden of Eden: academic neo-Marxism (known by many as 'cultural Marxism'). Critical Race Theory (CRT), Postcolonial Theory, Black Studies, Queer Studies, Gender Studies began to rear their  heads. Generally, though, this new tendency - labeled 'political correctness' by hostile conservative commentators - was confined to academia. And on occasion it was mocked and not feted (as it is now) by the media. 

By and large, the Left had been forgotten and what really stung the Left was the speed with which it had been forgotten. Only a few months after the dissolution of the USSR, race war was to take precedence over class war.  Ethnic wars broke out in the former Soviet republics and Yugoslavia - wars which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives - and intellectuals such as Bell pronounced these to be portents of the wars to come: wars henceforth were to be motivated not by ideology but ethnicity. This seemed to be an accurate assessment given that the move away from Marxism was permanent and irrevocable. Botched privatisations, IMF 'shock treatment', etc., may have plunged the economies of Eastern Europe and the former USSR into chaos, but there was never any question of a return to communism. 

It is this rather peculiar set of circumstances which explains much of the apoliticism of the period. On a personal note, at the time I took politics - mainstream politics - seriously. I read a number of books written by authors of the mainstream Left and Right (so as to be 'even-handed' and 'objective') and following the lead of my baby boomer parents, I read the newspapers, listened to the radio news and watched the TV news every day so as to keep up with current events. But at the same time, I had no fixed political convictions. I clung to a rather confused and incoherent collection of Left and Right ideas. Had I been pressed, I would have admitted that I was more interested in hobbies and popular culture than politics. In this, I was a typical 'normie'. I have since discovered how typical I was from reading Carl Boggs' classic work The End of Politics: Corporate Power and the Decline of the Public Sphere (2000): 

Why do so many Americans feel that politics has become irrelevant to their daily lives? Why is there so little public discussion of important social issues, despite unprecedented access to mass media and new communication technologies? This book delves beneath the sound bites and news headlines to explore the ongoing process of depoliticization in the United States. Attuned to the many contemporary trends eroding the public sphere, Carl Boggs illuminates the American retreat to an eerily privatized landscape of shopping malls, gated communities, new-age fads, rural militias, isolated computer terminals, and postmodern intellectual discourse. Yet Boggs maintains hope that current trends can be reversed, issuing an eloquent call for revitalizing politics, culture, and civic society. The paperback concludes with a new postscript on the movement against corporate globalization and the tumultuous presidential election of 2000.

IV.

In the nineties, the Far Right prospered and the Far Left did not, and in response to the burgeoning popularity of the Far Right, Boggs wrote a chapter on the proliferating Far Right movements of the decade. He regarded these as 'apolitical' - apolitical in the sense of being detached from civic society (and by that definition he was correct). 

What was my view of these 'apolitical' Far Right movements? For most of the nineties I was blissfully unaware of William Pierce's National Alliance, Richard Butler's Aryan Nations, Jared Taylor's American Renaissance, Tom Metzger's WAR. I was not exposed to their ideas; I was perfectly 'blue-pilled'. Perhaps for that reason I could enjoy with a clean conscience American TV shows such as Seinfeld, The X-Files, The Simpsons, Melrose Place (and lesser-known action TV shows such as Renegade, Pointman, M.A.N.T.I.S. and Fortune Hunter) like the rest of the sheep. 

I can imagine a white nationalist objecting to my consumption of this fare. The white nationalists would ask me in an accusatory tone: was I not aware that these TV shows were decadent garbage - and Jewish? Did I not know that David Duchovny, the star of the X-Files, was a Jew, that Mark Frankel, the star of Fortune Hunter, was a Jew? That the cast of Seinfeld were all Jews? (This is the standard white nationalist debating tactic; to pronounce something to be Jewish is to refute it, whether it is Jewish or no). 

Had I encountered these scolding white nationalists in the time of my innocence, I would have recognised them at once for what they were: killjoys. Pierce made America in the 1990s out to be unlivable when it was not. Pierce could always be counted on to bring the dark side of American life to your attention; he would always be regaling you with gruesome accounts of black on white atrocities such as the Wichita Massacre and the Knoxville Horror. But no rational American could be expected to live their lives in constant fear of being robbed, raped or murdered. But that was the outcome that Pierce and Taylor (author of The Color of Crime (1999)) apparently wanted. 

This is not to say that Pierce and Taylor did not provide value: of course they did. The question concerns what economists call opportunity costs: what would have benefited the average 'normie' c. 1995 - 'blue-pilling' or 'red-pilling'? The benefit of one cancels out of the other: this is the opportunity cost. 

The price paid for 'red-pilling' is that the 1990s-era state of mind - which was one of contentment and complacency - would have been spoiled for good. Pierce, a proponent of dramatic politics to be sure, opposed this 1990s mood, and surprisingly enough, he would have half-agreed with Fukuyama, who argued in an essay (and then a book) that while it is true that the the summit of human achievement had been reached by the 1990s, the peak had been attained only at the expense of foregoing of all heroism, risk and adventure. 'The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands'. [Francis Fukuyama, 'The End of History?', The National Interest, Summer 1989]. To this, Fukuyama expressed reservations and Pierce, full-blown opposition. For what mattered to Pierce more than anything else was the 'Fame of a dead man's deeds' - the remembrance through the ages of a life heroically lived. 

V.

Fukuyama built his argument on Hegel - and Marx, a fact which outraged the Left. History, Fukuyama says, results from Man's 'thinking things through': Man only explores the full implications of an idea - such as Bolshevism - by living through an idea. After 75 years of living the Bolshevist idea, Man had come to the conclusion that the idea did not work: hence the end of socialism in Eastern Europe, China and the Soviet Union. In this Hegelian discourse, the operative word is 'end': Fukuyama takes up the Hegelian thesis that history is a story with a beginning, middle and end, and as such it cannot be properly understood until the end is reached. Hegel writes, 'The owl of Minerva [the goddess of wisdom] spreads its wings only with the coming of dusk'. 

One should not overestimate the influence of intellectuals: they do not determine all that goes on in the culture of a particular period of time (e.g., the 1990s). All the same, credit must go to where credit is due to Fukuyama and the French postmodernist thinkers. In the decade of the 1990s they alone succeeded in capturing the essence of the age. It should be not forgotten that thinkers such as Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, and Baudrillard - all outcasts from the French Left - opposed Marxism for most of their careers and so naturally enough their ideas suited the post-Marxist era. 

Thirty years later, one intriguing possibility is that the ideas of Hegel and Fukuyama could serve as a means of illuminating one way out of our predicament. Covidianism has been forced upon humanity, much like Bolshevism, and is the product of a plan years in the making, much like Bolshevism; so Covidianism could be overturned, once Man has 'thought it through', that is, lived through the implications right to the end, much like Bolshevism. 

VI. 

The coming year will see a battle - perhaps the final battle - between what I call Covidian Man and what Fukuyama calls (after Nietzsche) the Last Man. I believe that the Last Man would win any such battle as he is in accord with nature whereas Covidian Man is not - Covidian Man is decidedly unnatural. 

Like any Far Right political activist, I have often come to lose my patience with the Last Man, the 'normie': his slothfulness and contentedness at times have made me despair of him so much so that I at have often considered dropping out of politics altogether. In one such dark period I was rescued from the slough of despond by re-reading Spengler and Yockey. I came to the realisation that the 'normie' had existed in every Culture prior to the Western. The 'normie' was with us in the days of ancient Babylon, Egypt, China, India; he is with us today; and he will be with us in the future. After our Western Culture perishes - like all the Cultures that preceded it - he will preponderate. The ruin of Western Culture will be inhabited by Nietzsche's Last Man, Spengler's Fellahin.

(It is this prediction of Spengler's that warranted, in the eyes of many, charges of pessimism). 

At the beginning of this essay, I intimated that that the Far Right activist occupies two worlds - the world of the 'red-pilled' and the world of the 'normie'. The cause of the activist's recent despondency is that our activist much likes the world of the 'normie' and he is sorry to see it go - he mourns its demise at the hands of Covidianism. On a personal note, my friends and I have many fond recollections of many happy hours spent in the bars and restaurants in the bohemian and 'normie' quarter of the city I live in; we spent those hours discussing politics and ideas while enjoying food and wine in a carefree and convivial atmosphere - like normal humans. All of these pleasures have been taken away by the Covidians. Are they gone for good? The Covidians say yes. According to them, the masks, hand dispensers, capacity limits, digital passports, QR codes, social distancing, working remotely, coerced injections, contact tracing, nasal swab tests, lockdowns, prison camps, etc., will stay in place forever and ever; certainly we cannot foresee any abeyance in the new year. No wonder then that so many in the movement have been driven to despair; the ground - the 'normie' ground - has disappeared beneath us. 

VII.

Something that is missing from today which was present yesterday is trust - trust in politicians, journalists, health officials, intellectuals, our peer group in other words. Only a few years ago we believed that the globalist elites - the Davos men - did not want to kill us or make us sick; we believed there was a lack of animus on their part towards us or at the least a lack of interest; and we believed that they were content to leave us alone. 

That trust can only exist if you believe that the universe is benevolent and means well by you. We find that optimism in evidence in many of the movies representative of the 1990s - one in particular being the  negro comedy Friday (1995). The movie is set in the suburb of South Central Los Angeles, but surprisingly enough, the suburb is not portrayed as a hellhole rife with gang shootings, etc.: the producers originally wanted a violent film but were persuaded by one of the stars, Ice Cube, to downplay any violence - a violent (and exciting) film, Ice Cube argued, would not have been true to life. In the completed movie, South Central LA comes across as a sunny, prosperous, happy place,and perhaps a little dull - certainly a place in which the Last Man lives. 

Spengler writes of the Cosmopolis - the World City - the city which appears with the onset of the old age of a Culture and which devours and incorporates all the suburbs, towns and countryside around it, making it all urban. The World City spawns copies of itself everywhere. This is why the suburb of South Central LA - in the 1990s, at least - resembles the outer suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne; and in much the same way, the fictional Mid-Western town portrayed in the daytime TV soap I mentioned earlier resembles any town in rural and regional Australia. The World City is omnipresent. 

One can criticise the Cosmopolis for its ubiquity, its homogeneity and its universality, but one must concede that in it, one could lead a life of freedom, one could enjoy the fruits of a consumer society and one could enjoy these - following the collapse of Marxism - without guilt. How life has changed today! By 2022, the World City had been turned into a giant prison. 

Perhaps - and this is a pessimistic line of thought - the free life of the World City contained the seeds of its own destruction. The cults and secret societies run by egalitarians, republicans, technocrats, intellectuals, free-thinkers, et al., only appear towards the end of a Culture's life and not its beginning. Furthermore, they only appear in the cities. Perhaps, then, it is the World City which bears the burden of guilt for giving us Klaus Schwab, Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, George Soros... 

VIII.

Even so, who is it that shoulders the ultimate responsibility for the granting of the Schwabs and Faucis power - absolute power - over us? The answer is the 'normie'. 

Covidianism has met with a great deal of resistance - it has not had things all its own way - and a common theme in the polemics against it is the stupidity of the sheep who allowed, step to step, the Covidians to take over their lives. All activists against Covidianism have run up against the obstacles of 'normie' stupidity, gullibility and the rest; the 'normie' seems impervious to facts. When the 'normie' is told that the mask he wears everywhere looks stupid, and worse, is useless in protecting him against Covid, he shrugs - all that matters is that his peer group endorses it and makes it compulsory; likewise, when he is presented with proof that the injections will kill or incapacitate a fifth or third or half of their recipients, this means nothing to him, he will not be deterred at all from lining up for his seventh or eighth booster shot. But of course he will be the first to complain that he was not sufficiently warned should it finally be acknowledged, by the political and health establishments, that the injections are almost guaranteed to cause a compromised immune system, strokes, heart attacks and even death. 

In short, his conditioning has proven to be extremely strong and effective. Supposing that the Covidians were overthrown tomorrow, at least 50% of the population would continue to wear their masks. This really should not surprise us, seeing that that the former members of a cult have a difficult time shrugging off the cult's beliefs and practices. Exiting a cult physically is one thing, exiting it mentally is another; the latter can take years. 

The above does seem to go against my earlier contention that the 'normie', seeing that Covidianism is unnatural and destructive, rise up against it. But the contradiction can be resolved if we accept that yes, the 'normie' will revolt, but only after a period of time. And how long would that period be? It took Eastern and Central Europe forty years to do away with communism (another unnatural doctrine); earlier revolts, such as those in Berlin in 1953 and Hungary in 1956, were brutally crushed. But we should not speculate: we can scarcely tell if the anti-Covidian revolution will take four years or forty.  

Two lessons emerge from the two revolts in Hungary in the last century, that is, the revolt of 1956 and the revolt of 1989. The first lesson is that the Left does not change; the second lesson, that the Right does. As an example of the former, consider the fact that the revolts against communism in 1956 and Covidianism in 2021 were regarded by the Left to be at both times the work of a neofascist conspiracy. This shows that the Left has hardly changed its tune in the past 65 years. In contrast, the Right has changed its tune. A prime example is Viktor Orbán: this is a man who in his youth fought for freedom as an anti-communist activist; this a man who became one of the heroes of the 1989 revolution; but this is also a man who has now joined the ranks of the Covidians; this is a man who no longer fights against totalitarianism but throws in his lot with it. The Orban case shows that Covidianism corrupts and corrupts absolutely. One could hypothesise that other anti-communists activists from the eighties, activists who at the time were the darlings of the conservative Right, men such as Václav Havel and Lech Walesa - would have been corrupted by Covidianism as well. 

In his anti-communist days, Orban would have believed, along with Fukuyama and Fukuyama's mentor Kojève, in Hegel's 'cunning of reason'. This is the idea that Man possesses enough logical capability to arrive at the correct conclusion after 'thinking things through'. Following Hegel, anti-communist liberals such as Orbán and Havel in the 1980s took an optimistic view of human nature: they believed that Man was smart enough to see through Marxism and so would be smart enough to reject it. 

But to paraphrase Keynes, in the long run we are all dead, and the Covidians could, up until the time that they meet the same fate as the Eastern European communists in 1989, cause tremendous damage - and they have done so already. 

Besides which, some of us in the movement do not believe in the 'cunning of reason'. The dark thought has crossed our minds that perhaps the 'normie' cannot be relied upon to make decisions in his own best interest. As proof, we only need look at the history of the past two years. 

IX.

I have written here on the travails of the Far Left in the 1990s, and now I will touch upon those of the Far Right. 

Ironically, by the 1990s, German nationalism had become a victim of its own success. As a thought experiment, let us suppose that we were to take an old-school German National Socialist - one who had lived through the war - from 1955 and transport him in time to 1995. We would see at once that the man was an anachronism; the events of 1989 to 1991 had put him out of business. Deeply disturbed, he would be asking himself a number of discomforting questions. With the reunification of Germany and the destruction of communism, what use was there for National Socialism? Why should he continue to be a National Socialist? Why would his fellow Germans want to become National Socialist again? 

Perhaps our time-traveller would knuckle under and resign himself to life as a German 'normie'. He would learn to amuse himself by watching American trash television, dancing at the Berlin Love Parade and shopping at the Bonn malls. The last activity should occupy an important place in his new political world-view, for in Fukuyama's interpretation of Hegel's concept of freedom, freedom means freedom to shop. Acceding to this thesis, in the months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the communist government of East Germany relented: it allowed Berliners from the Eastern half of the city to cross into the Western in order to shop. 

Our hypothetical National Socialist would, under the compulsion of events, be forced to navigate his way back to 'normiedom'. But I can imagine that many of the old fascists of his generation, men who knew and respected Hitler and lived through National Socialism - men such as Otto Remer, Otto Skorzeny, Léon Degrelle, Hans-Ulrich Rudel - would have objected. I would have found it interesting to debate post-communist politics with these men while they were in full possession of their faculties. To that end, a time machine would be necessary to pluck them out of the past and from a past in which they were young and vigorous - and hungry for political power.  

Debate matters here. In this modern age, we no longer believe in the divine right of kings and we expect politicians - even the most firmly entrenched ones - to argue the case for their legitimacy. Why should such and such a politician rule over us? The politician has to give reasons why and he must win over any sceptics and doubters. Even a politician who seizes through power through force of arms must devote  an inordinate amount of time and energy to persuasion and speech-making. See Castro, for instance, who like every successful communist revolutionary, won power not through the ballot box but a successful military campaign. Castro, a former lawyer, had to argue his case in the court of public opinion constantly. All politicians labour under similar constraints, even Neo-Nazi ones. So if we were to transport into the early nineties the young and vigorous Otto Remer of the early fifties, what arguments would he make for his being elected to office? Why should Germans vote for his Socialist Reich Party? My guess is that Remer's arguments would have fallen short; the sudden and abrupt changes in Germany and Eastern Europe would have revealed him to be a relic. 

This touches upon the question of the relation of the 'new' National Socialism to the 'old'. In a conversation fifteen years ago with a German nationalist who had met Remer, I argued that Remer's positions in the 1950s represented a departure from 'classic' National Socialism.  My friend dismissed the notion and referred to Remer condescendingly as an 'Old Nazi', and reflecting later and looking at photos of Socialist Reich Party rallies (which looked a lot like 'old' Nazi rallies) I came to the conclusion that my friend was right. 

Up to the 1970s, the German nationalist movement was filled with old Nazis who had new obsessions; these were Holocaust and WWII Revisionism. It is a knowledge and agreement with these that constitutes 'red-pilling': unless one is accordance with Remer's views on these, one is not 'red-pilled'. 

The great obstacle that the German nationalist - and we in the movement outside Germany - encounters when attempting to 'red-pill' the 'normie' is not hostility but indifference. He is not interested in the correct view of WWII or the Holocaust because he feels - rightly or wrongly - that the events of eighty years ago do not affect his life. And that is especially true today after two years of lockdowns. Why should he want to know the truth about the Holocaust when he has been unable to get a haircut for three months? 

The 'normie' often cannot see the wood for the trees. We can set ourselves the task of educating him, and in this educating him on the connections between the Covidians of today and the Masons of old; but it is more important that we exploit the openings that the Covidians have given us. They have made a rift in the social, economic and political structure. 

Like a good many observers, I find the behaviour of the globalist elites perplexing. Up until 2020, everything was going their way - the Great Replacement was proceeding along nicely, for example - and whatever they did met with the assent of the population. But in 2020, they undertook two actions that would endanger their position. The first of these was the ouster of an American president in a left-wing coup, the first in America's history; the second, the imposition of Covidianism across the entire world. In both instances, the elites broke with normality - and perhaps with the 'normie' as well. To judge by their actions of the last two years, it is as if the globalist elites, the neo-Masons, et al., have a political death wish: they want the 'normie' to turn against them - and terminate them with extreme prejudice. To that end they are doing everything possible... 

In 1969, Lord Russell of Liverpool published Return of the Swastika? The Rising Threat of Resurgent Nazism in Germany; Russell was one of the prosecutors at the Nuremberg war crimes 'trials', and twenty five years after the war, he finds that the Germans are not behaving to his satisfaction. Russell is filled with suspicion and rage; he excoriates the Germans - for their obduracy and also for their attitudes. He does not give one inch on the Holocaust story (and why should he, given the instrumental role he played in building it) and he rakes the Germans over the coals. What is interesting here is that both Russell and Covidians perceive their enemies in exactly the same way, their rhetoric takes the same tone. Reading Russell, we half-expect him to denounce the Germans for fomenting (to use a favourite pejorative term of the globalists) 'conspiracy theories'. In the parlance of 4Chan, too large a sector of the German population was 'based' and 'red-pilled' - that, in Russell's eyes, was their crime. 

The war crimes 'trials', the Morgenthau Plan, etc., and even Russell's propaganda were inflicted upon the Germans with the intention of continuing the war after the war. We in 2022 are approaching a state of war; abiding by Carl Schmitt's Friend / Enemy distinction, the globalists now see a large sector of the population as the Enemy. If Remer or any of the other 'old Nazis' were to return to the present, they would see that as a positive development; at last their Enemy has given them something to work with.