Featured Articles

Moralism and Moral Arguments in the War for Western Survival, Part 3

/37 Comments/in , /by

Part 1
Part 2

Is It Possible to Develop a Specifically Moral Argument for the White Past of Conquest and Slavery?

A second message is that in order to appeal to a wide range of Whites, we have to fashion an underlying moral message or at least have good rejoinders to the moral arguments of others. We already see that to some extent among conservatives who have nothing but scorn for the Alt Right. They emphasize the treatment of women and homosexuals in Muslim countries and refer to “radical Islamic terrorism” — implying that the terrorism has something to do with Islam (while avoiding the idea that jihad is central to Islam.  They will bring up the criminality and lack of labor participation of Middle Eastern and African immigrants. These are effective moral arguments because they argue for immoral, unfair effects on the traditional populations and culture.

But this doesn’t really get at the overriding moral argument that uniquely evil Whites are responsible for the actions of their ancestors in conquering land settled by others, slavery, etc. Of course, these accounts are carefully contextualized to ignore things like morally crusading Whites who uniquely ended slavery after a campaign based on empathy for far-away Africans. Whites ended slavery, passed Civil Rights, have funded endless uplift programs for Blacks, and twice elected a Black president — the liberal tradition so common among Northern Europeans aided and abetted in contemporary times by our hostile Jewish elite.

Also ignored are the characteristics of Whites and non-Whites that feed into current realities (e.g., IQ and personality differences, the Faustian soul of the West, etc.). Apart from the West, I have yet to hear of a movement opposed to slavery or anything else that worked by eliciting empathy. Appeals like this only work with Wersterners. These movements are a Western phenomenon and the media thrives on showing photos of suffering refugees and immigrants; “we need to help them,” never mind the short term and long term costs to our own people.

Pressing the guilt/empathy button doesn’t work in Africa or Asia despite the fact that huge swaths of humanity there (Arabs, Han Chinese, Bantu) have achieved their present territories as the result of the conquests of their ancestors. And slavery persisted in these areas long after it was abolished in the West. And even if these areas were prone to messages of guilt/empathy, you won’t see them there because these societies are not controlled by elites hostile to their traditional peoples and cultures of those areas.

One does not see Chinese people agonizing over the fact that the Han Chinese greatly expanded their territory at the expense of other peoples—a point brought out by Ricardo Duchesne in his groundbreaking The Uniqueness of Western Civilization. Nor does one see the Bantu peoples of Africa worrying about the ethics of displacing other African peoples as they spread far and wide from their homeland in Central Africa, including into South Africa where their treatment at the hands of White South Africans became Exhibit A for White evil during the apartheid era; nor do the Bantu-speaking peoples agonize about the widespread practice of slavery in Africa. Arabs do not apologize about their conquests in the name of Islam or their centuries-old role in slavery and the slave trade.

The lack of contextualization and the continual deluge of messages hostile to the White majority are good indications that the button pushing is an exercise in propaganda emanating from a hostile elite, enabled because of their control over the moral, intellectual, and political high ground. It’s not just emotional buttons that are pushed. Some of these memes are much more purely intellectual — a good example is the “race does not exist” meme, although I suppose many of these terms have emotional overtones as well because they are often linked in such a way that that they plug into the guilt mechanism. This means that they are addressed to  the higher brain centers which are able to exert substantial control over the more primitive (and self-preserving) lower brain centers responsible for things like ethnocentrism. Control of the  media and the academic high ground by the left means that Americans are bombarded by messages that enjoin them to inhibit their natural self-preserving tendencies and indeed, to feel guilt for them. These messages have also filtered down to churches and schools, so, unless they tune in to dissident media on the internet, Whites can spend their entire lives without hearing any contrary messages. It’s hard to overcome that.

Only Whites have been made to feel moral disgust at their own past of conquest and expansion. And only Whites—not all, to be sure, but a significant and important proportion—have felt moral outrage about slavery, to the point of banning it despite its material benefits to the society as a whole and to a great many individuals much more like themselves than the slaves they were freeing.

But this “everyone does it” is not really a moral argument, but rather an argument based on how we understand human nature and genetic self-interest, combined with showing that Whites uniquely developed moral arguments against the very things they were so good at—colonization and slavery. As an evolutionist, I am quite comfortable with these because they have been common throughout human history and again, Whites uniquely ended slavery. But the “anti-racist” answers that Whites have no moral claim to North America, Australia, and New Zealand, and that present-day Whites have “White privilege” as a result of the immoral actions of their ancestors. Of course, such an argument would not apply to Europe where we see the same phenomena of massive non-White immigration presented as a moral imperative.

So be it. Can Europeans make a moral argument to retain the lands they have controlled since the glaciers receded? Is longevity in a certain area a moral argument? I think not. But if it is, it would apply to every other people in one way or another, as Jared Taylor notes in a recent video. We would find that some native American groups displaced others, and we would talk about the Aztec empire and its subject peoples. Even the Hawaiians who came to the pristine islands eventually developed a society dominated by a particular chief that unified the islands at the expense of their close relatives holding power on the various islands but vicious fighting took place long before that between various islands. So then the White people take it over and suddenly we have a moral crisis. It’s what they call “selective prosecution.”

Fundamentally, if we take the ethical perspective that dominates the West today based on fairness and impartiality rooted ultimately in individualism and egalitarianism, we cannot make a specifically moral argument for White conquest. Such a perspective was foreign to the ancients who prized aristocratic values and were profoundly opposed to egalitarianism. In The Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche sketches this alternative morality — the morality of the strong versus the morality of the weak, the ethical world view of our Indo-European ancestors.

There is nothing strange about the fact that lambs bear a grudge towards large birds of prey: but that is no reason to blame the large birds of prey for carrying off the little lambs. And if the lambs say to each other, ‘These birds of prey are evil; and whoever is least like a bird of prey and most like its opposite, a lamb, – is good, isn’t he?’, then there is no reason to raise objections to this setting-up of an ideal beyond the fact that the birds of prey will view it somewhat derisively, and will perhaps say: ‘We don’t bear any grudge at all towards these good lambs, in fact we love them, nothing is tastier than a tender lamb.’ – It is just as absurd to ask strength not to express itself as strength, not to be a desire to overthrow, crush, become master, to be a thirst for enemies, resistance and triumphs, as it is to ask weakness to express itself as strength. (25–26)

The point of the left is to abolish any argument for retaining control of any territory for historically White countries—open borders for Whites and only for Whites. There are a variety of motives: hatred for Whites as ethnic competitors, monetary compensation (the massive infrastructure that incentives anti-White activism), and virtue signaling for many White SJW’s made possible because the control of  the media by the left has created a morally defined community opposed to the legitimate interests of Whites. Forget about ecological arguments—that bringing in 1 million plus immigrants yearly is an ecological disaster, forget about arguments from IQ, welfare dependency, criminality, not to mention the ethnic genetic interests of Whites. Forget about intellectual consistency — these people would be horrified at the thought that Korea or Nigeria ought to have displacement-level immigration. We are asked to ignore the evil effects of the racialization of politics and increasing political violence as non-Whites coalesce in the Democrat Party, the disuniting of society as community ties are destroyed, less willingness to contribute to public goods, etc.  These consequences of the invasion all have clear moral overtones and they support our interests because they have negative impact on people who cannot control the behavior of some of their ancestors.

Was it fair to the traditional White majority to bring in these millions of non-Whites given that the flood gates were opened by the 1965 immigration law presented dishonestly as having no effects on the ethnic balance of the country? Was it fair given that the arguments in favor of ending the bias toward Europe were the result of scientific fraud and developed by Jewish ethnic activists motivated by hatred toward the traditional White populations of the West?

Conclusion

In conclusion, I would love to be able to present a specifically moral argument within the current egalitarian zeitgeist for why it is morally okay for White people to take over North America at the expense of the natives. I can’t do that. Being susceptible to such moral arguments may well be part of our nature. But if so, we have to get over it. I suspect that the people in this room are quite proud of the accomplishments of our ancestors. And as an evolutionist, I have no problem with that.

Moralism and Moral Arguments in the War for Western Survival, Part 2

/17 Comments/in , , /by

Part 1.

Moral Indictments of the West as Characteristic of Jewish Intellectual Movements

Here I want to stress one aspect of my book The Culture of Critique. It’s no accident then that all of the intellectual and political movements discussed in the Culture of Critique were moral indictments if the West. These Jewish intellectuals understood how to appeal to Westerners. They knew what buttons to push. Together these movements comprise the intellectual and political left in this century, and they are the direct intellectual ancestors of current leftist intellectual and political movements, particularly postmodernism and multiculturalism. From Chapter 6 of The Culture of Critique (p. 213–214).

Collectively, these movements have called into question the fundamental moral, political, and economic foundations of Western society. A critical feature of these movements is that they have been, at least in the United States, top-down movements in the sense that they were originated and dominated by members of a highly intelligent and highly educated group. These movements have been advocated with great intellectual passion and moral fervor and with a very high level of theoretical sophistication. Each movement promised its own often overlapping and complementary version of utopia: a society composed of people with the same biological potential for accomplishment and able to be easily molded by culture into ideal citizens as imagined by a morally and intellectually superior elite [Boas and the war on IQ and behavior genetics]; a classless society in which there would be no conflicts of interest and people would altruistically work for the good of the group [communism, socialism]; a society in which people would be free of neuroses and aggression toward outgroups and in tune with their biological urges [psychoanalysis]; a multicultural paradise in which different racial and ethnic groups would live in harmony and cooperation [the Frankfurt School]—a utopian dream that also occupies center stage in the discussion of Jewish involvement in shaping U.S. immigration policy in Chapter 7. Each of these utopias is profoundly problematic from an evolutionary perspective, a theme that will be returned to in Chapter 8.

The originators of these movements were all vitally concerned with anti-Semitism, and all of the utopias envisioned by these intellectual and political movements would end anti-Semitism while allowing for Jewish group continuity. A generation of Jewish radicals looked to the Soviet Union as an idyllic place where Jews could rise to positions of preeminence and where anti-Semitism was officially outlawed while Jewish national life flourished. The psychoanalytic movement and the Frankfurt School looked forward to the day when gentiles would be inoculated against anti-Semitism by a clinical priesthood that could heal the personal inadequacies and the frustrations at loss of status that gentiles murderously projected onto the Jews. And the Boasians and the Frankfurt School and their descendants would prevent the development of anti-Semitic ideologies of majoritarian ethnocentrism.

A palpable sense of intellectual and moral superiority of those participating in these movements is another characteristic feature. This sense of intellectual superiority and hostility to gentiles and their culture was a recurrent theme of the leftist movements discussed in Chapter 3. I have also documented a profound sense of intellectual superiority and estrangement from gentile culture that characterized not only Freud but also the entire psychoanalytic movement. The sense of superiority on the part of a “self-constituted cultural vanguard” (Lasch 1991, 453–455) of Jewish intellectuals toward lower-middle-class mores and attitudes was a theme of Chapter 5. [This was a prominent theme really of the Trump victory.]

Regarding moral superiority, the central pose of post-Enlightenment Jewish intellectuals is a sense that Judaism represents a moral beacon to the rest of humanity (SAID, Ch. 7). These movements thus constitute concrete examples of the ancient and recurrent Jewish self-conceptualization as a “a light of the nations,” reviewed extensively in SAID (Ch. 7). Moral indictments of their opponents are a prominent theme in the writings of political radicals and those opposing biological perspectives on individual and group differences in IQ. A sense of moral superiority was also prevalent in the psychoanalytic movement, and we have seen that the Frankfurt School developed a moral perspective in which the existence of Judaism was viewed as an a priori moral absolute and in which social science was to be judged by moral criteria.

The “Holier than Thou” Phenomenon and the Advantages and Disadvantages of Online Anonymity

I think part of the dynamic pushing things right now is that there is a “holier than thou” phenomenon that often characterizes political and religious movements of all stripes. Strongly religious people compete with each other to be most virtuous in their local church. On the left, we see vegan fanatics shunning vegans who even talk to people who eat meat or eat in restaurants where meat is served — even family members. I am sure there is a dynamic within antifa groups where people who are do not condone violence or are unwilling to crack heads themselves are ostracized or at least have much less status.

This is also true on the Alt Right. People often vilify me for not coming down squarely on the side of Holocaust revisionism. And I don’t have swastikas on my page, nor do I tweet pictures of Jews going to ovens, or advocate National Socialism.

I think quite a bit of this, on both the left and on the right, has to do with anonymity made possible by the internet, but is especially true on the right given the moral opprobrium we are subjected to. I have found that as editor of TOO it is not unusual for me to have to tone down articles from people who use pen names. And there are some who may well have felt that there will be no consequences for them personally if they engage in Roman salutes or joke about the Holocaust while at the same time it marks them as on the cutting edge, as more authentic and more “in your face.” Ironically, people taking these positions are often plugged into this moral dynamic of being holier than thou. They see themselves as more honest — no matter what the consequences for the movement as a whole.

There is definitely a place for such things. There are different audiences out there, and different things work better with some people than with others. We should never get caught in a “one size fits all” approach. For some people, this brash sensibility may turn them on to a whole new way of thinking and make them read more about Jewish power and influence. It may appeal to them as a young person just because it is cutting edge and definitely not your parents’ attitudes. My approach is doubtless too boring and academic for quite a few people — I suspect the demographic for TOO readers and certainly TOQ readers is a bit older than some. But then, people who resonate to approaches like mine quite often are repelled by any hint of advocating National Socialism.

The problem comes when people do Roman salutes in a mixed situation where some people stand to lose a lot by being associated with such things and where the media is sure to be all over it — and make sure that their readers never forget. In that situation, the moral opprobrium that a large majority of the public feels about such things gets attached to everyone present. It is unfair of course, to suggest or imply that everyone present approves of such things, but who ever said life was fair? The media is indeed the opposition party to the Trump administration, and that goes double for us. They care nothing for fairness.

Of course, anonymity is indispensable for many of us. We are all aware that the left is only too eager to make us lose jobs and family ties. We see the disastrous results that can occur to people like Mike Enoch and the TRS crew when they are doxxed. But the anonymity has to always be tempered with responsibility and understanding of other people’s interests and concerns, especially when one is in a mixed group where not everyone is on the same page and where people are likely to be compromised (albeit unfairly) by media exposure. Losing livelihood and family connections are difficult indeed.

So an obvious message is that we have to have a clear understanding of our particular audience and act accordingly.

Go to Part 3.

 

Moralism and Moral Arguments in the War for Western Survival, Part 1

/43 Comments/in , /by

Obviously President Obama was a horrific president in pretty much every possible way. His domestic policies in particular have been anathema to the Alt Right — he would, after all, have loved to sign an immigration amnesty/surge bill into law. Nevertheless, couple of things he said in his farewell address made a lot of sense, although he probably wasn’t thinking about the Alt Right when he said them.

Obama said that too often people think of those who oppose them as not merely misguided but malevolent. This is a huge problem for the Alt Right. The very label is typically associated in the media with words like ‘Nazi,’ ‘White supremacist,’ and ‘racist’ — all of which have strong moral connotations after years of browbeating by the media.  These words produce psychological reflexes intended to preclude honest debate or any rational discussion of our ideas. And they have been very effective in doing just that.

During an interview with an NPR reporter, I mentioned that I hoped the phrase “White supremacist” would not be used in whatever eventually gets aired. The interviewer seemed surprised, thinking that “White supremacist” was a perfectly reasonable label to use, and defending his stance by claiming that some Alt Rightists have talked about Europeans as a superior and uniquely talented group. Depending on how an idea like that is phrased and conceptualized, I have no problem with it. We should have pride in the accomplishments of our European ancestors, as tabulated, for example, by Charles Murray.

But our desire to preserve a European identity and culture really has nothing to do with European talents, and I think pretty much everyone on the Alt Right is aware of this. We could be the most average or below average people on the planet but still have a legitimate interest in wanting to preserve our people and culture — and the territories needed for that. None of the people shouting about “White supremacists” would suppose that Africans should be supplanted from African states they control, no matter what their talents or lack thereof, and the same goes for Korea and every other country with a historical ethnic and cultural core. And of course, many of the same people comfortable with condemning “White supremacists” are quite content with Israel being a “Jewish state.”

But being called a White supremacist in today’s political climate has obvious moral implications (happily the phrase did not appear in the NPR interview). Such a person is not only misguided, he or she is malevolent. Such a person is consumed by hatred, anger and fear towards non-Whites, gays, women and the entire victim class pantheon, or so goes the stereotype And that’s the problem. Being cast as evil means you are outside the moral community. There’s no need to talk with you, no need to be fair, or even worry about your safety. You are like an outlaw in Old Norse society  —“a person [who] lost all of his or her civil rights and could be killed on sight without any legal repercussions.”

So the antifa at the November NPI conference felt entitled to beat up a cameraman, throw foul-smelling liquids at attendees, and break into a dinner venue. There have been other assaults, notably of Richard Spencer in January in Washington DC, but also in February at the UC-Berkeley riots. So we often hear “no free speech for fascists,” not only at antifa protests but in university classrooms, designed to shut down errant professors and students. College students showing sympathy for Donald Trump can be hounded into dropping out of school. We find students protesting having White philosophers on the curriculum. No need to discuss their ideas because they are dead White males and ipso facto a component of racial oppression. Read more

Communism In Romania: The Anti-Humans by Dumitru Bacu

/63 Comments/in , /by

To this end the students were obliged to crush under-foot everything they held most sacred ­– God, family, friends, love, wife, colleagues, memories, ideology ­– everything which bound them to the past, anything that might give them inner support while in prison. (Dumitru Bacu, The Anti-Humans)

The story of Communism in Romania may not be a unique story. The familiar elements all present their ugly heads. As the Bolsheviks came to power the lives of the indigenous population worsened precipitously — the ideology of the enlightened government against the backward people. Foreigners became policy makers. Peasants starved. Prisons swelled. Slave labor killed hundreds of thousands. And lastly, the indigenous intellectual class was suppressed. What is unique about what happened in Romania is how the intellectual class was suppressed. Rather than simple suppression through imprisonment and discouraging political activity, the intellectual class in Romania was subjected to sadistic experimentation in what has been dubbed “re-education experiments.”

The intellectual class targeted for re-education was a specific group of people. Rather than target older academics or those of influence, the Communist regime targeted university students for their experiments. These students were chosen for a variety of reasons. To become a student in a Romanian University was a difficult task. For example, to be a student, an individual was expected to know French and German as well as either Latin and Greek or English and Italian. This demanding language requirement as well as other academic requirements brought a high degree of prestige to the very word student. The prestige of being a student could not be bought either. The wealthy who wanted to send their children to university had to send their children to another country if they did not meet the requirements. The result was that a large portion of the student body came from peasant backgrounds.

The final, and perhaps most important reason for targeting students, was their ardent patriotism. Students in Romania were patriotic for a number of reasons. Just as our American rural class is disproportionally conservative, the Romanian students who mostly came from an agrarian background were also a highly conservative group. Furthermore an influential man on the student body was Corneliu Z. Codreanu. He established the Legion of Michael the Archangel (the Iron Guard or simply the Legionary Movement) in 1927. The organization’s principles were love of country, a code of honor and moral intransigence, the reciprocal loyalty of knighthood, rigorous subordination of body to spirit, and an absolute faith in Christ. These high-minded ideals attracted students and other intellectuals to the movement. Even 30 years after Codreanu’s murder by Bolsheviks in 1938 he had faithful followers, many being students who were still part of the nationalist Legionary Movement.

The most intense and psychologically damaging experiments were done at Pitesti Prison between 1949 and 1951. The primary victims were students, the majority of whom had previously been a part of the Legionary movement. The students were often arrested for being involved in “anti-Communist activities” which could mean essentially anything that the Communists found politically expedient. Often times being part of the Legionary Movement was reason enough to arrest a student but in other instances, telling an anti-Communist joke could be grounds for arrest. Regardless of how or why they were arrested, the true horrors of Communism made themselves apparent inside the walls of Pitesti. Read more

Jewish Privilege Devours Itself

/30 Comments/in , /by

Octopus self-cannibalism

Octopuses can sometimes engage in self-cannibalism, eating their own arms in what is thought to be a stress reaction. What initially begins as a nervous biting of one’s own limbs, descends into frenzy, as bacteria take hold in the resultant wounds. As the infection spreads, and the stress levels increase, the octopus savages its own arms at a rate faster than it can heal, or grow new limbs. Survival in such instances is rare. There is only a terminal fate for a cephalopod in which such behavior has firmly taken hold.

Stress-related self-destruction is also relatively common among humans, and not merely in the obvious form of deliberate suicide. Melville captured it best with Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab, a figure so psychologically and spiritually wounded, so bitterly sensitive, that he would give his own life and the lives of others in pursuit of revenge — the only palliative he felt would appease his mental self-gnawing. Rebuking the admonishments of Starbuck, he cries with barely concealed anguish: “Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.” Ahab’s insatiable hate for the white whale was certainly not intended as an allegory for the hatred felt by modern ‘progressives’ for the White man, and yet I feel that such a comparison is apt. These people will do anything to ‘strike the sun,’ to bring down their great opponent, and we may expect self-destructive behaviors to be an aspect of their maniacal pursuit of ‘Whiteness.’

The last few weeks have witnessed a couple of important instances in which the memes of ‘privilege,’ racism, and anti-Semitism, the chief intellectual harpoons forged to pierce the White behemoth, have been turned inward on those largely behind their construction. Very recently, England’s Bristol University has been caught up in a scandal after it emerged that one of its lecturers, Dr Rebecca Gould, who is almost certainly both Jewish and a ‘progressive,’ penned an article for CounterPunch in 2011 in which she argued that “Jews should stop privileging the Holocaust.” Given that such an argument simultaneously infringes upon several taboos, and thus casts Dr Gould into the nebulous category of a ‘self-hating Jew,’ it is a miracle that her career has managed to progress uninhibited for the last six years. Apparently the piece was only brought to light, and subjected to ‘social justice’ action, after one of her undergraduate students unearthed it and initialized a campaign against her. Read more

How to Cure a White Zombie: Ants, Crabbs and Societal Control

/35 Comments/in , /by

If grovelling ever becomes an Olympic sport, Britain has a potential world-beater ready and waiting. He’s called Stephen Crabb, and he was a minister in David Cameron’s Tory government. Here he is displaying his skills before an appreciative audience at Finchley Synagogue in London:

Israeli Independence Day: Work and Pensions Secretary Stephen Crabb leads UK celebrations

The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions addressed over 1000 people at the service at Finchley Synagogue, organised by youth organisation Bnei Akiva, as Israel’s Remembrance Day (Yom Hazikaron) led into Israeli Independence Day (Yom Haatzmaut). Mr Crabb began: “The remarkable sense of fellowship and unity felt in Israel, and in Jewish communities all around the world, as we remember those who have given their lives in the defence of Israel, is something truly beautiful and inspirational.”

He went on to describe Israel on Remembrance Day as “a country united as one to remember their fallen.” The former Wales Secretary said that “the need for a Jewish state remains as crucial now as it was in 1948”, and that the British Government “does not take the safety of the Jewish people for granted.” He said that on Israel’s 68th birthday, “we recall that this relatively young country – young but with deep ancient roots – has endured so much. It has also achieved so much.” …

The Minister, who visited Israel for the first time in 2007 with CFI, said that, as a Christian, he has “always felt a very close affinity with the Holy Land”. “At a time when the Christian population of the Middle East is in steep decline due to systematic and sustained persecution, Israel continues to be a place where Christians are welcomed and feel safe,” he said. …

Mr Crabb referred to the “repugnant rise in anti-Semitism both in Europe and here in the UK”, describing it as representing “a stain on our nation”. He said: “I want to reassure you that this government has an unequivocal zero-tolerance approach to this racist ideology. We need to make it clear that anti-Semitism, whether it is expressed through the pernicious illiberal boycotts and sanctions bandwagon; through pouring out hate on twitter; or through any other means, is totally unacceptable.”

He emphasised that “we should in particular hold those in public life to the highest standards on this.” The UK’s Jewish community, Mr Crabb said, “is, unquestionably, part of the fabric of our society and the contribution of Jewish people in business, in media, in politics, in culture, in all parts of our national life, has been truly immense.”  (Israeli Independence Day: Work and Pensions Secretary Stephen Crabb leads UK celebrations, Conservative Friends of Israel website, 12th May 2016)

Read more

The Failure of Multiculturalism in Polish Ukraine

/26 Comments/in , /by

Mykola Pymonenko – To War!

We are often told today that multiculturalism, that is to say a state made up of a diversity of peoples, is a great strength. No, it is in fact our greatest strength! To state any concerns or criticisms, no matter how mild, is seen as sacrilegious.

However, the opposite is true and throughout history where there are many examples of diverse and multicultural societies falling into discord and strife. The focus of this piece will be on a place that has been praised in hindsight for its liberalism and tolerance: the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania.

Poland-Lithuania came into being after the 1569 Treaty of Lublin when the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were unified and made into one country. Prior to this, in the 1385 Union of Krewo, the two were linked in a personal union under the reigning Lithuanian monarch. Before 1569 what are now Belarus and the bulk of Ukraine[i] were also part of the Grand Duchy, which was the largest European country at the time. As per the 1569 treaty, however, Ukraine was handed over to Poland, thus setting the stage for a violent future of ethnic conflict.

The Polish nobility or szlachta was used to a high degree of autonomy which only became greater after the old Lithuanian Jagellonian dynasty died out. After this occurred, the monarchy was elected and became increasingly subservient to the nobles. The szlachta, it should be noted, was not entirely ethnically Polish. It would come to include Lithuanian, Ukrainian and other non-Polish noble houses that Polonized to such an extent that they may as well have been ethnically Polish. Examples of the power to which the nobility held include their ability to bring back serfdom (so-called neo-serfdom) and a 1518 law which stated that the king could not accept in his royal courts complaints of subjects on noble land, giving the nobility a free hand. Nobles eventually gave themselves power to introduce corvée labour, seize peasant land and the peasants working it.[ii]

Yet all was not well with the nobility during the years leading up to the tumultuous seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,

Perceptive foreigners… saw, for instance, that the much vaunted freedom of the szlachta, which gave Poland the reputation of being one of the freest states in the world, rested on the complete deprivation of rights and enslavement of all the other classes of the population, that along with the unlimited freedom of the nobles, the burgesses were deprived of all participation in political life, hampered in their economic development, and shut within the walls of the towns. Parliamentarianism was flourishing in Poland, but alongside it, the executive was powerless to function. … The royal power was rigidly limited, and all decisions were made by the powerful ruling classes of nobles. This class, moreover, was degenerating. The Polish nobles had lost their former chivalrous and fighting spirit. They were corrupted by wealth and had lost their former energy which could now be aroused only to fight for privileges against real or imaginary attacks by the royal power.[iii]

Not only were they corrupted by vice and power, but the szlachta had ceased to see themselves as having any relation to the people they ruled over. The nobility had developed, from the sixteenth century on, an ideology known as Sarmatianism, which erroneously said szlachta were the descendants of Sarmatians, a steppe people originating in what is now southern Russia. Importantly, szlachta saw themselves as ethnically distinct from even the Polish peasants.[iv] It also came to view Roman Catholicism as the only true form of Christianity. Such an ideology was bound to create sharp social divisions but especially with their Ukrainian subjects. This was to have a great and terrible impact on the Commonwealth in the mid-late seventeenth century. Read more