Can the Ossis save Europe? Part 1 of 3

Today, over 25 years after the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain which split Europe asunder, profound social and cultural differences persist between the two halves of the continent. In the West, the ideology of “anti-racism” is largely hegemonic. The idea that indigenous Europeans should defend their culture and interests in general, and should oppose Africanization or Islamization in particular, is considered heresy — grounds for excommunication from civilized humanity.

Among the Ossis in Central and Eastern Europe, on the contrary, a casual and open ethnocentrism is remarkably common. (Ossis is the German nickname for former citizens of the communist German Democratic Republic. In this article I extend the term to all formerly communist Central and Eastern European countries.)

Bulgarian Prime Minister Boiko Borisov has said that Muslim immigration threatens the “demographic balance” of his country (which has had a Turkish minority of 10% of the population since Ottoman days). His Hungarian counterpart Viktor Orbán makes remarkable speeches. He recently highlighted the civilization-threatening and irreversible character of the demographic changes in Europe:

A modern day mass migration is taking place around the world that could change the face of Europe’s civilization. … If that happens, that’s irreversible. … There is no way back from a multicultural Europe. Neither to a Christian Europe, nor to a world of national cultures.

In Hungary, the even more nationalist Jobbik party commands over a fifth of the vote.

Central and Eastern European ethnocentrism is also evident at street level. The PEGIDA movement (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West) in Germany has organized demonstrations with tens of thousands of people, the biggest being in the former communist cities of Dresden and Leipzig. During my visit to an Identitarian event in Great Britain, I was pleased to see that the security was provided by sturdy Polish nationalists. No Bruderkrieg here! And while the current Polish regime likes to give off airs of being a progressive “European” (read: hypertrophied liberal) country, Poland’s annual Independence Day rally attracts thousands of nationalists, including toughs who insist on asserting the primacy of heteronormativity by burning down a rainbow arch. In Greece (a strange case) and Ukraine, we even have outright popular and battle-ready National Socialist movements.

In short, in the East nationalism appears much more palatable to a significant part of both the ruling establishments and the public than in the West. Why the difference? In part, the reasons are likely indigenous. Northwest Europeans (British, French, Scandinavians…) have long been more liberal than the rest of the continent, a fact which may well be related to a higher frequency in the genes of Ice Ace survivors.[1] However, it seems clear that the degree of difference of ethnocentrism between Western and Eastern Europeans today is more because of their exposure to two very different forms of Marxism since 1945.

In the West, there was the affluent society, bourgeois regimes and the cultural Marxism documented in The Culture of Critique, associated with figures such as Herbert Marcus and Jürgen Habermas. This culture, which put individualism, egalitarianism and anti-ethnocentrism above all considerations of the public good, gradually attained a Gramscian hegemony through the efforts of Hollywood, Anglo-American pop culture and media, the Ivy League universities, and local European liberal and/or Zionist ruling elites. There is of course regional variation: In France, local Zionists play a major role, in Germany an indigenous liberal elite imposed these ideologies upon a nation totally destroyed and traumatized by the world wars, and in Italy there is actually a relatively high degree of cultural freedom, with not-inconsiderable neo-fascist movements and intellectuals.

In the East things were very different. Instead of the soft, seductive Marxo-Freudianism of the Frankfurt School, they had the unforgiving terror of Stalinism. As a result, the population was not brainwashed, but rather made immune to a Marxist propaganda firmly associated with Russian imperialism. (In Central Europe, anti-communism and Russophobia go hand in hand, while in Russia the Marxist legacy is unfortunately partly intertwined with national pride.) These countries remained poorer. Life was rougher, yet more “normal” in a way. There is the more normal distribution of ethnocentrism: a general, “common sense” ethnocentrism and a sometimes violent ethnocentric fringe.

In short, the more natural, less brainwashed peoples of the East are in a good position to help their Western brothers turn to nationalism.

Traditional Values as Evolutionary Adaptiveness

It is striking to realize the degree to which so many of the old ways, such as patriarchy, heteronormativity and ethnocentrism — often institutionalized by religion so as to enforce and reinforce these norms culturally and socially — are evolutionarily adaptive. In the traditional world, tribes that promoted strong men[2] and reproductive women, suppressed homosexuality,[3] and protected their kin, tended to replace — either through violence or the womb — tribes that did not. That is why virtually all traditional societies throughout the world are, for the modern liberal, “misogynist,” “homophobic,” and “racist.”

These traditional values are almost certainly biologically-influenced. Even the New York Times can bring itself to print that “scholars suggest that in evolutionary times we became hard-wired to make instantaneous judgments about whether someone is in our ‘in group’ or not — because that could be lifesaving.” But equally clearly, these attitudes were socially and culturally magnified by traditional institutions and especially organized religion.[4]

These values, having been magnified culturally, could also be weakened or even outright suppressed, which is what has happened in the West since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, a long-term project of essentially bourgeois and, in the contemporary world, Zionist elites. This was often done by demonizing the old values as mere “prejudice” or “obscurantism” or “oppression.” In fact, at the level of the masses, any social norm needs to be more or less unthinkingly adhered to in order to work and few contest the necessity of a (civil) religion in general for society to function.

The better critique of traditional values would not be that they are “evil” but that they are no longer relevant in a technologically modern society. Certainly, with contraceptives, low infant mortality, less need for manual labor, and so on, we do not need exactly the same taboos regarding gender norms as those of the Middle Ages to have a healthy society. But we should not throw out the baby with the bath water, which is what Liberal/Zionist elites have done, spreading maladaptive values which are making Europeans worldwide vanish from the Earth and turning them into vulnerable minorities in their own homelands. These new values were partly promoted sincerely, because the old ways were inappropriate for a modern society. However, it is difficult to not see a part of malice, conscious or otherwise, as well: The promotion of self-destructive, anomic, atomized behavior among the masses has the effect of further removing checks upon and empowering exploitative bourgeois elites (including a very powerful Jewish component that sees its ethnic self-interest as dovetailing with such behavior on the part of non-Jews).

Jews do not require an adaptive general culture as much, being intelligent and famously activist in promoting their own adaptive subcultures. Indeed, “rootless cosmopolitanism,” anti-nationalism, and homosexual apologetics are often associated in the popular imagination. Anne Applebaum, an anti-Russian Jewish-American journalist and wife of former Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski, has written:

Halfway through an otherwise coherent conversation with a Georgian lawyer last week—the topics included judges, the court system, the police—I was startled by a comment he made about his country’s former government, led by ex-president Mikheil Saakashvili. “They were LGBT,” he said, conspiratorially.

What did that mean, I asked, surprised. Were they in favor of rights for sexual minorities? For gay marriage? Were they actually gay? He couldn’t really define it, though the conversation meandered in that direction for a few more minutes, also touching on the subject of the former president’s alleged marital infidelity, his promotion of female politicians, his lack of respect for the church.

Afterward, I worked it out. The lawyer meant to say that Saakashvili—who drove his country hard in the direction of Europe, who pulled Georgia as close to NATO as possible, who used rough tactics to fight the post-Soviet mafia that dominated his country—was “too Western.” Not conservative enough. Not traditional enough. Too much of a modernizer, a reformer, a European. In the past, such a critic might have called Saakashvili a “rootless cosmopolitan.” But nowadays the insulting code word for that sort of person in the former Soviet space—regardless of what he or she actually thinks about gay people—is “LGBT.” …

Yet despite the absence of Russian speakers, a form of Russia’s [sic] anti-Western ideology can be felt in Georgia, too. It’s a minority view that drifts in through religious leaders—part of the Georgian Orthodox Church retains old ties to Moscow—through some pro-Kremlin political parties and Russian-backed media. But it finds indigenous support, taking the form of xenophobic, anti-European—and nowadays—anti-gay rhetoric.

In short, “rootless cosmopolitans” are criticized in the former Soviet Union for spreading maladaptive values detrimental to the cohesion and identity of the country and, although Jews are not explicitly mentioned in the exchange, Applebaum immediately felt targeted by the criticism and responds condescendingly (“an otherwise coherent conversation”).

Anti-Semitism appears to be more common in the East. No doubt there is a latent memory of the ethnic group which was often so instrumental — as in Russia, Poland, and Hungary — in imposing those totalitarian regimes dedicated to what Winston Churchill called “the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality.” Indeed, Russian President Vladimir Putin has remarked upon Jewish predominance in the early Soviet regime and Serbian President Tomislav Nikolić has argued Jewish over-representation in “finance, art and science” contributed to Nazi anti-Semitism; unthinkable statements tantamount to political suicide for our Western politicians. Many Central and Eastern Europeans cannot help but notice that it is often members of the same ethnic group — such as George Soros — who are financing anti-nationalist, individualist-egalitarian and homosexualist propaganda in their countries. There is also support for obscene and hysterical anti-Christian feminist groups such as Femen and Pussy Riot.

In addition to cultural suppression, ethnocentrism appears to have been strongly attenuated in the West through high standards of living. Ethnocentrism and ingroup identification are strengthened in times of competition and threat (here, p. 72). The more insecure an individual or society is, the more ethnocentric it will tend to be.[5] The historian Robert Bartlett reports that medieval European societies, particularly in Central Europe, with its medley of Germans, Slavs, and Jews, were relatively tolerant during times of economic expansion. (Intra-) European racism increased however in the latter half of the High Middle Ages in the wake of overpopulation. Dominant groups drafted legislation excluding out-group members from intermarriage, guild membership, town citizenship, and so on. Bartlett writes: “The picture darkens as the recession of the later Middle Ages begins. As the meal shrank, the diners began to eye each other more suspiciously.”[6] It is not surprising, therefore, that heightened resource competition is a recurrent theme in European anti-Semitism. This mechanism is indeed visible in all multiethnic societies in times of crisis. A multiethnic society is an accident waiting to happen, an entity just waiting to collapse under pressure, typically upon losing a war (Austria-Hungary) and/or with the malicious encouragement of foreign powers (Lebanon, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria…).

Rising ethnocentrism in times of crisis is also evidenced in the “rally ‘round the flag” effect which governments are apt to exploit, diverting popular ethnocentrism to their particular oligarchic ends.[7] Indeed, pent-up feelings of tribal insecurity are liable to explode in ethnocentric spasms, which in American Blacks gives us periodic riots destroying their own neighborhoods and which in interwar Germany gave us the Third Reich. National Socialism can be understood as a uniquely radical, authoritarian, and explicit attempt to impose an adaptive culture and polity within Germany and total security without (including, tragically, to the detriment of other European peoples).

High standards of living — which remain historically unprecedented and likely to persist for some time, barring a major environmental or financial crisis, especially in light of the new efficiencies enabled by the Information Revolution — have softened Western ethnocentrism and manhood. In the West, we virtually have only dependents: students, welfare leeches, the disabled, office drones, and retirees. The new generations grow ever-more androgynous, and indeed this is celebrated by the regime and its propagandistic media outlets. In the East, we still have farmers and workers —  men. Many Easterners are intuitively repulsed by absurd Western pretensions of moral superiority through the public celebration of man-on-man sex. Eastern nationalists are indeed adept at exploiting Western apologia for homosexuality as evidence of “Gayropa’s” [гейропа] manifest decadence.

Evolutionarily adaptive behavior may in some respects be harder to promote in a modern society tempted by laxity and softened by consumerism.[8] But there is nothing inevitable about this. Western liberalism, interwar fascism and today’s Eastern European conservatism show that Europe’s history could have taken many different turns, that we have an almost infinite array of potentialities. An enlightened elite can, and must, promote values and policies which will allow Europeans to survive and flourish again.

Go to Part 2.

[1] To a significant extent, the history of the world over the past 500 years has been the story of non-Northwest Europeans attempting to emulate Northwest European success — whether in technology, wealth, martial prowess or good government — and generally failing. France wants to be like Germany; Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece want to be like the civilized “Europeans” (read: Anglo-Franco-Germans); Russia sporadically wants to be like the West; Turkey wants to be like Europe, etc. They all fail. They fail because, as the Russian historian Nikolai Trubetzkoi beautifully explained, every people is unique and crude attempts to emulate a (often temporarily) better-performing people will necessarily fail unless one adapts to local ethno-national conditions. Perfect equality of outcomes between different peoples is, by definition, impossible, but as Japan shows similar performance can be attained in certain areas if a people is talented and their particularities respected. Even without communism’s baleful, distorting impact in Central and Eastern Europe, the paths of different regions of Europe would not have been identical.

[2] When heterosexual men use the slur “faggot” against one another, it is typically to shame un-manly behavior, and conversely, to promote evolutionarily adaptive behavior.

[3] Repeated penis-to-anus sex with multiple partners is obviously pathogenic in the extreme and indeed explains the comparatively high prevalence of HIV among homosexuals to this day. Before the advent of condoms and modern medicine, such behavior would systematically lead to the spread of disease, which is likely why it was suppressed by most religions.

[4] Traditional rulers’ attitude towards ethnocentrism has varied. If their realm was ethnically heterogeneous, they had an interest in suppressing ethnocentrism to maintain social peace. Hence Christianity and Islam are universalist religions promoted by imperial authorities ruling over the ethnically chaotic mess which was the post-Roman Mediterranean world. These religions did however transfer ethnocentric loyalty, so to speak, to the religion, with non-believers facing various forms of exclusion: Anyone from any tribe may join the religious society and order, but they must submit to its rules and values prior to receiving its benefits.

[5] This would also explain why, among the masses, less intelligent people tend to be more ethnocentric. Although I suspect that those in the movement — who have emancipated themselves from ruling dogmas of the age — have very high IQs. Certainly your average liberal is much less intelligent and cultivated than his smugness would warrant. Rebecca Searles, “Intelligence Study Links Low I.Q. To Prejudice, Racism, Conservatism,” The Huffington Post, January 1, 2012.

[6] Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950-1350 (Penguin: 1994), 234.

[7] One of the most infamous examples being President George W. Bush and the Neoconservatives’ exploiting the patriotic fervor after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to launch an unprovoked war against Iraq and create a vast, all-encompassing Surveillance State.

[8] Comfort undermining virtue is indeed not a new problem. The fourteenth century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun’s celebrated Muqaddimah world-history presents a theory whereby virile tribes gifted with asabiyyah (group solidarity) conquer urban empires, which leads them to excessive comfort, laxity, and decadence, which in turn within a few generations will lead to their being conquered by a new, uncorrupted tribe.