General

Is a Russia-NATO Clash Over Ukraine Ahead?

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Ukraine’s independence is not vital to the United States. While a desirable goal, it is not worth our fighting a war with Russia to preserve…. Indeed, had we given Putin assurances that NATO was closed to Kyiv, we might have prevented what has happened, because that was the first and most insistent of Putin’s demands.

When Hungarian rebels arose in 1956 to overthrow the Communist regime imposed by Joseph Stalin, President Dwight Eisenhower refused to send U.S. forces to aid the Hungarians.

Ike would not take America to war with Russia over a small country in Central Europe.

While the Hungarians were heroic and inspirational, Hungary was neither a member of NATO nor a vital U.S. interest. Moreover, it was on the Soviet side of the Yalta line dividing Europe, and agreed to by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill at Yalta in 1945.

For similar reasons today, President Joe Biden has refused to send U.S. troops, ships or planes to attack Russian forces invading Ukraine.

Though a nation of 44 million and almost as large as Texas, Ukraine is neither a vital U.S. interest nor a member of NATO.

However, were Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade Estonia, whose population is 3% of Ukraine’s, America would be obligated to go to war with Russia.

Does this disparity make strategic sense?

Should not America have the same freedom of action to decide whether to fight for Estonia as we do to decide whether to fight for Ukraine? After all, Ukraine is far larger and more populous and strategic.

In 1948, President Harry Truman refused to use force to break Stalin’s Berlin Blockade. In 1956, Eisenhower refused to intervene to save Hungary. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy refused to use force to stop the building of the Berlin Wall.

In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson refused to intervene when the USSR invaded Czechoslovakia to crush the pro-democracy “Prague Spring.”

Yet, today, America’s leaders do not have the same freedom not to act as did Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson. We are obligated to act. Why?

Because, since the end of the Cold War, we have expanded the membership of NATO, and there are now 28 nations of Europe we are obligated to defend if they are attacked.

Ukraine is not one of them, but five of them that border Russia or Ukraine — Romania, Slovakia, Poland, Latvia and Estonia — are currently providing Stinger or Javelin missiles to Ukraine to destroy Russian tanks, down Russian aircraft, and kill Russian soldiers in Ukraine.

If Putin retaliated against any of these countries for these arms transfers that are killing Russian soldiers, the U.S. would be obligated, under Article 5 of NATO, to fight Russia on behalf of these NATO nations.

Article 5 automatically conscripts the United States into a war with Russia, if Moscow retaliates against a NATO nation providing weapons to kill Russian soldiers.

Why have we willingly tied our own hands in this manner?

During 40 years of Cold War, America remained secure while East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were all under Moscow’s control.

These nations are all free today as a result of the West’s victory in the Cold War. But why do all these nations have war guarantees from the United States when none of them, as the Cold War demonstrated, is a vital interest of the USA?

Why, after the Cold War ended in 1991, did we agree to fight a war with Russia, including a nuclear war, on their behalf when 40 years of Cold War demonstrated they were not essential to our security?

Today, by our refusal to intervene militarily in Ukraine, to slow or halt this Russian invasion, we are sending a message to the world.

That message?

Ukraine’s independence is not vital to the United States. While a desirable goal, it is not worth our fighting a war with Russia to preserve.

Moreover, the independence of Ukraine is not worth the risk of using U.S. planes to establish a no-fly zone for Russian planes in the skies over Ukraine.

Indeed, had we given Putin assurances that NATO was closed to Kyiv, we might have prevented what has happened, because that was the first and most insistent of Putin’s demands.

The heroic rhetoric we are hearing from our political and media leaders aside, the real message sent to Ukraine by our own and NATO’s actions and inaction is this:

We will send you weapons, but we are not sending our troops, and we are not going to fight your war for you, or beside you, unless and until we decide that it is in our vital interest to do so.

Fortunately, we had not brought Ukraine into NATO, nor given Kyiv a war guarantee that obligated us to risk everything for a nation deemed not vital to us.

Those who prevented the U.S. from realizing former President George W. Bush’s ambition to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO may have saved us from a war with Russia in which both of us could have suffered horribly.

Whether we go to war for a nation that was formerly part of the Soviet bloc should be a matter for decision by the Americans of that day and time — not mandated, not dictated by our signature on a 73-year-old treaty, devised for another era and another world.

If Only Putin Had Invaded Mexico…

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IF ONLY PUTIN HAD INVADED MEXICO …

As World War III looms in Europe, we must put narrow partisan differences aside and tap the brain power of the greatest minds among us. It is time for the Biden White House to call upon … Jared!

Speaking of the best and the brightest, our foreign policy mandarins must have felt like it was Christmas Day when a senile dementia patient became president. Finally! No meddling politicians to get in the way of our beautifully designed plans worked out at the Council on Foreign Relations. Although Joseph R. Biden is technically, in a strictly legal sense, “president,” it’s progressives running his domestic policy, and think-tank geniuses running his foreign policy.

Things are going great!

Let’s review the consistent position on Russia from our ruling class, informed by the whiz kids of international affairs.

OBAMA ERA 2009:

Throughout President Obama’s “reset” of the relationship with Russia — which had “deteriorated alarmingly” under President Bush, according to The New York Times — foreign policy experts were thrilled to have an American leader finally acknowledging the end of the Cold War.

A Times article cheerfully reported that “Mr. Obama has resolved not to let the ghosts of the 20th century get in the way of his goals in the 21st.” The paper editorialized, “We are relieved that Washington and Moscow are talking about cooperation.”

In a May 20, 2009, column titled “Cold War Leftovers,” Stephen Sestanovich expressed delight that “the cold war really is over.” More than two years later, on Oct. 28, 2011, British historian Geoffrey Wheatcroft informed Times readers: “Putin’s Russia, though obnoxious enough, scarcely represents a strategic threat.”

Evincing our shared humanity, the Russkies loved Obama. “After relations with the United States curdled in the final years of President George W. Bush’s tenure,” the Times cooed, “many people [in Russia] were relieved by Mr. Obama’s election.” Indeed, “Russia’s leaders … could not say enough good things about President Obama.” Sting was right: The Russians DO love their children, too!

Obama didn’t sanction Russia for placing spies on U.S. soil, and barely did for annexing Crimea. Peace reigned.

ROMNEY ERA 2012:

When Mitt Romney came along and described Russia as our “No. 1 geopolitical foe” in 2012, the world laughed itself silly.

Ridiculing Romney in an editorial titled “The Never-Ending Cold War,” the Times said his remark revealed “either a shocking lack of knowledge about international affairs or just craven politics.”

The BBC cited “experts” who said Romney’s statements on Russia reflected “his lack of experience in foreign policy.”

MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell proved Romney was wrong with a video clip of Andrea Mitchell stating: “Russia is not the greatest foreign policy challenge.” Enough said!

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow couldn’t contain her hilarity over the Republican National Convention’s offering “an extra bonus of threatening Russia.”

In a debate, Obama responded to Romney, “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.” To hoots of laughter at the Democratic National Convention, he accused Romney of being “stuck in a Cold War mind warp.” Then-Sen. John Kerry joked, “Folks, Sarah Palin said she could see Russia from Alaska. Mitt Romney talks like he’s only seen Russia by watching ‘Rocky IV.’”

TRUMP ERA, 2016:

Trump ran on having better relations with Russia, and he questioned the wisdom of letting every country in Europe into NATO — whereupon Russia became the most psychotically evil country in the world.

Nearly all the other Republican candidates jumped on Trump, sneering, “that’s not how the real world works” (Jeb!), calling Putin a “gangster” (Sen. Marco Rubio) and vowing to “start rebuilding the Sixth Fleet right under [Putin’s] nose, rebuilding the … missile defense program in Poland right under his nose … conduct very aggressive military exercises in the Baltic states … and I might also put in a few more thousand troops into Germany” (Carly Fiorina).

Clearly, Republican primary voters thus had a choice of two very divergent views of Russia. They picked the guy who wanted to have a better relationship with Russia.

Then Trump beat Hillary, and Democrats announced that he’d stolen the election by colluding with Russia, the most evil country on Earth. (This was absolutely NOT an insane conspiracy theory supported by zero evidence.)

To our great misfortune, instead of doing what he’d run on, Trump decided the sole focus of his administration would be proving that he was not too friendly to Russia! Voters never got the thawed relationship with Russia they’d voted for. (Or the wall, now that I think about it.)

RIDDLE: WHAT’S EASIER TO ROLL THAN AN EASTER EGG?
Donald Trump.

The smoking gun of Trump’s collusion with Russia was supposedly Trump’s platform committee rejecting a delegate’s proposed amendment to sell “lethal weapons” to Ukraine.

You know who else didn’t want to sell lethal weapons to Ukraine? Obama. German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. Professor Graham Allison of Harvard, national defense expert. As Matthew Rojansky, director of the Kennan Institute, explained to The New York Times in 2015, sending lethal weapons to Ukraine would make the U.S. “a belligerent party in a proxy war with Russia, the only country on Earth that can destroy the United States. That’s why this is a big deal.” This was “the view of many experts,” the Times added.

You’ll never guess what happened next. Before the end of his first year in office, Trump approved the sale of … lethal weapons to Ukraine! Conservatives were thrilled! See? Trump isn’t controlled by Putin! What do you say now, Resistance? (They said: Trump still stole the election by colluding with Russia.)

BIDEN ERA, 2022:

The Cold War is back! You might say liberals are “stuck in a Cold War mind warp.” They talk like they’ve “only seen Russia by watching ‘Rocky IV.’”

Joy-Ann Reid, Feb. 27, 2022: “Republicans … who came into the party through Reagan … which was highly adversarial toward the Soviet Union, why do they love Russia so much, … why do they love the Kremlin and Putin so much?”

Hey, Joy-Ann! The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back!

Unlike the experts and journalists whose deep study has led them to a sophisticated take on Russia (that flips back and forth with the politics of the moment), my position on Russia has been as unchanged as the Rock of Gibraltar, at least since the end of the Cold War. Coincidentally, it is exactly the same as my position on Taiwan, Haiti, Uganda and North Korea.

It is this: Tens of millions of illegals are pouring across our border and must be stopped.

COPYRIGHT 2022 ANN COULTER

Tweets on Ukraine

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Is Putin Considering Using Nukes on NATO?

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What Putin is suggesting is that in the last analysis, if military defeat beckons for Russia, and his own dispossession of power and political if not actual death are to follow, he may use the ultimate weapon in Russia’s arsenal to prevent it. What should U.S. policy be?

From his principal avenues of attack on Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin began this war with three strategic goals.

Send an army south from Belarus to capture Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and replace the government. Send forces into northeast Ukraine to capture its second largest city, Kharkiv, with 1.4 million people.

Third, extend the Donetsk enclave westward to establish a land bridge to Crimea and give Russia full control of the Sea of Azov and most of the Ukrainian coast along the Black Sea.

This last objective is almost achieved. Yet, as of Monday evening, five days into the war, neither Kyiv nor Kharkiv had fallen, though Russia had committed most of the troops it had assembled for the invasion.

Putin needs to get this war over with, for time is not on his side or Russia’s side.

In a week, he has become a universally condemned and isolated figure, and his country has been made the target of sanctions by almost the entire West. He is being depicted as an aggressor, even a war criminal, who is brutalizing a smaller neighbor, which, in its fierce and brave resistance, has taken on the aspect of a heroic nation.

The world is rallying to Ukraine.

In the UN Security Council, which Russia chairs, only Russia voted to veto a resolution denouncing it for aggression. India, China and the United Arab Emirates abstained.

As for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, his defiance of demands for surrender is being portrayed as Churchillian.

Moreover, serious military aid to Ukraine will soon begin.

Europeans and Americans have promised more Javelin missiles to destroy Russian tanks and armor, and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles of the type that took a heavy toll of Russian helicopters in the Afghan war of the 1980s.

NATO is uniting. Germany has voted to raise its defense budget and send its own anti-tank weapons and Stingers to Ukraine.

Economic sanctions imposed on Russia have crashed the ruble, caused a collapse of the stock market and severely restricted Moscow’s capacity to manage its debt.

Russian army units in Ukraine may be sufficient to occupy Kharkiv and Kyiv, but that army is insufficient to control and run a country the size of Texas with a population of 44 million people.

The Russians would have to find thousands of collaborators to help run the country. Where would Putin find them among a people that so widely detests him today?

The longer this war goes on, the greater the certainty that it bleeds the invading army to levels intolerable to Mother Russia, which is what eventually happened in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

If this war does not end soon, Putin is likely to lose it and fail in his goal of pulling Ukraine out of the Western camp and back into the orbit of Mother Russia.

Eventual defeat is becoming visible, and Putin probably cannot politically survive such a defeat.

As his motivation is to hold power and use it to carve a niche in history alongside the greatest Russian rulers of the past who enlarged the nation or empire, Putin is probably not going to accept defeat and go quietly.

Nor was it a sign of resignation that Putin, on Sunday, ordered Russia’s nuclear forces to high alert because, “Top officials in leading NATO countries have allowed themselves to make aggressive comments about our country.”

This is not the first time Putin has introduced the idea of using a nuclear weapon. On Feb. 19, days before the invasion began, Putin ordered drills of nuclear-capable ballistic and cruise missiles, bombers and warships.

In his speech announcing the military operation in Ukraine, Putin warned that countries that interfere with Russia’s actions will face “consequences you have never seen.”

Would Putin exercise what has been called the “Samson Option” – pulling down the pillars of the temple and taking your enemies with you?

What Putin is suggesting is that in the last analysis, if military defeat beckons for Russia, and his own dispossession of power and political if not actual death are to follow, he may use the ultimate weapon in Russia’s arsenal to prevent it.

What should U.S. policy be?

Avoid a widening of the war by preventing any escalation to nuclear weapons. Secure the independence of Ukraine. Effect the removal of Russian troops from Ukrainian territory.

If this requires that Ukraine give up any ambition to become a NATO nation, Putin’s declared purpose in launching the war, so be it. We might have avoided this war had we done so before it was begun.

This is not where we appear to be headed.

Finland, and Sweden, it is now being said, should be invited into NATO. Were that to happen, the U.S. would be obligated to help defend the 830-mile Finnish border with Russia.

This would be an act of hubris of the kind that has led to great wars.

John Mearsheimer: Why is Ukraine the West’s Fault?

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This video, despite being from 2015, provides clarity on the current Ukraine crisis. Putin quite clearly will not stand for NATO being on Russian’s border. Mearsheimer advocates a neutral Ukraine—a buffer state between Western Europe and Russia and argues that Putin will try to bring Ukraine to its knees rather than let it be in NATO. This is apparently happening now.

Mearsheimer, of course, co-authored The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, a masterful attempt to wrest U.S. foreign policy away from the clutches of the Israel Lobby (my review.) Sadly it has had no effect on U.S. policy since publication in 2008. Mearsheimer is an insightful, honest interpreter of foreign policy and makes clear his contempt for American foreign policy elites.

The Lockdown Disaster

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Vincent Zhou, the world-class figure skater forced to pull out of the Olympics because of COVID, can thank Anthony Fauci and our COVID-crazed media for his withdrawal.

In an agonizing Instagram post, Zhou expressed shock at the positive test, saying:

It seems pretty unreal that of all the people, it would happen to myself. … I have been doing everything in my power to stay free of COVID since the start of the pandemic. I’ve taken all the precautions I can. I’ve isolated myself so much that the loneliness I felt in the last month or two has been crushing at times.

His story is heart-wrenching not only because of his compelled withdrawal from the individual competition — and the loneliness he endured — but because our “public health authorities” lied to Zhou, leading him to do exactly the opposite of what he should have been doing to build up his immune system before the Winter Games.

Maybe nothing could have protected him — he was, of course, fully vaccinated — but the safest course would have been to expose himself to everything in 2021, not be the Boy in the Bubble. If only he’d gotten omicron back in December, like everybody else, his immune system wouldn’t have been a sitting duck for the tiniest whiff of COVID once he got to Beijing.

As Dylan H. Morris, a postdoctoral RNA virus researcher at UCLA, put it: “If you want to stay out of the hospital, giving your immune system a preview of the virus is valuable, even if that preview isn’t perfectly accurate.”

A few months into the pandemic, two basic models emerged for responding to COVID:

1) Make it endemic. Also known as “herd immunity” or, pejoratively, “Let ‘er rip!” Georgia and Florida, among other states, cautiously followed that path, as did the nation of Sweden.

2) Lock down the populace in order to prevent a single COVID molecule from ever drifting within 10 yards of a human being. Remember “Fifteen days to stop the spread!”? In the blue states, two weeks became two years — finally being abandoned this week only because Democrats fear the coming elections.

RESULT: Places that pursued the endemic route did no worse, and often quite a bit better, than the fascist lockdown states. Apart from preventing hospitals from being overwhelmed when the virus first hit New York, no benefit was derived from strict COVID policies.

The reason the virus hit so hard in 2020 was that our immune systems had never encountered anything like COVID before. “[T]he population was immunologically naïve,” explained statistician Philippe Lemoine, “which means that nobody had immunity against it.” It’s the same reason Native Americans were annihilated by viruses that Europeans had lived with for centuries. Now their immune systems recognize those viruses, too.

Training your immune system to recognize the virus, through vaccination or the real thing, reduces the severity and duration of future infections. Additional exposures give the body practice dealing with the various twists and turns of each new variant. Avoiding contact with viruses to protect your immune system is like avoiding weight-lifting to protect your muscles.

The Scientist magazine, among others, has pointed out that there’s little reason to believe that omicron is actually less dangerous than delta; it just seems so because our immune systems now recognize COVID and are able to quickly kill it.

Zhou might have known all this, but whenever epidemiologists tried to tell us that, our “public health authorities” and doomsday media buried the dissenters in scorn and calumny. Back on Oct. 4, 2020, Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University, Dr. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University produced The Great Barrington Declaration, pushing the endemic solution. Soon, thousands of scientists had signed the paper. Today, nearly 1 million have.

Four days later, on Oct. 8, 2020, Francis Collins, President Trump’s director of the NIH, emailed “The Science” Fauci, frantically warning that the declaration was getting too much attention! He urged a rapid response to discredit the signatories — one a Nobel Prize-winner in chemistry — and “take down” the paper’s ideas.

“The Science” permits no debate! (Though I suppose we’re lucky Collins merely called the renowned epidemiologists “fringe,” and not “white supremacists.”)

Governors, like Ron DeSantis in Florida, who listened to the epidemiologists rather than “public health authorities” were reviled by our media, amid florid predictions of disaster.

In April 2020, when Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia began lifting COVID restrictions, the Atlantic magazine blasted him with the headline: “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice.” Longtime reporter Ron Fournier wrote: “Mark this day. Because two and three weeks from now, the Georgia death toll is blood on his hands.” (Take note, deplorables: Trump jumped on the bandwagon and publicly criticized Gov. Kemp for opening up, too.)

About the same time, Gov. DeSantis also began easing restrictions. For this, the media dubbed him “Death-Santis.” The New Republic titled an article on April 10, 2020, “God Save the Florida Governor From His Stupidity.”

RESULTS: A month later, COVID cases in both states had declined, while cases continued to rise in the majority of other states.

Maybe that was a fluke. What’s the final score, two years later?

As of a week ago, among all 50 states, Georgia was ranked 15th in age-adjusted COVID deaths, well below communist-controlled New York and New Jersey. Florida was in the bottom half of all states, coming in at No. 31. Only 19 states did better.

As for Sweden, MSNBC and President Trump spoke as one in denouncing that country’s refusal to shut down. On April 20, 2020, Trump tweeted that Sweden was “paying heavily for its decision not to lock down.” A week ago, Sweden ranked 20th out of 31 nations in Europe in COVID deaths. Only 11 countries did better.

Even a tie score should go to the free states because their citizens didn’t have to stop living, learning, eating in restaurants, going to concerts, athletic events and on and on.

Not only did Armageddon not ensue in the free states, but their populations’ immune systems aren’t at risk of collapsing the next time a germ wafts their way. You know all those weird allergies to things like peanuts that didn’t exist 20 years ago? Wait until the kids who’ve spent their childhoods in masks encounter the Earth’s atmosphere again!

Naturally, there will be no consequences for our “public health authorities” who imposed cruel mandates and squelched opposing views: You can’t sue the government.

The rule should be that whenever our rulers claim emergency powers to impose draconian measures on the populace, they forfeit sovereign immunity. I know some epidemiologists who would be good expert witnesses for the lawsuits.

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Alfred Rosenberg: The Overthrow of the Gentleman

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Translated and introduced by Alexander Jacob

This 1940 essay by Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946) serves as a supplement to Chamberlain’s 1914 essay on ‘England’ in his Kriegsaufsätze.[2] It continues Chamberlain’s delineation of the degeneration of the aristocratic English gentleman into an unscrupulous businessman with a characteristic National Socialist focus on the Jewish contribution to this degeneration. At the same time, it highlights the socialist, ‘worker’-oriented aspect of National Socialism in general.

Alfred Rosenberg: The Overthrow of the Gentleman[1]

When the French Revolution smashed an old system, there fell, along with the political regime, also a social type that had been exemplary for the French of that time: the chevalier. The chevalier was the perfectly formed courtier of the culture of his time. He represented what was then called French culture. In his attitude, his sceptical way of observing the world, devotion to the king, social sleekness, he was doubtless the model for several phenomena of the eighteenth century. To his honour one can say that this type of gallant nobleman bravely retained itself in the end against the regime of Terror. In France there entered in the place of this chevalier a no longer definable mixture of sated bourgeois and Jacobin imitator, especially a stock-exchange speculator — in short, the ideal of the man of private means.

What played itself out in France a hundred and fifty years ago is repeated now to a greater extent in England. Even here a social type is declining: the English gentleman. This gentleman has become increasingly the ideal of the entire British world empire, but the significance and conception of this gentleman seemed, besides, to be somehow worth striving for even among other states and peoples.

The gentleman was, from the start, a man provided with ample wealth, educated according to the rules of social self-discipline, a privileged man, who could make financial manoeuvres that were not innocent and yet within the limits of that which was accepted by society, a man who offended nowhere and acknowledged all the narrow, even if unwritten, laws of British social intercourse as an obvious principle of life. Becoming such a gentleman had become the ideal not only of some bourgeois English circles but, beyond that, of most Englishmen in general. This striving was doubtless so powerful that no social revolution could emerge with greater force because every leader of such workers’ movements inevitably fell under the spell of the gentlemen, was elevated by them, accepted and then absorbed by them. Increasingly the gentleman became the British type characteristic of a big capitalistic age for his existence was bound to abundant financial means. But abundant financial means were to be striven for in the last decades only through big industrial and financial undertakings, and the latter were once again dependent on the exploitative possibilities of a large colonial possession. In order to maintain a large stratum of such rich gentlemen millions and millions of people had to, all over the world, and in England itself, labour with their slave work. England went to war in 1914 in order to maintain this condition of the gentleman forever, and one has not wrongly said that Great Britain conducted the war for the sake of the leisurely long weekend! The advantages of this British type — considering democracy as a political fact — doubtless lay in the fact that a certain stratum was, on account of their property, politically independent and did not need to become so corrupt as the poor parliamentarian devils in France, whose purse had to be repeatedly filled to make them amenable to great transactions, whether it be the Panama scandal[3] or other great profiteering schemes. But the great disadvantages lie exposed today, for the gentleman stratum wishes in principle for the eternalisation of the world capitalistic condition and it finally implies a contempt for work as a decisive value.

At this point intervenes the National Socialist Revolution, whose vocation it is to replace the type of British gentleman living on the work of others with a modern German type of work, though possible for every nation. Work in this National Socialist ethos has once again been recognised as the great decisive value, the real touchstone of the creative and performative capacity of the individual. And therefore every work that takes place on German soil is worthy of respect. It would be an absolutely false, ‘lordly’, standpoint if one wished to declare that any work in Germany could not be done by a German because it would offend his ‘lordly’ consciousness. This standpoint, explicable in Africa and under tropical conditions, would be intolerable for the German nation because therewith the possibility of a class warfare would enter once again on the horizon. If we wished to represent any work on German soil as unworthy of a German, then immediately so many subjective views would gain ground and nobody knows when the evaluation would pass from a negative to a positive one. We must rather hold fast, precisely now, to our old National Socialist principle that every work honestly performed extends to the benefit of the entire Reich and nation, that therewith also every industrious work, even the smallest, possesses its value and its share in the entire national work. Obviously we are not levelling here in any way and know that social justice does not consist only in giving to each honest worker a social security corresponding to his work and in increasing this according to the increase in performance; but it is equally a part of social justice that great work performances be also honoured appropriately in front of the entire nation with regard to the bearer of this performance. Only this correlation ensures what we call a ranking of life conditioned by value (emphasis added), and it is at the same time a truly national social attitude. Only through this can it be prevented that at any time a caste arise once again, and it be made possible that that hard type of our battle period remains decisive in the future — in another selective form but one still conditioned by work performance — for the National Socialist attitude even in the time of peace that follows.

*   *   *

Even the British gentleman, before he disappears now from the stage as a social ideal, has undergone a change. He was earlier predominantly the independently operative politician; with increasing capitalistic development he became to a decisive degree a businessman, the business idea became finally predominant,[4] until Edward VII[5] allowed even the rich Jews to enter increasingly into this capitalistic gentlemen’s society and, in the end, helped, through clubs and the press, to bring in a quick degeneration. The German language has already observed this change through certain nuances. Whereas earlier one spoke of a gentleman in a certain respectful tone, one speaks today of ‘gents’, and certain types of the present ruling Englishmen arouse in us only contemptuous laughter. In this way it has proceeded to such an extent that ‘honourable man’ and ‘gentleman’, which were perhaps similar concepts a hundred years ago, are today so differentiated that they often signify opposites. And when they emphasise ever so eagerly in London that they are fighting for the ‘old British’ and ‘humanitarian’ ideal, the present age is sufficiently enlightened about the actual facts of the social and political development to be able to view certain types of Great Britain today as real representatives of phenomena that were possible and understandable earlier. For, earlier, even dubious lapses were tempered by a certain moderation; today, British representatives have lost all form, and therewith all synoptic vision and attitude.

Today, we may say, to speak personally, that many outstanding people are definitely not honourable men but recent ‘gentlemen’ who are bound to the Jews. That is, personally, an insult but, in a social sense, a symbolic confirmation of an actual condition of social and political degeneracy. Whether it can still be changed is a question for the future. And so the faded gentleman must, like the French chevalier in the eighteenth century, disappear as an ideal worthy striving for, because the nations search for and wish to develop out of a new ethos also a new form of life.

[1] “Die Überwindung des Gentleman,” Völkischer Beobachter, 30 June, 1940.

[2] See “Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s England ,”Occidental Observer, December 13, 2021.

[3] The Panama scandal resulted from the floating of a lottery loan by the French Panama Canal Company to overcome a financial crisis in 1888. French parliamentarians were accused of taking bribes to vote for this loan, and the bribery was organised principally by the Jews, Baron Jacques de Reinach, Léopold Arton and Cornélius Herz. The loan itself proved incapable of preventing the collapse of the Panama company in 1889.

[4] Cf. H.S. Chamberlain’s comment on the degeneration of the British gentleman in A. Jacob, ‘Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s “England”, Occidental Observer, December 13, 2021: ‘This crudeness has slowly imbued almost the entire nation from the bottom to the top — as is always the case. Even fifty years ago it was an offence against class dignity if a member of the nobility took part in industry, trade and finance; today, the head of the oldest and greatest house of Scotland, brother-in-law of the king, a banker!’

[5] King Edward VII (1841-1910) was the eldest son of Queen Victoria was groomed by his parents to be the ‘first gentleman of the country’ and became an arbiter of men’s fashions in his time (see Maurice Muret, The Greatness of Elites, tr. Alexander Jacob, Arktos, 2022, forthcoming, Ch.V).