When my brother and I are playing video games, we often give my nephew—a toddler—an unplugged controller. We encourage him to believe he's actually playing the game, congratulating him on playing well and cheering when he completes each level. He probably senses that his character's not quite doing what he wants him to do, but it's easiest to dismiss those concerns and play along. After all, he's playing as well as his adult mentors. Our scheme will probably continue to work as long as he feels like he's winning.

A toddler can be forgiven for this naivety. But what about the hundreds of millions of Americans who line up at the polls every other year to fall for this same scam being perpetrated on a sweeping national scale? Unlike the noble lie perpetrated by me and my brother, this lie is anything but noble. In every election, the people try to vote for smaller government, fewer imperial wars, secure borders, and safe jobs. Yet, the controllers deliver up more government, more wars, more open borders, and more free trade agreements no matter which buttons we press.

For decades, we Americans have absentmindedly played along because it seemed like we were winning. However, the unraveling credit bubble and the unmistakable impression that America is becoming "the sick man of the globe" is leaving many of us feeling less like we're winning, and more like we're this idiot in the middle . . .

We've become a nation of idiots. Alain de Benoist, a leading luminary of Europe's New Right, confirms the worst in his recently translated book, The Problem of Democracy...

The notions of citizenship, liberty, and equality of political rights, as well as popular sovereignty, were closely interrelated. The most essential feature of citizenship was one's origin and heritage: Pericles was the 'son of Xanthippus from the deme of Cholargus'. From 451 BCE, one had to be born of an Athenian mother and father in order to become a citizen. Defined by his belonging, the citizen (polites) was opposed to the idiotes, or non-citizen—a designation that quickly took on a pejorative meaning (from the notion of the isolated individual with no belonging came the idea of the 'idiot'). Citizenship as a function thus derived from the notion of citizenship a status which was the exclusive prerogative of birth. To be a citizen meant, in the fullest sense of the word, to belong to a homeland - that is, to a homeland and a past.

We're regressing from true citizens with a common heritage into isolated individuals . . . idiots. We no longer have the power or the will to direct this government, a government which no longer belongs to us in any meaningful way. While many of America's founding fathers were known for churning out universalist platitudes, the founding documents and the Republic they instantiated reflected the united spirit and will of a common people. John Jay explained it best in Federalist Paper No. 2 . . . 

Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people, a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established liberty and independence.

In addition to John Jay, Louis March's Immigration and the End of Self-Government quotes Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, James Madison, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Calvin Coolidge, all corroborating the same basic vision of American identity. Abraham Lincoln, a racialist and ethnic nationalist by any standard, is conspicuously (though unsurprisingly) absent from this Southern gentleman's comprehensive list. Whether they were Federalists or Anti-Federalists, Yankees or Confederates, Democrats or Republicans, Americans shared an essentially Athenian conception of citizenship.

March contrasts this with Jewish neoconservative Nathan Glazer's contention that, "The United States is unique among the great nations of the world in the degree to which it refuses to define itself in ethnic or religious or national terms, as our basic founding documents make clear." A nation that refuses to define itself in national terms is a nation of idiots (to rely on the more common definition). Not that there's much of an American nation left...perhaps more of a global circus of "propositional" Americans propositioning one another.

For the past several decades, most Americans have eagerly parroted the multicultural platitudes on command but have implicitly identified with the traditional American ethnicity. This unexamined contradiction is increasingly strained by the demographic, political, cultural, and economic ramifications of having designed our nation's policies on those idiotic platitudes. The cognitive dissonance is reaching an inflection point, with more and more of us terrified on an instinctive level by our displacement, yet lacking the vocabulary to give voice to that fear. We're repelled by the progressive's "progress" yet remain indoctrinated in the progressive's ideological frame. More and more Americans perceive themselves as "standing athwart history, yelling 'Stop!'"

This growing unease with the status quo is an opportunity for us to sell Americans on a completely different type of progress, a radical alternative to idiocy. Unlike our opponents, who've been reduced to "waiting for Superman" to save them from their own mess, we can credibly offer a future worth looking forward to. Do you want better education? Remove diversity from the equation and our schools are among the world's best. Do you want to balance the budget? With a cessation of our imperial military adventures and gutting of the monolithic bureaucracies dedicated to social engineering, we can do that. Do you want better jobs? We can seal off the borders, broker trade agreements that protect America's strategically critical industrial infrastructure, and put Americans back to work. Do you want less crime? Well, you get the idea . . . 

The next few years will be crucial in determining whether Americans can break free of the progressive paradigm and embrace a traditional one, one in which progress is to be fertile instead of sterile, honorable instead of respectable, enriched instead of rich, and equal in the Athenian sense instead of the modern egalitarian sense. Recent developments are encouraging. Both mainstream academics like Robert Putnam and mainstream politicians like Angela Merkel are conceding that the global social engineering experiment in multiculturalism is dead. 

We know that we're not winning and we've lost faith in our elites. Sooner or later, my nephew's going to wise up and demand genuine and complete control of his character and determine his own course. Hopefully, we as a nation will stop being idiots and demand the same for ourselves.

The final blow to what remains of the theoretical case for American conservatism will be struck shortly, when women are allowed to serve in combat units of the American armed forces.  A draft report from the Army’s “Military Leadership Diversity Commission” has concluded that the current males only policy for combat units is “discriminatory” and therefore, there is no legitimate reason for it to continue.

The defining insight of the Alternative Right is that every traditional institution in the West has been fatally compromised by egalitarianism and radical leftism, and that ultimately modern conservatism serves as nothing more than the defense of the liberal establishment. The one possible exception to this rule has been the United States military.  In the popular imagination, the military represents an American warrior tradition that predates the Republic itself and is a bastion of conservatism and patriotism in a society gone mad.  It remains the only public institution that enjoys the widespread trust and support of the American people, far exceeding the approval ratings of the media, branches of government, corporate America, and even religion.

Nonetheless, a steadily increasing collection of papers and books from Thomas Ricks's Making The Corps in 1997 to Lt. Col. J.K. Dempsey's Our Army in 2010 contain much furrowing of brows and lamentations about the alleged monolithic conservatism of the officer corps and supposed alienation of officers from a decadent American society. Conservatives can smugly assert in response that it is the very innate conservatism of the military’s leadership that makes the institution so worthy of trust.  Furthermore, they could argue that this conservatism is inherent to the military profession, as Samuel Huntington elaborated in his seminal 1957 work, The Soldier and the State. Any progressive attempt to crack open the military and force it to operate like any other government bureaucracy is therefore doomed to failure.

Unfortunately, the progressives have succeeded.  Whatever the private opinions of the officer corps, the last few years have shown that the Army essentially operates with the same principles as any Ethnic Studies Program at a typical university.  In 2009, a major in the United States Army who had openly expressed outright contempt for the country he ostensibly served murdered American soldiers on an Army base.  Soldiers could not fire back and had to be saved by the police—because they are not allowed to be armed on base. Our mighty centurion General George Casey—in a pronouncement as immortal in its own way as Casear’s “Vini, Vidi, Vici”—commented that while the shootings were a tragedy, the greater tragedy would be if the Army's diversity were a casualty.

Darren Aronofksy's remarkable new movie Black Swan is a companion piece to his equally striking 2009 offering, The Wrestler. The two films take place in settings that could not possibly be more different, yet each tells essentially the same story, a story that is undeniably relevant to our age and culture.

In both, the protagonist is an artist fanatically attached to his craft, to the exclusion of all else in life, even his own well-being. The bulked-up, over-the-hill professional wrestler portrayed by Mickey Rourke can't fathom giving up the career that once brought him stardom and acclaim, even though it's led to his physical deterioration, late middle-age decrepitude, and severe heart problems. Meanwhile, the outwardly frail, inwardly driven and emotionally obsessive Broadway ballerina played by Natalie Portman dances on the very edge of mental collapse, her behavior increasingly erratic, marked by bouts of frightening hallucinations and episodes of queasy self-abuse.

Rourke's character parks his trailer among the down-home Red State denizens of the pro-wrestling circuit, while Portman's dwells with the Blue State New York cultural cognoscenti, but Aronofsky evinces no chauvinism for one society over the other, and both films are utterly bereft of any taint of condescension. The setting, while meticulously detailed and enjoyably authentic, is merely backdrop, however; the real story concerns the central character's willful self-destruction for the sake of his art.

Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler (2008)

Depressing as such a premise may sound, it is worth noting that the tragic denouement in both movies is paradoxically shot through with an exquisite jolt of exhilaration and triumph. The hero's determination to achieve artistic perfection at the cost of his health and sanity may expose him as spectacularly imprudent, but it inspires us just the same. There is indeed a grand romanticism to such gestures, one that temporarily shakes us out of our postmodern spiritual torpor and moves us to admiration.

A time there was when the awarding of a title of nobility in European countries was intended as formal recognition of the recipient's service to the crown, to the country, or to the state. Under the feudal system, the honour was given in exchange for military service and was hereditary; but in modern times it has been given, at least in theory, as a very special life-time award by the state to a tiny handful of individuals deemed by it to have led a singularly meritorious career. That is why the process has been termed 'ennoblement' -- the implication being that these individuals are somehow noble and worthy of such appellation. For this reason, concommittant with the very exclusive privileges they obtain, ennobled citizens have added responsibilities, especially with regards to standards of conduct.

When Tony Blair's Labour regime seized power in 1997, the nobility as a system had long been on the wane, the aristocracy having been progressively stripped of its legal powers through successive reforms. All the same, the majority of the House of Lords prior to 2000 was in the hands of a hereditary aristocracy, which were largely Conservative members. During the late 1990s, Blair undertook his long-threatened 'reform' of the House of Lords with gusto and in a partisan fashion, determined, above all, to increase Labour's representation in the chamber (according to him and his supporters, it needed to be more modern and 'democratic'). While at it, he also undertook to multiculturalise this old institution, as it was too uniformly White and male for his liking.

Two beneficiaries of Blair's policy were foreign-born Muslims: Manzila Pola Uddin (from Bangladesh) and Amir Bhatia (from East Africa), who became Baroness Uddin and Lord Bhatia respectively. They joined Indian-born Swraj Paul, since 1996 Lord Paul, and a wealthy long-standing supporter of the Labour Party and of the man who most diligently ruined the British economy in the decades since World War II, Gordon Brown.

Having been ennobled under such extraordinary circumstances, one would have thought that their Lordships and Ladyship would have gone the extra mile to prove their worth. After all, does not aristocracy mean 'rule by the best'? 

Yet, how did they repay the British state for the honours it bestowed upon them?

By theft.

All three have been found guilty of misappropriating public funds through fraudulent expenses claims. 

Needless to say that they are not the only ones in Parliament who have been found guilty of misconduct. The Parliamentary Expenses Scandal of 2009 provided a most unedifying spectacle, with many of these peers' 'blood-and-soil' British colleagues also caught with their arms elbow-deep in the cookie jar -- essentially pickpocketing me and all other taxpayers.

All the same, it is still especially galling when individuals who were not even born in the country and who have been awarded high honours instead of worthier citizens, behave in such corrupt and dishonourable fashion.

All now face suspension from the House of Lords and have been asked to return the £200,000 ($300,000) they stole. But in a just world, they would be stripped of their peerages altogether: these are not individuals deserving to be called 'noble'.

Kenneth Minogue has written what appears to be an interesting new book on the downfall of democracy as a viable political system. There are some excerpts at the New Criterion which are worth your attention. Minogue makes the point that the Managerial State and prosperity has more or less corrupted the national character and turned us into a nation of politically correct victims and limp wristed careerists. He doesn't explicitly recognize the checks on this put in place by the founding fathers to prevent this (aka only letting male freeholders vote), but it's worth keeping in mind as we degenerate into a nation of slaves.

My concern with democracy is highly specific. It begins in observing the remarkable fact that, while democracy means a government accountable to the electorate, our rulers now make us accountable to them. Most Western governments hate me smoking, or eating the wrong kind of food, or hunting foxes, or drinking too much, and these are merely the surface disapprovals, the ones that provoke legislation or public campaigns. We also borrow too much money for our personal pleasures, and many of us are very bad parents. Ministers of state have been known to instruct us in elementary matters, such as the importance of reading stories to our children. Again, many of us have unsound views about people of other races, cultures, or religions, and the distribution of our friends does not always correspond, as governments think that it ought, to the cultural diversity of our society. We must face up to the grim fact that the rulers we elect are losing patience with us...

It is this element of dehumanization that has produced what I am calling “the servile mind.” The charge of servility or slavishness is a serious one. It emerges from the Classical view that slaves lacked the capacity for self-movement and had to be animated by the superior class of masters. They were creatures of impulse and passion rather than of reason. Aristotle thought that some people were “natural slaves.” In our democratic world, by contrast, we recognize at least some element of the “master” (which means, of course, self-managing autonomy) in everyone. Indeed, in our entirely justified hatred of slavery, we sometimes think that the passion for freedom is a constitutive drive of all human beings. Such a judgment can hardly survive the most elementary inspection of history. The experience of both traditional societies and totalitarian states in the twentieth century suggests that many people are, in most circumstances, happy to sink themselves in some collective enterprise that guides their lives and guarantees them security. It is the emergence of freedom rather than the extent of servility that needs explanation...

The problem about identifying servility in our modern Western societies results from the assumption that freedom and independence are admirable, and their opposites not. Hence the strong human tendency to trade off freedom for some other condition of things—money, security, approval—must take on the appearance of a virtue. A further problem with servility is that its opposite might seem to be a swaggering parade of one’s own independence, but this is just as likely to be a cover for a servile spirit. Since the essence of servility is dependence of mind, independence is compatible with situational caution, as in the case of the assistant to Lord Copper in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, who responds to whatever idiotic remark his press baron employer might make with the words “Up to a point, Lord Copper.” Wariness, tact, and hypocrisy are inevitable elements in the comic conditions of modern bourgeois life, and their significance is never obvious, even to those indulging them...

And if it should seem that invoking servility as characterizing some of the conduct of modern Westerners is excessively dramatic, let me observe that we do actually have a vocabulary that recognizes slavishness in the everyday life of our societies. It happens, for example, when we call someone a toady, creep, wimp, careerist, or some other such denigration. Indeed, our vocabulary reveals a variety of ways in which we recognize tendencies which are quite precisely servile. Any failure to perform a public duty unless some private benefit is given, for example, is an exercise in corruption, and such corruption is a derogation of the moral life characteristic of the slave.

In storytelling, artifice and theater are evocative and necessary. In the best case, dramatic storytelling can lift us from the detritus of our mundane little anthills to another realm where we can imagine the pure forms and great ideas that inspire and impart deep wisdom and meaning.

The tragedy of the “post-modern” world of images is that for so many, artifice and theatrical drama have eclipsed the real. In this world of appearances and poses, every costume is disposable and the person is a mere actor, a blank slate, a ravenously hungry, ever- emptying digestive tract that grinds everything into waste.

For the commercial multiculturalist, culture is a folk hat and gender is a pose or “attitude.”  Everything is à la carte. Urban lumberjacks, land-locked surfers and cul-de-sac hip hop. Rabbi chic. Eskimo. Islam. Ferrari. Blue Steel. The ideals that once guided the lives of men are reduced to oily residues that one can splash on and wash off according to mood or occasion. There is no true commitment for the everyday actor, the Homo Californicus. There is only desire and sensation and social approval.

I was walking through a mall yesterday. Malls are always a deluge of stupid, but a window display for this caught my eye.

Why not Eau de “Christianity?”

“Virginity” parfum?

"Allahu Akbar!" an explosive new body spray from AXE?

In a way, it’s all fairly harmless.

But it also struck me as highly symbolic of the marriage of convenience between commercial values and multicultural relativism. Someone can blend together a few essences that smell nice, and then sacralize their fragrance product by giving it a name associated with an idea so powerful that millions of men have died seeking or protecting it. Now, without going to all the trouble, young suburban metrosexuals can squirt themselves with a little “honor” and head out for a night at "da club" with a vague sense of attachment to something beautiful and meaningful. A vague sense of being the kind of man who would stand his ground, protect his reputation, who would fight for a cause or to protect his people.

One of the private challenges for any sort of radical traditionalist seems to be wresting meaning back from the marketplace that degrades it.  

Postmodern consumerism is passive and easy.

Sincerity is subversive.

…and as they increase in years, so they increase in prowess and in skill in the art of arms for peace and for war. And they themselves, through their great zeal and determination, learn the true way to practice the military arts until they, on every occasion, know how to strive toward the most honorable course of action, whether in relation to deeds of arms or in relation to other forms of behavior appropriate to their rank. Then they reflect on, inform themselves, and inquire how to conduct themselves most honorably in all circumstances. They do this quickly and gladly, without waiting for admonitions or exhortations.

 

-- Geoffroi de Charny, The Book of Chivalry

Under Discussion: WAR, by Sebastian Junger

In WAR, Sebastian Junger notes that while pure objectivity is hard enough to maintain while covering a city council meeting -- let alone in the middle of a war -- he committed himself to writing “honestly” about the American soldiers he lived (and very nearly died) with as an embedded journalist in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. Junger gives a raw, real, gripping and insightful account of life and death in “The Valley,” but in WAR he never comes across as pretentious, preachy or even particularly political. Instead, Junger aims to get across what it feels like to be a man at war in a place where firefights often happen several times a day.

It is common to see soldiers portrayed as “victims” of war. Even as politicians and the media mechanically display a reverence for combat veterans and speak vaguely about “heroism” and “personal sacrifice,” it is often clear that many are uncomfortable with the idea that there are men who willingly kill for a living. Junger’s take on it is that they kill to keep on living, to stop someone from killing them. But back home many people speak of war as if it is something terrible that happened to soldiers who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Junger refreshingly admits that “war is a lot of things and it’s useless to pretend that exciting isn’t one of them.” Like Sergeant First Class William James in The Hurt Locker (2008), a lot of men apparently end up missing combat when they are sent home.

Lady Marian in Sir Ridley Scott's new Robin Hood is faithful, truthful, honorable, and compassionate -- character traits in women that seldom are promoted by the our media and entertainment industry. The website of Cosmopolitan magazine, for example, has seven features on the new film Sex and the City 2, a franchise that promotes vastly different values to today's women. In the film, there is a gay marriage, the main character cheats on her husband by kissing an ex-boyfriend, and the women continue to focus on fashion, this time in Abu Dhabi rather than New York City. The franchise's TV show dealt with abortion, massive consumerism, and promiscuity, culminating in the most conservative cast member, Charlotte, converting to Judaism to marry Harry Goldenblatt, then adopting a Chinese girl.

Lady Marion comes as a breath of fresh air in movies dominated by such portrayals of women, which are destructive to European Americans.

Truthfulness often is declared to be the primary value of Indo-European peoples. For example, the philosopher Julius Evola recounts that a lie was punishable by death in ancient Iran. This is in part because our ancestors were bound by a Truth that was higher than personal whims and material gains -- Duty was first to the gods and the folk.