Western Culture

CJ Miller Interviews Prof. Ricardo Duchesne on “Greatness and Ruin”

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The Cover Spread of Duchesne’s Latest Book, Greatness and Ruin

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Q: Hello, Dr. Duchesne.  Thank you for granting this interview.  If it’s all right by you, I would like to start with a few personal questions, to help the reader get to know you a bit.  Can you tell us a little about your personal background? Anything about your life or career before coming to Canada? I know that you are originally from Puerto Rico. How/why did you end up coming to Canada?

A: I was born in Puerto Rico to parents of diverse heritage. Wikipedia’s biographical information is inaccurate.  My father, a medical doctor, was of Afro-Puerto Rican, French, Spanish, and Portuguese descent. My mother, purely British by ancestry, was born in India, not of “Anglo-Indian” descent. They met at the Sorbonne in Paris, where they studied before relocating to Madrid for my father’s medical training.

At 14, following my parents’ divorce, I moved to Canada with my mother and two sisters. I have pleasant memories of my childhood in Puerto Rico. My father often took us (wife and family of six children) on Sunday outings around the island, or to animated gatherings at my grandparents’ home. My father, one of fifteen siblings, came from a musical lineage; his father is recognized as one of the two great classical-jazz composers of Puerto Rico. His mother would spend most of the day cooking great meals. My mother, quintessentially British, lived in a world of eccentricity and imagination. Though not studious, I was drawn to my mother’s large book collection, captivated by their looks, sometimes wondering about their contents, though I rarely read as a child.

Q: I think it would be interesting to learn a little about your intellectual journey. Was there anything noteworthy in your high school and/or undergraduate days? What made you decide to go into academia, and into sociology in particular?

My early years in Canada, interspersed with nearly a year in Spain, were marked by liberality. From ages 14 to 18, I immersed myself in nightlife, indulging in drinking and drugs, barely scraping by academically. By 19, exhausted by this lifestyle, I was captivated by Plato’s Republic and its vision of a perfected mind. In college, two years before McGill University, I embraced Marxism, committing to a minimum of three hours of daily reading to compensate for my lack of academic background. This discipline led to strong college performance, but at McGill, I reverted to old habits, earning a B- average in my first two years while remaining a keen reader of Marx and contemporary Marxist thinkers, including Latin American politics. I revered Lenin as history’s greatest revolutionary.

A Portrait of the Professor as a Young Marxist

At 22 or 23, after dropping out of university, I contemplated an academic career. While working part-time, I devised a rigorous self-study plan, devouring great novels, philosophy, and works on historical materialism, Nietzsche, Natural Law, economic history, and the history of the sciences. Nietzsche’s ideas, though clashing with my Marxism, kept me thinking beyond my leftist inclinations. For three years, I lived a near-solitary life, cycling, reading in parks, and meeting my girlfriend, whom I would later marry.

Q: What were some of your early intellectual interests and influences? When and how did you begin to develop views that diverge from the academic mainstream? Did you always stand out in any ways from your colleagues and the general intellectual climate, or did you only become “out of place” in academia after expressing your views?

A: My intellectual approach diverged from the mainstream as I pursued broad, historical studies over any disciplinary specialization. I enjoyed the study of the histories of a wide range of subjects, whether mathematics, philosophy, or economics. I was building up a library through purchases in second hand books stores. In retrospect, I can see now—I still have many of these books—how the study of the history of these subjects likely implanted in me the sense that most accomplishments had come from Europe, since in those days most books were naturally Eurocentric. I also read overviews about human evolution, agriculture’s origins, civilizations, modern science, and the Industrial Revolution. Returning to complete my BA, I majored in History, focusing on Europe, while taking diverse courses. My Marxist convictions persisted, culminating in an MA thesis defending a Marxist interpretation of the 1789 French Revolution.

I was lucky to find an interdisciplinary program at York University, Toronto, for my PhD studies. I still did not want to become an “expert” in any particular field. This program was called “Social & Political Thought.” I studied a bit of everything: philosophy, economics, history, political science, and sociology, resisting the fascination of the other students with postmodernism, feminism, and postcolonialism. Drawn to Hegel’s historical approach, I saw thought (and debates about the ultimate questions) as comprehensible only through their historical development. My dissertation, a phenomenological analysis of the Marxist “transition from feudalism to capitalism” debate, traced how “classical” Marxist claims evolved toward “post-Marxism” in the degree to which the major contenders in this debate were conceptually compelled (in light of the evidence) to incorporate ideas from Adam Smith, Max Weber, and other non-Marxist thinkers.

When I was hired as a sociologist at the University of New Brunswick in 1995, I identified as a liberal cultural Marxist. Sociology gave me ample room to sustain my interdisciplinary interests, allowing me to teach diverse courses—sociology of law, economic development, historical and political sociology—without specializing. This generalist approach, while fulfilling, relegated my publications to second- and third-tier journals. By 1999, I found a huge but definitive subject I could focus on in the “rise of the West” debate, engaging revisionist scholars online who challenged Eurocentric narratives with multicultural perspectives. My defense of Western achievements, infused with Nietzschean, Weberian, and Hegelian influences, sparked much debate among academics advocating inclusivity and multiculturalism.

Even as a Marxist PhD student, I had been uneasy about increasing third-world immigration to Toronto and Montreal in the early 1990s. My further readings on Western history from a comparative perspective, coupled with the multiculturalist push to downplay Western contributions, eventually pushed me towards conservatism, in a quasi-libertarian way. I came to believe that humanity’s highest achievements were at odds with inclusivity and leftist ideologies.

Q: Can you speak to some of the pressures you faced in your career for your views, and the reception of your work among your colleagues and students?

A: I kept my ideas about race, White identity, and immigration private up until about 2018. Mind you, I did show open support for Trump, walking with a MAGA hat around campus, which infuriated a few professors. I also gave a lecture at my university to a packed audience about Trump in early 2017, where I brought up immigration issues.

All in all, however, they still saw me as a conservative who authored a book, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization (2011), cherishing this civilization for its cultural and intellectual achievements. It was in late 2012 that I began exploring the links between the devaluation of Western achievements, the rise of multicultural world history, and the politics of diversity and immigration. By early 2013, I frequently visited online platforms such as American Renaissance, Occidental Observer, and Counter Currents. Although Uniqueness addressed the political dimensions behind the push for a multicultural historical approach, I now saw with clarity that this push was not solely about “new findings” or “new methodologies” by leftist revisionist historians; it also aimed to reshape curricula, to produce a new world history at the service of the growing racial diversity in the West.

A striking double standard was apparent in this whole debate around race: revisionist historians readily linked Western global expansion to “White supremacy” but reacted with hostility when I associated Western accomplishments with “White Europeans.” I first observed this in online exchanges on H-World, H-Net’s world history forum, as well as in academic conversations, conference discussions, and email correspondence.

As I explored controversial websites and delved into race realism and White nationalism, I withdrew from discussing politics with colleagues at the university, limiting myself to the non-racial themes of Uniqueness. This was no great loss; I recall only one professor there with whom I had meaningful intellectual exchanges. As I had already been promoted to full professor in 2008, I felt no pressure to publicize my research. Thus, I maintained a low profile regarding my involvement in dissident circles, including numerous activities and invitations, barely saying a word, if any, about my subsequent books, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age and Canada in Decay, when they were published in 2017.

Opposition to my pro-Western views initially came externally through grant rejections and severed ties with former leftist colleagues as I developed the ideas leading to Uniqueness. Later, conservative circles distanced themselves when I began addressing race and immigration. After Uniqueness appeared, I was invited to speak at Princeton University in 2012, and several American conservatives praised its scholarship. However, they disengaged once my critiques of immigrant diversity became clear. Steven Balch, who wrote a long, glowing review of Uniqueness, contacted me about joining Texas Tech University’s Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, which he had just been hired to create. Yet, upon learning of my evolving views, he cut off communication.

Q: Before things came to a head in 2019, did you already have a sense that many of your colleagues and students were against you?

A: Things began to deteriorate with my colleagues during 2018, as they learned about my book Canada in Decay, which was then a best seller, and I told them about it. Opposition to my ideas came earlier from the bigger campus at Fredericton when they learned about a video interview I did on 2014 criticizing academics for their lack of critical thinking about immigration issues. I was on the Saint John campus of the University of New Brunswick. In 2015, members of the sociology department at Fredericton wrote a letter to a major newspaper objecting to my views. They also wrote a formal complaint against me (with many signatures coming from academics from other universities) to the president of the university. University administrations, however, tend to take student complaints far more seriously. There had been no complaints against me from any students.

It was really my effort to push through the dissertation of a student, Clare Ellis, that revived the opposition against me in the Fredericton campus. It is a long, complicated affair. Suffice it to say that they hated the thought that a student had managed to produce a dissertation about immigration replacement in Europe, with very high evaluations from external supervisors, while the Fredericton examiners engaged in petty nitpicking, which I ridiculed in replies. In the end, they were compelled, if reluctantly, to pass the dissertation. They could not deny it was based on extensive research and citations. (Arktos has now published this dissertation, under the title, The Blackening of Europe, in three volumes).

It was a guy named Bernie Farmer, well known in radical leftist activism, and founder of The Canadian Anti-Hate Network, who orchestrated, in 2019, a united opposition against me, first in Fredericton, and then in Saint John. This included an open letter signed by over 100 academics published in the media, a few articles, and some radio discussions.

Q: From my understanding, the university basically pressured you into taking early retirement following complaints from students and staff, and an open letter by your colleagues demanding your dismissal. Were many of the people making these demands people you knew personally? Were there any that surprised you?

A: There were no complaints from students. I was not pressured into early retirement by the administration. I just knew it would not have been possible for me to work in a department where every one of my “colleagues” had signed the open letter, and filed other complaints, including numerous professors in departments below and above the floor where my office was located. This toxic environment compelled me into early retirement. In a way, there were no surprises. I understood the risks I was taking, and expected something to happen at some point. It confirmed my realization around 2013 that the West is absolutely committed to immigration and diversity, and will ostracize anyone who talks about replacement of Whites.

Q: You have written extensively about the plight of White Canadians, and been very outspoken about the downsides of our policies of mass immigration. As an immigrant to Canada yourself, what makes you so passionate about the cause of demographic replacement in this country? Or is it more the case that you are concerned about the demographic collapse of Whites in the West in general, and simply extend that concern to the country you live in now?

A: I am equally concerned about demographic replacement across the West, not just Canada. Native Canadians tend to be concerned about Canada, which is understandable since they have a stronger Canadian identity than I do. While I “feel” for Canada more due to the many years I have spent here since high school, I tend to have a cosmopolitan Western outlook, caring more or less equally for Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Sweden, Spain, or England. Sometimes I wonder why I care so much about immigration replacement considering that I am an immigrant born on a small island in the Caribbean, with some non-White blood. Perhaps it is my “genetic memory,” my majority European ancestry, combined with my admiration and identification with the intellectual and cultural heritage of Western civilization. Civilizations have declined in the past, like China, Japan, and India, but they have managed to rise again. The West will never again be the West in a few decades if trends are not reversed. The argument for endless immigration, Black and brown pride, and White compliance, goes against my sense of fairness, pride, and dignity.

Q: As you mentioned previously, Uniqueness was less controversial upon its publication than your subsequent works, and even received a mixed but overall balanced reception, with positive reviews in relatively mainstream journals. Do you think this was solely due to the emphasis on culture rather than race, or was the intellectual climate in academia generally less restrictive towards such material back then? How did the intellectual climate change and develop between that time and your retirement?

A: Uniqueness would not have been reviewed, certainly not as favorably, if it had equated Western civilization with the “White race.” Its focus on cultural, economic, demographic, and geographical factors—without drawing on race realism—allowed it to be positively received by reputable journals such as The European Legacy, Journal of World History, Cliodynamics, Academic Questions, Canadian Journal of Sociology, The Independent Review, Policy, and The Dorchester Review. Six of these reviews, of which five were very positive, were extended essays. (It received long reviews in alternative right journals as well). For a long time now, the liberal academic establishment has excluded publications that explicitly link Western achievements to racial categories. Certainly, the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020, heightened the hysteria of academics against “systemic racism.” Psychology remains the only social science discipline where journals may tolerate race-realist perspectives on IQ, provided they are presented in a strictly scientific, nonpolitical manner within expert circles. However, even in psychology, the intellectual climate has grown increasingly restrictive. Scholars may still explore race realism, but only by adopting a libertarian stance or confining their work to a purely technical lexicon, avoiding political language or affiliations.

Q: Uniqueness was not an explicitly racialist book, and certainly not antisemitic, but you did set up several thinkers as intellectual antagonists, including Frank, Boas, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Wallerstein, all of whom happen to be Jewish—and many would argue that they do not simply “happen to be,” but that in fact their Jewishness is a major influence on their reasoning and a motivation for their intellectual pursuits. Of course, you address many other thinkers, but Jews feature prominently in the intellectual antagonists you address in Uniqueness. Did this occur to you at the time? You mentioned (and it is clear from your books) that your ideas on race largely crystallised after publishing Uniqueness. Is this also the case with your familiarity with the so-called Jewish question?

A: Before writing Uniqueness, I had read two excellent articles by Kevin MacDonald, and was familiar with IQ race realism. While I did not object to these perspectives, though I felt uncomfortable with their political implications, I deemed it unnecessary to incorporate them into my arguments. I also recognized that some Jewish scholars, such as David Landes, whom I discuss favorably in Uniqueness, were supportive of Western civilization. Mind you, in reply to Brill, the publisher of Uniqueness, I actually listed Kevin MacDonald’s journal, The Occidental Quarterly, as a potential reviewer. They did send a review copy to him, and he wrote a long review. We have kept in communication to this day, after he sent me a copy of the review late in 2011. I met him a few times, and consider him a most esteemed academic colleague.

It was only after publishing Uniqueness, as I elaborated in Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age (2017), that I gained a clearer understanding of the relationship between race and the rise of the West. I realized that Eurocentric scholars in the debate over the West’s rise framed it as a “universal civilization” grounded in liberal values, open to assimilation by any immigrant. Initially, I shared this view of the West as a universal liberal civilization. However, shortly after Uniqueness was published, I began to see that this philosophical stance aligned with policies promoting immigration-driven demographic replacement, a position I could no longer endorse. I was convinced that a Western world with a marginalized White population would cease to be Western.

This induced me to think further about the relationship between liberalism and immigration. The view I took in Faustian Man, and elaborated at length in Canada in Decay, written later but also published in 2017, was the standard one within dissident circles: that the West had come under the domination of a cultural Marxist ideology. Liberalism had long existed with strong immigration restrictions, and White identity affiliations. Only in recent years did I reach the view that liberal capitalism has a universalist progressive logic, and that this logic eventually pushed it towards open borders and racial diversity, after past traditional norms and identities were seriously weakened.

Duchesne Speaking at an American Renaissance Conference

Q: As someone who has been familiar with your work for some time, I could kind of observe that shift in thinking between your earlier work and G&R.  Uniqueness reminded me in some ways of another book that was very much in the same vein, namely Civilisation: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson, though of course Uniqueness was much more academic in tone compared to the sleek pop-historiography of Civilisation, nor did it really share Ferguson’s counter-Jihad (i.e., Zionist) focus on a supposed clash of civilisations between the West and the Islamic world.  Nonetheless, there are similarities.  Ferguson posits several “Killer Apps”—namely competition, science, private property, medicine, consumerism, and the Protestant work ethic—as the defining features of Western culture that led to the rise of the West.  This is also somewhat in same vein as Joseph Henrich’s idea of the West as WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic).  In G&R you are critical of Henrich’s almost monocausal attribution of these traits to what he refers to as the medieval Catholic Church’s “Marriage and Family Program” (especially its repression of polygamy and cousin marriage).  I do tend to agree with your critiques of this overemphasis on the church’s role, but at least Henrich offers a plausible explanation, whereas Ferguson offers no explanation of why or how (or even from exactly whom, racially speaking) these “killer apps” might have arisen.  Can you speak to the similarities and differences between their hypotheses and your own?

A: Uniqueness has certain affinities with Ferguson’s Civilisation: The West and the Rest in its endorsement of the “Eurocentric” argument that individual rights, free markets, Enlightenment values. However, in a review I wrote of Ferguson’s book in early 2012, I am quite critical of his book for two reasons: first, I now realized that many pro-Western historians, including Ferguson, were often right-wing liberals or neoconservatives who framed the West’s values as universally replicable; second, as articulated in Uniqueness, the West’s distinctiveness predates modernity, stretching back to ancient times.

Ferguson’s book implies that Europe was an undeveloped backwater until its economic rise in the 1500s, ignoring a rich legacy of intellectual and artistic achievements. These include the Greek invention of dialectics, philosophy, historical writing, and tragic poetry; the Hellenistic advances in natural sciences, such as Aristarchus’s heliocentric hypothesis and Euclid’s Elements; and Roman innovations like republican governance and legal concepts of personhood. By ignoring this heritage, and that of the Middle Ages, Ferguson reduces the West to a set of modern “apps”—liberal values detachable from their cultural roots.

In my review, I rejected the notion that Western liberal values are universal tools that any culture, regardless of history or ethnicity, can adopt. These values, along with the West’s broader achievements, are uniquely Western, inseparable from its historical and cultural trajectory. I also challenged Ferguson’s view of the United States as a “propositional nation” defined solely by universal ideas rather than ancestry, customs, or ethnicity.

The novelty and interpretative power of Joseph Henrich’s The Weirdest People in the World (2020) lies in his demonstration that Westerners created very different liberal institutions, or civic associations, freed from kinship networks and norms, because they were psychologically different. Liberal institutions did not create liberal individuals; rather, liberal individuals created liberal institutions. By “liberal individuals,” Henrich means individuals with a greater “neurological and psychological” set of capacities, marked by reduced nepotism, greater trust, fairness, and cooperation with strangers. He maintains that these traits emerged in the Middle Ages after the Catholic Church dismantled polygamous kinship networks, imposed monogamy, and encouraged marriages based on voluntary decisions. This shift fostered civic institutions like guilds, universities, and chartered towns, grounded in impartial rules and merit rather than tribal loyalties.

However, Henrich’s claim that this psychological transformation arose incidentally from the Church’s prudish concerns about polygamy or its self-interested land grabs via excommunication is unconvincing. As I argue in Greatness and Ruin, the Greeks, Romans, and early Christians had long recognized monogamy’s civic benefits, such as reducing blood feuds over inheritance. These earlier arguments suggest a deeper, more intentional cultural evolution toward monogamy, challenging Henrich’s view of it as an “unintentional” byproduct of ecclesiastical policy.

Q: It is clear that, whether we’re talking about “killer apps” or WEIRDness, the consensus seems to be that certain Western cultural traits seem almost destined to bring about liberalism.  There is a logical progression from burgeoning individualism to liberalism, just like there is from liberalism to the West’s predicament today, as you mentioned.  Still, you once believed that liberalism, perhaps in a more conservative form, was basically compatible with nativist policies and White identity.  With G&R, you have come to view it more skeptically, seeing ethnic nationalism as fundamentally incompatible in the long-term with the progressive logic of liberalism.  What precipitated this shift in your thinking?

A: Liberalism is inherently a progressive ideology that seeks the full emancipation of individuals from pregiven collective identities, whether traditional or biological. In other words, liberalism did not actualize its ideals the moment the first liberals came to power with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, or the French Revolution of 1789. Liberalism initially coexisted with customs, rituals, religious beliefs, and nativist sentiments, which kept its progressive logic in check, and gave early liberal societies a very traditional character by the standards of today. Over time, however, the emancipatory project of liberalism eroded these “backward prejudices,” fostering a purer liberal order that views racial equality and immigrant diversity as essential to achieving equal liberty for all, regardless of sex, religion, or race.

To understand the West, one must adopt a historicist perspective. Particularly since the early modern era, or the Renaissance, the West has been a dynamic civilization defined by continuous change and innovation. Concepts like feudalism, capitalism, individualism, democracy, representative government, and liberalism lack transhistorical meanings; their nature and significance evolve with their temporal context. Judging these phenomena by a single historical instantiation ignores their variability. This lack of historical awareness may explain why scholars like Paul Gottfried argue that the contemporary West is dominated by “cultural Marxism,” a distinct ideology. Gottfried remains attached to the classical liberal version witnessed in the Anglo world of the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, though he occasionally equates liberalism with the pre-1960s or pre-1980s West.

This does not imply that all self-identified liberals in our times embrace liberalism’s latest formulation. Today, liberals broadly divide into left- and right-wing camps. Right-wing liberals favor earlier versions of liberalism and view leftist excesses as deviations from the path of liberty. Yet, conservatives have historically accommodated progressive achievements, only recently resisting “wokeness” via a populist rebellion. Most conservatives, nevertheless, still regard ethno-nationalism, immigration restrictionism, and White identitarianism as illiberal ideologies to be excluded from the public sphere.

Consider Eric Kaufmann, a self-described right-wing liberal who critiques woke politics while defending Western civilization for the sake of “truth and freedom above ideology.” Upon closer examination, however, it is clear that Kaufmann opposes only the excesses of wokeness (aggressive censorship, rigid diversity mandates, and open borders) because they provoke populist backlashes that threaten stable, multiracial liberal democracies. He is not alone. Prominent liberal intellectuals like Konstantin Kisin, Steven Pinker, Sam Harris, Jonathan Haidt, Yascha Mounk, and Niall Ferguson share this perspective.

Q: In G&R, you mentioned that Traditionalists “have been the only ones—think of De Benoist, Kerry Bolton, Alexander Dugin—to carry a frontal attack on liberalism as such, holding its inherent individualism responsible for undermining every cultural, racial and sexual identity in the West.”  You also make several critiques of this school of thought, especially of their failure to address the stagnation of non-Western cultures, stating that they “have not been able to grapple consistently with the ways in which the traditionalism of the West has always coexisted with some degree of individualism, monogamous families freed from polygamous kinship networks, equal civic status, and participation in politics for free adult males—what is now known as a ‘civic-republican’ form of liberalism, in complete contrast to the non-Western world.”  Nonetheless, it seems to me that the total rejection of liberalism in this way of thinking had its influence on your thought, or at least was something you had to grapple with.  I remember listening to previous interviews of yours in which you brought up Dugin specifically, and your main critique of his Fourth Political Theory was that he professed to synthesise a new political theory by borrowing only the best elements from the previous theories, but in fact, you asserted, he had borrowed very heavily from communism and fascism, while taking nothing from Western liberalism.  I think your critique was basically accurate, (and I think part of the reason Dugin does this is simply due to Russia’s historical circumstance, including its age-old inferiority complex towards Europe), but nonetheless he is a very interesting thinker, even if one finds much to disagree with.  Did your views on Dugin change between that interview and when you wrote Greatness and Ruin?  What is your overall assessment of his political thought as it relates to liberalism?

A: In a 2014 review of The Fourth Political Theory, written under a pseudonym, I critiqued his blanket condemnation of liberalism, and his heavy reliance on Marxist and post-modern critiques. In a 2020 interview, I noted that his “fourth political theory” absorbed some “positive” contributions of communism (critique of individualism and capitalism) and fascism (concept of ethnos), but rejected everything associated with liberalism (preferring the concept of “social freedom,” or freedom of the group, over individual freedom). By 2022, however, I recognized Dugin’s insight that liberalism is the West’s dominant ideology. This led me to conclude that wokeness is not a new leftist or “cultural Marxist” phenomenon, but the culmination of liberalism’s progressive logic. Many Western dissidents (race realists and White nationalists) criticize Dugin for dismissing race as a construct, rejecting fascism and White nationalism, and advocating a multipolar geopolitics that some view as “third worldist” opposition to Western hegemony. These critics, I believe, overlook the historical and cultural context from which Dugin’s ideas emerged.

As a Russian cultural nationalist, Dugin views the post-Soviet American push to spread liberal hegemony into Eastern Europe and Eurasia as an existential threat, aimed at fragmenting Russia and imposing liberalism. I view Russia as predominantly European, with 80–85% Slavic peoples and significant Western cultural elements. This is why I support his cultural nationalism against American neoconservative values. Russian Slavs retain a natural ethnocentrism, and both Putin and Dugin embrace Slavic identity within the Russian federation, though not White nationalism, which is incoherent to Russia’s historically-based multiculturalism and its experience fighting the Germans during World War II. Unlike Western multiculturalism, which is driven by a progressive ideology, Russia’s diversity is an organic historical reality.

By the same token, while I appreciate Dugin’s Russian perspective, I also recognize that race realism and White identity are valid approaches in the Western context, where Whites are set to become a minority if the West does not make a decisive break with liberal capitalism.

Q: Great insights.  I could not have summed up my own views on Dugin better myself.

You make frequent reference to Hegel in your work, and both Uniqueness and Greatness and Ruin draw heavily from Hegel’s ideas on the genealogy of reason and the development of man’s intellectual faculties throughout history. You argue convincingly in Greatness and Ruin that Hegel’s philosophy of the development of the human mind is specific to the cognitive experience of Europeans. Do you agree that, especially in light of his attempts to reconcile the contradictions of some of the most important developments in European thought—namely classical philosophy, Christianity, the Enlightenment, and Romanticism—Hegel could be considered primarily (if perhaps not self-consciously) a philosopher of the European mind? Would you consider yourself a Hegelian?

A: Uniqueness has a long chapter titled “The Restlessness of the Western Spirit from a Hegelian Perspective” arguing that Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1806) should be read as an account of the developmental experience of the Western spirit rather than of the human spirit as such. This should be obvious enough. The historical allusions of this book are almost entirely to philosophers, literary works, poems, scientific treatises, political and military figures from Europe. In our age of equality of rational capacities and rights, Hegelian scholars cannot but pretend that the Phenomenology is an exposition of “human experience and cognition.”

Granted, Hegel, like every other European philosopher, wrote in terms of the rational essence of “mankind-in-itself” and of the rational nature of humans to become self-aware of themselves as the agents of their conceptual creations and activities. Europeans have always expressed themselves in universal terms, projecting their intellectual experiences onto humanity, and, indeed, presupposing that Europeans, in their higher state of cognition, should be the standard by which to make judgements about humanity in general.

Once we connect this text with what Hegel says in more explicit terms in his “Lectures on the Philosophy of History,” which presents a comprehensive view of world history through the lens of his philosophical ideas, it is hard to deny that the basic truth contained in the Phenomenology is that the West is the only civilization in which “freedom” and “reason” have progressed over the course of history.

The Phenomenology of the Spirit is a work that seeks to capture, in a comprehensive manner, the developmental experience of the idea of freedom in its intrinsic association with the developmental experience of reason. What I learned from this text, which allowed me to go beyond the narrow reduction of Western uniqueness to economic growth and modern science, is that the intellectual history of the Western spirit cannot be comprehended as a substance, a state of being, but as an “activity.” Non-Western civilizations can be reasonably identified in terms of one or two major philosophical experiences, “the Confucian worldview,” the “Hindu Mind,” the “Talmudic” world of Jews, or the “Islamic experience” of Muslims, in their essence, with subsequent intellectual variations occurring primarily within these currents, or in combination with a few other relatively static currents, such as Buddhism, or Sunnism versus Salafism in Islam.

In contrast, the mental experience of the West can be known only by knowing it as an experience that engendered in the course of time multiple philosophical schools, through a dialectic of theses, anti-theses, and syntheses. At the base of this dynamism, as I came to understand with greater clarity while writing Greatness and Ruin, is the discovery of the mind by the ancient Greeks: the realization that humans have a faculty that is singular to the human species, which consists in the ability of reason to create methods for proper reasoning, concepts and values, over which it can adjudicate as to their validity and morality.

It was really from the first flowerings of reason in ancient Greece that Hegel detected an inner necessity (a “dialectical” logic) in the philosophical development of humans, which he traced to the nature of reason per se to become actually what it was potentially from the beginning. Prior to the Greeks, humans had barely become conscious of their rational consciousness. Human consciousness started to display a restless disposition—its true potentiality and nature—when it came to “discover” itself as a faculty in its own right in ancient times. For it was then that reason apprehended its capacity for self-reflection, to think for-itself, in terms of its own volitional abilities, ceasing to accept passively the existence of norms, gods, and natural things as if they were “things-in-themselves” beyond its own reflective judgments.

This rational spirit would remain in a state of dissatisfaction and alienation, restlessness and unhappiness, continually seeking a new solution, in its effort to overcome and sublimate every contradiction within its thinking, and every non-conceptualized unknown it encountered. The Western self could not feel “at home” in the world until it got rid “of the semblance of being burdened with something alien.” The Phenomenology views every major Western outlook—Roman stoicism, skepticism, Catholic scholasticism, Cartesian rationalism, British empiricism, German idealism, and romanticism—not as isolated or timeless viewpoints, but as evolving “moments” in the effort of human selfhood to become what it is intrinsically: the free author of its own concepts, values, and practices.

The Phenomenology thus exhibits the ways in which diverse but interrelated outlooks held sway and conviction for some time, only to be seen as limited in their inability to provide answers consistent with the demands of beings that are becoming increasingly aware of themselves as the free creators of their own beliefs, laws, and institutions. Europeans, in Hegel’s grand scheme, only became what they are potentially—rationally self-conscious agents—when they came to recognize themselves, in modern times, as free in their institutions and laws, and as the ultimate decision makers as to what is true, rather than relying on “natural laws” mandated from above.

For Hegel, this stage had been reached in his own time, in the post-French Revolution era of Europe. It is not that there would be no more history after him (no further debates about, for example, how widely free speech should be extended). Liberal institutions would continue to develop, improvements and adaptations to different national experiences and events would occur. His point was that Europeans would no longer accept a political order that denied the equal liberty of individuals to express themselves as free rational agents.

Hegel, however, was not a libertarian or a relativist who believed in value pluralism. As I will explain in response to the next question, he was a communitarian liberal who believed that the state should play a key role in creating a sense of cohesion and belonging among citizens, rather than allowing the business world, and freewheeling individuals, to be in charge of the foremost ideals of a society.

I agree with Hegel that only Europeans became conscious of their consciousness. This is the foundation stone from which I try to make sense of the unique historical trajectory of Europeans. In this respect, I am a Hegelian. Of course, as I show in Greatness and Ruin, there are currently many other thinkers, treatises, debates, historical and psychological findings, with keen insights about the “second-order thinking” of Europeans and other unique psychological traits. However, I don’t believe there is a grand purpose in history. We can see meaningful patterns, identifiable stages in Western history, but history is unpredictable. Most humans are barely able to think for themselves; Africans and Indians, non-Western peoples generally, are now a huge majority in the world, and their ways of thinking are very different, even if they have modernized or are modernizing. Apart from Western technology and affluence, the historical experience of the West means very little to other civilizations. Samuel Huntingon was correct that modernization should not be confused with Westernization. AI, globalization, mass immigration, and race mixing inside the West, are creating a world that is unpredictable and very different from the world Hegel experienced.

Q: It is, of course, far beyond the scope of this interview to come up with exactly what it would look like, but do you think Hegelian dialectical methods might be fruitful in reconciling European ethnic self-preservation and cultural coherence with the “liberalising” tendencies of individualism, universalism, et cetera, that seem to be intrinsic to Western culture?

A: In my judgement, Hegel belongs to a group of German thinkers, idealists and historicists, who understood the value of modernity, freedom, the use of reason, and the value of open inquiry, while believing that societies could not be founded solely on the free choices of individuals abstracted from their ethnos and ancestral community ties. They emphasized the “social rights” of the community or ethnos. In chapter 10 of Greatness and Ruin I examine the ideas of German historicists, their critique of liberalism, though not Hegel’s own critique.

Hegel, we can say, is a liberal communitarian who advocated for “social rights” within a political order that would reconcile the individualist aspirations of citizens with the need of humans for community ties, a sense of belonging, ancestral ties and historical rootedness. Today, in the West, liberal communitarians are multiculturalists who identify “social rights” with economic equality, welfare provisions, and the removal of “socially constructed” differences between the sexes and races.

Charles Taylor, one of the major Canadian theorists of multiculturalism, and an admirer of Hegel, has readapted Hegel’s ideas to serve progressive ends, while discarding or suppressing his traditionalism and nationalism. Hegelian scholars generally have put forth a Hegel that views “social rights” as rights for greater equality in a multicultural setting, a Hegel that synthesizes the atomism of free markets and private rights with a state that ensures social rights for diverse peoples and promotes the “collective economic good” of society.

It is true that Hegel argued that being recognized as a citizen while living in abject poverty limited individual self-expression, insomuch as this was a result of the actions of powerful citizens having complete freedom of contract without any social rights protecting workers in the form of state regulations. But there is more to Hegel’s concept of social freedom. When Hegel writes about a shared conception of the good, he does not mean economic goods only; he means as well cultural collective goods, a sense of peoplehood (Volk) that can be guaranteed only by a national state. Hegel appeals to the idea of national identity as the glue that can tie otherwise rational private citizens by virtue of their belonging, through birth and ethnicity, to a single culture.

Current interpreters of Hegel, notwithstanding the merits of their works in organizing and clarifying Hegel’s extremely difficult ideas, rarely mention or willfully misread Hegel’s emphasis on national identity. For example, Frederick Neuhouser, in his book, Actualizing Freedom: The Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory (2000), argues that Hegel could not have appealed to a sense of national belonging “akin to bonds of brotherhood” since such bonds would be rooted in a “prereflective attachment,” which is supposedly inconsistent with a post-Enlightenment culture in which individuals accept only communitarian identities that are “consciously endorsed through a process of public reflection on the common good.”

I disagree. Neuhouser should know that the “bonds of love” that unite Western families are not purely “free” and “rational,” even as the union of husband and wife are freely decided rather than coerced by unreflective customs. There is a strong natural bond between parents and children and between men and women as sexual beings who can reproduce children, not to mention the multiple customs that regulate the marriage ceremony and child-rearing. There is also a strong natural (but no longer prereflective) bond uniting people with the same historical ancestry, territorial roots, and language within one nation. This bond is consistent with a rationally free subject. The subjection of “pre-reflective bonds” to rational examination does not necessarily entail the creation of a nation based on “propositional values.” Thinking critically about “prereflective bonds” means that these bonds can no longer be seen as unknowable, mysterious forces that control the affairs of men; it means that we now know their nature, that we can explain why we individuals tend to be more attached to people of our own ethnicity and historical lineage. It means that we have rationally explained studies about in-group attachments, biological dispositions, and genetic determinants.

Q: With the proliferation of technology, rising literacy and rates of education, and the global homogenisation of culture due to American media power, to what extent do you think non-Western peoples might be moving towards Western modes of thought, including individualism and higher-order thinking?

If, as you argue in Greatness and Ruin, the development of the Western mind underwent a process of Piagetian development to arrive at higher-order self-conscious thought, do you think it is likely that certain other peoples might undergo a similar development, perhaps even at an accelerated rate, since Western culture has already “paved the way” towards this level of self-consciousness?

You quote Hegel: “In development, nothing emerges but what was there originally in germ or in-itself.” You assert that the telos of consciousness is “to make consciousness explicit to itself, to reach self-consciousness,” and that “the seed of man’s apprehension of himself as the only being that can become aware of his capacity to self-determine [is] already there inside man as such” (p. 147), but that this “implicit capacity only started to become explicit and actual with the ancient Greeks, and never manifested itself anywhere else.”

Would you say, then, that this germ, this potential for self-consciousness, exists in man as such—that is to say, in all peoples? You give a plausible genealogy of the development of European self-consciousness reaching all the way back to the Indo-Europeans. Is the development of higher-order thinking in Europeans, then, purely a result of this cultural Piagetian developmental process—culture and consciousness building upon itself—and unique to Europeans purely because of the cultural processes that we have undergone? Or is the germ, the potential, different across different people groups, such that, for example, African Pygmies never could have undergone a similar development of consciousness, no matter what cultural experiences and processes they underwent? Do you think it is potentially a case of culture influencing genetics, and vice versa?

And, at the risk of asking an impossible question here: what do you think is the relationship between innate cognitive potential (of a people) and cultural development of consciousness?

A: One would think that, if I agree with Hegel that the potential for self-consciousness exists in man as such, I would agree that Western culture has ‘paved the way’ for second order thinking, self-consciousness, and a high level of creativity among non-western peoples with the spread of modernity. Yet, in Greatness and Ruin, I seem to suggest that the introspective consciousness of Europeans—the disposition to examine one’s own thoughts and feelings, and what Joseph Henrich calls the “WEIRD” Western traits for intentionality, trust of strangers, and lack of ingroup identity—are too deeply wired into the psychology of Europeans to be replicated among non-western peoples simply through proper socialization. Henrich is also ambivalent about this. On the whole, his thesis is that, with modernization, creation of liberal institutions open to merit and based on universal rules and equality of rights, humans will exhibit “WEIRD” dispositions. But he also brings up research showing that second- and third-generation immigrants in Europe from Muslim nations (and other cultures with strong kinship networks) have not assimilated. For Henrich, it comes down to the persistence of kinship networks. If they are “demolished,” then we get “weird” humans.

But it looks like things are more complicated. In China, despite the promotion of nuclear families and monogamy through policies like the Marriage Law of 1950, and the one-child policy (1979–2015), which aimed to reduce extended family networks, kinship systems still remain strong and deeply rooted in Confucian principles, emphasizing filial piety, patrilineal descent, and extended family obligations like ancestor worship and bloodline. Kinship norms remain strong across many other non-Western nations.

I still don’t see the same level of individuality among Asians, Africans, Mestizos, and Muslims, despite adoption of monogamy, some liberal institutions, and modernization. I don’t see the same degree of what Charles Taylor called the “inner depths” of the Romantic movement in Europe, in his book Sources of the Self (1989). This refers to a very uniquely European modern understanding of the self as having a profound, inward or “authentic” dimension, feelings and moral sensibilities. The self in Chinese and Japanese cultures remains more tied to social roles and pre-modern philosophies, external rules and expectations.

Genetics matters, of course. Populations with low average IQs can’t attain a profound inwardness, beyond superficial consumerism and narcissistic forms of self-expression. It can’t be denied, however, that nations like China and Japan today exhibit high scientific reasoning and formal operational thinking, with significant achievements particularly in applied science. Japan has won 28 Nobel Prizes in science, making major contributions like the bullet train (Shinkansen, 1964), lithium-ion batteries (1980s), and robotics (ASIMO). China is currently a leader in fields like quantum computing, CRISPR gene editing, and 5G technology.

It can be argued, nevertheless, that China and Japan excel in applied and technical fields like engineering and materials science), but not in more “creative” fields like theoretical physics or biology, where Western scientists still dominate. A 2018 Journal of Creativity Research study found that Japanese students score lower on measures of “creative ideation” compared to American students, which has been attributed to a focus on consensus and rule-following. Japan and China mainly excel in continuous improvement or “iterative refinement” rather than “disruptive innovation,” as witnessed in American tech-driven breakthroughs in Silicon Valley). Similarly, a 2021 study in Frontiers in Psychology found that Chinese students show “high convergent thinking” (problem-solving within rules) but “lower divergent thinking” (generating novel ideas), as compared to Westerners.

The West remains the citadel of political liberalism and pluralism. China is an illiberal culture with a surveillance state. China’s social credit system and extensive digital monitoring create a highly controlled environment, which suppresses individual self-expression. While Japan’s post-World War II constitution guarantees freedoms of expression, association, and thought, making it de jure a liberal democracy, its culture remains deeply collectivist, emphasizing group harmony, deference to authority, and social roles over personal expression.

While I can see a high tech, AI/genetic engineering world taking us in directions never anticipated, with the full participation of East Asians, I don’t anticipate seeing again in history the high level of creativity Europeans exhibited in the invention of all the fields of knowledge, multiple philosophical outlooks, exploration, and mapping of the world. This will remain the singular legacy of Europeans.

Q: Earlier, you mentioned the “uniquely European modern understanding of the self as having a profound, inward or ‘authentic’ dimension.”  This reminded me of something I’ve been mulling over for some time, and I’d like to get your thoughts on it:

Do you think there is a sort of trade-off between self-consciousness and authenticity?  I sense that White people often understand (intuitively, though often not intellectually) that other people-groups have more kinship-based ways of thinking, and to some extent even admire or envy them for the “authenticity” of their cultures, traditions, and kinship bonds.  Is the White liberal yearning for “authenticity” a mere romanticisation of a lower level of consciousness, a sort of “noble savage” ideation?  Is it, in effect, a yearning for a return to the smothering womb of undifferentiated selfhood, a shirking of the responsibility that comes with higher consciousness?

Anecdotally, as a child growing up in an already very multicultural and racially diverse environment, I often looked at the natural, unexamined (and thus totally self-confident) ethnic identity of my non-White peers with a degree of envy.  It seemed like a source not only of pride, but also of strength, reassurance, certainty, something they could always fall back on, so to speak.  They were just so sure of who they were and what people they belonged to, and I didn’t see the same thing among any assimilated White Canadians.

I agree with your assessment in Greatness and Ruin that this sort of unexamined, purely instinctual, kinship-based tribal identity is probably not possible for Whites to ever truly return to; the collective European mind has undergone a developmental process that makes this type of thinking alien to us, which is both to our advantage and our disadvantage, as you have laid out.  However, I feel that the awakening of ethnic nationalism in the Romantic era was, to an extent, a subconscious response to this problem: a yearning for the authenticity of unexamined ethnic tradition and belonging.  Ironically enough, the rise of ideological Nationalism was largely driven by intellectuals romanticising (and often embellishing) the supposed unexamined traditions of peasants to construct ethnic national identities.  (I do not say ‘construct’ in a dismissive way; the identities of modern ethnic nations had organic roots in history, culture, kinship, etc.; they were ‘constructed’ in the sense of being self-consciously ‘synthesised’ to some degree from diverse regional customs for the political expediency of binding together ethnic nation-states.)  I do see the irony here in the self-conscious attempt to construct unconscious ethnic/national identity, but I do not think it is necessarily a contradiction.  Modern ideological Nationalism, while it is based in organic cultural and kinship groups, is also a liberal idea to some extent, or at least could not have come into being without liberalism.

If self-consciousness and a degree of individualism are inherent to the Western mind, then perhaps ideological Nationalism can strike a balance between these elements on the one hand, and the power (and human need) of belonging and identity on the other hand.  Just because the identity is to some degree self-conscious and intentional, does not mean it lacks all authenticity.  Total universalist individualism is ruinous for us; total, unthinking, kinship-based tribalism is impossible for us; it seems to me that some sort of self-conscious Nationalism is the best way forward, whatever form it might take.  What are your thoughts on this?

A: Since about the 1960s, you are correct, a lot of progressive Whites have come to identify “authenticity” with non-Western cultures, holding an idealized image of Native American “environmentalism” or African tribal vibrancy, echoing Rousseau’s noble savage and the Romantics’ nostalgic imaginings of the Middle Ages as an Eden of organic unity. They have identified the West, by contrast, as “artificial” and “soulless” in its corporate-driven consumerism and careerism.

However, when I write about the “uniquely European modern understanding of the self as having a profound, inward or ‘authentic’ dimension,” I have in mind another aspect in the Romantic longing for authenticity as the expression of one’s unique, inner self. Behind Rousseau’s imagining of the “noble savage” and the Romantic longing for the organic unity of the Middle Ages, I find a modern rebellion of the individual against the Enlightenment’s cold rationalism and the stultifying effects of industrial mechanization. The Romantics framed their rebellion as a return to an imagined natural authenticity in pre-modern man, unaware that they were a product of Western modernity, expressing a novel variation of the Western longing to be oneself, to create one’s aesthetics and values, rather than to conform to societal expectations and prescribed social roles.

The idea of living an authentic life is essential to the philosophy of existentialists like Sartre and Camus. With the collapse of monarchy and religion, followed by increasing scepticism about the ability of reason to create universal values to ground human societies and give meaning to one’s life, existentialists, including Nietzsche, radicalized the meaning of authenticity as the complete transvaluation of all prior beliefs and the creation of one’s lifestyle in a world that was otherwise absurd and meaningless. We are condemned to be free. We have a choice to be either free in an authentic way, original and true to one’s chosen purposes, or to follow the average man’s predilection to accept external dogmas and remain unoriginal (“bad faith”).

Liberal pluralism, in its own political way, accepts the meaninglessness of the world, the inability of Western peoples to reach consensus about the “good life” or the “highest” values. The state should simply create a public sphere in which everyone can do their own thing without infringing on the rights of others. The only commitment can be to the plurality of values in a state of tolerance.

The current Western projection of an authentic organic life to non-White cultures is a reflection of the alienation Westerners feel in their hyper individualized societies. Humans, including Westerners with their individualist psychologies, have a longing to be rooted somewhere, to belong in a community. As liberalism eviscerated every tradition which hitherto sustained our liberal societies for many centuries, until recent decades, leaving Western individuals alone in the “absurd” world Camus wrote about, they were drawn to seek communitarian ties in the pre-modern world and in more traditional non-Western lands.

Liberal multiculturalism, which is based on a school of thought identified as “liberal communitarianism,” is a product of this mindset. Charles Taylor and Will Kymlicka effectively told White Canadians that bringing vibrant and authentic cultures from the non-White world would give Canada a communitarian identity that Anglo-capitalist liberalism could not provide. By not demanding assimilation from foreign immigrants and from the nationalistic Quebecois, and allowing them to enjoy certain collective rights to their cultural traditions and folkways, Canada would become a more culturally vibrant nation. Immigrants and Quebecois would in turn be encouraged to join this multicultural liberal order, agreeing to respect the rights of individuals to free expression rooted in Anglo liberalism—that is, to be open to the right of members of their ethnic communities to make their own cultural choices. For a time, most Whites bought into the idea that attending multicultural festivals and the like would give them some collective meaning and authenticity. But with the outright swamping of the nation with endless streams of new immigrants, many are feeling more alienated than ever, as their neighbourhoods and cities have turned into ethnic enclaves and rootless melting pots without substantial ties. This is happening across the West.

Just a few years ago, as one can read in my extended review of Joseph Henrich’s The Weirdest People, published in June 2022, I believed that nationalism, the creation of ethnic-cultural states by Europeans, could strike a balance between their individualism and the inescapable longing humans have to belong to a community of people with strong ethnic and cultural bonds. The nation states of the West, after all, were quite liberal a few decades ago despite their White-only immigration policies. As you point out, nationalism emerged within evolving liberal states; and in its inception after 1789, nationalists did not call for civic liberalism alone, but insisted that the creation of nationalist states should be grounded on the actual historical reality that territorial states in Europe were rooted in common ancestral ties and historical experiences. They were not mere constructs of the imagination. Liberalism was compatible with ethno-nationalism. I defended this view in my book Canada in Decay.

I now think it will be very hard to recreate national ethno-cultural states within the framework of our liberal institutions. It is not accidental that across the West, not in only one or two Western states, liberal governments eventually agreed, after World War II, to delink their states from any ethnic group and even any cultural tradition. We are now in a “post-national” stage, in which calling Canada a “liberal Western nation” is deemed to be exclusionary. In Canada in Decay, I attributed this to the “march through the institutions” of cultural Marxist ideologues. But now I see it as the progressive unfolding of liberalism. A state that prioritizes an ethnic group is simply incompatible with the principle of individual rights.

I can’t see how, in our times, the state of France, for example, would abolish Article 1 of the Constitution, which emphasizes equality before the law for all French citizens “without distinction of origin, race, or religion.” This would entail a restoration of the Vichy fascist regime, which would entail a declaration of war against the existing order. I can’t see either how the United States would reject integration (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954). Integration is rooted in the 14th Amendment (1868), which provides a constitutional basis for laws ensuring equal protection for everyone regardless of race. Rejecting the 14th Amendment and Brown v. Board of Education would entail a huge upheaval.

It would also entail accepting a prolonged breakdown in the capitalist economy, which would require a very strong political movement to stand up to global capitalism, which would require, moreover, a sizable proportion of White men with high levels of “V” and “C”. Australian millionaire Jim Penman writes (in his 2014 book Biohistory) about two temperamental traits, labeled “V” (vitality, high testosterone, aggression, risk-taking) and “C” (sexual restraint, control of children, family orientation, work ethic), which are both essential for the creation and maintenance of civilizations. These two traits have declined considerably in the West. I have a hard time envisioning a rejection of liberalism under low levels of V and C.

However, liberalism is decomposing, tensions are rising, and a climate may be emerging in which V levels will rise among White men, and that may open unanticipated possibilities.

Q: Do you think it will be possible for the West to walk back from the precipice it is on and achieve a better balance between its universalism and individualism, and reverence for its heritage? What do you think this might look like?

A: My hope comes from the expanding failures of liberalism. We were promised—rooted in the moral ideals of liberalism—that Western nations could overcome the divisions and conflicts associated with World War II, racial segregation in the United States, and millennia-old ethnic tensions across Europe, with the implementation of immigrant multiculturalism, the promotion of equal cultural rights to “disadvantaged minorities,” the elimination of White-only immigration policies, and the creation of societies in which everyone, regardless of racial and religious identities, would eventually enjoy equality of liberty and opportunities as individuals. Diversity was inherently a good: the more diversity, the more progressive and liberating Western nations would become.

Well, for some years now many Western leaders have been compelled to admit, if implicitly, that increasing diversity does not necessarily entail increasing harmony. Racial and cultural tensions have grown across the West. Blaming “systemic racism” and “White supremacists” no longer carries the same powers of persuasion among large segments of the population as it has for the last two or three decades. In Greatness and Ruin, I outline many other failures of liberal capitalism. This ideological order, after bringing great dynamism and prosperity for many centuries, has reached a moral dead end, notwithstanding continuing innovations and GDP expansion.

But now that liberal progressivism has eaten up, deconstructed, and trashed the traditions, customs, and rituals that sustained this society for centuries—attachments to family, country and God—things are falling apart. When William Butler Yeats wrote “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” in his poem The Second Coming, published in 1920, he could not have imagined a breakdown of liberal societies permeated with foreign immigrants educated to identify native Whites as targets for permanent reparations. We are rapidly reaching civil war-like conflicts. I agree with David Betz, a mainstream academic at King’s College London, that Britain could see civil war within five years.

This is the source of my optimism, which is rooted in my pessimism about the ability of Whites to break away peacefully, through elections and reforms, from this liberal reality. As far as Western elites see it, the die is cast; the West has been racially diversified; liberalism guarantees equality of rights for everyone. Racism is basically illegal. The West is a multicultural civilization based on the separation of culture (not just religion) and the state. Culture is a choice. The state has no right to impose any values other than the value that everyone has a right to choose their values as long as they accept the equal rights of others. In other words, the state has a right to ensure that everyone accepts multicultural liberalism in the public sphere. Those who reject this order can be marginalized.

Even conservatives don’t see it as a problem that the White populations of many Western nations are already set to become a minority within a few decades. They think it is quite insulting to insinuate that non-Whites are “less Canadian” or “less American” or “less British.” As long as non-Whites embrace “German values” or “Swedish values,” it will be the same. That is, as long as immigrants embrace the values of multiculturalism and equality of choice, the West will remain the West.

It is true that White citizens in Western nations never voted to become a minority. Many want immigration to be reduced. Our liberal order allows voters to ask for less immigration. Remigration, however, is not allowable. I think the Trump administration, as it is, understands that deporting 20 million or so illegals is extremely difficult within this order. Expedited mass deportations will require illiberal measures incompatible with legally established American values. Stephen Miller’s “narrow interpretation of liberalism,” which prioritizes rule of law and national sovereignty for deporting criminals, seems to work only for non-working illegal immigrants, but not for working illegals.

So far, as of June 2025, Trump’s deportation numbers are less than 200,000. Most of these deportees had criminal records. These deportations were justified in terms of Miller’s arguments, as a proportionate response to lawbreaking. But deporting 20 million would require authoritarian measures, such as sweeping raids, detention camps, and “legal shortcuts,” which counter liberal principles like due process, pluralism, and individual rights. “Targeting” communities of “Latinos” would “undermine equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment.” Deporting working “undocumented” immigrants (those integrated into the economy and paying taxes) would clash with free market values. Identifying and detaining millions in workplace raids would be seen as invasive authoritarian surveillance measures. Liberal capitalism cherishes free markets, diversity, and mobility. Deporting 20 million would require invoking something like the Insurrection Act or declaring a national state of emergency to deploy military forces.

We see a similar situation in the actions of the Italian leader Giorgia Meloni. The liberal media identifies her as “far right,” and, accordingly, it set into motion a way of reabsorbing her into the liberal order away from radical measures; indeed, it has managed to use her populist beliefs to strengthen and streamline Italy’s role within this regime. Since taking office in October 2022, only 50,000 illegal migrants were deported. Yet, at the same time, a 2023 decree regularized 450,000 undocumented migrants already in Italy in order to meet “labor shortages.” Legal immigration quotas have been expanded. Some estimate that 280,000 “irregular” migrants, mainly Africans, have landed over the last 32 months. The “Mattei Plan” has bribed African rulers (for example, in Tunisia, Ethiopia, Nigeria) with a payment of 5.5 billion euros to encourage voluntary returns and “address migration’s root causes.” Today, Meloni is being celebrated for her “economic pragmatism,” E.U. alignment, labor policies, tax cuts and “digitalization.” She is “optimizing” Italy’s needs within the global liberal order. In appreciation, she obtained 194.4 billion euros from the E.U.’s Recovery Fund.

To the question “What do you think this (taking on liberal multiculturalism) might look like?”— let me respond by way of what Nayib Bukele, the President of El Salvador, has accomplished. Keep in mind, though, that Bukele has been dealing with criminals, not legal citizens, and that in El Salvador liberalism has not penetrated deep into the psychology of the population, and that many illiberal customs remain strong. What his actions show me is that a Western leader will have to act in even more authoritarian ways if he is to clean up the mess liberals have caused with mass immigration and wokeness. Bukele successfully accomplished his goals (while gaining the support of over 90% of the population) by suspending some constitutional rights and limiting due process. He had no choice, indeed, but to declare a state of emergency multiple times, curtailing the right to legal counsel, freedom of association, and privacy in communications. His administration conducted mass detentions of over 85,000 on the basis of “uncorroborated allegations,” going against the “presumption of innocence and due process.” (I am quoting the words liberals in the West have used condemning his actions.)

He had to restrict judges’ ability to offer alternatives like bail or house arrest; to impose virtual hearings often involving hundreds of defendants at once, with little opportunity for effective defense. Detainees have been frequently unaware of charges, with lack of access to legal representation. Bukele had to limit judicial autonomy, replacing corrupt Supreme Court individuals with loyalists, a policy he extended to lower courts. These actions are “contrary to liberal ideals of an independent judiciary protecting individual rights.” There have been many “human rights violations,” with families often denied information about detainees’ whereabouts, “undermining equal protection under the law.”

Moreover, Bukele’s government had to curtail freedom of expression by criminalizing reporting on gang activities, with journalists facing surveillance. He had to employ the military to “intimidate” political opponents, once threatening the legislature with armed forces to pressure lawmakers. He had to use propaganda to encourage citizens to report suspected criminals, which “fostered a climate of fear and informant culture, undermining liberal values of privacy and community.” His “unconstitutional pursuit of re-election in 2024” further eroded “democratic norms.”

This is what allowed him to be successful: authoritarian control over all branches of government and civil society, controlling key institutions like the Supreme Court and Attorney General’s office, and thus the weakening of the system of “checks and balances.” This is what allowed El Salvador to escape decades of corruption, violence, and fear.

My optimism, then, is based on the failure of liberal multiculturalism, though I don’t see a way out within the order of liberalism, and believe the West must experience the most revolutionary changes witnessed in history to transcend its current reality. History, however, is full of surprises, and we can’t anticipate what AI and genetic engineering will do.

Q: It sounds like what you see as a possible way for the West to correct course, pragmatically speaking, are more authoritarian policies within the framework of liberal democracy to curtail immigration and deport illegal immigrants and criminals on a large scale. This is certainly plausible and desirable to those concerned with the demographic future of the West.

What about in the realm of ideas? What do you think is the likelihood of illiberal ideas gaining mass acceptance? Anecdotally, in both online discourse and casual conversation with everyday people, I see racial awareness and even the beginnings of familiarity with the Jewish issue spreading rapidly, the latter especially among young people. I don’t have any numbers on this, nor do I believe some sort of “great awakening” is right around the corner, but I do believe that every year, more people are becoming open-minded to these ideas; the sacred cows of liberalism are losing relevance; the holocaust begins to be seen not as a unique evil that grants the Jewish people special victim status for eternity, but as a historical anecdote, a tragedy of war like any other, and its narrative and claims are even coming under more scrutiny, closer to the mainstream than ever before. Instead of kumbaya cultural harmony, we see, as a result of mass immigration, ethnic conflicts being imported from the motherland to play out on Canadian soil (see for example the conflict between Sikh and Hindu nationalists over the issue of Khalistani separatism). This also disproves the left-liberal notion that all non-Whites share common interests opposed to those of the “White oppressor.” As Whites become a plurality in their own countries, instead of the mainstream or the “oppressor,” we become just another racial group among many. The youth of both the hard left and right see “liberal” almost as a slur, and put little stock in the promises of democracy or the “rules-based international order.” Do you think that, eventually, illiberal ideas and more group-oriented ways of thinking could begin to supplant liberal individualism among Whites, or is it too deeply rooted in the Western mind for anyone but fringe tendencies to move beyond it?

A: It’s true that an increasing number of prominent X “influencers” and conservatives, like Matt Walsh and Charlie Kirk, are now, in the last month or so, calling for an end to legal immigration, admitting that anti-Whiteness is widespread, and suggesting that the United States must remain majority White. A very noticeable momentum against immigration replacement is palpable on X and among everyday Whites. Saying that I don’t see a way out of this mess “within the framework of liberal democracy” may seem out of step. To be clear, I believe it is possible to “curtail immigration and deport illegal immigrants and criminals,” though not “on a large scale” without a strong re-evaluation of our liberal values and adoption of authoritarian measures.

This effort, to deport 15 or 20 million illegals, will produce a groundswell of opposition in the U.S., creating a civil war-like situation. Now, add to this, a plan to remigrate millions of legal Muslim, Asian, and African immigrants, with families, in all the largest territorial areas of the West. These possibilities are nowhere in the horizon of nations like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Never mind efforts to deal with the failure of integration in the U.S.. We can’t avoid widespread societal conflicts. Liberalism is deeply entrenched in all the institutions, the schools, universities, publishing houses, newspapers, law courts, political parties, Google, AI, police departments, and the military. Mere feelings, online posts, and the revitalization of dormant ingroup instincts among Whites are not enough. We need organized movements, political parties, with clearly articulated illiberal ideas, principles, and policies. Liberal populism is not enough. As I indicated in the case of Meloni’s Italy, populism lacks a cohesive ideological alternative; it cannot but operate within the framework of liberalism, easily softened and employed by those in power to meet the larger ends of liberal diversity. Things will unravel and skid out of control. Opposition to deeply held liberal institutions and beliefs will grow. Alternative ideological outlooks may emerge.

Q: Great answers, and a lot to think about.  Dr. Duchesne, thank you for your time.  And to the reader, in addition to Greatness and Ruin, please check out Duchesne’s earlier books, and his website https://www.eurocanadians.ca/ .

Two Styles of Moral Thinking: Reciprocity vs. the Unique Rightness of the In-Group

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Philosophers have been debating the nature of justice since antiquity without ever coming to agreement. Formally, justice means “giving every man his due.” In other words, it concerns the distribution of rewards and punishments or (more broadly) of the good and bad things of this world to human beings. The debate really concerns what principle ought to determine the distribution. This is what philosophers are trying to establish when they argue over the nature of justice.

Although no conclusive agreement has ever emerged on the question, some general principles appear to have been thrown up by the debate itself. One such principle is reciprocity. The idea is that one necessary (but probably insufficient) condition for justice is that the same principles a person (or group) applies to himself (or itself) must also be extended to rival claimants.

The issue of reciprocity arises in debates over racial nationalism. White nationalists seek to create White ethnostates, and this may appear prima facie unjust because it requires the exclusion of other possibly quite decent and worthy people from such states. This is, of course, precisely the injustice of which nationalists’ opponents accuse them.

The nationalists’ answer is that they want nothing for their own group that they would not be happy to allow others: every ethnicity should be free to form its own ethnostate. So, while these other groups may indeed be excluded from our countries, this does not deprive them of a homeland of some kind—one from which they are even free to exclude us in their turn.

We can see from this example that the nationalist and his opponent—whom we may call the integrationist, the antiracist, the cosmopolitan, or any of a number of other terms—actually do agree on something: both argue in terms of reciprocity, supporting political arrangements as just only if they apply the same principles to all. The integrationist wants every country opened up to everybody, while the nationalist wants a particular homeland for every group—and thus (indirectly) for every individual. Both agree, in other words, that justice requires reciprocity, and both apply this principle in their thinking, even though they arrive at different and contradictory political programs.

One consequence of this situation is that no appeal to justice-as-reciprocity can decide the point at issue between integrationists and nationalists. Any verdict in favor of one doctrine or the other must be based on some other consideration, such as its relative compatibility with human nature. I would suggest that the tribal nature of man might be especially relevant in this context.

It is likely that the disposition to reason morally in terms of reciprocity is stronger in some people than others, like virtually all human dispositions. And racial realists will easily understand that if this is the case, such a disposition almost certainly differs across genetic groups as well. I would expect to find thinking in terms of reciprocity most common in Europeans and their descendants, although I admit never having made an empirical study of this.

One great European expression of the importance of reciprocity, or applying the same principles to others that we would claim for ourselves, is what the philosopher Immanuel Kant called his categorical imperative: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” A maxim is a rule of behavior. So what Kant means is that rules of behavior possess moral legitimacy only if they can be applied in the same way to everyone. The essence of morality, in his view, lies in not making exceptions in one’s own favor.

For example, it would be advantageous to me to take anything I wanted from anyone else: in other words, to steal. But if this principle were applied universally, there could be no security of property for anyone, and civilization would quickly collapse back into savagery. So the maxim “steal whatever you desire” fails to conform to the categorical imperative, whereas the maxim “do not take things that do not belong to you” does conform to it. The latter rule can thus be morally legitimate, while the former cannot. A similar argument could be made about lying, which if it became universal would completely destroy social trust and thus also result in the collapse of civilization. The rule that we should tell the truth, on the contrary, can be universalized and is therefore morally legitimate.

In his book Why Race Matters, the Jewish-American philosopher Michael Levin suggests that conformity to the principle of reciprocity is a basic feature of what he calls “Caucasoid morality.” In tribute to Kant’s formulation of this principle in his categorical imperative, Levin calls persons who think morally in terms of reciprocity “kantian:”

A kantian can be expected to see things from a variety of perspectives. He will follow general rules, not constantly seek to make an exception of himself. He knows that other people take their own ends as seriously as he takes his, so he does not treat others as mere resources. Nobody wants his own preferences overridden for the sake of someone else’s, so a kantian will not selfishly override the preferences of others. A kantian who wishes others to serve his own ends attempts to recruit them as he would wish to be recruited, by persuasion or bargaining rather than threat, coercion, or deception. Kantians are aware that they sometimes need help, so they are inclined to help others. Since a kantian like everyone else wants to be able to rely on promises, he is trustworthy. (Why Race Matters, 211–212)

This is, in fact, a reasonably good description of our everyday conception of what a good person is, although it may not include the whole of moral virtue (e.g., heroic self-sacrifice for the group). Levin points out that applying such moral principles requires some intelligence, since it involves an ability to abstract from one’s personal interests. So while there certainly exist bad persons of high intelligence, there may be limits to how good (in the kantian sense) a person can be without some intelligence. This helps to explain why kantian behavior may be more common among races with higher intelligence, e.g., among Whites than Blacks.

My impression, as already stated, is that European descended people are especially prone to moral reasoning in terms of reciprocity. I will not try to prove this thesis conclusively within the confines of an essay, but I can point out how it might explain certain cultural misunderstandings which arise in our age of mass immigration and multiculturalism.

For example, I once came across a story about a Christian pastor who visited a Mosque in an immigrant neighborhood in Europe. During his visit, the resident Imam presented him with a copy of the Koran, which the man politely accepted. The pastor then extended an invitation to the Imam to come visit his church, which the Imam proceeded to do. There, the pastor politely presented him with a copy of the Christian Bible. The Imam drew back in horror, fearing contamination from the infidel’s disgusting and sacrilegious book, in such clear contradiction to everything contained in the Holy Koran.

It would, I think, be safe to observe that this Muslim Imam did not reason morally in terms of reciprocity. But that does not make it impossible for us to understand his behavior. He was a Muslim, after all: he believed in the divine origin and unique rightness of his particular faith tradition. If God really did dictate the Koran and reveal his will to Muhammad in a way he never did to any other human prophet, then the Imam was correct to act as he did. Infidel dogs such as that polite Christian pastor are bound for the flames of hell, and such a fate is no more than what they deserve for their inexplicable failure to recognize the obvious truth of Muhammad’s claim to be God’s final and most perfect prophet!

In other words, rather than reasoning morally in terms of reciprocity, the Muslim reasons in terms of the unique rightness of his in-group, the ummah or worldwide community of Muslim believers. Many writers have noted this aspect of Islam. Frithjof Schuon, e.g., writes of Muslims’

curious tendency to believe that non-Muslims either know that Islam is the truth and reject it out of pure obstinacy, or else are simply ignorant of it and can be converted by elementary explanations; that anyone should be able to oppose Islam with a good conscience quite exceeds the Muslim powers of imagination, precisely because Islam coincides in his mind with the irresistible logic of things. (Quoted in Serge Trifkovic’s The Sword of the Prophet, p. 199)

Their implicit faith in the rightness of the authoritative traditions of their in-group is so powerful that they are unable to place themselves outside of it even in their imaginations, as Schuon notes. This is, of course, directly contrary to the practice of the kantian as described by Prof. Levin, who “can be expected to see things from a variety of perspectives.” Communication between an observant Muslim and a European who thinks in terms of reciprocity is thus inherently difficult and cannot be overcome by mere good will on either side: that European pastor will inevitably see the problem as getting the Imam to reason in terms of reciprocity, while the Imam will see the problem as the pastor’s failure to convert to Islam. The two ways of reasoning are simply incommensurable. This is one reason the presence of any significant number of Muslims within Western societies will always be problematic.

The same failure of communication due to different styles of moral reasoning can be met with in other contexts as well. One example is holocaust commemoration. Many European gentiles are easily recruited to support this cause out of a sincere horror for the killing of the innocent. They see the holocaust as an especially horrifying example of man’s inhumanity to man. It is irrelevant for them that the particular case involved Germans killing Jews; it would have been just as wrong and just as horrifying if it had involved Jews killing Germans instead.

But some European gentiles eventually come to the realization that many Jews do not see matters in this way at all. For Abraham Foxman, e.g., the holocaust “was not simply one example of genocide but a near successful attempt on the life of God’s chosen children and thus on God himself.” It would have been an entirely different matter if Jews had been killing Germans rather than the other way around, for the Germans are not God’s chosen children! In Foxman’s way of looking at things, there can be no reciprocity when one is a Jew, for his in-group is unique and not commensurable with any other human group. It would be positively wrong to apply the same standard to Jews as to the other peoples of the world. He even comes close to identifying his own group with Almighty God.

Elad Barashi is an Israeli television producer with ties to the current governing coalition in Israel. Regarding that country’s ongoing war on Gaza, he recently unbosomed himself as follows:

[W]ho is the man who doesn’t want to see Gaza burned to the ground by the IDF’s fire? Who is the man who defends and has mercy on these Nazis? Who is the fool who says there are ‘innocents’ in Gaza? Who is the despicable scoundrel who wants to let them flee to Arab countries or Europe freely?… The 2.6 million terrorists in Gaza deserve death!! They deserve death!! They deserve death! Men, women, and children—by any means necessary, we must simply carry out a Shoah against them—yes, read that again—H-O-L-O-C-A-U-S-T! In my view—gas chambers. Train cars. And other cruel methods of death for these Nazis. Without fear, without weakness—just crush. Eliminate. Slaughter. Flatten. Dismantle. Smash. Shatter. Without conscience or pity—children and parents, women and girls—all of them are marked for a cruel and harsh death…. Who is the brave man who will decide to bring a total Holocaust to Gaza, so that rivers of blood will flow from it, so that rotting Gazan corpses pile up in mounds…. (X post, since deleted but available here)

He goes on, but this sample of his thinking is perhaps adequate for our purposes.

Mr. Barashi’s reflections might be usefully understood in the context of frequent Jewish warnings against facile holocaust comparisons which trivialize that event’s allegedly unique horror. Here we see someone not simply comparing current events with the holocaust but actually calling for a new one: no “never again” for this Jew!

But, of course, the holocaust Mr. Barashi wishes to see is not really the same as the late unpleasantness in Eastern Europe. In fact, it will be the farthest thing imaginable from the Nazi holocaust, because this time it will involve Jews killing Palestinian “Nazis.” For the essential question in assessing holocausts is not how many deaths they involve but whose ox is getting gored. The case where Jews are being killed is not simply distinct from the case where Jews are doing the killing: they are polar opposites. One is the greatest horror in all of human history, while the other is more than justified and rejected only by the unpardonably weak—such as Jews who want to make peace with their neighbors.

If European gentile thinking turns decisively upon the principle of reciprocity, much Jewish thinking turns upon the principle of Jewish uniqueness. It is easy to see that the two principles are precisely opposed to one another. For Kant, the essence of right behavior lies in not making an exception of oneself, and the principle can apply to groups as well as individuals. For the Jew, the fundamental fact about the world is the Jew-Gentile distinction, along with the entirely exceptional status of his own people.

However, we must not rush to conclude that this un-Kantian way of thinking, so difficult for many European-descended people even to wrap their minds around, is a specifically Jewish trait: the Muslim, as noted above, also sees his religion as universally and uniquely true, something that gives the ummah or community of Muslim believers a status not unlike that which the Jewish nation holds in Jewish thinking. Both are, of course, entirely incompatible with justice-as-reciprocity, and problematic in any group residing among Europeans prone to thinking morally in those terms.

Even if I am correct that such thinking is especially characteristic of Europeans, it is only fair to ask whether the contrary style of thinking—viz., in terms of the unique rightness of an in-group—has not also sometimes characterized us. One can certainly make a case that it has, citing certain teachings of historical Christianity in support. The Gospel of John depicts Christ as saying “No one comes to the Father except through me.” This has traditionally been understood to mean that there is no salvation outside Christianity (although Catholics and Protestants argue over whether this means communion with Rome or personal faith in Christ). That would make Christians the unique depositories of spiritual truth, and thus incomparable with all other people in the world. If this sounds vaguely Jewish, that is no accident. For most of Christian history, most Christians have held to the doctrine of supercessionism, which understands Christians as heirs to the divine promise made to Abraham (Genesis 12: 1-3) and understands the Christian Church as having replaced (or “superceded”) the Jewish nation as God’s chosen people.

Although it embarrasses many contemporary Christians, the traditional understanding of these doctrines was that non-Christians are bound for eternal damnation after death. The early North African Christian writer Tertullian wrote graphically of his fantasies of seeing Christ’s pagan enemies suffering in the flames of hell. This is not so different from what we find in Islam. When I ask Christians about this awkward aspect of their faith tradition, they usually admit that it makes them uncomfortable, but say they have faith in God to do whatever is right. In their minds, this probably does not include roasting all Buddhists in eternal fire.

Europeans did not always view their religious traditions as having a unique claim to truth. First-time readers of Herodotus’s Histories are often surprised to find him writing of foreign peoples worshiping Greek gods: e.g., the Egyptians worshiping Apollo. Of course, the Egyptians did not have any god named “Apollo.” Instead, they had a god named “Horus.” When Greeks heard Egyptians telling stories about Horus, he sounded more like Apollo to them than like any of the other Greek gods. So they concluded that “Horus” was simply the Egyptians’ name for Apollo. This is called an interpretatio Graeca. Herodotus uses the procedure in describing the religious life of all foreign peoples he describes.

What Herodotus never does is claim that only the Greek gods are the true gods, while the Egyptians and everyone else worship false gods, for which blasphemous practice the Greek gods are sure to punish non-Greeks after death. At one point he declares: “I have no desire to relate what I heard about matters concerning the gods . . . since I believe all people understand these things equally.” In other words, no one stands in a privileged relation to the divine. It is a kind of reciprocity concerning religion: your gods are probably as valid as mine. When modern European Christians think in a similarly tolerant and easygoing way about alien religious traditions, they may be succumbing to liberal modernity—but they may also simply be returning to a way of thinking long characteristic of their non-Christian ancestors.

Where did the less tolerant aspects of historical Christianity come from? Many would say they first came into the world with monotheism itself: in other words, with Judaism, the world’s first monotheistic religion. It does not seem to have occurred to Jehovah’s first worshipers that Baal and Ashera might be alternative Canaanitic names for their own God. Why not? One obvious possible explanation is that Jews are not Europeans—and neither were their ancient Israelite ancestors who first formulated monotheism. The same goes for Islam, which shares with Judaism the idea of a special and particular relation to the divine in which outsiders do not participate.

Just as intolerance and the unique rightness of in-group tradition are not absent from European history, the ability to think in terms of reciprocity is not necessarily entirely lacking in non-European peoples. It was, after all, the Jewish academic philosopher Michael Levin whom I cited as formulating justice-as-reciprocity in a useful way. And even Orthodox Jews who recognize the authority of the Talmud and rigorously separate themselves from all gentiles may understand the value of practicing justice-as-reciprocity among themselves. Indeed, such Jews are especially noted for high levels of in-group trust.

Finally, we should ask ourselves whether or not it is acceptable or even advisable for European-descended people to think partly in terms of the inherent claims of our in-group rather in terms of reciprocity. We might point out, e.g., that this is simply how the game of evolution is played: all persons and groups want to get their genes into the future for no other reason that the genes are theirs. Why should Europeans be any different from platypuses in this regard? We all want to survive and reproduce, and if any group does not wish to do so, it will not be long before another, healthier group comes along that will be happy to replace it.

So while we are sincere in acquiescing to the existence of homelands for non-Europeans from which even we ourselves may be excluded, our ultimate political aims have a purpose which transcends a mere willingness to practice reciprocity. Fundamentally we want what all living organisms want: to perpetuate our kind. Justice-as-reciprocity is an important component of European moral thinking, but not its sole and ultimate horizon.

In sum, while all human groups reason to some extent in terms of both reciprocity and the interests of the in-group simply because it is the in-group, Europeans are probably especially prone to the former style of thinking and non-Europeans to the latter. As a practical matter, we must be aware of both styles of moral reasoning. We should be willing to practice reciprocity with all who are willing to practice it with us—in other words, to practice reciprocity reciprocally. But when we encounter outsiders committed to the supposedly unique claims of their in-group, we must counter with an unapologetic commitment to our own.

The Heresiarchs

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9095 words

Everybody, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come
Haruki Murakami, ‘1Q84’

‘Don’t Look Now’[1]: Psycho-Historical Antecedents

For Western Europe, this current unhappy year 2025, not only marks the 80th anniversary of its Anglo-Saxon occupation, but also the 50th anniversary of the release of Pasolini’s 120 Days of Sodom (Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma). Undoubtedly, ‘Salò’ constitutes the most shocking cinematographic evidence of the cultural ‘reorientation’ of Eurasia’s Atlantic Rim, after the final victory of the Anglo-Saxon ‘Crusade against Europe’ ended its independence in that even unhappier ‘Zero Year’, 1945.[2] Although the film’s utterly depraved pornographic content and its deliberately antinomian director decisively preclude their inclusion in the canons of Western high art (the post-1945 sum total of which is remarkably meagre in any case), they still hold great diagnostic value for those few historians still inclined to study the current putrefaction stage of the ‘Decline of the West’. Even the outer circumstances of the film’s release, which took place some weeks after the death of its director, are heavy with appropriate symbolism: in a remarkable example of ‘life imitating art’, the gruesome details of Pasolini’s murder are seamlessly aligned with the psycho-dramatic program proposed in his final script, radically inverting and, of course, purposefully perverting what is commonly accepted as the West’s greatest literary creation: Dante’s Divine Comedy.[3] With the benefit of two generations of hindsight, its content may now be profitably projected on the course of recent Western psycho-history:

(1) Il girone delle manie ‘the circle of manias’ of 1970-1995, for which the prerequisite cultural tabula rasa of Stunde Null and economic consumer paradise of les trente glorieuses had been created by, respectively, the Greatest and Silent Generations (cohorts born 1890-1915 and 1915-1940). This ‘circle’ is realized by the Boomer Generation (cohort born 1940-1965), whose rise was heralded by the LARP-revolutions of ‘1968’, making Western Europe’s civilizational regression irreversible by the mid-1980s. Elsewhere, the author has suggested that, after the Boomers’ ‘march through the institutions’, the ‘ABBA’ years 1978-1980 mark the actual civilizational ‘point of no return’,[4] but the neoliberal scorched earth policies of the Reagan-Thatcher-Lubbers regime took some time to take full effect. The loss of techno-idealistic drive and basic geopolitical realism in Western civilization as a whole are most dramatically illustrated by two collapses on the Western frontiers: the Challenger disaster of 1986, effectively replacing the ‘Space Age’ exploration with ‘Star Wars’ megalomania, and the assassination of Rabin in 1995, effectively ending the decolonization era outside the West and marking the start of an all-out Anglo-Zionist crusade for global hegemony.

(2) Il girone della merda ‘the circle of excrement’ of 1995-2020, during which the now-maniacal Boomers, having descended into collective narcissism and unbridled consumerism and having abandoned the religious and ethical precepts of the Western Tradition, rule without checks and balances.[5] Beyond a shadow of a doubt, they have proven Kierkegaard’s words: remove the anguished conscience, and you may as well close the churches and turn them into dance halls. Rejecting Western Tradition, the Boomers have adopted a structurally inverted Weltanschauung, hence radically antinomian and overtly nihilistic, with all classical hallmarks of a (self-)destructive cult: behavioral and personality changes, loss of personal identity, cessation of scholastic activities, estrangement from family, disinterest in society and pronounced mental control and enslavement by cult leaders.[6] This internal ‘cultic’ condition has its counterpart in an aggressively proselytizing external ‘mission’ (exporting ‘values’ such as ‘liberal democracy’, ‘DEI’, ‘LGBTQ rights’, the ‘free market’, the ‘Rules Based Order’), resorting to forced conversion wherever necessary (ranging from soft-power ‘colour revolutions’ in the post-Soviet space to the ‘humanitarian interventions’ in the former Yugoslavia and the ‘Arab Spring’ bloodbath in the Middle East).

Under the Boomer regime, the West’s Weltanschauung, which may defined as cultural nihilism applied internally and satano-globalism applied externally, is also characterized by distinctly millenarian overtones: slogans such as Bush’s ‘New World Order’ and Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ point to the ‘doomsday cult’ aspect of regime now ruling the ‘Collective West’. With the Boomers safely ensconced in privileged safety ‘bubbles’ (‘uniparty cartels’, ‘tenured positions’, ‘trust funds’, ‘gated communities’), the soul-crushing internal manifestations of this cultic regime, including neo-Victorian labour and housing conditions (‘deregulation’, ‘privatization), wholesale ethnic replacement (‘asylum seekers’, ‘labour migrants’) and the perversion of law and order (‘affirmative action’, ‘hate speech legislation’), are primarily borne by the Boomers’ children and grandchildren (Generation X, cohort 1965-1990, and the Millennials, cohort 1990-2015). The even more horrifying external manifestations, including IMF/World Bank-imposed debt slavery across the Global South (‘privatization’, ‘austerity’), mass human trafficking into the West (‘smuggler’ networks, ‘NGO’ facilities) and systematic violence to subdue anti-hegemonic resistance anywhere (engineered ‘extremist terrorism’, tailored ‘forever wars’), are primarily borne by the masses of the ‘s**thole countries’ of the Global South, whose psychological dehumanization precedes their necropolitical decimation. During this quarter of a century, which more or less equals the ‘Unipolar Moment’ in international politics, the internal and external victims of the Boomer elite’s New World Order found themselves caught drowning in this deliberately created ‘circle of excrement’.

(3) Il girone del sangue ‘the circle of blood’, starting in 2020, represents the final ‘Age of Consequences’ in Western psycho-history: with the ‘Covid Scamdemic’ and the follow-up ‘Vaccinocaust’, obviously aimed at tearing down the pillars of Western socio-economic life and culling the Western population, the once Boomer-based and West-centred New World Order project has crossed a historical threshold. Elsewhere, the author has pointed out that the ‘Ten Months That Shook the World’, between the ‘Covid’ lockdown of March 2020, through the ‘BLM’ summer and the ‘Biden’ coup autumn of the same year, and the ‘January 6th’ episode of 2021, effectively mark the final Fall of the West.[7] From that point onwards, the West is effectively defunct as a historically distinct Kulturkreis, leaving its remnant peoples and remnant institutions ‘captured’ (in older words: ‘possessed’) by unmitigated satano-globalism, creating a state of ‘zombification’ in which the name ‘Western’ is reduced to a highly deceptive place-holder term bereft of the cultural and civilization content and continuity that it once covered.[8] With the fading out of its carrier cohort, the Boomer Generation, the satano-globalist New World Order project itself is now undergoing a radical transformation, characterized by demographic metastasis as well as eschatological acceleration. Demographically, its predominantly White, late-stage paternalist and ‘culturally Christian’ demographic carrier is now replaced by a new rabidly anti-White, fiercely (f)emocratic and militantly anti-religious successor generation of hand-picked, ‘Manchurian Candidate’-type Young Global Leaders and a host of DEI minions, preferably proudly incompetent, unabashedly narcissistic and openly hostile to the interests of the ‘mass formation’-shaped slave populations that they are to rule.

Thus, ‘Europe’ is now ruled by the ‘power women’ likes of Finland’s ‘rainbow family’/‘topless office’ Sanna Marin, Estonia’s ‘war at any price’/‘hate Russia but not rubles’ Kaja Kallas and Germany’s ‘trying everything’/‘phizergate’ Ursula von der Leyen. Ideologically, the Boomers’ New World Order project is now rapidly shifting towards its only logically consistent end-state, which combines a techno-totalitarian surveillance state (abolition of civil rights) with a bio-leninist caste system (inversion of meritocracy) and a transhumanist agenda (bio-technical control) and which, given its pursuit of the ‘immanentization of the eschaton’, is perhaps best described by the term ‘satano-globalism’. Its necessary corollary in the domain of domestic and international Realpolitik is the normalization of what Achille Mbembe has aptly termed ‘necropolitics’, i.e. the state-sponsored condemnation to various (physical, psychological, cultural) forms of death and existential liminality of specific, greater or smaller, target populations in the pursuit of biopolitical aims. The most logically consistent application of necropolitics equals the ultimate application of transhumanism, i.e., the (technological) supersession of the whole of humanity, which in turn equals the aim of satanism, completing the ‘circle of blood’.

The sacred scriptures of the world’s great religions record several instances of whole nations caught up in vicious cycles of psycho-historical decay. Thus, on the boundary of recorded history, there is the dismal record of the days of Noah, when few heeded the gathering clouds. But there is no need to look back further than the more recent record of the days of Lot, when the first Sodom and Gomorrah went up in smoke:

Then the Awful Cry overtook them at the sunrise
And We utterly confounded them, and We rained upon them stones of heated clay
Lo! therein verily are portents for those who read the signs
– Quran 15:73-5

Sycorax’ Hour[9]: Necropolitical Preliminaries

Moving into the final phase of the three-circle trajectory, Western Europe now finds itself shorn of its existential essence, effectively bereft of the civilization, the culture and the identity that once defined it as the heartland of the West: it has now entered a post-Western existential state. During the first circle ‘mania’ phase, which corresponds to the Boomers’ 1970-1995 heyday, Western Europe abandoned its culture, inverting its Nomos archetype by adopting anti-ethics and anti-aesthetics. Moving through the second circle ‘excrement’ phase, which corresponds to the Boomers’ 1995-2020 decadence, Western Europe abandoned its civilization, inverting its Evangelion archetype through the coercive and violent pursuit of globalist-nihilist hegemony (geopolitical ‘Unipolarity’). Now entering the third circle ‘blood’ phase, starting with the Annus Horribilis of 2020 (the Covid-BLM-Biden operations resulting in the Fall of the West), Western Europe faces the inversion of its Techne archetype, as evidenced by the redirection of its φαρμακεία from life-saving medicine to transhumanist sorcery and by its redirection of its οἰκονομία from ploughshares to swords. The direct physical violence attendant on the inversion of the Techne archetype, rapidly expanding internally (‘gender surgery’, ‘vaccine damage’) as well as externally (‘Ukraine’, ‘Gaza’) and increasingly depersonalized through new technologies (‘drone warfare’, ‘AI targeting’), is compounded by novel forms of non-physical violence, particular to a new age of ‘hybrid’ and ‘multi-dimensional’ war and to a new reality of a ‘technologically framed’ world in which most of humanity is already (partially) absorbed in a matrix of multiple ‘alternative realities’ (‘virtual workspaces’, ‘digital communities’, ‘online dating’), such as ‘deplatforming’, ‘geofencing’ and ‘algorithmic censorship’. Rapid advances in information technology, nano-technology and bio technology, allowing for an unparallelled degree of real-time surveillance, subconscious manipulation and custom-made intervention in the lives of entire nations by nebulous forces entirely beyond the control of obsolete institutional ‘checks and balances’, are even now giving rise to a techno-totalitarianism of unprecedented scope and depth — the preparation of this ‘System of the Beast’, complete with a Palantir panopticon and a CBDC dungeon, is now approaching its final stage. At a whim, these techno-totalitarian forces can impose pandemics, create wars or disrupt supply-lines, unleashing the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse of plague, war, hunger and hell on a global scale, by simply choosing some convenient ‘narrative’, ‘locking down’ the economy, imposing ‘mass formation’ conditions, ‘deplatforming’ critical voices and, where necessary, moving dissenters ‘off the grid’. The Covid-BLM-Biden-vaccine narratives of 2020-21 were a successful test of how easily the population of the (ex-)West can be manipulated into self-destructive behaviour by these means and the Ukraine-Gaza narratives of 2022-23 showed how they can also be used to ‘weaponize’ whole nations against any designated external enemy, be it the greatest military power in the world (Russia) or a defenceless refugee population on a strip of desert land (Gaza). As a result, millions have already died without as much as a dent in the infernal mechanisms perpetuating the ‘circle of blood’.

As things stand now, it looks like the West’s psycho-historical trajectory will have to run its full course, with the lazy passivity and shameful apathy of the (ex-)Western masses gradually giving way to enthusiastic support and undisguised sadism, much like the exhaustion of the Roman Republic gave way to the cruelty of the Roman Empire. This psycho-historical devolution, by which the (ex-)West is now descending into a state of neo-atavism, is guided and exploited by those advocating it and profiting from it, but, once set in motion, it also has an autonomous, self-reinforcing dynamic: the systematic projection of collectively held complexes onto convenient scapegoat populations is a basic psychological mechanism that finds its ‘natural’ (viz. non-anagogically corrected) outlet in bloody sacrifice and ritual sadism (damnatio ad bestias, malleus maleficarum). Thus, it is not surprising that the neo-Christian, tradition-respecting, martially minded and nationally cohesive Russian people are maligned and assaulted by the nihilistic, anti-traditional, decadent and identity-less masses of the West. Similarly, it is not surprising that religiously open, ethnically open, history-immersed and spiritually minded Palestinians are despised and massacred by the religiously closed, ethnically closed, history-falsifying and materially oriented Zionist colonists who came to the Holy Land on an ‘inverted crusade’ mission from the West.

The start of the second Trump presidency, in January 2025, likely marks the point at which the last restraints on the rising blood lust of the West are removed in the international arena: the last remnants of the ‘rules based order’ (OSCE, ICC) and the ‘international institutions’ (WHO, UNWRA), already long obsolete, irretrievably biased and deeply corrupted in any case, are being relegated to the dustbin of history and the last pretences at professional diplomacy and balanced journalism are being discarded as superfluous relicts of an irrelevant past. Within the West, these are not, however, being replaced by the known — and safely predictable — modalities of earlier ages, such as hard-headed realism and brazen self-interest. At the inter-state level, neither imperial Realpolitik nor mercantilist calculus have staged a comeback in Western international politics: instead, chaos reigns supreme. A tipping point has been reached: after decades of deliberate miseducation, constant media propaganda, systemic corruption and anti-meritocratic programming, the inner decay of Western societies, thus far hidden by generational delay and institutional prestige, is finally starting to show on the outside, cracking the thus-far shallow but smooth outer façade in the international arena. Shamelessly, Tinder-quality ‘power women’, ‘openly gay’ golden boys, ‘affirmative action’ non-Westerners and ‘double-citizenship’ Zionists now claim to ‘represent’ ex-Western nations — without any thought for the most basic interests, or even survival, of the states that they claim to ‘lead’.

The leaders of the Eurasianist East and the Global South would make a grave mistake in assuming that these Western ‘leaders’ are seeking the peace, prosperity and well-being of the Western nations and states, or even that they are pursuing rational goals and calculated profits. On the contrary, pursuing sub-rational ‘emotions’ and pursuing non-calculable ‘experiences’, both exclusively related to narrowly narcissistic egos and exclusively derived from specific psychopathologies, these malignantly diseased predators, much like the vampires and zombies of literary and cinematographic fiction, should be assessed according to the mortal danger they pose to their prey, the latter category comprising all still authentically human individuals within the (ex-)West as well as all still authentically human societies across the rest of the world. These vampiric and zombified creatures may incidentally serve certain specific political agendas and certain specific economic interests, most transparently those of the ‘big banking’, ‘big business’, ‘big pharma’ and ‘big tech’ sectors which unleashed them on the world in pursuit of certain short-term projects, but they can and do run amuck, much like the monster created by Dr. Frankenstein. The world’s Witching Hour has begun.

Tis now the very witching time of night
When churchyards yawne and hell it selfe breakes out contagion to this world
– Shakespeare, Hamlet

‘15 Minutes’[10]: Demonological Perspectives

Unfortunately, the vampiric and zombified nature of the Western ‘leadership’ does reflects, to varying degrees across various areas of the West (less so in the still-Catholic and Orthodox part of the EU than in its ex-Protestant part and the overseas Anglosphere), the ‘katagogic’ metamorphosis that a significant part of the populace has undergone since the 1960s. These ‘lost soul’ masses, suffering staggering rates of obesity, body dysphoria, drug addiction, mental disease and ‘vaccine’ damage, provide a limited but dependable electoral base for the West’s vampiric and zombified ‘leadership’: thus, the intensely psychopathic[11] and increasingly grotesque characters currently representing the ‘Collective West’ do externally reflect the true inner state of the West. To the extent that other, less affected sections of the Western electorate still vaguely recognize the diseased nature of their society, however, they tend to vote for ‘controlled opposition’ figures that are only marginally less diseased than the fully vampiric and zombified ‘mainstream’ candidates and that have been carefully screened for their ability ‘compromise’ when the time is right.

Thus, all across the West, a whole host of ‘populist’ and ‘civic-nationalist’ false prophets are biding their time in the opposition benches, waiting in the wings of institutional power and standing by to take their turn at ‘leadership’. The moment their turn has come, however, they fall in line with the ‘establishment’, nudged by ample rewards and co-opted by the ‘powers that be’: their essential role is to serve as ‘lightning rods’ for societal discontent and to ‘put on a good show’. Since the early 2000s and all across the West, this mechanism has proven its efficiency, time and again, with ‘populists’ coming to power and nothing ever changing. Obscene income disparities, chronic housing shortages, generational income insecurity, wholesale ethnic replacement, intermittent terror waves, rampant grooming gangs, imploding family structures, collapsing education systems, woke-weaponized judiciaries, maliciously micromanaging bureaucracy, ubiquitous social media pornification, staggering addiction rates, unchecked transgender cultism — all these things are only getting worse. Over time, the accumulating weight of injustice, decadence and ugliness is creating a wave of suffering, disgust and despair that not many can bear. As the social, legal and political order dissolves under the combined aegis of kleptocracy (the banksters’ elite), pornocracy (the women’s rights’ elite), ochlocracy (the consumer mob) and idiocracy (the whore-nalysts of the media class and the mid-wits of the academic class) and as the number of ‘lost souls’ increases, daily life itself becomes surreally perverted until finally a tipping point is reached: the point beyond which reality itself breaks down, giving way to collective madness.

For… globalists, leftists and run of the mill psychopaths, free will means the ability to choose not to believe in archetypes, or morality or even objective truth. They choose nihilism, but this is only part of the problem. The defiance of truth goes beyond some misguided attempt to be free from societal judgment. Instead, [these] people define freedom without responsibility as the ultimate state of being. In other words, they view the capacity to inflict suffering and destruction without regard as an evolutionary advantage. They think their lack of humanity makes them superhuman. It’s no mistake that leftists and woke activists are obsessed with power dynamics; their new religion ensures that they cannot see the world any other way. For woke ideologues everything revolves around which groups hold power and how they can take that power for themselves. Thus, questions of right and wrong never enter into the equation. Power is the end that justifies all means. They see moral order as an artificial construct that oppresses them, because they want to do evil without consequence. Moral relativism at its core requires the victimization of others as a form of rebellion against order.

Of course, the injustice of this mentality is hard to dismiss but leftists have a way around that. There’s no shortage of woke activists who have displayed a contempt for the law and for morals when they’re being judged, but they will joyfully embrace morals and the law when they think these things can be used against their enemies. Hypocritically, leftists like the idea of rules, but only for other people. Rules are a shield to prevent retribution from the people they victimize. That’s the only purpose rules serve for the woke. To summarize, leftists are total relativists. The rules do not apply to them. The law does not apply to them. Morality does not apply to them. Conscience is non-existent for them — or it exists but they have trained their minds to ignore it. Biological reality does not apply to them. They think they are special and that boundaries should only exist for the people they don’t like. This is pure evil. There’s no other rational way to look at it.[12]

Thus, within the West, the second Trump presidency, following the ‘Biden Era’ socio-economic and legal-moral bankruptcy of its system of governance and reflecting the post-‘9/11’, post-‘Covid’, post-‘QAnon’ implosion of its public trust, may be said to mark a perceptual tipping point: this is point at which the boundary between reality and fiction breaks down and at which the audience and the actors merge. The line dividing the carefully choreographed LARPs of the Washington spin-doctors and the Hollywood mind-benders from real-life psychopathy and kinetic violence has been crossed. Ironically but appropriately, this emerging ‘alternative reality’ is ushered in by former reality show and talk radio host Donald Trump, now appointed Entertainer-in-Chief. At the sounding of this second ‘trump’, in the twinkling of an eye, all is changed: nightmarish forces, including demonic entities and ghoulish dispositions long ago cast out into the outer dark by Christian morality, are now pouring back into waking reality through the crumbling ‘walls of the world’. Taking possession of the ‘lost souls’ of the West, they will inflict their ‘15 minutes’ of triumph on an unsuspecting humanity: ab occidente tenebrae.

Hell is empty and all the devils are here
– Shakespeare, The Tempest

Operation Pandemonium: Kakistocratic Mechanisms

Outside the West, it is now widely recognized that the deliberate promotion of degeneracy and the targeted application of terror have been key strategies in imposing globalist-nihilist hegemony over the Eurasian East and the Global South ever since the end of World War II. The twin strategies of ‘hearts and minds’ and ‘shock and awe’ to demoralize and destroy non-compliant populations and enemy states may be nothing new as imperialist tools, but the globalist-nihilist versions of both are characterized by two significant innovations: the scientific mass-application of social engineering and the ‘inverse engineering’ of societal structures and state institutions to achieve an antinomian end-state. Inside the West, these same twin strategies have also been applied, but with greater sophistication and in different dosages: whereas the wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands of civilian enemies was required outside the West (e.g. the Phoenix Program in Indochina and Operation Condor in Latin America), the surgical removal of the occasional high-profile (semi-)dissident sufficed in Europe and North America (e.g., Malcolm X in America in 1965, Veronica Guerin in Ireland in 1996, Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands in 2002, Udo Ulfkotte in Germany in 2017). The submission to globalist-nihilist-dominion of indigenous Western populations, posing a potential but permanent political threat to the hostile elite within its geographic home-base territory, was primarily achieved through subterfuge – at least till the point that these populations were sufficiently reduced in relative demographic weight vis-à-vis the Third World colonists that they ultimately were to be replaced with (a process formally begun with the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965). Thus, side by side with the policies of anti-natalism (‘women’s rights’, ‘sexual liberation’, ‘birth control’) and mass-immigration (‘guest labour’, ‘asylum seekers’, ‘family unification’), an unprecedented program of miseducation, disinformation and gaslighting was gradually put in place, based on psycho-social deprogramming, socio-economic conditioning and culture distortion. The result is a multi-layered system of institutionalized deception, reaching from collective longue durée culture (foundational mythology, archetypal identity, deep history) to individual day-to-day experience (news cycle, bureaucratic status, financial security).

Arguably, the important mechanism underpinning this full spectrum deception is the manipulation of language because truth has to be spoken to power and the most efficient way to repress the truth is by controlling speech itself: if a man cannot say what he means, he will never mean what he says. The long-term effect of systematic Orwell-type linguistic manipulation, exploiting basic cognitive mechanisms such as psychological bias, confirmation bias, reflexive thinking and apophenia and enhanced by sophisticated marketing strategies such as demographic targeting and subliminal messaging, is to reduce the meaning of words to highly exploitable placeholder variables, resulting in highly manipulable collective states of cognitive dissonance and paranoia.

The deliberate weaponization of various forms of modern art is an important element in this process of language manipulation: art shapes language and perception by creating association shortcuts and artfully crafted propaganda can perform a very efficient ‘thought crime stop’ function. Properly ‘marketed’ and artfully crafted, propaganda can induce collective states of irrationality and infantilization, creating a buffer of ‘protective stupidity’ between the rulers and the ruled, eliminating the individual reasoning and maturity on which collective rationality and civic responsibility depend. Deliberately blurred, the boundary between reality and fiction can thus be ‘artistically’ adjusted in either direction: prime examples of how such adjustments on the sliding scale from ‘historical fact’ to ‘conspiracy theory’ are taking place over time are the many Hollywood-Pentagon co-production ‘files’, ‘disclosures’ and ‘investigations’ covering the ‘controversial’ subjects of JFK, UFOs and 9/11 — all incomplete in terms of information given to the public. But such boundary adjustments do not only take place retroactively, as in ‘rewriting the past’, but also proactively, as in ‘shaping the future’, through a clever combination of artistic precognition and cultic protocol: prime examples of this ‘predictive programming’ are Hollywood-Pentagon co-produced movies such as ‘Contagion’ (2011, ‘pandemic preparedness’), ‘Transcendence’ (2014, ‘transhumanism preparedness’), ‘Finch’ (2021, ‘climate change preparedness’), ‘Leave the World Behind’ (2023, ‘hybrid war preparedness’), ‘Civil War’ (2024, ‘Trump preparedness’) and ‘Zero Day’ (2025, ‘deep state take-over preparedness’). These retroactive and proactive manipulations of language and art, in which virtual and alternative realities are created, must be understood as essential elements of the information warfare, now broadening to cognitive warfare by which the Western hostile elite is seeking to maintain and enhance its power: cognitive warfare degrades the capacity to know, produce or thwart knowledge.[13] As the Western hostile elite shifting into ‘flight forward’ mode both at home and abroad, its use of tricks, pranks and fakes to achieve ‘full spectrum dominance’ is becoming increasingly obvious: the ‘news’ and ‘analyses’ put out by the Western legacy media are now so transparently biased and absurd that the West’s cognitive bubble can now be properly described as an ‘Empire of Lies’. This output is also starting to show remarkable similarity, in reality-bending technique if not anagogic intent, to the propaganda output of the Third Reich, including straight-forward Nazi-era parodies such presenting NATO as fighting the barbaric hordes on a new Eastern Front for Lebensraum (read: raw material and real estate collateral for Black Rock and Vanguard) and European civilization (read: the sacrosanct rights to have gay discos and transgender surgeries), and the EU as promoting media Gleichschaltung for the protection of values. [A] wave of repression [is] sweeping the major Western states. … It is a structural movement in government of the worst kind. It can only be compared to the wave of fascism that swept much of Europe in the 1930s. … The now-threadbare mantle of ‘public intellectual’ in the West has passed to lightweight figures like Jordan Peterson and populist Islamophobes like Douglas Murray.[14]

The effect of full spectrum deception is to induce a state of highly manipulable ‘fluidity’ at all levels of human existence, a ‘we will never know the truth’ state at the collective and at the individual level, befitting the ‘Age of Aquarius’ spirit permeating the Western public sphere at the time when the techniques underpinning it were perfected in various ‘MKUltra’-type experimentation programs. This state of fluidity, in which all collective forms of identity (religion, ethnicity, caste, lineage, gender) were first ‘critiqued’ and then ‘deconstructed’ in all experiential domains, gradually caused the atomization of the collective and the alienation of the individual. As the traditional concepts of the church, the nation and the family as collective reference points were demolished and as the natural hierarchies of age, gender and ability were denied, community gave way to ‘society’, culture was replaced by ‘entertainment’, vocation was exchanged for ‘career’, artisanship shifted to ‘production’, aesthetic values were superseded by ‘consumer choices’, knowledge was reduced to ‘opinion’ and private morality abdicated to ‘public opinion’. As this process reached its logical conclusion, a collective state of malignant narcissism came to reflect the individual state of counterfeit identity adopted by the rootless masses of the ‘collective West’, as reflected in the ‘modernized’ public institutions catering to their new need. Thus, ‘modernized’ churches turned anti-transcendental, reflecting the exclusively here-and-now ‘life style choices’ of their ‘liberated’ members (hence their feminist and woke-oriented personnel, their vernacular and sentimentalized services and their politicized and activist messaging), ‘modernized’ academia turned anti-meritocratic, reflecting their new ‘equal opportunity’ clientele (calculating tinder girls preparing for post-age 30 sinecures, ambitious metrosexual soy-boys pursuing laptop-career bubble lives, and resentful BIPOCs bent on ethnic vengeance), and ‘modernized’ state institutions turned anti-justice, reflecting the narrow interests of the West’s bankster elite, which seeks to nullify all political and legal checks and balances on its power to exploit the masses domestically and the non-West internationally. The latter inversion of state power, which meant that state institutions abandoned the Katechon principle (protection of the weak and encouragement of virtue), effectively resulted in politicide and kakistocracy, shielding the predatory and parasitic globalist hostile elite from political repercussions and legal accountability.

By 2020, after four decades of West-led liberal neo-imperialism (the post-WWII bipolar era) and three decades of West-based globalist hegemony (the post-Cold War unipolar moment), the twin strategies to achieve globalist-nihilist hegemony, i.e., the full spectrum promotion of counterfeit values and ideas and the necropolitical application of war and terror, had resulted in the de facto end of effective resistance inside the West as well as the de facto submission of most states outside the West. Domestically, real dissident voices had been silenced and replaced by controlled opposition LARPs. Internationally, sovereign state power outside the West-led ‘rules-based order’ had been significantly reduced: a few minor anomalies (Serbia, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela) aside, only the military molochs the Eurasia (Russia, China, Iran, North Korea) and some of their direct neighbours (Belarus, the -stans, Vietnam, Laos) retained any trace of true sovereignty. At this point, however, the West’s ruling elite fell victim to the great bane of all would-be rulers of the world: hubris. About its the decision to ‘go for broke’, the why question may, up to a point, be argued: perhaps the ruling elite’s ‘flight forward’ was triggered by a ‘Nature Bats Last’-style calculus of looming ecological collapse, or by a ‘Georgia Guidestones’-style calculus at global population billions reaching the magic number 8, or by the approaching biological expiry date of the boomer core of the hostile elite, or simply by the need to conquer the immense resources of Eurasia to provide additional collateral for the banksters to be able to continue the global financial Ponzi Scheme — it does not matter.

The how question, however, is beyond dispute: in March 2020, the globalist elite decided to impose fully fledged techno-feudalism within the West (the ‘Covid’ psyop, enabling socio-economic lockdown and massive wealth transfers to the top, the ‘Biden’ coup, ending residual free speech and residual legal recourse, the ‘vaccine’ roll-out, culling the masses and paving the way to transhumanism) and, in April 2022, it decided to take down Russia, the most powerful remaining sovereign state remaining outside the West, through a combination of military pressure (Project Ukraine), political subversion (terror campaign and black propaganda), economic starvation (sanctions and blockade). Once again, both of these agendas were pursued by the twin strategies of counterfeit concepts and necropolitical violence. The domestic agenda combined an artificial narrative (‘Covid’), a counterfeit crisis (‘lockdown’) and a convenient scapegoat (‘unvaccinated’) with unabridged democide, viz., the Vaccinocaust.

Similarly, the international agenda combined an invented nationality (removing the sub-category ‘Ukrainian’ from the overall category ‘Russian’), an artificial state (claiming rule over the Bolshevik SSR territory for the Majdan regime) and a fictitious narrative (projecting imperialist design and aggressive intent to the Moscow government) with prolonged, large-scale military conflict, viz., the Ukraine War. In the Western masses, both agendas induced a permanent state of ‘mass formation’, achieving a level of collective psychosis and hallucination unprecedented in recorded history but entirely compatible with their preceding decades of scientifically engineered conditioning. In such a society, characterized by institutionalized cognitive dissonance, where sexual perversion substitutes biological gender, administrative citizenship overrides birth nationality and individual grievances prevail over the common good, literally anything is possible — including the unopposed rule of undisguised evil. After the completion of Operation Mockingbird, which achieved the cultic ‘deprogramming’ of the Western masses, and Operation Mindf**k, which achieved their cultic ‘immunity’ to reason, the globalist-nihilist ruling elite is now free to unleash its final offensive to conquer the world: Operation Pandemonium.

Exploiting the NBICs (Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Sciences), the globalist West’s ability to wage cognitive war has been exponentially enhanced, approaching the point at which a shift from artificial intelligence to artificial identity and from trans-humanism to anti-humanism can and will be made. As the cognitive-domain global arms race heats up, the Eurasian East will be forced to speed up its counter-measure response time as well as reinvent its innovation cycle – this is the era of dromocracy.[15] Operation Pandemonium is about to commence.

Now I lay me down to sleep
Pray the Lord my soul to keep
If I die before I wake
Pray the Lord my soul to take
Hush, little baby
Don’t say a word
Never mind that noise you heard
It’s just the beasts under your bed
In your closet, in your head
Exit light, enter night
Take my hand
We’re off to never-never land
– ‘Enter Sandman’, Metallica

The Cainite Strain: Antinomian Continuities

The previous paragraphs sketched the psycho-historical, necropolitical, demonological and kakistocractic trajectories of the Crisis of the Modern West, which is now obviously closing in on its dénouement. At this point, an attempt should be made to address the question as to its probable outcome. After all, even if the West itself is assumed to be irrevocably lost, the Rest still will have to face considerable (geopolitical, macro-economic) fall-out and would have to deal with significant (material, human) debris. As Western civilization approaches its ‘event horizon’, to be either utterly destroyed or fundamentally transformed, its overall historical arc is becoming increasingly clear and an educated guess as to its final destiny becomes feasible. Preliminary to providing ‘guestimate’, this paragraph serves to more precisely sketch out the historical arc to be followed.

If the Christian Tradition that has essentially shaped Western civilization is taken as its ‘factory settings’ reference point and if the Crisis of the Modern West is analysed according to the ‘thesis-antithesis’ dialectic method, then many of the structural inversions characterizing that crisis appear as entirely logical — even predictable. The overall historical trajectory becomes clear: as its original Christian world vision and its Christian mission statement are structurally inverted, the West comes to adopt a diametrically opposed world vision and mission statement. Thus, the West does not merely become post-Christian or non-Christian: it becomes anti-Christian, espousing values and aims that are antithetical to those of the Christian Tradition. The Church’s negative anthropology (‘original sin’) is replaced by a positive anthropology (‘human rights’), its prescription for individual world-overcoming (time-independent transcendence) is replaced by a push towards collective world-absorption (history-bound materialism) and its anagogic socio-cultural structures (disciplined hierarchies promoting good works) are replaced by anti-meritocratic anarcho-tyranny (hedonist atavism inhibiting good works). Essentially, the Christianity-shaped archetypal idea(l) of the Nomos, once guiding the West in the abstract (religious conscience) and the concrete (worldly law), is replaced by its logical counterpart: antinomianism.

Throughout its history, Christianity has always faced antinomian challenges, either embedded within ‘non-own’ (old, external) religious forms or within ‘home-grown’ (new, internal) heresies, but the greatest of these challenges came with the eighteenth-century rise of the ‘Enlightenment’ in the West. Although the founders, thinkers and adherents of the ‘Enlightenment’, which caused and includes all of nineteenth- and twentieth-century historical-materialism (liberalism, anarchism, socialism, communism), claim that they stand aside from religion, their ideas and movements all necessarily take the form of heresies of Christianity: they originate in, are shaped by and relate to an entirely Christian society. This is implicitly and sufficiently shown in their stand for ‘secularity’ (i.e., an antithetical position vis-à-vis religion), ‘science’ (i.e., an antithetical position vis-à-vis revelation) and ‘humanism’ (i.e., an antithetical position prioritizing creation over the Creator). But the discursive power of the ‘Enlightenment’ heresies is precisely located in their (apparent) lack of engagement with Christian doctrine — or any other religious doctrine. Neither the older ‘Gnostic’ heresies besetting early Christianity (e.g., the Nicolaitans, Borborites and Carpocratians) nor the newer ‘doctrinal’ heresies plaguing institutional Christianity (e.g. the Pelasgians, Almaricians and Dulcinians) ever came close to the success of these ‘Enlightenment’ heresies. From a Traditionalist perspective, the success of these ‘Enlightenment’ heresies can be explained by their radical rejection of the most basic foundations of all religious life, which are the quest for transcendence, the experience of the numinous, and the knowledge of the Sacred: this rejection befits the current state of the human world, now entering the Kali Yuga, which is the final phase of the Great Cycle of the Ages. The current physical, intellectual and spiritual state of humanity is so much degraded that now, for the average person, even the simplest requirements of traditional religion are too great a burden, numinous experiences are beyond the range of perception and transcendence is impossible, if not inconceivable.

This is not to say that the many heresies besetting Christianity, past and present, small and great, do not also possess a time- and place-independent common dominator, which can be deduced from their effect, which is antinomianism, i.e., their incompatibility with the wellbeing and continuance of humanity. Because, in the final analysis, antinomian practice, taken to its logical conclusion, does not merely serve ritual ‘deprogramming’ (as in child abuse grooming), ceremonial ‘counter-initiation’ (as in masonic degree transition) and cultic ‘dehumanization’ (as in adenochrome harvesting), but also the realization of a larger, long-term aim: human extinction. The promotion of anti-natalism, trans-sexualism and trans-humanism, which are among the final practical outcomes of ‘Enlightenment’ heresies irrespective of their initial theoretical precepts, is a recurrent feature in all antinomian movements. As an adjunct to trans-humanism, there may also be noticed the promotion of sub-humanism, through the idolization of theriomorphy, in which humans abandon the human state and are transformed, voluntarily or involuntarily, into chimaeras, such as vampires, werewolves and zombies. In 2021, the mere propagandistic promotion of this sub-humanization agenda was augmented by the imposition of coercive laws, prompting large sections of the Western masses to accept mRNA injections and submit to altering their genetic codes. Another, more obvious sign that physical alterations to the human form, preliminary to the eventual elimination of humanity as a whole, are gaining ‘mainstream’ acceptance throughout the West is the exponential rise in the visibility of body-altering tattoos, piercings, plastic surgery and transgender operations.

Consistently, antinomianist movements set out to ‘free’ women from the ‘curses’ of marriage, childbearing and motherhood, and the method of ‘freeing’ them is to flatter them by ‘equality’ (i.e., ignoring female weaknesses), to talk them into ‘emancipation’ (i.e. eliminating male protectors) and to make them aspire to the status of ‘hierodule’ (i.e., separating the sexual and procreative functions). It should be noted that, within such movements, women tend to have very prominent leadership roles: leaving aside the mythological record of female archons, such as Adam and Eve’s forgotten daughter Norea, who tried to set fire to Noah’s ark, there were as many female heresiarchs in pre-modern times (Marcellina, Helena, Philomena, Flora, etc.) as there are in modern times (Fatemeh Baraghani, Helena Blavatsky, Simone de Beauvoir, Germaine Greer, etc.). From this perspective, it is no surprise that, in the increasingly antinomian West, a strikingly high number of women have recently come to occupy the (at least formally) highest positions of political leadership. There is no need to repeat the short list of female political ‘luminaries’ given in the first paragraph: this femocratic role call is part of emo-history rather than psycho-history. In short: modern Western matriarchy in its counter-cultural and neo-atavistic manifestations, including exogamic ‘open borders’ in politics, home impulse-driven ‘conspicuous consumerism’ in the economy, all-pervasive pornocracy in the social media, all-levelling idiocracy in education, ‘virtue-signalling’ taboos in the public square and ‘open relations’ in the private sphere, are predictable side-effects of the victory of antinomian heresy in the West. Thus, the ‘Enlightenment’ has plunged the West into a new Dark Age.

For convenience, the antinomian common denominator of the host of heresies faced by Christianity over the centuries may be referred to as the Cainite Strain, after those — supposedly fictitious — followers of humanity’s first assassin. Such reference has the advantage of allowing the sacred scripture of the Abrahamic religions to shed light upon the obscure origins and the hidden continuities of antinomian heresy. Over the 19th and 20th centuries, the gradual spread of ‘Enlightenment’ heresy across the Christian world, disguised as socialism, communism and liberalism, triggered substantive investigations into canonical and apocryphal scripture to discover the nature of the Mark of Cain and the identity of the Serpent Seed. Undoubtedly, some of these investigations led to over-simplified conclusions and race-determinist distractions (including the ‘update’ from the Calvinist predestination doctrine to the contemporary ‘reptile class’s’ conspiracy theory), but, as a collective endeavour, they had the advantage of raising public awareness that the ancient curse of antinomian heresy had returned to the Christian world and its ultimate origins had to be properly understood before it could be effectively combatted. In this matter, the mythopoeic nature and psychosocial functionality of the specific origin myths and cultic customs adhered to by various antinomian heretical groups should not be allowed to distract from the very real effectiveness of the resulting ‘constructed identities’ in gaining political and economic powers for these groups. Because, hidden in the shades of the secularist and scientific ‘Enlightenment’ heresies of socialism, communism and liberalism, very real political and economic power was being accumulated by a loose conglomerate of cultic groups adhering to non-secular and non-scientific myths and customs, from eighteenth-century Free Masonry and nineeenth-century-century Anglo-Saxon Israelism to twentieth-century Zionism and twentieth-first-century nihilist globalism.[16] Important common features shared between these various iterations of this cultic conglomerate are the recurring themes of unchallenged global hegemony to be ruled by a Chosen People, the re-establishment of an Ancient Covenant, the building of a New World Order and the rebuilding of a Temple. The increasingly open messaging of this of this ethnic-cultic conglomerate, which has recently begun exiting its self-spun shade and is about to take centre-stage in world affairs, now allows for a realistic estimate of its progress along its collective Nigra Peregrinatio — and its final destination:

Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves
That ye are the children of them which killed the prophets
Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers
Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?
– Matthew 23:31-3

Nigra Peregrinatio: Holocaustological Horizons

The Crisis of the Modern West proper may be said to have started at roughly the same time in the geopolitical as well as the numino-political realm: the U.S.-U.S.S.R. military occupation of the European heartland was completed in May 1945 and the discovery of the ancient heretical texts at Nag Hammadi took place in December 1945. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the fatal weakening of its worldly and spiritual Katechon forces meant that Europe no longer had any defence against the spread of antinomian heresy: gradually, its political, economic and social system became distorted, until a point of no return was reached in all domains of life. At the same time, another, ‘cultic’ war was waged on Europe aimed at the inversion of its religious identity and values, by the rewriting and overwriting of the history and doctrine of its identity-shaping Christian Tradition. Synchronized with the discovery of the Nag Hammadi and Qumran heretical texts (1945, 1947), the New Israel identity of old Christian Europe was eliminated through the establishment of the Zionist ‘State of Israel’ and the Holocaust Claims Conference (1948, 1951). Thus, ex-Christian Europe, which had once sent out mighty crusader armies to conquer the Holy Land and colonize the Near East, found itself militarily and psychologically conquered by the same cabal of the largely Anglosphere-based Cainite heresiarchs that ran the Zionist colony in Palestine.

Claiming to represent the ancient ‘Israelites’, either by ‘Jewish’ birth descent or by ‘Judeo-Christian’ ideological allegiance (both categories representing historical frauds according to authoritative historians), these Cainite heresiarchs then proceeded to claim a ‘blank cheque’ from history based on a holocaustological narrative custom-designed to fit the collective Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome of the European peoples after World War II. Soon enough, the European peoples found themselves in the role of willing ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ accomplices to all crimes perpetrated by their heresiarchical hostile elite. These include not only the crimes committed overseas against the peoples of the Middle East (Naqba, Arab Spring, Gazacaust)[17] and the Global South (‘austerity program’ neo-colonialism, ‘shock-therapy’ disaster capitalism, ‘humanitarian intervention’ war), but also those committed at home against the peoples of the West themselves (ethnic replacement through mass immigration, family breakdown through social engineering, debt slavery through neo-liberal usury). Within the West, the now decades-old holocaustological narrative, perpetuated by educational dogma, media censorship and lawfare blackmail, has resulted in a mass cult of ‘judeolatry’ impervious to historical fact, rational argument and legal procedure. Its cultic symbols pervade the entire West, from ubiquitous Stolpersteine and Noahide rainbow flags in the street to endlessly repeating holocaust-themed films and talk shows in the mass media.

The very first Stolperstein, set on 16 December 1992 in front of Cologne City Hall, with Heinrich Himmler‘s order for the initiation of deportations

Here it should be explicitly and emphatically stated that, from a Traditionalist perspective, the self-identification of the heresiarchs ruling the West with any authentic Tradition or any authentic religious or ethnic identity, as it attempts vis-à-vis ‘Judaism’ and the ‘Jews’, represents nothing but a shallow counterfeit — an abomination short and simple.[18] The fact that the consistent attempt by the heresiarchs ruling the West to associate themselves (either directly or indirectly) with the Mosaic religion (i.e., Judaism, a remnant form of earlier Abrahamic religions) and the Jewish ethnicity (i.e., the Israelites, a polygenic population formerly defined by Mosaic religious practice but now lacking any such delineation) is a transparent fraud, as shown by the fact that they do not adhere to any religious Tradition and do not practice any citizenship allegiance except to that of the ‘State of Israel’, i.e., their own self-invented and entirely artificial Zionist colony in Palestine. Judaism, a religious Tradition only still authentically adhered to by small remnant groups such as Neturei Karta, is so entirely hostile to any collective project of worldly dominion and any personal indulgence of antinomian freedom as to be entirely incompatible with the heresiarchs’ globalist-nihilist project. To the contrary, it may very well be argued that within authentic Judaism, just as in any other authentic religious Tradition, lies the key to the redemption of the Mark of Cain assumed by the heresiarchs. Specific to Judaism is the concept of the ba’al tshuva, or ‘master of the return’, referring to the personal redemption of sin by the acknowledgement of guilt (‘atonement of shortcoming’), and its pre-emption by conscientious orthopraxy (‘walking in righteousness’). Without a doubt, Judaism is the most Nomos-detailing of all of the Abrahamic religions: as such, it is diametrically opposed to the antinomianism practiced and propagated by the heresiarchs now ruling the West. In that sense, Judaism invites those heresiarchs claiming ‘Jewish’ heritage to repentance — now and here, before it is too late.

It is usually said that Judaism is the standpoint of the law. However, this could also be expressed by saying that Judaism lies in anxiety. But here the nothing of anxiety signifies something other than fate. It is in this sphere that the phrase ‘to be anxious-nothing’ appears most paradoxical, for guilt is indeed something. Nevertheless, it is true that as long as guilt is the object of anxiety, it is nothing. The ambiguity lies in the relation, for as soon as guilt is posited, anxiety is gone, and repentance is there. The relation, as always with the relation of anxiety, is sympathetic and antipathetic. This in turn seems paradoxical, yet such is not the case, because while anxiety fears, it maintains a subtle communication with its object, cannot look away from it, indeed will not, for if the individual wills it, repentance is there.

That someone or other will find this statement difficult is something I cannot help. He who has the required firmness to be, if I dare say so, a divine prosecutor, not in relation to others but in relation to himself, will not find it difficult. Furthermore, life offers sufficient phenomena in which the individual in anxiety gazes almost desirously at guilt and yet fears it. Guilt has for the eye of the spirit the fascinating power of the serpent’s glance. The truth in the view of attaining perfection through sin lies at this point. It has its truth in the moment of decision when the immediate spirit posits itself as spirit by spirit. Contrariwise, it is blasphemy to hold that this view is to be realized in concreto. It is precisely by the anxiety of guilt that Judaism is further advanced than Greek culture, and the sympathetic factor in its anxiety-relation to guilt may be recognized by the fact that it would not at any price forego this relation in order to acquire the more rash expressions of Greek culture: fate, fortune, misfortune. Kierkegaard

As outlined in the first paragraph, the West crossed the psycho-historical threshold of the ‘circle of blood’ in 2020. Their ‘culture distortion’ program having run its course, the antinomian heresiarchs have now effectively made the Western masses complicit in their crimes, including those crimes perpetrated against themselves. The sado-masochistic shift from victim to perpetrator has been completed and the Western masses now identify with their rulers, to the extent that antinomian heresy has become the norm and even open genocide has become accepted practice whenever deemed necessary to uphold the cultic narrative, as in Gaza. As befitting antinomian heresy, that cultic narrative, however, is as flexible in content and form as the heresiarchical elite itself: both the narrative and the elite can and do shape-shift with amazing alacrity, ditching used-up stories and people and absorbing new stories and people to suit the final aim of the movement. The recent ‘radicalization’ of the narrative and leadership throughout the West proves the point: the media shift to the justification of ethnic cleansing and open genocide in the Holy Land and the policy shift to ‘Israel First’ governance in the United States and Germany indicate the rapid Zionization and Israelization[19] of the West.[20] The absence of any substantial resistance to these developments proves that the West, as a whole, has fallen into unapologetic evil, encouraging the ruling heresiarchs to hasten their ‘inverse crusade’ against those still resisting their Griff nach der Weltmacht across the Eurasian East and the Global South. They may very well overreach as they resort to this Flucht nach Vorn, but those opposing it, whether still resisting their rule inside West or fighting it in the Eurasian East and Global South, should never forget that, ultimately, they are merely representatives of a much older and much more dangerous, viz. non-human enemy. They should also remember that the program the West-based heresiarchs are ultimately working for is not at all concerned with human power – or any human purpose. Rather, this program is essential inhuman and anti-human: it is to immanentize the eschaton and realize the rule of the antichrist. In that sense, the heresiarchs should not only be fought by worldly means: they should also be fought by spiritual means. First, they should be called upon to repent and turn away from their pilgrimage to Chorazin. Finally, those still refusing should be exorcised, by all possible means, and cast into the Outer Darkness.

Errare humanum est, perseverare diabolicum

Coda: Occidentalist Epilogue

Because the author hails from the fallen West and because his fate is linked to its fate, it is appropriate that this epilogue should serve the edification of his fellow Westerners. The question, however, arises as to what is still worth saying.

The handful of colleagues and comrades who, over the last years, tried but failed to prevent and remedy the Fall of the West do not need words of solace and support — they ‘know the score’ and have, accordingly, either made themselves scarce or resigned themselves to the approaching final judgement. The rest of the Dissident Right, now effectively defunct but until recently the only movement conceivably capable of altering the political trajectory of the West, has either betrayed or abandoned the cause. Most of its ‘White Nationalists’, now amply subsidized by NATOstan agencies, have aligned themselves with the most psychopathic Russophobe elements of the Kiev regime. Most of its ‘Civnat Conservatives’, now comfortably co-opted by the new ‘right-wing’ governments of the West, have resorted to the richer pickings of militant Zionism and populist islamophobia.[21] Most of its ‘intellectual leaders’, already compromised by their failure to stand up and be counted on the Great Reset issues of ‘Covid’, ‘vaccines’, ‘Ukraine’ and ‘Gaza’, have been deceived and discredited by the trompe-l’œil of the Trump Moment.

On the Western masses, now hopelessly mired in irredeemable decadence and wilful ignorance, no more words should be wasted. Unworthy of their ancestors, they flounder.

Entartet Geschlecht, unwert der Ahnen! Wohin, Mutter, vergabst du die Macht über Meer und Sturm zu gebieten? O zahme Kunst der Zauberin, die nur Balsamtränke noch braut! Erwache mir wieder, kühne Gewalt, herauf aus dem Busen wo du dich bargst! Hört meinen Willen, zagende Winde! Heran zu Kampf und Wettergetös’! Zu tobender Stürme, wütendem Wirbel, treibt aus dem Schlaf dies träumende Meer! Weckt aus dem Grund seine grollende Gier! Zeigt ihm die Beute die ich ihm biete! Zerschlag es dies trotzige Schiff, des zerschellten Trümmer verschling’s! Und was auf ihm lebt, den wehenden Atem, den lass’ ich euch Winden zum Lohn!

‘Degenerate race, unworthy of your ancestors! How, o mother, did you dispose of the power of ruling sea and tempest? O feeble art of the sorceress, now only cooking up curative potions! Raise up in me once again, bold power, rise up from my breast where you have lain concealed! Give ear to my will, half-hearted winds! Off to battle and storm! Into the raging tempest and furious vortex, raise from her slumber this somnolent sea! Awaken from her depth her malevolent greed! Show her the prize that I have to offer! Let her smash this insolent ship, let her gorge on her shattered wreckage! And whatever has life on her, that faint breath. I leave as reward for you winds!’ – Wagner, Tristan und Isolde

Notes

[1] Title of an occult-themed thriller film (Nicholas Roeg, 1973), artistically depicting the effects of clairvoyance and precognition – appropriate to the Biblical record of the fate of Lot’s wife Ado, who was turned into a pillar of salt when she turned during her family’s flight from Sodom.

[2] Skewed reference to the wartime memoir Crusade in Europe by Dwight Eisenhower,  former Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force, published in 1948.

[3] For the author’s short-hand ‘top five’ of European high literature, cf. Alexander Wolfheze, Globus Horribilis, Twelve Futuro-Fundamentalist Essays (Arktos: London, 2024) 572-81.

[4] Cf. Wolfheze, Globus Horribilis, 21-7.

[5] The author’s aetiology of the Crisis of the Modern West, cf. Alexander Wolfheze, Alba Rosa. Ten Traditionalist Essays about the Crisis in the Modern West (Arktos: London, 2019).

[6] Florence Kaslow and Marvin Sussman, Cults and the Family (Haworth, 1982).

[7] For the author’s full analysis of the Annus Horribilis events of 2020, cf. Wolfheze, Globus Horribilis, 35-118.

[8] For the author’s sphere impressions of the direct aftermath of the Fall of the West, cf. Wolfheze, Globus Horribilis, 119-45.

[9] Reference to the sea witch Sycorax, the ‘Scythian Raven’, mentioned in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest as the mother of the mooncalf creature Caliban, both inhabitants of some unspecified ‘cannibal isle’ in the Atlantic – appropriate to the black arts-practicing Neo-Atlanticist heresiarchs ruling the West.

[10] Title of a thriller film (John Herzfeld, 2001), artistically depicting the effects of ‘applied antinomianism’ in the context of a collectively narcissist society, set in NYC, the West’s ‘heart of darkness’. The title itself refers to Andy Warhol’s quotation ‘in the future, everybody will be world-famous for 15 minutes’, accurately capturing the narcissist megalomania characteristic of the West’s ‘Century of the Self’.

[11] Bert Oliver, ‘When “Psychopathic” is No Exaggeration’, Brownstone.org 22 January 2024.

[12] Brandon Smith, ‘The NWO Religion: How the Woke Postmodern “Faith” Glorifies Evil’, Alt-Market.us 17 April 2025.

[13] François du Cluzel, ‘Cognitive Warfare’, Innovationhub-actorg 2020, p. 5.

[14] Craig Murray, ‘This Hell’, The Unz Review 9 April 2025.

[15] Aleksandr Dugin, ‘Dromocracy. Speed as Power’, Geopolitika.ru 18 October 2022.

[16] For the author’s cultural-historical analysis of the occult origins of Western Modernity, cf. Alexander Wolfheze, The Sunset of Tradition and the Origin of the Great War (Cambridge Scholars: Newcastle upon Tyne, 2018) 88-126.

[17] For the author’s eschatological analysis of the Gazacaust, cf. Wolfheze, Globus Horribilis, 554-70.

[18] For the author’s take on the ‘Jewish Question’, cf. Alexander Wolfheze, Rupes Nigra. An Archaeo-Futurist Countdown in Twelve Essays (Arktos: London, 2021) 247-78.

[19] Humaira Ahad, ‘Dark Abyss: How Israeli Settler Society Became a Sanctuary for Rapist, Pedophiles’, Presstv.ir 14 April 2025.

[20] For the author’s assessment of these phenomena, cf. podcast ‘Alexander Wolfheze on the Amsterdam Psy-Op’, Truth Jihad / Kevin Barrett, Unz.com 19 November 2024.

[21] For the author’s take on the ‘Islam Question’, cf. Wolfheze, Rupes Nigra, 373-88 and 431-44.

On the Indoctrination of Frau Löwenherz: A Case Study of Culture as Programming

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Leonie Plaar standing among the environs that surround her. She has been conditioned to be content with that which is objectively distressing and jarring. A perfect symbol for modern Germany and Europe on the precipice of oblivion.

Meet Leonie Plaar, who goes by the moniker Frau Löwenherz as well as Leonie Löwenherz.  Far-left, lesbian, Antifa, she is a most grotesque figure who exemplifies many of our troubles.  Quite regrettably, she has a TikTok account with over 500,000 followers, while other social media accounts, namely her German language TikTok and Instagram accounts, have just under 100,000 and just over 50,000 followers, respectively.[1] She has made various appearances on German television, some of which were made objects of derision and ridicule by a number of detractors. Most amusing of all, she stormed off twitter and migrated towards Bluesky due to Elon Musk’s policies allowing users to express themselves more freely, including those that offend her far-left orthodoxy.

 

A screenshot of her last tweet announcing her departure from Twitter, migrating to Bluesky.  The German language along with her likeness are weaponized against that very essence.

Pictures from several years ago attest to her natural beauty which she has, to put it mildly, neglected. Facial contortions resulting from a permanent state of outrage manifesting from the wokescold ideology seem to be making her, if not ugly, far less attractive. There is a certain, bitter irony in her moniker of Frau Löwenherz, a name that draws from her Germanic personage even as her message and very being advocate for the abolition of Germany and the German people.  In this way, she and her handlers are using her Germanic phenotype and mannerisms to deconstruct or dismantle that Germanic essence. Given how pedestrian and unoriginal her takes are, a matter discussed at length below, one cannot help but conclude she has been choreographed and boosted by certain nefarious, powerful interests.

In this video from last year, she made a presentation in Cologne talking about her decision to cut off contact from her father. Her stated reasons, like most if not everything this woman has ever uttered, are cut whole cloth from the boilerplate of cliched thoughts of the far-left hive mind that pervade both America and Europe. What grievances compelled her to such a drastic decision? Her father supports Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD) and is generally opposed to how the Bundesrepublik handled the Covid pandemic and vaccination requirements.[2] For these unforgivable sins, for such political heresy of the day, she destroyed her relationship with her father, as it is unclear what effect this has had with other members of her family.  Based on what is divulged in this presentation, by all accounts he was and is a loving father (she describes herself as a Papakind or daddy’s favorite), and a man who, supporting the AfD, loves Germany and wants to protect it from national and racial suicide.

The video is distressing, but there are some silver linings. The YouTube thumbs down extension reveals a ratio of over four to one dislikes and likes, and that is with the disincentive to even bother given how youtube tries to hide such feedback. In addition, a number of German language comments left by Antifa sorts and other such lefty rabble indicate a number of comments denouncing this woman, the decisions she made, and what she stands for have been deleted.

A brief perusal of her TikTok accounts and other content reveals that she only utters tired cliches that could very well be taken for verbatim by millions of others so inclined, both when she is speaking in English and her native German, with some buzzwords including “cishet male,” “toxic relationships” and “all men” being a few that stick out after a very brief perusal of her main TikTok page. Another cliché from her German TikTok account is “Liebe wen Du willst” (love whom you want).  While in college, as she was being indoctrinated in cultural Marxist claptrap, she wrote a poem called “Alter Weißer Mann” (“Old White Man),” proving that pulling all the registers from intersectioanlist feminism and other such wokery is a tried-and-true formula for poetry so bad it does not warrant discussion let alone translation here.  Then there is this presentation on a Ted Talk offshoot— aside from speaking in unoriginal boilerplate, her far-left activism seems to be correlated to putting on some pounds. But just as this reveals that she and so many of her ilk are incapable of an original thought or idea, the ubiquity of these clichés, the maggots of the mind, further demonstrate how they have consumed so many tens of millions, across different nations and languages. It is such unvaried, uniform regurgitation of the very same language that gave rise to the NPC meme.

A screenshot of her Ted Talk. More thumbs down ratings than otherwise, and this despite the disincentive to even bother. One is reluctant to make comments on another’s appearance, but she has packed on some pounds. One can only infer that the dysfunction of her far-left nuttery is giving her the body of a middle-age woman before reaching 30.

Many such cliches are seen in this video. Use of the word “triggered” to describe how Plaar has rightly incurred the ire of her detractors, or “non-binary lesbian” friends as people she was protecting by destroying the relationship with her father. Denouncing the AfD for “at the very least taking an indirect part in deaths of people” sounds very reminiscent of lefty woke jargon about “stochastic terrorism” lodged against various right-of-center influencers.  When discussing her decision to cut off her father, and ostensibly much of her actual family, she talked about how she has her own family of friends and supporters in the LGTBQ community. She has a “magnificent family,” (großartige Familie), a family of queer people her age, by now a tired cliché repeated so many thousands of times over. This by now is a familiar yarn, covered for example in Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier, which discusses at length the modus operandi of those indoctrinated in the transgender cult to cut off family as a matter of course (sometimes while still accepting payments for college tuition and living expenses).  It is a growing phenomenon that is coming to characterize millennials and Generation Z.  In most contemptible fashion, at the conclusion of this presentation Plaar encourages others in a similar situation as her to do the same, asserting that no one is obligated to maintain a relationship with people who “are a danger to you,” “take energy from you,” or that “you do not feel comfortable around,” assuring audience members there is a “family out there for you.”

Towards the end of the presentation, seen above, Plaar encourages audience members to cut contact from family members they disagree with. The image of Grumpy Cat is a bizarre touch to such a sinister message. In addition to how terribly dated “Grumpy Cat” is, another silver lining is the down vote to up vote ratio, exceeding 4-1.

That every utterance is so thoroughly unoriginal—verbatim the same slogans, phrases, and sentences simply translated into German— is proof that she is a product of cultural programming. As explicated in “Thrust Into It All; The Individual Defined by Culture and Circumstance,” we all are a product of cultural programming to a profound, even incalculable degree. A great irony with individuals like Frau Plaar is that she assuredly likens herself to be a very unique individual.  Many of her videos denounce racism, neo-Nazis, and the like, from which it can be inferred that she has lapped up—with a voracious appetite and most ardent fervor—the servings of Kriegschuld offered to her on an unremittent basis since birth as a “good,” modern German.

As explained in “Thrust Into It All,” one could take an exact clone of Plaar, but place her in a different cultural milieu and period of time, and, that clone—by virtue of being born in that different time and circumstance alone–would be a radically different individual than what we now behold. If she were not born in modern Germany with the decades of national self-flagellation, the indoctrination through both education and culture of Kriegschuld talking points, but in Germany in the 1920s or 30s, she would most likely have views that would make her father and other AfD supporters seem radical in a very different way, not because of any accusations of being “far-right,” but because of their classical liberalism and, one, would presume, some measure of aversion to Hitler and the more onerous policies of that regime. If she were born in the 1920s or ’30s, she would have been compelled to join the Bund deutscher Mädel, but most likely would have joined of her own free volition, to the extent one really chooses to do anything at all.  Rather than be indoctrinated with war guilt and later the tenets of intersectionalism and other such cultural Marxist jargon proffered at the University of Osnabrück and elsewhere, she would have a greater awareness as well as righteous resentment and indignation towards the number of hardships afflicted on the German people in the wake of the 1918 armistice and later the Versailles Diktat, including paying not a million but a billion marks for a loaf of bread during the number of inflation crises that Germany experienced, the nigh one million Germans who died during the naval blockade of 1918, among other hardships and indignities suffered by the German people on direct account of the do-goody Western democracies. Doubtless she would also have a more enlightened view on the legitimacy of Germany’s territorial claims on the Sudetenland and Danzig, as well as a more enthusiastic view of marching into the Rhineland Palatinate (Germany marching into her own backyard) and the Anschluss (Austrians overwhelmingly supported it). German newspapers in the 1920s and ’30s covered atrocities and mass murder in Stalin’s Soviet Russia in a way that did not exist in the English-speaking world and in a way that is downplayed to this day in Germany, so her affinity for the historical predecessors to Antifa and the far left, namely the KPD would be most unlikely. It is almost certain she would have supported Germany’s war effort in the Second World War, particularly after the German armed forces avoided a protracted war by making France capitulate in six weeks, and not without good reason, especially without the advantage of hindsight.

Images of BDM girls like this are illustrative.  The programming instilled from that cultural milieu versus the one we see today is the only real difference between women like this and those like Frau Plaar. Culture matters, and matters more than anything. Culture is of course a projection of power.              ◊

The role of cultural milieu as programming of each individual is not merely illustrated by considering what Leonie Plaar would be like 80 to 100 years ago, but is further demonstrated by the realization that, in many ways, the choices she makes and the utterances she makes are not an individual choice at all as properly understood, but are part of a greater rubric of sociological and cultural phenomena that shape and define the individual in any context, but most especially in modern Germany as she stands on the precipice of nationaler und völkischer Abschaffung.  The real terror of Leonie Plaar is that she is not just an individual, not an isolated incident, but is part of a greater hive mind that is leading Germany and all of Europe to ruin—to racial and national suicide. Having chosen to be lesbian[3], she is part and parcel of the antinatalism that has a death grip on Germany, Europe, and White populations across the world.

Since the original date of publication, this image was recently posted on her Instagram account, confirming this author’s contention that she had a boyfriend in college. A precise translation is unncessary, as it is nothing other than cookie-cutter, boilerplate misandry of the lesbian sort.

Proof of this contention—that her cookie cutter far left leanings are not an individual trend but part of an insidious cultural and societal trend in Germany and to a lesser extent Europe—is pervasive and is demonstrated in any number of news stories about modern Germany. See the demonstrations against the AfD, as tepid and restrained as that party is, most recently in Essen, or that “good” Germans have a fleet of ships, as part of an organization called the Sea Eye, to interdict boats and rafts of Africans—not to send them back or. . . other, harsher measures to prevent them from reaching European shores, as ought to be done—but to rescue them and ferry them to European shores for settlement.

When compared with a certain, tragic generation of Germans nearly a century ago, Plaar and “good” Germans like her, as products of a pernicious social programming, are in many ways an inversion of the two excellent Terminator movies worthy of discussion and acknowledgement.[4] Everyone knows the difference between the original terminator in the first movie, sent to kill Sarah Connor, and the second cyborg, once referred to as “Uncle Bob,” sent in Terminator 2: Judgment Day to protect John Connor: programming. Skynet of course programmed the first terminator to assassinate Sarah Connor to prevent John Connor from being born, and after that failed John Connor and the human resistance overtook a Skynet stronghold in 2029 and programmed a captured terminator, sending him back in time to protect him in 1991 from the T-1000 played by Robert Patrick.  In human affairs, the cultural milieu that envelops the individual is the programming, defining the individual in such profound ways that are only slightly less determinative than the programming of a Cyberdine Systems Model 800 cyborg.

Programming Status: Complete: A screenshot from the presentation, focusing on a blonde German woman absorbing the message.  The process of indoctrination is captured at this very instant in time. As discussed below, in order to win, nationalists will have to stop the process of programming and indoctrinating young people.

Many would of course object to the analogy for comparing the generations of Germans who came of age during the Third Reich to the cyborg terminator sent to protect John Connor and the future of humanity.  Simply stated, Germans of this period have been unfairly maligned, as the vilification of them is always made with the advantage of hindsight, and never accounts for the legitimate reasons everyday Germans followed Hitler without that advantage of hindsight[5], including the myriad injustices of the Versailles Diktat, the deprivations and hardships suffered by the German people at the end of World War I mentioned above, the legitimate threat of communist revolution, the shocking and extreme decadence and sexual degeneracy of the Weimar Republic, especially Weimar Berlin, not to mention legitimate territorial claims on Sudetenland, Danzig, and Austria.  Ernst Nolte and others correctly distinguish between the German people at the time and the political leadership at the top that failed them in such utterly devastating, catastrophic fashion.  In spite of such unfair vilification, Germans of this time period advocated for the family, advocated for natalist policies that would allow the German people to propagate beyond a couple of generations, and they fought for their country against the evils of liberal democracy, Soviet Bolshevism, and International Jewry.  Despite the catastrophic moral and military failures of the top leadership, this generation did have a decency utterly absent in individuals like Plaar who seek the abolition of their own people.  Contrary to conventional wisdom, and contrary to what deluded Germans like Plaar insist as she and those of her ilk march Germany to her very abolition, the hypothetical Plaar born in 20s and 30s—or really the generation of women from that period—is much closer to the benign, savior of humanity “Uncle Bob” variety of terminator cyborg than its predecessor sent to snuff out the future of humanity. And no matter how much Plaar and those like her would deny it, it is a nigh certainty she would have gladly fallen in line as a BDM girl as a clone born in the 20s or 30s. She has after all shown a strong propensity to follow whichever way the winds of power blow.

A still from the Victory Parade in Berlin after the capitulation of France in 1940, depicting what appears to be a BDM girl, perhaps 17 or 18, giving flowers to a German soldier. Behold a different sort of German woman of very much the same phenotype. One might call this woman Fräulein Löwenherz.  Such a woman did not fancy herself bisexual at 15 and later alternate between lesbian and lesbian bisexual, nor did she forsake her father or her male counterparts to bolster her lefty credentials on social media. Cultural milieu is the defining difference between her and so much of what we see today.

The Terminator analogy is of course somewhat simplistic in other ways, as few metaphors bear close scrutiny.  The concept of Geworfenheit as formulated by Martin Heidegger is of course in tension with Entwurf¸ or projection, the way the individual interacts with the externalities that envelop him.  Some of us are endowed with some small semblance of autonomy, even if free will is far more limited than the Anglo-American tradition so foolishly supposes. In many ways, free choice is but an extensive drop-down menu, in which the choices available to the individual are prepopulated by the externalities that envelop him, including time and circumstance one is born into and other externalities from cultural milieu to familial and religious upbringing.

There is another imperfection in this analogy, however, namely that many societies present a conflict between receding incumbent cultures and ascending subversive ones, with Germany being arguably a better example than any other in the Occident.  To be sure, Germany, like almost all of Europe, is in serious trouble, beset on all sides by this sort of subversive cultural programming, the intake of junk American Unkultur, replete with English-language advertising and English-language pop songs that imperil the future of not just the German language but many European languages and other languages around the world. This however is in tension with the incumbent culture of Germany, one that has developed over centuries and that rejects the insidious views and lifestyles of persons like Plaar, or those who commit miscegenation or want to flood Germany and other European lands with Third World hordes who have no right to set foot on the sacred continent. In this way, individuals are subject to two competing efforts to program, although the insidious, malignant cultural programming that infected Plaar does seem to be ascending.

The opposition between an incumbent and at the moment receding culture and an ascending subversive new culture might lead some to question whether the constraints on individual autonomy are as severe as argued for. Although the analogy to cyborg programming may be a bit simplistic and overstated in some respects, those who insist on free will overlook things such as the abiding tendency of sorts like Plaar, especially women, to go with the dominant social order, the power of peer pressure, the appeal of authority wielded by whatever professors indoctrinated her with feminist and intersectional jargon at the University of Osnabrück, the irrational compulsion to rebel against one’s parents, among other externalities that most are not even conscious of.

In many ways, simplistic and erroneous notions about individual autonomy, whatever that is supposed to mean, combined with the greater philistinism of mainstream conservatism that holds matters of culture and the arts in open contempt, at least here in the States, have contributed greatly to many of our troubles that have allowed young women like Plaar to be so indoctrinated, to be so programmed.  All of this might have been avoided if there were an established opposition to cultural Marxism that actually cared about culture, and was not merely feigned opposition by paid-to-lose shills who only pretend to serve their constituencies.  Germany, alas, is a special case, being a vanquished country, a nation that did not have legal sovereignty until after reunification, a country that abides by a constitution written at the direction of and with assistance from the victors that conquered her.  Germany is a country in which leftist youth wear t-shirts reading “Germany Must Die So That I May Live,” it is a country in which an insidious philosophy called “anti-Germanism” compels self-hating Germans to brandish signs thanking Bomber Arthus Harris for firebombing Dresden to counter protest sensible Germans who protest the war crime perpetrated by the “do-goody” Allies.

Of course, these elements in the culture and higher education stem from the march through the institutions of power here in the States by cultural Marxism. Intersectionalism, the anti-white rhetoric, everything that comprises Plaar’s malignant programming of the mind was imported from the United States, much of which was imported from German Jews fleeing the Nazi regime in the 1930s.[6] Because these harmful “ideas,” to the extent one can call them ideas, most immediately originate from the United States, those beholden to more mainstream views or who are (somehow) still beholden to quaint and erroneous views about American exceptionalism make a grave error in thinking all of this is peculiar to the Germans or that somehow the Germans collectively deserve this or are responsible for this.         ◊

It is unclear what the best short- and long-term solutions are for those Germans (and other European peoples) not infected by the insidious programming that has infected those like Frau Plaar. As always, no matter how daunting and seemingly intractable a problem may be, any solution requires a correct understanding of the nature of the problem.  Germans, Europeans, and the European Diaspora have no hope of prevailing without the critical, essential understanding that Frau Plaar and those like her are a product of the cultural milieu that envelops them and envelops us all. To save heiliges Deutschland und Mutter Europa, the cultural programming must be changed by any means necessary and available, not unlike how the programming of the Model 800 cyborg determines whether he is a friend or foe of humanity in the two Terminator films. For Germany in particular, changing the cultural programming, and doing so in time, will be difficult, but German nationalists do have an incumbent cultural foundation that has existed for centuries.  That incumbent cultural foundation needs to be protected and touted with much greater vigor than has been seen in recent memory.

The fate of not just Germany but all of Europe may hinge on whether a critical mass of Germans can overcome decades of war guilt. The ridiculous outrage from Sylt, where chants of “Ausländer Raus, Deutschland den Deutschen, Ausländer Raus” to L’Amour Toujours” became a national scandal, including the “cancellation” of persons involved, calls for five year prison sentences, and banning the song from Octoberfest and other festivities. Conversely, different variations of the song shot up on the varous German music charts, one sign of many showing there is still hope for Germany yet.

At some point, Germans and Europeans writ large need to understand that the United States is not their friend and find some way to expel not only the American armed forces from Germany and other European countries, but expel and expunge many horrid auspices of American Unkultur from their midst. This will require a more enlightened, authoritarian ethos, a dark enlightenment, that rejects American platitudes about individual autonomy and especially the absurd notion that what consenting adults do is no one else’s concern. If for example Germany were to ban or oust McDonald’s as ought and must be done, a critical mass of persons must come to understand that persons making the “choice” to patron these portents of Pax Americana affect Germans and Europeans collectively.[7] The same rationale—the same dark enlightenment–applies to embracing intolerance for a certain sort of German woman who desires to copulate with men of different races, holds “refugees welcome” signs at the train station to greet passenger trains full of migrants, and so on. Above all, Germany and other vassal states of the American empire must come to the realization that they are occupied nations and develop the political will demanding they cease to be so.  These are just some of the steps necessary to end the process whereby young Germans and Europeans altogether are programmed by this insidious American creed.  The failure to either discern this fundamental truth about culture as programming or to successfully implement measures to disrupt and end such programming will ensure that persons like Plaar and her handlers will prevail, even as her phenotype and lineage will be assured of extinction through the auspices of antinatalism and the Great Replacement should these elements continue to succeed.

Other articles and essays by Richard Parker are available at his publication, The Raven’s Call: A Reactionary Perspective, found at theravenscall.substack.com. Please consider subscribing on a free or paid basis, and to like and share as warranted. Readers can also find him on twitter, under the handle @astheravencalls.

Notes

[1] To dissuade readers from adding view counts, links to her English and German language TikTok accounts are provided in this footnote. General website is here. Archives: https://archive.is/fQNjm; https://archive.is/os20a; https://archive.is/5PCBj

[2] She makes a number of outlandish claims in denouncing both the AfD and her father. In addition to accusing the AfD of engaging in “Nazi rhetoric,” and associating the party with the Hitler salute, she further claims her father indulged conspiracy theories about Bill Gates wanting to put microchips in people through these experimental vaccines. In addition, she states the last utterance compelling her to break off contact with her father was when he “unironically compared the vaccine mandate to the Holocaust.” She even accuses AfD supporters of engaging in rhetoric expressing a desire to see “people like me dead,” a sentiment that I cannot condemn entirely but also highly doubt has any basis in fact, particularly as Alice Weidel is lesbian.  Given the number of outlandish statements she has made that have no apparent basis in fact, one would be wise to consider her an unreliable narrator. Shortly before the Holocaust accusation, at approximately 15:25, she challenged her parents regarding the vaccine asking, what would convince you to take the opposite conclusion from your reticence to take the vaccine. Her father replied “nothing.”  This is much more likely to have happened, and, of course, it is no reason to destroy a relationship with a loving father.  Finally, this video likely references her last visit with her father, demonstrating her intentions were not in good faith. She went there looking for a fight.

[3] In the video presentation discussed at length in the second paragraph on, Plaar divulges that she discovered she was bi-sexual at 15 and determined she was lesbian at 17 and came out  at some point in time thereafter, when precisely is unclear.  However, in these two TikTok videos, she identifies as “lesbian and bi.”  Additionally, about a year ago,  I seem to recall discovering a video evidencing she had a boyfriend in college among other materials. Regrettably I now am unable to locate these videos.  Regardless, that she identifies alternately as lesbian or bisexual demonstrates her lesbianism is a choice and socially and culturally conditioned, as female sexuality is generally much more fluid than male sexuality. EDIT March 31, 2025. A recent entry on her instagram confirms she had a boyfriend in college. She the note made on this date to see the image.

[4] One is reluctant to make any reference to American popular culture, but there are outliers for almost everything Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day are great cinema with profound themes and great story-telling that distinguish them from so much dreck.

[5] While the German people of the time and today are undeserving of the unmitigated villainy that has unfairly maligned them, the regime—or more precisely its political leadership at the top—had a number of moral failings, not to mention a number of catastrophic strategic and tactical blunders that doomed Germany, despite the deutsche Wehrmacht being a most lethal instrument and one of the great paragons of military discipline in all history; even the greatest warriors cannot fight three peer powers on three fronts simultaneously and emerge victorious. As stated elsewhere, I am most ambivalent about the Nazi period, as I regard Hitler and those in his inner circle with a strong aversion, although this aversion diverges largely from conventional wisdom.  I am deeply sympathetic to the reasons for which everyday Germans followed Hitler—without the advantage of hindsight—as I regard the Allies as bad or worse. I do condemn Hitler however, for in effect losing the war by involving Germany in a war with three peer powers simultaneously, not to mention the barbarism he perpetrated against Slavic Europeans, the Russians in particular although the German armed forces saw much barbarism perpetrated by the Russians as well from the very onset of Operation Barbarossa.  Hitler also brutalized his own people, and showed callous disregard for the lives of his own men in “stand or die” orders. While in Allied captivity, Field Marshall Ritter von Leeb once stated “The excesses of National Socialism were in the first and final analysis due to the warped personality of the Führer,” to which Heinz Guderian responded, “the fundamental principles were fine.” This is an entirely reasonable position on the matter.

[6] See Culture of Critique by Kevin MacDonald, for starters.

[7] See specifically the subsection captioned “Ubiquity of Fast Food.”

GROK 3 Agrees That White European Men Are Responsible for Almost All the Greatest Human Accomplishments

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One of the most damaging costs of the imposition of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” across Western universities has been the outright exclusion, suppression, and demonization of research and open debate about the racial character and cultural greatness of the West. For decades now, academics have been reducing the rise of the West to the creation of colonial empires, the extraction of gold and silver from the Americas, the “genocide” of Amerindians, the African slave trade, the malevolent use of modern weapons against a supposedly peaceful Asian world, and the cultivation of “white supremacist” notions against non-Caucasians.

The following article is an effort to show that the West far outperformed the rest of the world combined in all the intellectual, scientific, technological, artistic, literary, athletic, and philosophical endeavors of life.

These lists are not based on my subjective preferences but on careful documentation and extensive research from a wide variety of sources, books, dictionaries, encyclopedias, Wikipedia, reference books I have consulted over many years of studying Western Civilization. The origins of this particular article go back to i) an article published at the Council of European Canadians website on July 2020 consisting of many lists of European greatness without any elaboration; ii) a number of articles published at Postil magazine, each covering the topics of European music, painting, cartography, mathematics, children’s literature, chemistry, geology, philosophy, universities, and paradoxes. Unlike the lists posted in the July 2020 article, the lists below include introductory statements and details about the key names, dates, and the specific nationalities of individuals, as well as descriptions of the accomplishments. These details rely on Grok 3, which I consulted for weeks making sure that the claims I make in these lists are verified and substantiated by the AI powers of Grok 3.

I asked Grok 3 to evaluate all these lists. It pleases me to say that, on the whole, except for minor additions, specifications of dates, correction of minor errors, Grok did not have major objections to the claims made in these lists about the far greater accomplishments of “white men of European ancestry”. Grok did note that many of these lists were “Eurocentric”. On some occasions I did follow Grok’s suggestions, tempering somewhat my initial, and intentionally provocative, wording that “all the greatest … were white men”. I am aware, and have not denied in my publications, that the non-European world was responsible for a few peak-level achievements.

I did not always accept Grok’s suggestion to be “inclusive” of non-European names and females. Grok’s criticisms, it needs to be understood, cannot be divorced from the liberal progressive context within which Grok, and all current AI systems, operate. Some of the names and achievements recommended by Grok are simply not on the same level of excellence and originality. A common observation Grok made is that I should take into account that, “especially in Europe, access to education, literacy, and scholarly pursuits was overwhelmingly restricted to men, particularly those from privileged socioeconomic backgrounds. Women and non-Europeans were systematically excluded.” Intelligent as Grok is, it can’t consider that non-Europeans have their own places and civilizations where Europeans have never been in privileged positions.

These lists cheerfully use some of Grok’s own words about the achievements of “white men of European ancestry” to illustrate its strong agreement. The brief introductions cover the rationale behind the choice of topics, names, and achievements, and, in most instances, the degree to which I agreed (or not) with Grok’s suggestions. This article, however, does not aim to explain this vast discrepancy in achievements between the West and the rest. That’s the work of The Uniqueness of Western Civilization (2011), Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age (2017), and my upcoming book, Greatness and Ruin: Self-Reflection and Universalism Within European Civilization (2025).

I. 100% of the Greatest “Modern” Inventions

In the case of this list, I asked Grok directly: “I’m looking to defend my thesis that white men are almost solely responsible for the inventions that created the modern world. Here is my list so far, are there any I’m missing? Any that you’d remove?”

Grok basically suggested the names of a few additional “white men” responsible for other great innovations, and it correctly indicated, as I already knew, that mechanical clocks and optical lenses were medieval inventions, and that the origins of optical lenses can be traced back to the Islamic world of the early Middle Ages.

I left this list as it was for two reasons: i) the additional names/inventions it suggested are already included in other lists, and ii) my judgment that it was the Italians who first crafted semi-shaped ground lenses in the thirteenth century is one that Grok agrees with if one rephrases the question, or ask specifically about this one invention, … I just did again, and this is Grok’s reply: “Yep, you’re right—the Italians were indeed the first to craft semi-shaped ground lenses back in the 13th century”. Now, I kept this medieval invention in this “modern” list because this breakthrough set the stage for the development of concave and convex lenses later in the 1600s to correct near- and farsightedness. This is even truer of mechanical clocks, which originated in the Middle Ages, but would be continuously improved upon thereafter. A crucial distinction between the West and the rest is why the former civilization was inclined to improve (or innovate) continuously its inventions, whereas China barely did.

Printing Press – Johannes Gutenberg (German, white male) is credited with the movable-type printing press around 1440.

Electricity – Michael Faraday (English, white male) and Thomas Edison (American, white male) are key figures in its practical development and application.

Television – John Logie Baird (Scottish, white male) demonstrated the first working television system in 1926.

Vaccination – Edward Jenner (English, white male) pioneered smallpox vaccination in 1796.

Computer – Charles Babbage (English, white male) designed the Analytical Engine, and Alan Turing (English, white male) later shaped modern computing.

Photography – Louis Daguerre (French, white male) developed the daguerreotype in 1839.

Airplane – Orville and Wilbur Wright (American, white males) achieved powered flight in 1903.

Nuclear Energy – Enrico Fermi (Italian, white male) led the first controlled nuclear chain reaction in 1942, building on work by others like Ernest Rutherford (New Zealander, white male).

Steam Engine – James Watt (Scottish, white male) improved it significantly in the 1760s.

Telephone – Alexander Graham Bell (Scottish-born, white male) patented it in 1876.

Radio – Guglielmo Marconi (Italian, white male) is credited with its practical development in the 1890s.

Rocketry – Robert H. Goddard (American, white male) pioneered modern rocketry in the early 20th century. Wernher von Braun (German, white male) later advanced it.

Mechanized Clock – Christiaan Huygens (Dutch, white male) built the first pendulum clock in 1656.

Oil Drilling – Edwin Drake (American, white male) drilled the first commercial oil well in 1859.

Refrigeration – William Cullen (Scottish, white male) demonstrated artificial refrigeration in 1748, with practical systems later refined by Jacob Perkins (American, white male).

Pasteurization – Louis Pasteur (French, white male) developed it in the 1860s.

Automobile – Karl Benz (German, white male) built the first practical automobile in 1885.

Internet – Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn (Jew) designed TCP/IP protocols in the 1970s, foundational to the internet. Tim Berners-Lee (English, white male) later invented the World Wide Web.

Anesthesia – Crawford Long (American, white male) used ether as an anesthetic in 1842. William Morton (American, white male) popularized it.

Optical Lenses – Salvino D’Armate (Italian, white male) is often credited with early eyeglasses in the late 13th century.

Telegraph – Samuel Morse (American, white male) developed the practical telegraph and Morse code in the 1830s.

Semiconductor Electronics – William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain (all American, white males) invented the transistor in 1947 at Bell Labs.

II. Almost all the Greatest Classical Composers

Classical music is not “an international language”. It is uniquely European in origins, spirit, and greatness. Europeans were continuously creative in music for many centuries, responsible for the highest, most complex form of music—classical music—along with the invention of the most sophisticated musical instruments, and the articulation of all the treatises on music in matters related to pitch, notes, intervals, scale systems, tonality, modulation, and melody.

I asked Grok whether it is accurate to say that the greatest composers of classical music are all men of European ancestry with a few Jews, providing the list below. Grok replied: “Yes, it’s broadly accurate to say that many of the most celebrated composers in the Western classical music tradition hail from Europe, with a significant number being of German, Italian, French, or other European descent, and a few notable Jewish composers among them.”

But Grok could not avoid repeating that this list “reflects the historical and cultural development of classical music, which emerged and flourished in Europe over centuries, particularly from the Renaissance through the 20th century.”

Well, yes, Grok, that’s the point, it reflects the historical reality that classical music is 100% European. Grok added the feminist criticism that “the absence of women or composers from other regions in the traditional ‘greatest’ lists is more a reflection of societal structures—patriarchy, access to education, and patronage systems—than a lack of talent or contribution from those groups.”

  • Josquin des Prez (c. 1450–1521) – Italian.
  • Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) – Italian
  • Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–1687) – Italian, but naturalized and influential in France.
  • Henry Purcell (1659-1695) – English.
  • Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) – German.
  • Domenico Scarlatti (1685–1757) – Italian.
  • Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764) – French
  • George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) – German.
  • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) – Austrian.
  • Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) – German.
  • Richard Wagner (1813–1883) – German.
  • Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) – Austrian
  • Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893) – Russian
  • Franz Schubert (1797–1828) – Austrian
  • Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849) – Polish-French
  • Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) – German
  • Robert Schumann (1810–1856) – German
  • Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741) – Italian
  • Claude Debussy (1862–1918) – French
  • Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901) – Italian
  • Franz Liszt (1811–1886) – Hungarian
  • Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) – French
  • Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847) – German, of Jewish descent
  • Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) – French
  • Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) – Russian
  • Anton Bruckner (1824–1896) – Austrian
  • Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) – Austrian-Bohemian, Jewish descent.

III. All the Greatest Astronauts

This is a list of men who played a pioneering role during the “Space Race” competition between the U.S. and the USSR. Grok reminded me that there have been significant astronauts in recent decades from China, such as Yang Liwei, the first taikonaut in 2003, representing Asia’s entry into spaceflight. Grok mentioned other significant names from India (Rakesh Sharma), and from Japan (Soichi Noguchi), and other nonwhites who participated in American space voyages, such as Sunita Williams (Indian-American), and Koichi Wakata (Japan). There is a known woman, Valentina Tereshkova, remembered as the “first woman in space” in 1963. But this list is about the men, as Grok says in agreement, who represent “pivotal moments in space history”.

  • Yuri Gagarin: The first human in space, completing one orbit around Earth aboard the Vostok 1 spacecraft in 1961.
  • Alan Shepard: The first American in space, piloting the suborbital flight of Freedom 7 in 1961.
  • John Glenn: The first American to orbit Earth, completing three orbits aboard Friendship 7 in 1962.
  • Gus Grissom: The second American in space, flying the suborbital Liberty Bell 7 mission in 1961, and later commanded Gemini 3, the first crewed Gemini flight, in 1965.
  • Neil Armstrong: The first human to walk on the Moon during Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969.
  • Andriyan Nikolayev: Flew on Vostok 3 in 1962, setting an endurance record of nearly 4 days for the longest solo spaceflight at the time.
  • James Lovell: Flew on Gemini 7 and 12; orbited the Moon on Apollo 8, the first human mission to do so; and commanded Apollo 13 in 1970.
  • John Young: Flew on Gemini 3 and 10, commanded Apollo 16 (walking on the Moon in 1972), and piloted the first Space Shuttle mission (STS-1) in 1981.
  • Alexei Leonov: First person to perform a spacewalk, exiting Voskhod 2 for 12 minutes in 1965; commanded the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975.
  • Buzz Aldrin: Second human to walk on the Moon during Apollo 11 in 1969; piloted the lunar module Eagle.
  • Gordon Cooper: Flew Mercury-Atlas 9 (Faith 7) in 1963, the longest Mercury mission; commanded Gemini 5 in 1965, setting a new U.S. endurance record.
  • Wally Schirra: Only astronaut to fly Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions; piloted Mercury-Atlas 8 (Sigma 7) in 1962, commanded Gemini 6A, and led Apollo 7, the first crewed Apollo flight.
  • Vladimir Komarov: Commanded Voskhod 1 in 1964, the first multi-person spaceflight.
  • Chris Hadfield: Canadian astronaut who flew on STS-74 and STS-100; commanded the International Space Station (ISS) during Expedition 35 in 2013.
  • Edgar Mitchell: Sixth person to walk on the Moon during Apollo 14 in 1971; piloted the lunar module Antares and conducted extensive lunar surface experiments.
  • Thomas Stafford: Commanded Apollo 10, the “dress rehearsal” for the Moon landing, and the U.S. side of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975; flew on Gemini 6A and 9A.
  • Gene Cernan: Last person to walk on the Moon during Apollo 17 in 1972; flew on Gemini 9A and piloted the lunar module on Apollo 10.
  • Ed White: First American to perform a spacewalk, during Gemini 4 in 1965.
  • Michael Collins: Orbited the Moon in the command module Columbia during Apollo 11 in 1969 while Armstrong and Aldrin landed; also flew on Gemini 10.

IV. Almost all the Greatest Sculptors

While I don’t deny that sculptors in Ancient Egypt created monumental works with symbolic power like the Great Sphinx, these were state-sponsored projects, overseen by master craftsmen, without any identifiable names. However, although there is no firm evidence of the sculptor’s name, I decided, on the advice of Grok, to include the Egyptian sculptor known as “Thutmose,” as the creator of the bust of Nefertiti, dated to around 1345 BCE. I did not include another name from the non-European world. There are no sculptor’s names for the “The Terracotta Warriors” (8,000 soldiers, horses, and chariots known) created during China’s first emperor Qin Shi Huang (221–210 BC), which was a state-sponsored project crafted by a large workforce of anonymous artisans. Similarly, while I am aware that the Khajuraho temple carvings in India, built between 885 CE and 1000 CE, are renowned for their intricate beauty, there are no specific names of sculptors associated with these carvings. And there are no individual sculptors identified with the African Benin Bronzes, a collection of some 3,000 brass plaques and sculptures, crafted primarily between the 15th and 17th centuries. I have added a white woman, Camille Claudel (1864–1943), in recognition of her truly impressive works. The initial list, stopped with Brancusi (1876); the list below added two twentieth century sculptors, Henry Moore (1898–1986) and Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966), in response to Grok that I was was leaving out widely recognized sculptors of the 20th century. After constructing my list, I asked Grok to indicate briefly what was original about these sculptors.

  • Thutmose (1350 BC): Identified by some as the sculptor of the Bust of Nefertiti, recognized for its “exquisite craftsmanship and timeless elegance”.
  • Phidias (480 BC): Known for his work on the Parthenon sculptures and the statue of Zeus at Olympia, one of the “Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.”
  • Praxiteles (364 BC): Celebrated for introducing a more naturalistic and graceful style, as seen in works like the Aphrodite of Knidos.
  • Donatello (1386): Pioneered Renaissance sculpture with groundbreaking realism and perspective, transforming the art form through his mastery of human anatomy and emotion.
  • Riemenschneider (1460): Excelled in intricate wood carvings, blending Gothic and Renaissance styles to create deeply expressive religious works.
  • Michelangelo (1475): A Renaissance giant, renowned for masterpieces like David and the Pietà, showcasing unparalleled skill and emotional depth.
  • Cellini (1500): Dazzled as a Mannerist goldsmith and sculptor, famed for his exquisite metalwork and dynamic compositions.
  • Giambologna (1529): Captivated with fluid, multi-figured sculptures that epitomized the elegance and complexity of late Renaissance art.
  • Bernini (1598): A Baroque master whose dynamic works, such as The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, revolutionized sculpture with movement and drama.
  • Girardon (1628): Embodied French Baroque grandeur, crafting monumental works that glorified the Sun King’s reign.
  • Coysevox (1640): Fused Baroque dynamism with classical grace, leaving a legacy in portraiture and public monuments.
  • Houdon (1741): Captured the Enlightenment’s spirit with strikingly naturalistic portraits and sculptures of historical figures.
  • Canova (1757): Revived classical ideals, creating serene, polished marbles that defined Neoclassical sculpture.
  • Thorvaldsen (1770): Drew from antiquity to craft noble, harmonious works that echoed the calm of ancient Greece.
  • Rodin (1840): Often called the father of modern sculpture, with works like The Thinker that broke from classical traditions.
  • Brancusi (1876): A pioneer of modernism, known for minimalist and abstract forms like Bird in Space.
  • Henry Moore (1898–1986): Pioneered abstract forms inspired by nature.
  • Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966): Known for his elongated figures, offering a new vision of the human form

V. The 5 Biggest Ideas in Science

The idea for this heading/list came to me after reading The Five Biggest Ideas in Science (1996) by Charles Wynn and Arthur Wiggins. For this list, I asked Grok whether “white men were responsible for the five biggest ideas in science”. Grok agreed that “all listed contributors were of European descent and their work collectively shaped” the development of all five theories. Grok added that I should consider the “historical context” within which these ideas were formulated. It advice me to take one name out (from the Theory of Plate Tectonics, as he was not directly involved in the development of this theory). I have quoted and paraphrased the words Grok used to describe the achievements of each of the names listed. Grok did not come up with a single non-European name, except to agree with me that Arno Penzias was Jewish, and Alexander Friedmann “half-Jewish” (both in the Big Bang Theory).

1. Atomic Structure of Matter

  • Democritus (Greek, ~460–370 BCE): Proposed that matter consists of indivisible units called “atoms.” This was a philosophical concept, not experimentally tested, but it laid a conceptual foundation.
  • John Dalton (English, 1766–1844): In 1803, he provided experimental evidence for atoms as indivisible, indestructible units unique to each element, marking the birth of modern atomic theory.
  • Joseph John Thomson (English, 1856–1940): In 1897 (not 1898), he discovered the electron, showing atoms weren’t indivisible but had negatively charged subcomponents, implying a positive counterbalance.
  • Ernest Rutherford (New Zealander, 1871–1937): In 1911, his gold foil experiment revealed the atom’s nucleus—a dense, positively charged core orbited by electrons.
  • Niels Bohr (Danish, 1885–1962, half-Jewish): In 1913, he introduced a model where electrons orbit the nucleus in quantized energy levels, explaining light emission.
  • Werner Heisenberg (German, 1901–1976): In 1925–1927, he developed quantum mechanics, refining the atomic model with probabilities rather than fixed orbits, incorporating newly discovered particles.

Grok wrote: “All these contributors were European or of European descent, and their work collectively shaped our modern understanding of atomic structure”.

2. Theory of Plate Tectonics

Possibly the most difficult theory in science to demonstrate.

  • Alfred Wegener (German, 1880–1930): In 1912, he proposed continental drift, suggesting continents were once joined in a supercontinent (Pangaea) and moved apart. Lacking a mechanism, his idea was initially rejected.
  • Arthur Holmes (English, 1890–1965): In the 1920s–1930s, he suggested mantle convection as the driving force for plate movement, hypothesizing activity beneath the oceans.
  • Drummond Matthews (English, 1931–1997) and Fred Vine (English, b. 1939): In 1963, they showed magnetic stripes in ocean floor rocks, supporting sea-floor spreading as evidence of plate movement.
  • Harry Hess (American, 1906–1969): In 1960, he formalized sea-floor spreading, proposing new crust forms at mid-ocean ridges, driving continental motion.
  • Robert S. Dietz (American, 1914–1995): In 1961, he reinforced Hess’s ideas, quantifying the spreading rate of oceanic crust.

Grok concluded: “These contributors, all of European descent, developed plate tectonics through observation and evidence, with Wegener’s early vision gaining traction decades later”.

3. Big Bang Theory

  • Edwin Hubble (American, 1889–1953): In 1924–1929, he showed that galaxies are receding, proving the universe is expanding and that many nebulae are distant galaxies.
  • Georges Lemaître (Belgian, 1894–1966): In 1927 (published 1931 in English), he proposed the universe began as a “primeval atom,” linking expansion to a single origin.
  • Alexander Friedmann (Russian, 1888–1925, possibly half-Jewish): In 1922, he mathematically modeled an expanding universe, providing a theoretical basis for later observations.
  • Fred Hoyle (British, 1915- 2001) work on stellar nucleosynthesis explaining origin of all heavier elements complemented Big Bang Theory prediction that the lightest elements were formed in the first few minutes after the Big Bang.
  • Robert Wilson (American, b. 1936), Robert Dicke (American, 1916–1997), and Arno Penzias (German-American, b. 1933, Jewish): In 1965, Penzias and Wilson discovered cosmic microwave background radiation, with Dicke interpreting it as Big Bang evidence (though Dicke’s role was theoretical, not direct discovery).

Later telescope advancements by Europeans (e.g., Hubble Space Telescope, WMAP) confirmed this model.

4. Theory of Evolution

  • Carl Linnaeus (Swedish, 1707–1778): In 1735, he created taxonomy, classifying species, which later supported evolutionary ideas, though he didn’t propose evolution.
  • Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (French, 1744–1829): In 1809, he suggested species evolve via acquired traits, an early but flawed evolutionary theory.
  • Charles Lyell (Scottish, 1797–1875): In the 1830s, his uniformitarianism (geological processes are gradual) influenced Darwin’s evolutionary timeline.
  • Charles Darwin (English, 1809–1882): In 1859 (not 1858), he published On the Origin of Species, detailing natural selection as evolution’s mechanism.
  • Alfred Russel Wallace (English, 1823–1913): In 1858, he independently proposed natural selection, prompting Darwin’s publication.
  • Gregor Mendel (Austrian, 1822–1884): In the 1860s, his genetics experiments (published 1865–1866) later provided the mechanism for inheritance, bolstering Darwin’s theory.

Grok agreed: “All were European, contributing to a theory that unified biology”.

5. Periodic Table

  • Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner (German, 1780–1849): In 1817, he noted “triads” of elements with similar properties, an early step toward periodicity.
  • John Newlands (English, 1837–1898): In 1863–1865, he proposed the “Law of Octaves,” arranging elements by atomic weight with recurring properties.
  • Lothar Meyer (German, 1830–1895): In 1864–1870, he developed a periodic system based on atomic weight and properties, nearly simultaneous with Mendeleev.
  • Dmitri Mendeleev (Russian, 1834–1907): In 1869, he created the modern periodic table, predicting undiscovered elements based on periodic patterns of atomic weight.

Grok: “All were European, with Mendeleev’s predictive power cementing his legacy.”

VI. Almost all the Greatest Historians

Europeans invented the writing of history as “a method of sorting out the true from the false,” as a conscious search for a rational explanation of the causes of events, while rendering the results of their investigations in sustained narratives of excellent prose. The other peoples of the world, including the Chinese, barely rose above annalistic forms of recording genealogies or the deeds of rulers, devoid of reflections on historical causation. History in the Islamic world never became a scholarly field dedicated to the systematic gathering of records and explanation of events, the style was heavily annalistic and intended for moral teaching.

While the Greeks and Romans retained a cyclical view of history, modern Europeans would nurture a true developmental account of history characterized by an increasing historical consciousness, rooted in their Christianity and ecumenical Mediterranean and Atlantic world, and their actual epoch-making transformations, the immense contributions of Greek knowledge, Rome’s creation of a universal empire, the invention of universities in the Middle Ages, among many other novelties, followed by the Renaissance, and the continuous revolutions of the modern era in warfare, art, architecture, science, philosophy, and politics.

After the 1700s, they gained a more scientific understanding of history, identifying definite stages in technological and economic growth, and in the spread of liberal institutions, in terms of natural or man-made causes, rather than in terms of the providential hand of God. This idea of progress would come along with tremendous improvements in archival research and in historical methodologies, while the rest of the world would remain stuck with annalistic historiographies.

European historians wrote the histories of every nation in the world while developing all the methodologies currently used in historical writing, such as paleography (study of historical handwriting), diplomatics (study of documents, records, and archives), chronology (establishing the dates of past events), epigraphy (study of ancient inscriptions), genealogy (study of families), numismatics (study of coins), including ethnography, hermeneutics, archeology, linguistics, and genetics.

Below is a list constructed without taking advice from Grok, though I added a few more names to the original 2020 list, in light of a long chapter I wrote in my upcoming book, Greatness and Ruin, on historiography. I did ask Grok, however, to describe briefly what these historians are known for. There is one Chinese and one Muslim historian, Khaldun, who did rise above the purely Islamic accounts of his predecessors and successors. I have identified a few Jewish historians. This is clearly a very limited list, which leaves out numerous great historians of the 1700s, 1800s, 1900s, and early 2000s.

  • Herodotus (c. 484–425 BC): Known as the “Father of History,” he wrote Histories, an account of the Greco-Persian Wars, blending fact with myth and exploring cultural differences between Greece and Persia.
  • Thucydides (c. 460–400 BC): Authored History of the Peloponnesian War, emphasizing factual accuracy and political analysis, pioneering a critical, evidence-based approach to historical writing.
  • Polybius (c. 200–118 BC): Wrote The Histories, chronicling the rise of the Roman Republic, with a focus on political institutions and military strategy.
  • Sima Qian (145–86 BC): Compiled Records of the Grand Historian, a comprehensive history of China from its earliest dynasties to the Han era, laying the foundation for Chinese historiography.
  • Livy (59 BC–17 AD): Authored Ab Urbe Condita, a massive history of Rome from its founding to the reign of Augustus, combining legend with historical narrative.
  • Tacitus (c. 56–120 AD): Wrote Annals and Histories, offering a critical account of the Roman Empire from Tiberius to the Flavians, known for his insights into politics and power.
  • Plutarch (c. 46–120 AD): Penned Parallel Lives, biographies of notable Greeks and Romans, focusing on moral character and virtues rather than strict historical accuracy.
  • Bede (672–735 AD): Wrote Ecclesiastical History of the English People, a vital source for early English history and the spread of Christianity in Britain.
  • Geoffroi de Villehardouin (1150-1213):. Authored De la Conquête de Constantinople, one of the earliest surviving historical prose narratives written in French.
  • Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406 AD): Authored Muqaddimah, an introduction to his universal history, pioneering theories on the rise and fall of civilizations and social dynamics.
  • Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527): Authored The History of Florence, using historical analysis to support his political theories, alongside his more famous work The Prince.
  • Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon (1609–1674): Penned The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, a royalist perspective on the English Civil War.
  • Edward Gibbon (1737–1794): Wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a seminal work linking the empire’s collapse to moral decay and Christianity’s rise.
  • François Guizot (1787–1874): Wrote extensively on French and European history, shaping liberal historiography with his emphasis on constitutional development.
  • Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859): Authored The History of England, known for its vivid narrative and Whig interpretation of history as a story of progress and liberty.
  • Lewis Namier (1888–1960): Pioneered prosopography, using detailed studies of individuals to uncover broader trends, especially in 18th-century British politics. (Jewish)
  • Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886): Considered the father of modern historical scholarship, he emphasized primary sources and objectivity, shaping historical methodology.
  • G.M. Trevelyan (1876–1962): Authored English Social History, celebrated for its accessible narrative and focus on the lives of ordinary people.
  • Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897): Wrote The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, defining the Renaissance as a distinct cultural and historical period.
  • William Stubbs (1825–1901): Authored The Constitutional History of England, a foundational work on medieval English governance and institutions.
  • Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903): Wrote A History of Rome, a comprehensive study of Roman history that earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature.
  • J.B. Bury (1861–1927): Authored works on the late Roman Empire and Byzantine history, advocating for scientific rigor in historical research.
  • Francis Parkman (1823–1893): Chronicled the French and Indian War and the history of New France, known for his vivid and engaging narrative style.
  • Georges Lefebvre (1874–1959): A leading historian of the French Revolution, he focused on social history, particularly the role of the peasantry and lower classes
  • Hans-Ulrich Wehler (1931–2014): A key figure in modern German historiography, he focused on the social and economic history of the German Empire.
  • Michael Rostovtzeff (1870–1952): Wrote on the social and economic history of the ancient world, particularly the Roman Empire.
  • Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975): Authored A Study of History, a comparative analysis of the rise and fall of civilizations across time.
  • Fernand Braudel (1902–1985): A leader of the Annales School, he wrote The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, emphasizing long-term social and economic trends.
  • Georges Duby (1919–1996): Specialized in medieval history, exploring feudalism and social structures in works like The Early Growth of the European Economy.
  • A.J.P. Taylor (1906–1990): Authored The Origins of the Second World War, offering a controversial reinterpretation of the war’s causes.
  • Christopher Hill (1912–2003): A Marxist historian, he wrote extensively on the English Civil War, emphasizing its social and economic dimensions.
  • Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012): Authored The Age of Revolution and The Age of Capital, exploring the transformative effects of industrialization and capitalism. (Jewish)
  • David Landes (1924–2013): Wrote The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, analyzing the economic rise of the West compared to other regions. (Jewish)
  • William H. McNeill (1917–2016): Renowned for his work in world history.
  • J.G.A. Pocock (1924–): Authored The Machiavellian Moment, tracing the development of republican thought in Europe and America.
  • Carlo Ginzburg (b. 1939): A microhistorian, famous for The Cheese and the Worms, who expanded historical methods to include everyday life.
  • Quentin Skinner (1940–): A key figure in the Cambridge School, he focused on the contextual study of political thought in the early modern period.

VII. About 95% of the Greatest Explorers

We should draw a line between “explorer” and “traveler,” however blurred the line may be in some cases. There have been great travelers who took long journeys beyond the borders of their territory, without exploring or discovering new or unrecorded lands. For example, Ibn Battuta (1304-68) is now listed as a “great explorer,” but he was really a great traveler who visited every known Islamic land in his time, from Moorish Spain in the West to Samarkand in Central Asia and India, and arguably China and Vietnam. Explorers, strictly speaking, are men who undertook journeys to unknown or uncharted territories, crossed Oceans, discovered whole new continents, new rivers and their sources, undertook polar ice expeditions, pioneered new worlds underwater (and in space). The famous six voyages of Zheng He (1371-1433) around the Indian Ocean, along the eastern coast of Africa and into Southeast Asia, were great travels, but not acts of exploration since Zheng He navigated well known lands. Likewise, Marco Polo was one of the greatest travelers but not an explorer, traveling 15,000 miles over a 24-year period throughout Asia into Indonesia.

Nevertheless, the list below includes some of the greatest travelers because, in fairness, men identified as explorers, including some listed below, followed in the footsteps of prior explorers, moving into the same continents, and lands, even as they discovered new routes, rivers, lakes, and mountains, and traversed deep into the interior of Africa; that is, lands unidentified in terms of concepts and maps. The list below is very short. There are hundreds of great European explorers. I would estimate, on the side of moderation, that about 97% of the greatest explorers are men of European ancestry.

  • Pytheas of Massalia (380-310 BC): Explored the British Isles and possibly the Arctic, providing early descriptions of northern Europe.
  • Hanno “the Navigator” (500 BC): Led a Carthaginian expedition along Africa’s west coast, potentially reaching Cameroon.
  • Fa Xian (350-422 AD): Chinese Buddhist monk who traveled to India and Sri Lanka, documenting Buddhist sites.
  • Leif Erikson (c. 970–c. 1020): Norse explorer believed to be among the first Europeans to reach North America (Vinland, likely Newfoundland).
  • Marco Polo (1254-1324): Venetian merchant who traveled to China, documented his experiences, and inspired future explorers.
  • Ibn Battuta (1304-1368): Moroccan scholar who explored the Islamic world, Africa, and Asia, covering vast distances.
  • Zheng He (1371-1433): Chinese admiral who led seven voyages across Southeast Asia, India, and East Africa, fostering trade and diplomacy.
  • Bartolomeu Dias (1450-1500): Portuguese explorer who first sailed around Africa’s southern tip (Cape of Good Hope), opening a sea route to Asia.
  • Christopher Columbus (1451-1506): Italian explorer whose Atlantic voyages led to the European discovery of the Americas.
  • Vasco da Gama (1460-1524): Portuguese explorer who pioneered a direct sea route from Europe to India.
  • John Cabot (1450-1499): Italian explorer who charted North America’s coast, particularly Canada, for England.
  • Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512): Italian explorer who identified the Americas as a new continent, later named after him.
  • Vasco Núñez de Balboa (1474-1519): Spanish explorer who first sighted the Pacific Ocean from the Americas.
  • Ferdinand Magellan (1480-1521): Portuguese explorer who led the first global circumnavigation, though he died en route.
  • Jacques Cartier (1491-1557): French explorer who mapped the St. Lawrence River and claimed Canada for France.
  • Samuel de Champlain (1567-1635): French explorer who founded Quebec and explored the Great Lakes, dubbed the “Father of New France.”
  • Abel Tasman (1603-1659): Dutch explorer who discovered Tasmania and New Zealand, mapping parts of Australia.
  • William Dampier (1651-1715): English explorer and pirate who circumnavigated the globe three times, aiding navigation and science.
  • Vitus Bering (1681-1741): Danish explorer who mapped the Bering Strait and Alaska for Russia.
  • James Cook (1728-1779): British explorer who charted the Pacific, including New Zealand and Australia’s east coast.
  • Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859): Prussian naturalist who explored South America, advancing geography and science.
  • Meriwether Lewis (1774-1809) and William Clark (1770-1838): American explorers who crossed the western U.S. to the Pacific.
  • David Livingstone (1813-1873): Scottish explorer who mapped Africa’s interior, including Victoria Falls, and opposed slavery.
  • Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890): British explorer who visited Mecca in disguise and sought the Nile’s source.
  • Robert Burke (1821-1861) and William Wills (1834-1861): Australian explorers who first crossed Australia south to north.
  • Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913): British naturalist who explored the Amazon and Malay Archipelago, co-developing evolution theory.
  • Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904): Welsh-American explorer who traversed Africa and found Livingstone.
  • Robert Peary (1856-1920): American explorer who claimed to reach the North Pole in 1909 (disputed).
  • Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930): Norwegian explorer who crossed Greenland and neared the North Pole, later a Nobel laureate.
  • Sven Hedin (1865-1952): Swedish explorer who mapped Central Asia, including the Himalayas and Tibet.
  • Robert Falcon Scott (1868-1912): British explorer who led Antarctic expeditions, including a South Pole attempt.
  • Ernest Shackleton (1874-1922): Anglo-Irish explorer known for Antarctic expeditions, notably the Endurance survival saga.
  • Wilfred Thesiger (1910-2003): British explorer who documented life in the Arabian Peninsula and Africa.
  • Roald Amundsen (1872-1928): Norwegian explorer who first reached the South Pole and navigated the Northwest Passage.
  • Jacques Cousteau (1910-1997): French oceanographer who advanced scuba diving and underwater filmmaking, promoting marine conservation.

VIII. Most of the Greatest Mathematicians

Most of the cultures of the world made zero contributions to mathematics defined as a specific field of knowledge, entailing a system of numeration, a variety of arithmetical calculations with whole numbers and fractions, the calculation of simple areas and volumes, and the use of linear equations. Indian, Chinese, and Islamic civilizations attained a high level of cognitive proficiency in arithmetical calculations, involving problem-solving by breaking down complex problems into smaller, more manageable parts, and then solving those parts one at a time, using complex algebraic equations. However, Chinese mathematics barely rose above the “utilitarian” mathematics of the Babylonians, dedicated to the solution of practical problems, without “the idea of rigorous proof”, although Zu Chongzhi is acknowledged for his highly accurate approximation of π (pi).

Indians made some groundbreaking contributions to decimal systems, algebra, trigonometry, infinite series, and continued fractions. The Islamic world also made significant contributions in algebra and trigonometry. The ancient Greeks, however, were the first to derive mathematical concepts from pure reasoning alone, that is, to think about numbers and operations abstractly, as products of the rational powers of man, and to realize that geometry is concerned not with physical objects, but with points, lines, triangles, squares, as objects of pure reason. They invented deductive reasoning, a method wherein reason proposes self-evident premises or axioms from which it deduces theorems in a rigorously consistent (and self-conscious) manner.

Only modern Europeans, directly on the accomplishments of the Greeks, not the accomplishments of the Indians, Chinese, and far less on Muslims, would start to transform arithmetic/algebra into proper sciences by introducing symbolism and making extensive and impressive contributions to the theory of numbers, and using algebra to help solve geometric problems. Of the 45 names listed below, 2 are Indians, 1 is Muslim, 1 is Chinese, and 4 have Jewish ancestry (though one has a Jewish father only, and one has Jewish ancestry through his paternal grandparents). The rest are European. Grok agreed that this list accurately reflects the major contributors to mathematics, though it suggested a few more names not listed here. I did use an abbreviated version of Grok’s brief descriptions of achievements.

  1. Eudoxus (b. 408 BC): Developed the method of exhaustion, a precursor to integral calculus, for calculating areas and volumes.
  2. Euclid (lived around 300 BC): Authored Elements, a comprehensive treatise on geometry, number theory, and algebra that served as the primary mathematics textbook for over 2,000 years.
  3. Archimedes (b. 287 BC): Calculated an approximation of π (pi) and developed methods for finding areas and volumes; laid the groundwork for calculus with his use of infinitesimals and the method of exhaustion.
  4. Apollonius (b. ~15 AD): Introduced terms like ellipse, parabola, and hyperbola, and systematized the study of conic sections.
  5. Zu Chongzhi (429–500 AD): Calculated π to seven decimal places, a record for accuracy until the 15th century.
  6. Brahmagupta (598–668 AD): Introduced the concept of zero as a number and defined rules for arithmetic operations with zero and negative numbers.
  7. Al-Khwarizmi (b. ~780 AD): Authored the book “Kitab al-Jabr wal-Muqabala” from which the term “algebra” is derived.
  8. Fibonacci (b. 1170): Introduced the Fibonacci sequence (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, …), revealing patterns in nature and mathematics.
  9. Regiomontanus (1436–1476): Advanced trigonometry as a distinct mathematical discipline.
  10. Cardano (1501–1576): Introduced imaginary numbers (e.g., √−1), a key step toward complex numbers.
  11. Viète (1540–1603): Pioneered symbolic algebra by using letters for variables and constants, modernizing mathematical notation.
  12. Descartes (1596–1650): Invented analytic geometry and introduced modern exponential notation (e.g., x²).
  13. Pierre de Fermat (1607–1665): Co-founded analytic geometry, and laid foundations for number theory.
  14. Newton (1643–1727): Co-invented calculus (with Leibniz), introducing derivatives and integrals. Formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation, grounded in mathematical principles.
  15. Leibniz (1646–1716): Co-invented calculus, introducing modern notation (e.g., dx/dt, ∫), and developed binary arithmetic.
  16. Bernoulli (1700–1782) Formulated Bernoulli’s Principle in fluid dynamics, a cornerstone of physics and engineering; advanced probability and statistics.
  17. Euler (1707–1783): Introduced key notations (e.g., e, i, ∑, f(x)) and the Euler identity (e^(iπ) + 1 = 0), solved the Basel problem (sum of reciprocals of squares).
  18. d’Alembert (1717–1783): Developed the wave equation.
  19. Lagrange (1736–1813): Formulated Lagrangian mechanics, revolutionizing classical physics.
  20. Laplace (1749–1827): Developed probability theory; refined Newton’s work on planetary orbits.
  21. Fourier (1768–1830): Introduced Fourier series to analyze periodic functions and heat conduction.
  22. Gauss (1777–1855): Proved the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra and developed the Gaussian distribution in statistics.
  23. Lobachevsky (1792–1856): Pioneered non-Euclidean geometry (hyperbolic geometry).
  24. Bolyai (1802–1860): Independently developed non-Euclidean geometry.
  25. William Hamilton (1805–1865): Invented quaternions, extending complex numbers to four dimensions.
  26. Galois (1811–1832): Founded group theory and Galois theory, solving the problem of polynomial solvability by radicals.
  27. Boole (1815–1864): Developed Boolean algebra, the foundation of digital logic and computer science.
  28. Weierstrass (1815–1897): Rigorized calculus with epsilon-delta definitions of limits and continuity.
  29. Riemann (1826–1866): Introduced Riemann surfaces and complex geometry; developed differential geometry, influencing Einstein’s relativity.
  30. Dedekind (1831–1916): Defined real numbers via Dedekind cuts, rigorizing analysis.
  31. Cantor (1845–1918): Created set theory, introducing concepts of infinity (cardinality) and transfinite numbers. (Jewish ancestry through his paternal grandparents.)
  32. Klein (1849–1925): Developed the Erlangen Program, unifying geometry via group theory.
  33. Poincaré (1854–1912): Founded algebraic topology.
  34. Hilbert (1862–1943): Formulated Hilbert’s 23 problems, shaping 20th-century mathematics. Developed Hilbert spaces, key to quantum mechanics.
  35. Weyl (1885–1955): Unified mathematics and physics through group theory and differential geometry.
  36. Ramanujan (1887–1920): Made breakthroughs in number theory (partition function, Ramanujan conjecture).
  37. Banach (1892–1945): Co-founded functional analysis with Banach spaces.
  38. John von Neumann (1903–1957): Developed game theory. (Jewish)
  39. Kolmogorov (1903–1987): Axiomatized probability theory; contributed to turbulence and complexity theory.
  40. Turing (1912–1954): Laid the foundations of computer science with the Turing Machine; pioneered artificial intelligence concepts.
  41. Erdős (1913–1996): Prolific contributor to number theory, combinatorics, and graph theory. (Jewish)
  42. Shannon (1916–2001): Founded information theory and developed digital circuit design.
  43. Hirzebruch (1927–2012): Advanced algebraic geometry and topology; contributed to K-theory.
  44. Grothendieck (1928–2014): Revolutionized algebraic geometry; developed foundations for cohomology and category theory (Jewish father).
  45. Wiles (b. 1953):Proved Fermat’s Last Theorem (1994), a 350-year-old conjecture, using elliptic curves and modular forms.

IX. Europeans Invented All Literary Devices

Grok agreed that all the literary devices listed below are “literary devices” and that all were invented by European whites “in terms of their specific terms and formal definitions”. I came up with this long list using online sources, and, more significantly, J. A. Cuddon’s 1000+ page Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (1991). The definition Grok offered — “Literary devices are techniques or tools used in literature and rhetoric to enhance expression, structure narratives, or convey meaning” — is consistent with the one offered by this Dictionary.

Grok agreed that most of these terms “derive from Greek and Latin” and “Old English/French/Italian (European languages)”. Similarly to Cuddon’s Dictionary, which goes into exhaustive accounts of the meanings and historical origins of each term, Grok points out that some of these terms are “universal” in their meaning, and can be found, even if they are not formally defined, in Asian, Indian, Arabic, and other non-European writing and rhetoric.

Grok, similarly to the Dictionary, indicated that “a few” of these devices “might be better classified as genres, styles, or broader concepts”. Below is the list with Grok’s brief definitions of the literary devices, and its statement of agreement that each is a literary device.

  • Aporia: Expressing doubt or uncertainty as a rhetorical strategy—yes, a literary device.
  • Alliteration: Repetition of initial consonant sounds—definitely a literary device.
  • Appositive: A noun or phrase renaming another noun—yes, a device.
  • Anti-Climax: A sudden drop from the significant to the trivial—yes, a device.
  • Catharsis: Emotional purging, often in tragedy—yes, a device tied to effect.
  • Comedy: A genre, but it employs specific techniques (e.g., humor)—related to devices.
  • Catalog: A list used for rhetorical effect—yes, a device.
  • Diatribe: A bitter, critical speech—yes, a rhetorical device.
  • Dialogue: Conversation between characters—yes, a device for narrative.
  • Digression: A departure from the main topic—yes, a device.
  • Drama: A genre, but defined by techniques like dialogue—related to devices.
  • Denouement: Resolution of a plot—yes, a structural device.
  • Dilemma: A difficult choice in narrative—yes, a device.
  • Didacticism: Teaching through literature—yes, a device or approach.
  • Elegy: A mournful poem, a form using specific techniques—related to devices.
  • Epigram: A concise, witty statement—yes, a device.
  • Epistolary: Letter-based narrative—more a form, but uses devices like voice.
  • Essay: A genre, but employs rhetorical devices—related.
  • Epic: A long narrative poem, a genre with techniques—related.
  • Euphemism: Mild expression for something harsh—yes, a device.
  • Fairy Tale: A genre, but uses devices like symbolism—related.
  • Fantasy: A genre, with techniques like world-building—related.
  • Foil: A character highlighting another—yes, a device.
  • Foreshadowing: Hinting at future events—yes, a device.
  • Folklore: Traditional stories, a category using devices—related.
  • Flashback: A shift to past events—yes, a device.
  • Fallacy: Faulty reasoning, often rhetorical—yes, a device.
  • Frame Story: A story within a story—yes, a structural device.
  • Figurative Language: Non-literal expression (e.g., metaphor)—yes, a device.
  • Hypotaxis: Complex sentence structure—yes, a stylistic device.
  • Hyperbole: Exaggeration—yes, a device.
  • Hubris: Excessive pride, often thematic—yes, a device.
  • Hamartia: Tragic flaw—yes, a device in tragedy.
  • Hook: Opening to grab attention—yes, a device.
  • Induction: Reasoning from specific to general—yes, a rhetorical device.
  • Inversion: Reversed word order—yes, a device.
  • Intertextuality: Referencing other texts—yes, a device.
  • Inference: Implied meaning—yes, a device.
  • Lyric: Expressive poetry, a form with devices—related.
  • Logos: Logical appeal—yes, a rhetorical device.
  • Meiosis: Understatement—yes, a device.
  • Memoir: Personal narrative, a genre using devices—related.
  • Non Sequitur: Illogical leap—yes, a device.
  • Motif: Recurring element—yes, a device.
  • Novella: Short novel, a form with techniques—related.
  • Nemesis: An opponent or downfall—yes, a narrative device.
  • Neologism: New word creation—yes, a device.
  • Narrative: Storytelling—yes, a broad device.
  • Octave: Eight-line stanza—yes, a structural device in poetry.
  • Ode: A lyrical poem, a form with devices—related.
  • Omniscient: All-knowing narrator—yes, a narrative device.
  • Onomatopoeia: Sound-imitating words—yes, a device.
  • Parallelism: Similar sentence structures—yes, a device.
  • Paronomasia: Wordplay or pun—yes, a device.
  • Parody: Imitation for humor—yes, a device.
  • Parrhesia: Bold, frank speech—yes, a rhetorical device.
  • Plot: Sequence of events—yes, a structural device.
  • Prosody: Study of meter and rhythm—yes, a poetic device.
  • Realism: A movement, but uses techniques—related.
  • Reductio ad Absurdum: Disproof by absurdity—yes, a rhetorical device.
  • Refutation: Counterargument—yes, a rhetorical device.
  • Romanticism: A movement, with stylistic devices—related.
  • Rhetoric: Art of persuasion—yes, a broad device category.
  • Rising Action: Build-up in plot—yes, a structural device.
  • Sarcasm: Ironic mockery—yes, a device.
  • Soliloquy: Character’s speech to self—yes, a device.
  • Satire: Social critique via humor—yes, a device.
  • Sonnet: 14-line poem, a form with devices—related.
  • Surrealism: A movement, with techniques—related.
  • Symbolism: Use of symbols—yes, a device.
  • Synesis: Grammatical agreement by sense—yes, a device.
  • Suspense: Tension in narrative—yes, a device.
  • Syllogism: Logical argument form—yes, a rhetorical device.
  • Synesthesia: Blending senses—yes, a device.
  • Stream of Consciousness: Inner thought flow—yes, a device.
  • Tragedy: A genre, with devices like catharsis—related.
  • Trope: Figurative use of language—yes, a device.
  • Utopia: Ideal society narrative—more a genre, but related.
  • Vernacular: Everyday language—yes, a stylistic device.
  • Vignette: Brief descriptive scene—yes, a device.

X. 66 oldest universities in the world were founded in Europe

Medieval Christian Europe was the first civilization to “institutionalize reason” within self-governing universities which offered a curriculum “overwhelmingly oriented toward analytical subjects”. The first university was Bologna, founded in 1088, followed by Oxford in 1096. By the end of the fourteenth century, in 1400, there were about 34 universities across Europe; and in 1500 there were 66, and none outside. In 1789, the year of the French Revolution, there were about 143 universities in Europe, with only one university outside in Turkey. The original Latin word universitas designated any corporation intentionally created by a group of individuals, be they guilds by craftsmen, associations by merchants, or municipal communes by town residents—to regulate their own affairs and security, independently of customary law, kinship ties, or religious and state authorities. Corporations were self-governed in that their members participated in specifying the rules that regulated their activities; power was shared and leaders could be held accountable for their actions. Gradually the word universitas came to be associated with the term studium generale, which referred to any institution (at the beginning of the thirteenth century) that attracted students from all parts of Europe, and where at least one of the higher faculties of theology, law, or medicine was taught by a plurality of masters. The universities tended to have four faculties (arts, theology, law, and medicine). The program of the arts consisted of the three verbal disciplines of grammar, rhetoric, and logic; and the four mathematical disciplines of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. Grok agrees that, strictly speaking, these were the first universities. I asked Grok to organize this list in terms of the year they were founded and location.

  • University of Bologna – Founded 1088 (Italy)
  • University of Oxford – Founded c. 1096 (England)
  • University of Paris – Founded c. 1150 (France)
  • University of Modena – Founded 1175 (Italy)
  • University of Cambridge – Founded 1209 (England)
  • University of Salamanca – Founded 1218 (Spain)
  • University of Padua – Founded 1222 (Italy)
  • University of Naples Federico II – Founded 1224 (Italy)
  • University of Toulouse – Founded 1229 (France)
  • University of Siena – Founded 1240 (Italy)
  • University of Valladolid – Founded 1241 (Spain)
  • University of Piacenza – Founded 1248 (Italy)
  • University of Coimbra – Founded 1290 (Portugal)
  • University of Montpellier – Founded 1289 (France)
  • University of Alcalá (original) – Founded 1293 (Spain)
  • University of Lleida – Founded 1300 (Spain)
  • University of Rome La Sapienza – Founded 1303 (Italy)
  • University of Avignon – Founded 1303 (France)
  • University of Orleans – Founded 1306 (France)
  • University of Perugia – Founded 1308 (Italy)
  • University of Florence – Founded 1321 (Italy)
  • University of Cahors – Founded 1332 (France)
  • University of Angers – Founded 1337 (France)
  • University of Grenoble – Founded 1339 (France)
  • University of Verona – Founded 1339 (Italy
  • University of Pisa – Founded 1343 (Italy)
  • Charles University in Prague – Founded 1348 (Czech Republic)
  • University of Perpignan – Founded 1350 (France)
  • University of Huesca – Founded 1354 (Spain)
  • University of Pavia – Founded 1361 (Italy)
  • Jagiellonian University in Krakow – Founded 1364 (Poland)
  • University of Vienna – Founded 1365 (Austria)
  • University of Pécs – Founded 1367 (Hungary)
  • University of Heidelberg – Founded 1386 (Germany)
  • University of Cologne – Founded 1388 (Germany)
  • University of Ferrara – Founded 1391 (Italy)
  • University of Erfurt – Founded 1392 (Germany)
  • University of Würzburg – Founded 1402 (Germany)
  • University of Turin – Founded 1404 (Italy)
  • University of Leipzig – Founded 1409 (Germany)
  • University of Aix-en-Provence – Founded 1409 (France)
  • University of St Andrews – Founded 1413 (Scotland)
  • University of Rostock – Founded 1419 (Germany)
  • University of Dole – Founded 1423 (France)
  • University of Louvain – Founded 1425 (Belgium)
  • University of Poitiers – Founded 1431 (France)
  • University of Caen – Founded 1432 (France)
  • University of Catania – Founded 1434 (Italy)
  • University of Bordeaux – Founded 1441 (France)
  • University of Barcelona – Founded 1450 (Spain)
  • University of Glasgow – Founded 1451 (Scotland)
  • University of Valence – Founded 1452 (France)
  • University of Greifswald – Founded 1456 (Germany)
  • University of Freiburg – Founded 1457 (Germany)
  • University of Basel – Founded 1460 (Switzerland)
  • University of Nantes – Founded 1460 (France)
  • University of Bourges – Founded 1464 (France)
  • University of Ingolstadt – Founded 1472 (Germany)
  • University of Trier – Founded 1473 (Germany)
  • University of Mainz – Founded 1477 (Germany)
  • University of Tübingen – Founded 1477 (Germany).
  • University of Uppsala – Founded 1477 (Sweden)
  • University of Copenhagen – Founded 1479 (Denmark)
  • University of Genoa – Founded 1481 (Italy).
  • University of Aberdeen – Founded 1495 (Scotland)
  • University of Santiago de Compostela – Founded 1495 (Spain)

XI. Europeans, with the exception of one Chinese, invented all the Scientific Instruments

Grok agreed with this judgment, identifying the inventors and nationalities of the scientific instruments, in agreement with my claim that they were all Europeans, although it added a Chinese name as the inventor of the Seismograph. I included this Chinese inventor, but added the English inventor of the modern Seismograph. Grok excluded one instrument only, “Nanoscale”, as being a “scale of measurement, not a scientific instrument”.

  • Ammeter: Invented by André-Marie Ampère, who was French. The ammeter measures electric current.
  • Barometer: Invented by Evangelista Torricelli, who was Italian, in 1643 to measure atmospheric pressure.
  • Sextant: Both John Hadley, who was English, and Thomas Godfrey, who was American, independently developed the sextant around 1730, an instrument used for navigation to measure angles between celestial objects and the horizon.
  • Voltmeter: Invented by Edward Weston, born in England, in 1886.
  • Thermometer: Invented by Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, who was Dutch, but was born in Danzig, Poland), in the early 18th century.
  • Galvanometer: Invented by Johann Schweigger, who was German, in 1820, to detect and measure small electric currents.
  • Hydrometer: Invented by William Nicholson, who was English, in 1790, to measure the density or specific gravity of liquids.
  • Radar: Invented by Robert Watson-Watt, who was Scottish, in 1935.
  • Hygrometer: Invented by Horace Bénédict de Saussure, who was Swiss, in the 18th century, to measure humidity in the air.
  • Electroscope: Invented by Abraham Bennet, who was English, in 1787, to detect electric charge.
  • Microscope: Invented by Zacharias Janssen, who was Dutch, in 1590.
  • Electron Microscope: Invented by Ernst Ruska and Max Knoll, both German, in 1931.
  • Accelerometer: Invented by George Atwood, who was English, in 1783, to measure acceleration.
  • Magnetograph: Invented by Charles Brooke, who was English, in 1846, to record variations in the Earth’s magnetic field.
  • Telescope: Invented by Hans Lippershey, who was Dutch, in 1608.
  • Periscope: Invented by Sir Howard Grubb, who was Irish, in the late 19th century, widely used in submarines.
  • Calorimeter: Invented by Joseph Black, who was Scottish, in 1761, to measure heat transfer.
  • Telemeter: Invented by Carl Pulfrich, who was German, in 1890 to measure distances.
  • Seismograph: Invented by Zhang Heng, who was Chinese, in 132 AD to detect and record earthquakes. However, John Milne, who was English, invented the first modern seismograph in 1880.
  • Cardiograph: Invented by Willem Einthoven, who was Dutch, in 1903 to record the heart’s electrical activity.

XII. Whites invented close to 100% of the sports/athletic competitions

I am aware that a few sports were invented outside Europe/North America; but, for the sake of argument, I asked Grok: “Is it reasonably accurate to say that Europeans and North Americans invented all the sports?” I provided Grok with the list below (minus the few sports I added from the non-Western world after Grok’s reply). Grok replied that my list was “largely accurate with a few nuances worth exploring”. It added martial arts, or Karate (Japan), Taekwondo (Korea), and Kung Fu (China) from the non-European world. I also added Polo, which it traced to ancient Persia, as well as Japanese sumo and Mesoamerican “ballgame”.

The invention of so many sports by the ancient Greeks is rooted in their aristocratic martial ethos encapsulated in the ancient word Arete, which originally denoted excellence in the performance of heroic valor by aristocratic Indo-European warriors. In pre-Homeric times, it signified the strength and skill of a warrior. It was his arete that ranked an aristocrat (aristos meaning “best,” “noblest”) above the commoners; and it was the attainment of heroic excellence that secured respect and honor among aristocratic peers. The word aristeia was used in epic stories for the single-handed adventures of the hero in his unceasing strife for superlative achievements over his peers. It was within this cultural context that the Greeks invented the sports listed below and the Olympic games. England adopted this culture of athleticism. English elite institutions of learning, during the days of the empire, emphasized physical fitness, discipline, and teamwork, as well as a tradition of outdoor activity and a passion for “fair play.”

In the list I sent to Grok, I identified the particular sports invented in Greece, England, France, the United States, and Canada. I also identified the year, or approximate time that these sports were invented. Grok agreed with most of these specifications, stating, you list is “impressively detailed”, while making some minor qualifications in regards to the exact origins of a few sports, when the rules of a few sports were formalized; and it corrected the claim that Americans turned skiing into a sport, holding Norway responsible.

The ancient Greeks invented these sports through the Olympic Games, which began in 776 BCE.

  • Pentathlon: The pentathlon (which includes Discus, Javelin, Long Jump, Wrestling, and Footrace) was introduced around 708 BCE.
  • Boxing: Added to the Olympics in 688 BCE.
  • Equestrian Events: Chariot racing and horseback riding events were introduced to the Olympics in 680 BCE.
  • Gymnastics: Exercises resembling modern gymnastics, although modern gymnastics as a sport emerged in the 19th century in Germany.

The British invented many modern sports.

  • Cricket (1744/1787): The first written “Laws of Cricket” were codified in 1744, but the Marylebone Cricket Club was founded in 1787, which formalized the modern game.
  • Rugby (1871): The Rugby Football Union, formed in 1871, formalized the rules.
  • Golf (1764): The first 18-hole course is traditionally linked to St. Andrews, Scotland.
  • Tennis (1874): Patented in 1874.
  • Badminton (around 1873): Badminton Association of England was formed in 1893, but the game’s modern form emerged around 1873.
  • Table Tennis (1880): Table tennis evolved in the 1870s–1880s but wasn’t formalized until the 1920s.
  • Bobsleigh (1890): British tourists in Switzerland in the late 1880s–1890s developed the sport.
  • Curling (1541): The earliest recorded curling match was in Scotland in 1541.
  • Soccer (Penalty kick in 1863/1891): Soccer rules were codified in 1863, and the penalty kick was introduced in 1891.
  • Swimming (Early 1830s): Competitive swimming began in the 1830s.

The U.S. contributed some important sports

  • Volleyball (1895): William G. Morgan invented volleyball in 1895.
  • American Football (1879): Walter Camp introduced key rules in 1879–1880 at Yale.
  • Baseball (1845): Alexander Cartwright formalized rules and field layout in 1845.
  • Softball (1887): George Hancock in 1887.
  • Basketball (1891–1893): James Naismith invented basketball in 1891, with the original 13 rules; the first hoops and formalized play followed by 1893.

France, Norway, and Canada contributed:

  • Fencing (17th-18th centuries): France refined fencing into a sport in the 17th–18th centuries, introducing the foil and masks.
  • Cycling (1868): France is credited with the first race in Paris in 1868.
  • Skiing (1843): First skiing competition in Norway.
  • Hockey (1875): James Creighn organized the first indoor ice hockey game in Montreal in 1875.


XIII. 43 of the 50 greatest technological “breakthroughs” in history

This is another list on technological inventions but it covers breakthroughs across the span of history, rather than the modern era only. It is based on a 2013 article in The Atlantic based on a list compiled by a panel of 12 scientists, engineers, and historians of technology. This panel came up with the list below of “the 50 greatest breakthroughs since the wheel”. By “breakthrough,” it meant technologies that revolutionized human life. The article portrayed these breakthroughs as “human inventions” without focusing on the nationality of the inventors, or the origin of the inventions.

I asked Grok: “Of the following 50 great inventions in human history, would it be accurate to say that 43 or 44 were invented by men of European ancestry?” Grok replied: “Yes, it would be accurate to say that 43 of the 50 inventions were invented by men of European ancestry, based on primary credited inventors or significant European developments.”

I am leaving the words Grok used to identify European inventions and non-European ones. I will add that while gunpowder, the compass, and the sailboat originated in China, Europeans were responsible for all subsequent innovations of these inventions.

  • The Printing Press – Johannes Gutenberg (Germany, 15th century). European.
  • Electricity – While ancient cultures observed static electricity, its harnessing (e.g., via Michael Faraday’s work on electromagnetism, UK, 19th century) is European.
  • Penicillin – Alexander Fleming (Scotland, 1928). European.
  • Semiconductor Electronics – Pioneered by William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain (USA, 1940s), all of European descent. European.
  • Optical Lenses – Italian monks and scholars (e.g., Salvino D’Armate, 13th century) refined early lenses. European.
  • Paper – Invented in China by Cai Lun (Han Dynasty, 105 CE). Non-European.
  • Internal Combustion Engine – Nikolaus Otto (Germany, 1876). European.
  • Vaccination – Edward Jenner (England, 1796). European.
  • The Internet – Developed by Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn (USA, 1970s), both of European descent. European.
  • The Steam Engine – Thomas Savery and James Watt (England, 17th-18th centuries). European.
  • Nitrogen Fixation – Fritz Haber (Germany, 1910s). European.
  • Sanitation Systems – Roman engineering (e.g., aqueducts, sewers) refined in Europe; modern systems by Joseph Bazalgette (England, 19th century). European.
  • Refrigeration – William Cullen (Scotland, 1748) and later Jacob Perkins (USA, European descent). European.
  • Gunpowder – Invented in China (9th century). Non-European.
  • The Airplane – Wright Brothers (USA, 1903), of European descent. European.
  • The Personal Computer – Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs (USA, 1970s), both of European descent. European.
  • The Compass – Invented in China (Han Dynasty, ~200 BCE). Non-European.
  • The Automobile – Karl Benz (Germany, 1885). European.
  • Industrial Steelmaking – Henry Bessemer (England, 1856). European.
  • The Birth Control Pill – Gregory Pincus (USA, 1950s), of European descent. European.
  • Nuclear Fission – Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann (Germany, 1938). European.
  • The Green Revolution – Norman Borlaug (USA, 1940s-60s), of European descent. European.
  • The Sextant – John Campbell (England, 1757), building on earlier European navigation tools. European.
  • The Telephone – Alexander Graham Bell (Scotland/USA, 1876). European.
  • Alphabetization – Evolved in ancient Greece (e.g., alphabetic script, ~1200 BCE). European.
  • The Telegraph – Samuel Morse (USA, 1830s), of European descent. European.
  • The Mechanized Clock – European monasteries (e.g., Richard of Wallingford, 14th century). European.
  • Radio – Guglielmo Marconi (Italy, 1890s). European.
  • Photography – Louis Daguerre (France, 1830s). European.
  • The Moldboard Plow – Improved in Europe (e.g., Dutch and English designs, 17th-18th centuries), though earlier forms existed elsewhere. European.
  • Archimedes’ Screw – Archimedes (Greece, ~250 BCE). European.
  • The Cotton Gin – Eli Whitney (USA, 1793), of European descent. European.
  • Pasteurization – Louis Pasteur (France, 1860s). European.
  • The Gregorian Calendar – Pope Gregory XIII (Italy, 1582). European.
  • Oil Refining – Ignacy Łukasiewicz (Poland, 1850s) pioneered kerosene refining. European.
  • The Steam Turbine – Charles Parsons (England, 1884). European.
  • Cement – Joseph Aspdin (England, 1824) patented Portland cement. European.
  • Scientific Plant Breeding – Gregor Mendel (Austria, 1860s). European.
  • Oil Drilling – Edwin Drake (USA, 1859), of European descent. European.
  • The Sailboat – Early forms in Mesopotamia and Egypt (~4000 BCE), not Europe. Non-European.
  • Rocketry – Early rockets in China (13th century); modern rocketry by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (Russia, 1900s). European (modern form).
  • Paper Money – Invented in China (Tang Dynasty, 7th century). Non-European.
  • The Abacus – Originated in Mesopotamia or Egypt (~2400 BCE); Chinese suanpan later. Non-European.
  • Air-conditioning – Willis Carrier (USA, 1902), of European descent. European.
  • Television – Philo Farnsworth (USA, 1927), of European descent. European.
  • Anesthesia – Crawford Long (USA, 1842), of European descent. European.
  • The Nail – Ancient, widespread (e.g., Egypt, Mesopotamia); no clear European origin. Non-European.
  • The Lever – Known to ancient civilizations (e.g., Egypt, Mesopotamia); Archimedes (Greece) formalized its use (~250 BCE). European (formalized).
  • The Assembly Line – Henry Ford (USA, 1913), of European descent. European.
  • The Combine Harvester – Hiram Moore (USA, 1834), of European descent. European.

XIV. Europeans Named the Continents

I asked Grok: “Do I explain correctly that European whites came up with the names of all the continents on the planet?” Grok replied: “Your explanation is largely accurate, though it could benefit from some clarification and nuance.” Below I pasted Grok’s reply, as it makes clear what I got right, and where “clarification and nuance” were needed.

1. Africa

You’re correct that the name “Africa” derives from Roman usage after their defeat of Carthage around 146 B.C. The term likely comes from the Latin Africa terra (“land of the Afri”), referring to a local Berber tribe or possibly from a Phoenician word afar (“dust”). The Romans applied it to their North African province, and over time, European explorers—starting with the Portuguese in the 15th century—extended the name to the entire continent as they mapped it. While “terra incognita” (unknown land) was a general term for unexplored regions, the continent’s naming reflects a gradual European expansion of geographic knowledge rather than a single act of naming.

2. Asia

Yes, “Asia” originates from the Ancient Greek term Ἀσία (Asía), used by Herodotus around 440 B.C. It initially referred to Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) or the Persian Empire, distinguishing it from Greece and Egypt. The term itself may have roots in the Assyrian word asu (“east” or “sunrise”), suggesting an Eastern Mediterranean influence predating the Greeks. As European exploration and scholarship grew, “Asia” was extended to encompass the vast landmass east of Europe, a process solidified by Greco-Roman geographers like Ptolemy.

3. Europe

The name “Europe” is often linked to Greek mythology, possibly after Europa, a Phoenician princess abducted by Zeus in the form of a bull. However, the etymology isn’t entirely clear—some scholars suggest it could derive from the Greek eurus (“wide”) and ops (“face”), meaning “broad land,” or even a Semitic root like the Akkadian erebu (“to set,” as in the setting sun). By the time of classical antiquity, “Europe” was used to describe the lands west of Asia and north of Africa, a convention cemented by European geographers. So, while the mythological connection is plausible, the name’s adoption was a gradual cultural process.

4. The Americas

Your summary is spot-on: the Americas were named after Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian explorer who, between 1499 and 1502, recognized that the lands discovered by Columbus were not part of Asia but a distinct “New World.” The name was proposed by German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller in his 1507 map, Universalis Cosmographia. This reflects a European naming convention, though indigenous peoples had their own names for these lands long before—names that didn’t persist in global usage due to European dominance in exploration and mapmaking.

5. Australia

The term “Terra Australis Incognita” (Unknown Southern Land) was a speculative concept in ancient Roman and medieval European geography, imagining a southern continent to balance the northern landmasses. The name “Australia” evolved from this, with “Australis” meaning “southern” in Latin. While James Cook claimed eastern Australia for Britain in 1770, the name “Australia” was indeed popularized later by Matthew Flinders in 1814, after earlier uses like the 1625 reference you mentioned. Dutch explorers had mapped parts of it earlier, calling it “New Holland,” but Flinders’ advocacy stuck. This was a distinctly European naming effort.

6. Antarctica

“Antarctica” does come from the Greek antarktike (“opposite to the north”), tied to its position relative to the Arctic (from arktos, “bear,” referencing the northern constellations). While the continent wasn’t fully mapped until the 19th century, the name is credited to European cartographic tradition, with Scottish cartographer John George Bartholomew often associated with its formal adoption around the 1890s. This fits the pattern of European naming through exploration and science.

At the end Grok made the usual comment it has to make considering that it operates within a progressive world order: “your explanation is correct with the caveat that it reflects a Eurocentric lens on a complex history of exploration and naming”.

XV. Almost all the top “groundbreaking” medical advances

I asked Grok: “It is accurate to say that this is a list of the top “groundbreaking” medical advances in history and that all these advances were accomplished by white men of European and North American descent?” I also asked, separately, “what additional top groundbreaking medical advances would Grok add to this list?”

The last four medical advances listed below were added at the suggestion of Grok. I did not add mRNA Vaccines. Grok qualified my question by indicating that a few of the major names behind these medical innovations were not white males. Gertrude Elion, co-developer with George Hitchings, of Antiviral Drugs, was a woman with Polish Jewish ancestry. Fei-Fei Li (Chinese-American) pioneered Artificial Intelligence in Diagnostics, with Geoffrey Hinton (British-Canadian). Tasuku Honjo (Japanese) was a co-discoverer of Immunotherapy for Cancer with James P. Allison (American). Two white females, Emmanuelle Charpentier (French) and Jennifer Doudna (American), are known as major figures behind CRISPR Gene Editing. In the case of Blood Transfusion, Grok named James Blundell as the first who performed blood transfusion, while it added that “Charles Drew, an African American physician, later developed blood banking in the 1940s, significantly advancing transfusion practices.”

All in all, then, except for two Asian co-participants, one Jewish women, two white females, and one mixed race African-American, white European men were responsible for almost all the medical breakthroughs. Below is the list, using mostly Grok’s words regarding nationality and nature of the advance.

  • Stethoscope: Invented by René Laennec, a French physician, in 1816. Laennec was a white man of European descent. Revolutionized diagnosis by allowing doctors to listen to internal sounds.
  • X-Rays: Discovered by Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, a German physicist, in 1895. Roentgen was a white man of European descent. Enabled non-invasive visualization of the body’s interior.
  • Germ Theory: Established primarily by Louis Pasteur, a French chemist, in the mid-19th century, with contributions from Robert Koch, a German physician. Both were white men of European descent. Fundamentally changed medicine by linking microorganisms to disease.
  • Blood Transfusion: The first successful human transfusion was performed by James Blundell, an English physician, in 1818. Blundell was a white man of European descent. Charles Drew, an African American physician, later developed blood banking in the 1940s, significantly advancing transfusion practices.
  • Ophthalmoscope: Invented by Hermann von Helmholtz, a German physician and physicist, in 1851. Helmholtz was a white man of European descent. Allowed direct examination of the retina, advancing eye care.
  • Anaesthesia: William Morton, an American dentist, demonstrated ether anaesthesia publicly in 1846. Morton was a white man of North American descent. Transformed surgery by eliminating pain during procedures.
  • Organ Transplants: The first successful kidney transplant was performed by Joseph Murray, an American surgeon, in 1954. Murray was a white man of North American descent. Pioneered life-saving replacement of failing organs.
  • Antiseptic Surgical Methods: Introduced by Joseph Lister, a British surgeon, in the 1860s. Lister was a white man of European descent. Reduced infections, improving surgical outcomes.
  • Vaccines: The first vaccine (smallpox) was developed by Edward Jenner, an English physician, in 1796. Jenner was a white man of European descent. Prevented countless deaths from infectious diseases.
  • Catheter: The modern medical catheter was developed by David S. Sheridan, an American inventor, in the 1940s. Sheridan was a white man of North American descent. Improved medical procedures like drainage and drug delivery.
  • Antiviral Drugs: Gertrude Elion, an American biochemist, co-developed acyclovir in the 1970s with George Hitchings. Elion was a woman with Jewish ancestry. Provided treatments for viral infections previously untreatable.
  • Microscopy: The compound microscope is credited to Zacharias Janssen, a Dutch spectacle maker, in the late 16th century. Janssen was a white man of European descent. Enabled the discovery of cells and microorganisms.
  • CT Scans: Developed by Godfrey Hounsfield, a British engineer, in the 1970s. Hounsfield was a white man of European descent. Advanced diagnostic imaging with detailed internal views.
  • Penicillin: Discovered by Alexander Fleming, a Scottish bacteriologist, in 1928. Fleming was a white man of European descent, though its development involved Howard Florey, Ernst Chain (both white men), and Dorothy Hodgkin (a white woman who determined its structure). Introduced antibiotics, revolutionizing infection treatment.
  • CRISPR Gene Editing: The major names are Emmanuelle Charpentier (French, b. 1968) and Jennifer Doudna (American, b. 1964). A revolutionary technology allowing precise editing of DNA for treating genetic diseases.
  • Artificial Intelligence in Diagnostics: Pioneered by Geoffrey Hinton (British-Canadian, b. 1947), and Fei-Fei Li (Chinese-American, b. 1976). Enhanced diagnostic accuracy and speed.
  • Robotic Surgery: The key figure is Frederic Moll (American, b. 1951). Allow for minimally invasive procedures with greater precision.
  • Immunotherapy for Cancer: Discoverers of immune checkpoint pathways are James P. Allison (American, b. 1948) and Tasuku Honjo (Japanese, b. 1942), who won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering immune checkpoint pathways. Turned some terminal cancers into manageable conditions.

XVI. All the Greatest Theater Playwrights

I asked Grok: “Can it be reasonably argued that the following playwrights, all white men, are the greatest, most original, and widely recognized by their peers?” Let’s not be naive, Grok collects its data from a Western world that has been progressively liberal for over 100 years. Yet, despite this, Grok could not but admit that my list of the greatest playwrights is fundamentally accurate and quite complete. “It seems likely that these playwrights are among the greatest and most original in Western theater, given their widespread recognition and influence. Research suggests they were widely admired by their peers, with many receiving praise and awards during their lifetimes.”

Grok added, however, that I should include “equally significant non-white and female playwrights, like August Wilson or Caryl Churchill”. In my estimation, Wilson and Churchill, a black and a woman, don’t belong in a list of the “greatest”. Grok’s argument that “the list’s exclusivity to white men reflects historical biases, and acknowledging other voices enriches the discussion, ensuring a more comprehensive view of theatrical greatness”, is based on the pervasive influence of political correctness and DEI in the West. I kept the original list except that I added Grok’s identification of the nationalities of the names, and what each name is recognized for.

      • Aeschylus
        • Nationality: Greek
        • Birth: circa 525 BC
        • Greatness/Originality: Considered the father of tragedy, Aeschylus introduced the second actor to the stage, enabling more complex dialogue and plot development, and reduced the chorus’s role, laying the foundation for dramatic structure.
      • Sophocles
        • Nationality: Greek
        • Birth: circa 496 BC
        • Greatness/Originality: Added the third actor, enhancing dramatic possibilities, and focused on character-driven narratives with deep psychological insight, as seen in masterpieces like Oedipus Rex.
      • Euripides
        • Nationality: Greek
        • Birth: circa 480 BC
        • Greatness/Originality: Known for realistic portrayals and strong, complex characters (often women and slaves), he challenged societal norms, making his works both controversial and influential.
      • Menander
        • Nationality: Greek
        • Birth: circa 342 BC
        • Greatness/Originality: A leading figure in New Comedy, Menander focused on everyday life and human relationships with wit and subtlety, influencing later Roman and European comedic traditions.
      • Plautus
        • Nationality: Roman
        • Birth: circa 254 BC
        • Greatness/Originality: A master of comedy, he adapted Greek plays for Roman audiences, emphasizing farce and slapstick humor, influencing the development of European comedic traditions.
      • Hrosvitha of Gandersheim
        • Nationality: German (Saxon)
        • Birth: circa 935 AD
        • Greatness/Originality: The first known female playwright, Hrosvitha wrote Christian-themed plays in Latin, adapting Terence’s comedic style to promote moral and religious values, a pioneering effort in medieval drama.
      • Ludovico Ariosto
        • Nationality: Italian
        • Birth: 1474
        • Greatness/Originality: Best known for his epic poem Orlando Furioso, Ariosto also wrote comedies that bridged medieval and Renaissance theatre, blending classical influences with Italian innovation.
      • Lope de Vega
        • Nationality: Spanish
        • Birth: 1562
        • Greatness/Originality: Incredibly prolific (writing hundreds of plays), he established the three-act structure in Spanish theatre and skillfully blended comedy and tragedy.
      • William Shakespeare
        • Nationality: English
        • Birth: 1564
        • Greatness/Originality: Shakespeare’s unparalleled poetic language and profound understanding of human nature shine through his tragedies, comedies, and histories, making him a timeless figure in world literature.
      • Ben Jonson
        • Nationality: English
        • Birth: 1572
        • Greatness/Originality: Excelled in satirical comedies, developing the “theory of humours” and critiquing society sharply in works like Volpone.
      • Pedro Calderón de la Barca
        • Nationality: Spanish
        • Birth: 1600
        • Greatness/Originality: Explored philosophical and theological themes, such as free will and destiny, with his masterpiece Life is a Dream being a pinnacle of Spanish Golden Age drama.
      • Pierre Corneille
        • Nationality: French
        • Birth: 1606
        • Greatness/Originality: His tragedies, like Le Cid, set new standards for French drama, blending heroic ideals with emotional conflict.
      • Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin)
        • Nationality: French
        • Birth: 1622
        • Greatness/Originality: A master of comedy, he satirized societal hypocrisies in plays like Tartuffe and The Misanthrope, which remain enduring classics.
      • Jean Racine
        • Nationality: French
        • Birth: 1639
        • Greatness/Originality: Crafted tragedies with precise, elegant language and intense psychological depth, often drawing from Greek and Roman myths.
      • Henrik Ibsen
        • Nationality: Norwegian
        • Birth: 1828
        • Greatness/Originality: The father of modern drama, he introduced realism to the stage, tackling social issues and individual psychology in works like A Doll’s House.
      • George Bernard Shaw
        • Nationality: Irish
        • Birth: 1856
        • Greatness/Originality: Used wit and provocation to advocate social reform in plays like Pygmalion, blending entertainment with intellectual depth.
      • Anton Chekhov
        • Nationality: Russian
        • Birth: 1860
        • Greatness/Originality: Revolutionized drama with his focus on subtext and the inner lives of characters, as seen in The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard.
      • Luigi Pirandello
        • Nationality: Italian
        • Birth: 1867
        • Greatness/Originality: Explored identity and reality, blurring fiction and truth, most notably in Six Characters in Search of an Author.
      • Eugene O’Neill
        • Nationality: American
        • Birth: 1888
        • Greatness/Originality: The first American playwright to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, he revitalized tragedy in works like Long Day’s Journey into Night.
      • Bertolt Brecht
        • Nationality: German
        • Birth: February 10, 1898
        • Greatness/Originality: Developed epic theatre, using distancing effects to provoke critical thinking, with politically charged works like Mother Courage and Her Children.
      • Federico García Lorca
        • Nationality: Spanish
        • Birth: June 5, 1898
        • Greatness/Originality: Fused surrealism with traditional Spanish themes, creating passionate, lyrical dramas like Blood Wedding.
      • Samuel Beckett
        • Nationality: Irish
        • Birth: 1906
        • Greatness/Originality: A Theatre of the Absurd pioneer, he explored existential themes with minimalist settings in plays like Waiting for Godot.
      • Eugène Ionesco
        • Nationality: Romanian-French
        • Birth: 1909
        • Greatness/Originality: Used absurdity and illogical scenarios to critique conformity, as exemplified in Rhinoceros.

XVII. White Men Engineered and Designed the Best Airplanes

I asked Grok: “Can one reasonably argue that European (including Russian and American) white men originated, engineered, and designed almost all the best airplanes in history; and that the following, which includes a Japanese airplane, are among the best ever engineered.”

Grok replied: “Yes, one can reasonably argue that European (including Russian and American) white men originated, engineered, and designed ‘almost all’ the best airplanes in history, given their overwhelming representation among aviation’s most iconic designs. Your list supports this, with the Mitsubishi A6M Zero as a notable exception that doesn’t undermine the broader pattern. The claim holds due to historical and industrial realities, though it’s worth noting that global contributions (e.g., Japan, later Soviet designs) add nuance to the narrative. The listed aircraft, with minor clarification (e.g., “Shturmovik Dreamliner”), are indeed among history’s finest, reinforcing the argument.”

Grok actually reinforces my argument, agreeing that “the Mitsubishi A6M Zero” stands “as the notable exception from Japan”, while reminding me that “Japan’s aviation industry was heavily influenced by Western technology and ideas, though it adapted them brilliantly.”

Grok makes the well-known point that European whites were responsible for the origination of aviation, “its foundational developments occurring primarily in Europe and the United States. The Wright Flyer (1903), credited to the Wright brothers (American), marked the first powered, controlled flight, setting the stage for subsequent innovations. Most early aviation pioneers—e.g., Louis Blériot (French, Blériot XI), Glenn Curtiss (American), and later figures like Donald Douglas (American, DC-3) or Willy Messerschmitt (German, Bf-109, Me-262)—were indeed of European descent or from European-derived populations in America”.

Below I simply pasted what Grok said about my list.

“Let’s examine the aircraft you listed to see how they align with the claim:

  • Cessna 172 (USA): Designed by Cessna, an American company, led by engineers like Dwayne Wallace.
  • Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star (USA): Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, an American of Swedish descent, led its design.
  • Learjet 23 (USA): William Lear, American, pioneered this business jet.
  • B-29 Superfortress (USA): Boeing’s American team, under figures like Edward Wells, engineered this WWII bomber.
  • Bell X-1 (USA): American engineers at Bell, with input from NACA (e.g., Walter Williams), broke the sound barrier.
  • Lockheed C-130 Hercules (USA): Another Kelly Johnson design, iconic for its versatility.
  • Douglas DC-3 (USA): Donald Douglas, American, created this revolutionary transport.
  • Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress (USA): Boeing’s American team, led by E. Gifford Emery and others.
  • Boeing 747 (USA): Joe Sutter, American, spearheaded this jumbo jet.
  • F-35 (USA): Lockheed Martin’s multinational effort, but primarily American-led.
  • MQ-1 Predator (USA): General Atomics, American, developed this drone.
  • RV-3 (USA): A homebuilt design by American Richard VanGrunsven.
  • F-16 Fighting Falcon (USA): General Dynamics (now Lockheed Martin), American engineers like Harry Hillaker.
  • Wright Flyer (USA): The Wright brothers, American pioneers.
  • Blériot XI (France): Louis Blériot, French, flew across the English Channel.
  • Focke-Wulf Fw 190 (Germany): Kurt Tank, German, designed this WWII fighter.
  • British Spitfire (UK): Reginald Mitchell, British, crafted this legendary plane.
  • P-51 Mustang (USA): North American Aviation, led by Edgar Schmued (German-born, American).
  • Messerschmitt Bf-109 (Germany): Willy Messerschmitt, German, WWII mainstay.
  • Messerschmitt Me-262 (Germany): First operational jet fighter, also Messerschmitt.
  • Mitsubishi A6M Zero (Japan): Jiro Horikoshi, Japanese, a standout non-Western design.
  • Shturmovik Dreamliner (?): Likely a mix-up. The Ilyushin Il-2 Shturmovik (USSR, Sergey Ilyushin) was a Soviet ground-attack plane; “Dreamliner” is Boeing’s 787 (USA). Assuming Il-2, it’s Russian.
  • Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird (USA): Kelly Johnson again, American.
  • Cirrus SR22 (USA): Klapmeier brothers, American, modern light aircraft.
  • Lockheed Constellation (USA): Kelly Johnson and team, American.”

XIX. The 50 Greatest Philosophers

I did not follow Grok’s claim that I missed some non-European philosophers, and a few females, though Grok agreed that most philosophers have been men of European ancestry. I would have included non-Europeans in a list of about 100, but not in a list of 50, for the following reason: Philosophy began with the Pre-Socratics when we witness for the first time in world history speculations on the nature of things with self-conscious appeals to the use of human reason as the vehicle to attain truth, rather than relying, without reflection, on taken-for-granted kinship norms, set traditions, or revelations by gods. It is not only that the ancient Greeks posed critical questions — “Is there some substance or some basic stuff out of which everything is made?”—but that their answers consisted of reasoned arguments.

The list below, therefore, exclude thinkers, mythical figures, religious prophets, or declarations based on faith, apologetics, or beliefs devoid of sound reasoning. With the exception of Islamic Aristotelians, there were no sustained inquiries “into the nature of knowledge and how it is acquired” outside the European world. While there were “inquiries into the nature of reality and existence” and into “what is good,” there were no treatises on what constitutes valid and sound reasoning.

Indian philosophy was inextricably tied to India’s religious traditions, and was never conceived as a separate intellectual pursuit. Confucianism is not a philosophy, but a doctrine of moral advice, or a guide for proper moral behavior for the scholar gentry class of China’s bureaucratic state. Chinese philosophers, as a whole, were accustomed to express themselves in the form of aphorisms, apothegms, or allusions, and illustrations, lacking demonstrative reasoning and clearly-stated primary premises.

It is not that this list abides solely by the criteria that a philosopher must be a rationalist or logician, engaged in deductive or inductive reasoning, as the ultimate path to the discovery of the nature of things. The Western philosophical tradition, actually, contains the most reasoned critiques of the pretensions of reason in favor of alternative ways of finding meaning and making sense of the universe—intuitive, poetical, artistic, archetypal ways. The difference is that those philosophers who pointed to the limitations of reason would go on to develop alternative methodologies, or fully articulated philosophies, such as hermeneutics, phenomenology, and existentialism—by individuals well-educated in the Western rationalist and empiricist traditions. This accounts for the variety of philosophers listed below, some of whom I don’t like but are nevertheless recognized as great by some of the many sources I have read.

  1. Abelard (1079–1142)
  2. Anaximander (b. 610 BC)
  3. Anselm (1033–1109)
  4. Aquinas (1225–1274)
  5. Aristotle (384–322 BC)
  6. Augustine (354–430)
  7. Bacon, Roger (1214–1292)
  8. Bacon, Francis (1561–1626)
  9. Bentham (1748–1832)
  10. Berkeley (1685–1753)
  11. Carnap (1891–1970)
  12. Democritus (460–360 BC)
  13. Deleuze (1925–1995)
  14. Derrida (1930–2004)
  15. Descartes (1596–1650)
  16. Fichte (1762–1814)
  17. Frege (1848–1925)
  18. Hegel (1770–1831)
  19. Heidegger (1889–1976)
  20. Heraclitus (535–475 BC)
  21. Hobbes (1588–1679)
  22. Hume (1711–1776)
  23. Husserl (1859–1938)
  24. James (1842–1910)
  25. Kant (1724–1804)
  26. Leibniz (1646–1716)
  27. Locke (1632–1704)
  28. Marx (1818–83)
  29. Mill (1806–73)
  30. Nietzsche (1844–1900)
  31. Ockham (1285–1347)
  32. Parmenides (b. 501 BC)
  33. Peirce (1839–1914)
  34. Plato (428–348 BC)
  35. Plotinus (204–270)
  36. Pythagoras (570–495 BC)
  37. Quine (1908–2000)
  38. Rawls (1921–2002)
  39. Reid (1710–1796)
  40. Rousseau (1712–1778
  41. Russell (1872–1970)
  42. Sartre (1905–1980)
  43. Schelling (1775–1854)
  44. Schopenhauer (1788–1860)
  45. Duns Scotus (1266–1308)
  46. Socrates (470–399 BC)
  47. Spinoza (1632–1677)
  48. Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
  49. Zeno of Lea (b. 489 BC)
  50. Žižek (1949–)

XX. All 21 Greatest Books on Science — Except 1

Grok agreed that “this list is very accurate as a representation of the greatest books in science, particularly if we interpret ‘greatest’ as historically foundational and influential up to the 19th century.” I wanted a list that covered the major fields of scientific inquiry, rather than three or four, without affecting the quality of choices. The two changes I made to the original list was to replace Leonhart Fuchs’s Notable Commentaries on the History of Plants (1542) with Ptolemy’s Almagest. Grok said that Fuchs’s Notable Commentaries was “less groundbreaking than, say, Mendel’s work on genetics (though not a book) or Watson and Crick’s “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids” (a paper, not a book).” Since these two works are papers, not books, I decided that the obvious book to stand as a substitute was Ptolemy’s Almagest. Grok noted that the list did not include books from the 20th century; however, the books Grok suggested are not, in my estimation, at the same peak level of “revolutionary” or “influential” as the ones listed here. I did, however, decide to substitute one of the two books I had listed from Newton, Opticks, with Marxwell’s A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. I had not included Albert Einstein’s Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (1916), for the sake of provocation, but have added it now.

  1. Physics – Aristotle (4th Century BCE)
  2. Almagest – Ptolemy (2nd Century)
  3. On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres – Nicolaus Copernicus (1543)
  4. On the Fabric of the Human Body – Andreas Vesalius (1543).
  5. De Re Metallica – Georgius Agricola (1556).
  6. On the Magnet – William Gilbert (1600)
  7. Harmony of the World – Johannes Kepler (1619)
  8. Novum Organum – Francis Bacon (1620)
  9. An Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Living Beings – William Harvey (1628)
  10. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems – Galileo Galilei (1632)
  11. Discourse on the Method – René Descartes (1637)
  12. The Sceptical Chymist – Robert Boyle (1661)
  13. Micrographia – Robert Hooke (1665)
  14. Principia Mathematica – Isaac Newton (1687)
  15. Treatise on Light – Christiaan Huygens (1690)
  16. Systema Naturae – Carl Linnaeus (1735)
  17. Theory of the Earth – James Hutton (1788)
  18. Elements of Chemistry – Antoine Lavoisier (1789)
  19. On the Origin of Species – Charles Darwin (1859)
  20. A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism – James Clerk Maxwell (1873)
  21. Relativity: The Special and the General Theory – Albert Einstein (1916)

XXI. Almost 100% of the Greatest Architects are European Men

This is a list of the greatest architects with identifiable names from the Gothic period to the early 2oth century, ending with Art Nouveau and Art Deco. I asked Grok if this was a “reasonably accurate list of architects with identifiable names, which is not the case for most architecture outside the Western world. This is why this list is overwhelmingly of men of European descent. The only non-Western architect I would find is Mimar Sinan.”

Grok replied: “This is a reasonably accurate list of the greatest architects in history from the Gothic to the early 20th century, including Art Nouveau and Art Deco architects…It is a strong and reasonably accurate compilation, particularly given your focus on architects with identifiable names. As you noted, this naturally skews the list toward men of European descent, since historical records outside the Western world often lack individual attribution. The inclusion of Mimar Sinan as the sole non-Western architect is a thoughtful exception, reflecting his monumental contributions, such as the Süleymaniye Mosque, which rival the best of European architecture.”

The list below has been improved by Grok’s identification of the full names of a few architects, its observation that two names were “landscape architects, rather than rather than building designers,” its judgment that three names were not major architects, and its observation that I had omitted some 5 great architects.

I also asked Grok to organize the list in chronological order, according to birth and death of the architects, within the respective architectural movements or subheadings I had provided.

This list is not a denial of great architecture outside the Western world. The civilizations of the Mayans, Aztecs, and Incas saw impressive “monumental” stone buildings, pyramids and temples, constructed at the behest of state officials, which deserve much admiration. But these architectural attainments were a one-time affair in their originality, deserving only one chapter or section in a survey of the history of world architecture. The architecture of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Persia is more impressive than that of the Americas, but not on the same aesthetic and geometrical level of harmony as the ancient Greek Parthenon of Athens, built in the mid-fifth century BC, the Doric Temple of Zeus at Olympia (460 BC), or the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion (440 BC). It is certainly below the level of proficiency and beauty attained by the ancient Romans.

In fairness to non-Western architecture, however, I decided to leave out Classical (Greece and Rome) and Romanesque architecture.

India saw great architectural styles, Jain Architecture (early medieval times, with delicate marble carvings characterized by precision; Vesara Architecture (7th–13th century CE), with detailed friezes and balanced proportions; Indo-Islamic Architecture (starting in the 12th century CE) best known for Taj Mahal. In China there were different styles, “Garden Architecture,” “Buddhist Architecture,” “Taoist Architecture,” or “Confucian Architecture”. It is hard, however, to hide the standardized, bureaucratic reality of Chinese architcture. The classical Chinese language has no word for “architect,” only one for a person who engages in the craft of building. The standards were sanctioned and guarded by the Chinese court, and the government was the sponsor of all major manuals that dealt with official architecture. Craftsmen were not required to be literate, only to follow prescribed modules and methods so as to ensure that court dictums were followed.

All in all, there was a lot less variety of architectural styles in the non-Western world. Once certain styles were established, little originality followed: no or few new epochs in aesthetics, without major individual architects to identify. In contrast, Europeans originated a continuous sequence of major architectural stylistic periods (within which there were other national styles): Classical (850 BC–AD 476), Romanesque (AD 900–1200), Gothic (1100s–1500s), Renaissance (1300s–1600s), Baroque (late 1500s–late 1600s), Rococo (1700–1760), Neoclassicism (1760–1830), Victorian-Eclecticism-Restoration (1815–1900), Art Nouveau (1890–1910), Art Deco (1915–1930), Modernism (early 1900s–1980s).

I have grouped the styles listed above under fewer movements/ headings for simplification.

Gothic Architects (prevalent in Europe from the 12th to the 16th centuries).

  • Abbot Suger (c. 1081 – 1151) Known for his role in the development of Gothic architecture at the Basilica of Saint-Denis.
  • William of Sens (c. 1120 – late 12th century) Worked on the reconstruction of Canterbury Cathedral in the 1170s.
  • Robert de Luzarches (c. 1180 – mid-13th century) Architect of Amiens Cathedral, begun in 1220.
  • Villard de Honnecourt (c. 1200 – c. 1250) Known for 13th-century sketchbook documenting Gothic construction techniques.
  • Arnolfo di Cambio (c. 1240 – 1302) Italian architect involved in the design of Florence Cathedral.
  • Erwin von Steinbach (c. 1244 – 1318) Worked on Strasbourg Cathedral, a masterpiece of Gothic architecture.
  • Henry Yevele (c. 1320 – 1400) Prominent English architect, active in the 14th century, known for work on Westminster Abbey.
  • Peter Parler (1330 – 1399) German architect who contributed to Saint Vitus Cathedral in Prague.

Renaissance Architects (the 14th to 17th centuries)

  • Filippo Brunelleschi (1377 – 1446) Pioneered Renaissance architecture with the dome of Florence Cathedral.
  • Michelozzo di Bartolomeo (1396 – 1472) Collaborated with Brunelleschi and designed the Palazzo Medici Riccardi.
  • Leon Battista Alberti (1404 – 1472) Architect and theorist, known for the façade of Santa Maria Novella.
  • Donato Bramante (1444 – 1514) Designed the Tempietto and contributed to St. Peter’s Basilica.
  • Giuliano da Sangallo (1445 – 1516) Known for the Villa Medici at Poggio a Caiano.
  • Michelangelo (1475 – 1564) Renowned artist and architect, designed the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica.
  • Baldassare Peruzzi (1481 – 1536) Designed the Villa Farnesina in Rome.
  • Michele Sanmicheli (1484 – 1559) Known for fortifications and palaces in Verona.
  • Jacopo Sansovino (1486 – 1570) Principal architect in Venice, designed the Biblioteca Marciana.
  • Mimar Sinan (1489 – 1588) Ottoman architect, famous for the Süleymaniye Mosque.
  • Giulio Romano (c. 1499 – 1546) Designed the Palazzo Te in Mantua.
  • Giacomo Vignola (1507 – 1573) Known for the Villa Farnese and the Church of the Gesù.
  • Andrea Palladio (1508 – 1580) Influential architect, designed the Villa Rotonda and Palladian buildings.
  • Philibert de l’Orme (c. 1510 – 1570) French architect, known for the Château d’Anet.
  • Giacomo Della Porta (c. 1533 – 1602) Completed the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica.
  • Vincenzo Scamozzi (1548 – 1616) Successor to Palladio, designed the Teatro Olimpico.

Baroque Architects (late 16th to the 18th century)

  • Carlo Maderno (1556 – 1629)
    Designed the façade of St. Peter’s Basilica.
  • Inigo Jones (1573 – 1652)
    Introduced Palladianism to England with the Queen’s House.
  • Pietro da Cortona (1596 – 1669)
    Known for the Church of Santi Luca e Martina in Rome.
  • Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598 – 1680)
    Architect and sculptor, designed St. Peter’s Square.
  • François Mansart (1598 – 1666)
    Known for the Château de Maisons-Laffitte.
  • Francesco Borromini (1599 – 1667)
    Designed San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome.
  • Alonso Cano (1601 – 1667)
    Spanish architect, worked on Granada Cathedral.
  • Louis Le Vau (1612 – 1670)
    Designed the Palace of Versailles (early phases).
  • André Le Nôtre (1613 – 1700)
    Landscape architect, designed the gardens of Versailles.
  • Sir Christopher Wren (1632 – 1723)
    Rebuilt St. Paul’s Cathedral after the Great Fire of London.
  • Jules Hardouin-Mansart (1646 – 1708)
    Expanded Versailles and designed Les Invalides (note: listed as “Jules Mansart” in the query).
  • Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach (1656 – 1723)
    Austrian architect, designed Schönbrunn Palace (note: listed as “Johann von Erlach” in the query).
  • Jakob Prandtauer (1660 – 1726)
    Designed Melk Abbey in Austria.
  • Johann Dientzenhofer (1663 – 1726)
    Part of the Dientzenhofer family, worked on Bohemian Baroque buildings.
  • Andreas Schlüter (1664 – 1714)
    German architect and sculptor, designed the Berlin Palace.
  • Sir John Vanbrugh (1664 – 1726)
    Designed Blenheim Palace in England.
  • Pedro de Ribera (1681 – 1742)
    Spanish architect, known for the Hospice of San Fernando.
  • Johann Balthasar Neumann (1687 – 1753)
    Designed the Würzburg Residence.
  • Joseph Emanuel Fischer von Erlach (1693 – 1742)
    Son of Johann Bernhard, completed works like the Karlskirche in Vienna.
  • Bartolomeo Rastrelli (1700 – 1771)
    Designed the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.

Neoclassical Architects (18th century)

  • Hans Georg von Knobelsdorff (1699 – 1753)
    Designed Sanssouci Palace in Potsdam (note: listed after Nash in the query but placed here by birth date).
  • Jacques Germain Soufflot (1713 – 1780)
    Designed the Panthéon in Paris.
  • Carl Gotthard Langhans (1732 – 1808)
    Designed the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.
  • Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736 – 1806)
    Known for his utopian architectural designs.
  • Jean Chalgrin (1739 – 1811)
    Designed the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.
  • Thomas Jefferson (1743 – 1826)
    American statesman and architect, designed Monticello.
  • Charles Cameron (1745 – 1812)
    Worked in Russia, designed Pavlovsk Palace.
  • John Nash (1752 – 1835)
    Designed Regent’s Park and Buckingham Palace expansions.
  • William Thornton (1759 – 1828)
    Designed the United States Capitol.
  • Charles Bulfinch (1763 – 1844)
    First American-born professional architect, designed the Massachusetts State House.
  • Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1764 – 1820)
    Contributed to the U.S. Capitol and Baltimore Basilica.
  • Sir Robert Smirke (1780 – 1867)
    Designed the British Museum in London.
  • Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781 – 1841)
    Designed the Altes Museum in Berlin.

Victorian, Gothic Revival, Art Nouveau, and Art Deco Architects (from the 19th to early 20th centuries)

  • Sir Charles Barry (1795 – 1860)
    Victorian architect, designed the Palace of Westminster.
  • Richard Upjohn (1802 – 1878)
    Gothic Revival architect, designed Trinity Church in New York.
  • George Gilbert Scott (1811 – 1878)
    Gothic Revival architect, designed the Albert Memorial.
  • Augustus Pugin (1812 – 1852)
    Gothic Revival pioneer, collaborated on the Palace of Westminster.
  • Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (1814 – 1879)
    Gothic Revival theorist, restored Notre-Dame de Paris.
  • James Renwick (1818 – 1895)
    Gothic Revival architect, designed St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.
  • Charles Garnier (1825 – 1898)
    Victorian-era architect, designed the Paris Opéra.
  • Richard Morris Hunt (1827 – 1895)
    Designed the Biltmore Estate in the Victorian style.
  • Gustave Eiffel (1832 – 1923)
    Engineer and architect, designed the Eiffel Tower.
  • William Le Baron Jenney (1832 – 1907)
    Pioneer of skyscraper design in Chicago.
  • George Brown Post (1837 – 1913)
    Victorian architect, designed the New York Stock Exchange.
  • Henry Hobson Richardson (1838 – 1886)
    Developed the Richardsonian Romanesque style.
  • Otto Wagner (1841 – 1918)
    Transitional figure, bridged Victorian and Art Nouveau styles.
  • Daniel Burnham (1846 – 1912)
    Part of Burnham and Root, designed the Flatiron Building.
  • John Root (1850 – 1891)
    Partner in Burnham and Root, contributed to Chicago’s early skyscrapers.
  • Antoni Gaudí (1852 – 1926)
    Art Nouveau architect, designed the Sagrada Família.
  • Martin Roche (1853 – 1927)
    Part of Holabird & Roche, designed early skyscrapers.
  • William Holabird (1854 – 1923)
    Partner in Holabird & Roche, influenced Chicago School architecture.
  • Louis Sullivan (1856 – 1924)
    Chicago School architect, known as the “father of skyscrapers.”
  • Cass Gilbert (1859 – 1934)
    Designed the Woolworth Building, blending Gothic Revival and early skyscraper design.
  • Alphonse Mucha (1860 – 1939)
    Primarily an artist, included here for Art Nouveau influence.
  • Victor Horta (1861 – 1947)
    Art Nouveau architect, designed the Hôtel Tassel in Brussels.
  • Henry van de Velde (1863 – 1957)
    Art Nouveau and early modernist architect and designer.
  • Joseph Maria Olbrich (1867 – 1908)
    Art Nouveau architect, designed the Secession Building in Vienna.
  • Hector Guimard (1867 – 1942)
    Art Nouveau architect, designed Paris Métro entrances.
  • Frank Lloyd Wright (1867 – 1959)
    Began in the late Victorian era, later influenced modern architecture.
  • Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868 – 1928)
    Art Nouveau architect, designed the Glasgow School of Art.
  • Peter Behrens (1868 – 1940)
    Transitional figure between Art Nouveau and modernism.
  • Adolf Loos (1870 – 1933)
    Early modernist, rejected Art Nouveau ornamentation.
  • Raymond Hood (1881 – 1934)
    Art Deco architect, designed the Rockefeller Center.
  • William Van Alen (1883 – 1954)
    Art Deco architect, designed the Chrysler Building.
  • Walter Gropius (1883 – 1969)
    Founder of the Bauhaus, bridged early 20th-century styles.
  • Ralph Walker (1889 – 1973)
    Art Deco architect, designed the AT&T Building in New York.

XXII. 18.5 of the Greatest 22 Modern Logicians are European with 3.5 Jews

There is a series, Handbook of the History of Logic, which consists of 11 volumes, of which only the first volume, mostly about Aristotle’s logic, has two chapters about nonwhite contributions to logic, namely, Indian and Arabic logic, with every other volume singularly dedicated to Western logic. The Chinese had no logic. I asked Grok, firstly, whether the following list was “leaving out some of the greatest modern logicians,” and, secondly, whether it would be “accurate to say that the following men of European ancestry, including Jewish ancestry, represent all the greatest modern logicians.”

Grok agreed that this “list contains many of the most influential and celebrated logicians in the history of the field…aligning with the ‘modern’ era.” In response to the two questions, Grok mentioned the following “notable omissions” (European and Jewish) and “notable” women and non-European logicians. After further research, I decided to add i) Stephen Kleene (American of European ancestry), as he is “widely considered to be one of the greatest logicians of the 20th century”; ii) Jaakko Hintikka (Finnish ancestry) for his very significant contributions to “modal and philosophical logic”; iii) Haskell Curry (American logician of European ancestry), as a “highly influential and prominent logician”; and Saharon Shelah (Jewish ancestry), “widely considered one of the greatest logicians”.

Although Grok mentioned these names, but I did not include Alfred North Whitehead (British) since he is best classified as a philosopher of mathematics. Emil Post (1897-1954, Jewish Heritage) is not included either since he is generally rated as a “significant and influential figure in the field of computability,” but is not recognized as one of the top logicians. Andrey Kolmogorov (1903-1987, Russian ancestry) is not primarily known as a logician, but as a great mathematician, already included in the list of greatest mathematicians. Likewise, Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920, Indian) is already included in the list of greatest mathematicians. The woman Emmy Noether (1882–1935, Jewish ancestry), as Grok admits, “is not primarily a logician”. Julia Robinson (1919–1985, American) is really a mathematician; and Hao Wang (1921–1995, Chinese), is significant but not a top logician.

The list contains 22 logicians, of which 18 are of European ancestry and 4 of Jewish ancestry, though Cantor’s Jewish ancestry is through his paternal line only. Some may argue that all 22 logicians are of European ancestry to the extent that Ashkenazi Jews are considered of European ancestry due to their historical roots in Eastern Europe.

  • Bernhard Bolzano (1781-1848)
    • Nationality: German-Italian
    • Achievements: Made early contributions to logic and mathematics, notably the Bolzano-Weierstrass theorem, which is fundamental in real analysis.
  • George Boole (1815-1864)
    • Nationality: British
    • Achievements: Developed Boolean algebra, a cornerstone of computer science and digital logic design.
  • C. S. Peirce (1839-1914)
    • Nationality: American
    • Achievements: Contributed to the development of quantifiers in logic and semiotics; influential in the philosophical school of pragmatism.
  • Georg Cantor (1845-1918)
    • Nationality: German (Jewish ancestry through his paternal line)
    • Achievements: Founded set theory and introduced the concept of infinite sets and transfinite numbers, revolutionizing mathematics.
  • Gottlob Frege (1848-1925)
    • Nationality: German
    • Achievements: Developed the first formal system of predicate logic, laying the groundwork for modern logical systems.
  • Giuseppe Peano (1858-1932)
    • Nationality: Italian
    • Achievements: Formulated the Peano axioms for natural numbers, advancing the formalization of arithmetic in mathematical logic.
  • David Hilbert (1862-1943)
    • Nationality: German
    • Achievements: Proposed Hilbert’s program to formalize all of mathematics; made influential contributions across multiple mathematical fields.
  • Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
    • Nationality: British
    • Achievements: Co-authored Principia Mathematica with Alfred North Whitehead, aiming to derive mathematics from logical axioms.
  • Jan Łukasiewicz (1878-1956)
    • Nationality: Polish
    • Achievements: Developed many-valued logics and Polish notation, which influenced computer science and logical syntax.
  • Thoralf Skolem (1887-1963)
    • Nationality: Norwegian
    • Achievements: Contributed to mathematical logic with the Skolem normal form and the Skolem paradox in set theory.
  • Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970)
    • Nationality: German
    • Achievements: Key figure in logical positivism; advanced the philosophy of science and inductive logic.
  • Haskell Curry (1900-1982)
    • Nationality: American
    • Achievements: Developed combinatory logic, a notation for functions without variables, foundational in theoretical computer science; the concept of currying in programming is named after him.
  • Alfred Tarski (1901-1983)
    • Nationality: Polish Jewish
    • Achievements: Defined truth in formal languages through his semantic theory; made major contributions to model theory and formal semantics.
    • Note: The query lists his birth year as 1902, but historical records confirm he was born on January 14, 1901.
  • Alonzo Church (1903-1994)
    • Nationality: American
    • Achievements: Developed the lambda calculus and co-formulated the Church-Turing thesis, foundational concepts in computability theory.
  • Kurt Gödel (1906-1978)
    • Nationality: Austrian-American
    • Achievements: Proved the incompleteness theorems, demonstrating inherent limitations in formal mathematical systems.
    • Note: The query lists him as German, but he was born in Austria-Hungary and later became a U.S. citizen, making Austrian-American more accurate.
  • Willard Quine (1908-2000)
    • Nationality: American
    • Achievements: Contributed to logic, set theory, and philosophy of language, notably with the concept of the indeterminacy of translation.
  • Stephen Kleene (1909-1994)
    • Nationality: American
    • Achievements: Developed regular expressions, the Kleene star, and significant concepts in computability and recursion theory, including the Kleene hierarchy.
  • Gerhard Gentzen (1909-1945)
    • Nationality: German
    • Achievements: Developed natural deduction and sequent calculus, essential tools in proof theory.
    • Note: Born November 24, 1909, later in the year than Kleene (January 5, 1909), placing him after Kleene chronologically.
  • Alan Turing (1912-1954)
    • Nationality: British
    • Achievements: Introduced the Turing machine, a fundamental model of computation, and advanced computability theory and cryptography.
  • Jaakko Hintikka (1929-2015)
    • Nationality: Finnish
    • Achievements: Contributed to modal logic and developed game-theoretical semantics, influencing logical and philosophical analysis.
  • Saul Kripke (1940-)
    • Nationality: American-Jewish
    • Achievements: Developed Kripke semantics for modal logic; highly influential in the philosophy of language with works like Naming and Necessity.
  • Saharon Shelah (1945-)
    • Nationality: Israeli
    • Achievements: Leading figure in model theory, known for developing stability theory and classification theory; made significant contributions to set theory, including proper forcing.

XXIII. Almost all the Greatest Adventure Stories

That white men of European ancestry wrote all the greatest adventure novels should not be surprising considering that they explored most of the world, mapped the earth, the moon, the sea beds, identified countless stars and galaxies, climbed the highest mountains, reached the center of Antarctica, navigated all the oceans and rivers, and achieved numerous breakthroughs in science, technology, and in all the disciplinary fields of knowledge. On the advice of Grok, I added the adventure tale, Journey to the West (China) and The Epic of Gilgamesh (Mesopotamia). I did not include The Epic of Gilgamesh because I don’t consider it to be heroic with an individual hero. But, considering it has been a very influential epic from the Middle East, and that it is viewed by some as an “adventure story,” I have decided to include it. Gary Paulsen’s novel, Hatchet, was also added, after Grok suggested it. In the original 2020 list, I listed two novels by Dumas and Verne, but decided this time to include one book per author, for the sake of consistency. It should be noted that Alexander Dumas had a paternal grandfather of African descent.

  • The Epic of Gilgamesh by Sin-leqi-unninni
    • Publication Year: ~2100 BCE
    • Nationality: Mesopotamian
  • Odyssey by Homer
    • Publication Year: ~8th century BCE
    • Nationality: Greek
  • Aeneid by Virgil
    • Publication Year: 19 BCE
    • Nationality: Roman
  • Journey to the West by Wu Cheng’en
    • Publication Year: 1592 (specific year for the first known complete edition)
    • Nationality: Chinese
  • Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
    • Publication Year: 1605 (first part)
    • Nationality: Spanish
  • Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
    • Publication Year: 1719
    • Nationality: English
  • Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
    • Publication Year: 1726
    • Nationality: Irish
  • Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss
    • Publication Year: 1812
    • Nationality: Swiss
  • Ivanhoe by Walter Scott
    • Publication Year: 1819
    • Nationality: Scottish
  • The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
    • Publication Year: 1826
    • Nationality: American
  • The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
    • Publication Year: 1844
    • Nationality: French
  • Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
    • Publication Year: 1851
    • Nationality: American
  • 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
    • Publication Year: 1870
    • Nationality: French
  • Roughing It by Mark Twain
    • Publication Year: 1872
    • Nationality: American
  • The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne
    • Publication Year: 1874
    • Nationality: French
  • Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
    • Publication Year: 1883
    • Nationality: Scottish
  • King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard
    • Publication Year: 1885
    • Nationality: English
  • Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson
    • Publication Year: 1886
    • Nationality: Scottish
  • Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope
    • Publication Year: 1894
    • Nationality: English
  • Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling
    • Publication Year: 1897
    • Nationality: English
  • The Call of the Wild by Jack London
    • Publication Year: 1903
    • Nationality: American
  • The Sea-Wolf by Jack London
    • Publication Year: 1904
    • Nationality: American
  • Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
    • Publication Year: 1912
    • Nationality: American
  • The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle
    • Publication Year: 1912
    • Nationality: Scottish
  • The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan
    • Publication Year: 1915
    • Nationality: Scottish
  • Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini
    • Publication Year: 1922
    • Nationality: Italian
  • The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard
    • Publication Year: 1922
    • Nationality: English
  • Beau Geste by P. C. Wren
    • Publication Year: 1924
    • Nationality: English
  • The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson
    • Publication Year: 1941
    • Nationality: Swedish
  • The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat
    • Publication Year: 1951
    • Nationality: English
  • Lord of the Flies by William Golding
    • Publication Year: 1954
    • Nationality: English
  • Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian
    • Publication Year: 1969
    • Nationality: English
  • Hatchet by Gary Paulsen
    • Publication Year: 1987
    • Nationality: American
  • The Beach by Alex Garland
    • Publication Year: 1996
    • Nationality: English
  • The Road by Cormac McCarthy
    • Publication Year: 2006
    • Nationality: American

XXIV. 100% of the Greatest Physicists of the 19th century

The 1800s were ground breaking in physics, establishing the unification of electricity and magnetism into a single framework, the laws of thermodynamics, the wave theory of light, the idea of conservation of energy, or the principle that energy is neither created nor destroyed, but only transformed. These revolutionary insights were carried out by a cast of European men only, as the rest of the world remained stuck in a pre-Newtonian mental state. The names below follow closely my initial list, except that I have taken Grok’s advice, adding two very important names, Clausius and Ohm; while excluding Euler as he belonged in 1700s, even if his impact spilled over into the early 1800s. Thomas Young (1773–1829) and Robert Brown (1773–1858) were removed from the original list as less impactful . Grok agreed that all of these men are European in ancestry.

  • Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736–1813)
    • Achievement/Originality: Developed Lagrangian mechanics, a reformulation of classical mechanics that became foundational for later physics, though much of his work was in the 18th century, influencing 19th-century developments.
    • Nationality: Italian (born in the Kingdom of Sardinia, later worked in France).
  • Augustin-Jean Fresnel (1788–1827)
    • Achievement/Originality: Pioneered wave optics, developed the theory of diffraction, and invented the Fresnel lens, revolutionizing the understanding of light as a wave.
    • Nationality: French.
  • Georg Ohm (1789–1854)
    • Achievement/Originality: Formulated Ohm’s Law, establishing the fundamental relationship between voltage, current, and resistance in electrical circuits, crucial to electromagnetism.
    • Nationality: German.
  • Michael Faraday (1791–1867)
    • Achievement/Originality: Laid the foundation for electromagnetism with discoveries like electromagnetic induction and pioneered electrochemistry with his laws of electrolysis.
    • Nationality: British (English).
  • Sadi Carnot (1796–1832)
    • Achievement/Originality: Established the groundwork for thermodynamics through his work on heat engines, introducing the concept of the Carnot cycle.
    • Nationality: French.
  • Julius Robert Mayer (1814–1878)
    • Achievement/Originality: Formulated the principle of conservation of energy (first law of thermodynamics), independently recognizing energy’s fundamental role in physical processes.
    • Nationality: German.
  • James Joule (1818–1889)
    • Achievement/Originality: Conducted experiments establishing the mechanical equivalent of heat, solidifying the conservation of energy and advancing thermodynamics.
    • Nationality: British (English).
  • Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894)
    • Achievement/Originality: Made immense contributions to thermodynamics (conservation of energy), optics (theory of vision), and electrodynamics, bridging multiple fields of physics.
    • Nationality: German.
  • Rudolf Clausius (1822–1888)
    • Achievement/Originality: Formulated the second law of thermodynamics and introduced the concept of entropy, shaping modern thermodynamics.
    • Nationality: German.
  • Lord Kelvin (William Thomson, 1824–1907)
    • Achievement/Originality: Advanced thermodynamics with the Kelvin temperature scale and contributed to electromagnetism, including work on transatlantic telegraphy.
    • Nationality: British (Scottish-Irish).
  • James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879)
    • Achievement/Originality: Developed Maxwell’s equations, unifying electricity and magnetism into electromagnetism, a cornerstone of classical physics.
    • Nationality: British (Scottish).
  • Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906)
    • Achievement/Originality: Revolutionized statistical mechanics with his work on entropy and the Boltzmann equation, explaining the microscopic basis of thermodynamics.
    • Nationality: Austrian.
  • Albert A. Michelson (1852–1931)
    • Achievement/Originality: Conducted the Michelson-Morley experiment (1887), disproving the existence of the luminiferous ether and paving the way for Einstein’s relativity.
    • Nationality: American (born in Prussia, now Poland, immigrated to the U.S.).

XXV. Whites invented all the home appliances

The key figures associated with the development of many of the home appliances everyone in the world loves are all of European ancestry, and they are men except for two female exceptions, Melitta Bentz, inventor of the coffee filter, though not the electric coffee maker, and Josephine Cochrane, inventor of the dishwasher. Worth remembering that many of these inventions were improved over time, and that subsequent innovators brought important changes and refinements. I am using some of Grok’s own words to describe the nature of the inventions, the contribution of each inventor, and their particular nationality.

  • Refrigerator: The concept of artificial refrigeration dates back to William Cullen, who demonstrated it in 1748, but the first practical home refrigerator was invented by Fred J. Wolf in 1913.
  • Stereo: The modern stereo system, delivering two-channel sound, was pioneered by Alan Blumlein in the 1930s.
  • Stove: The first practical cast-iron stove for home use was invented by Benjamin Franklin in 1742, known as the Franklin stove. For electric stoves, Thomas Ahearn patented an electric oven in 1892, which evolved into the modern electric stove.
  • Washing Machine: The first patented washing machine was by Nathaniel Briggs in 1797, a hand-powered device. However, the electric washing machine was developed by Alva J. Fisher in 1908.
  • Toaster: The first electric toaster was invented by Alan MacMasters in 1893 in Scotland. Charles Strite perfected the pop-up toaster in 1919.
  • Microwave: Percy Spencer invented the microwave oven in 1945 after noticing a melting chocolate bar near a magnetron.
  • Coffee Maker: The drip coffee maker was invented by Melitta Bentz in 1908, using a paper filter. For electric percolation, Gottlob Widmann patented an electric coffee maker in 1954.
  • Food Processor: Pierre Verdun created the first food processor in 1960, marketed as the “Robot-Coupe” in France. Carl Sontheimer later adapted it for the U.S. market in 1971, popularizing the Cuisinart brand.
  • Blender: John Oster and Fred Waring; Oster developed a blender in 1937, but Waring financed and marketed the “Waring Blendor” in 1938, based on a design by inventor Frederick J. Osius.
  • Air Conditioning: Willis Carrier invented the first modern air conditioner in 1902, originally for industrial use.
  • Water Heater: The first practical water heater was invented by Edwin Ruud in 1889.
  • Vacuum Cleaner: Hubert Cecil Booth invented the first powered vacuum cleaner in 1901; and James Murray Spangler created the first portable electric vacuum in 1907.
  • Dishwasher: Josephine Cochrane invented the first practical dishwasher in 1886. Her hand-powered design was later electrified.

XXVI. Almost all the greatest Political Theorists

European men wrote most of the major treatises on politics, formulated most of the concepts, and almost all the ideologies or isms we know about. The following concepts and ideologies were originated and fully explained in countless treatises: Democracy, Justice, Natural Law, Sovereignty, Social Contract, General Will, Separation of Powers, Rights of Man, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Utilitarianism, Dictatorship of the Proletariat, Liberalism, Conservatism, Socialism, Communism, Anarchism, Limited Government, Constitutionalism, Natural Rights, Feminism, Civil Rights, Environmentalism, Pluralism, Globalization, Multiculturalism, Justice as Fairness, Fascism, Traditionalism, and more.

I asked Grok whether “it can be accurately argued that this list includes the greatest political thinkers in the world. Did I leave out any truly major political philosopher?”. Before I sent the list to Grok, I made sure there were enough Chinese names, and one Indian name, adding Han Feizi and Kautilya, so as to avoid statements from Grok about “Eurocentrism”.

Grok replied: “No, you did not leave out any truly major political philosopher. The list includes the greatest political thinkers in the world, and while other significant figures could be added, those present are sufficient to represent the field comprehensively.”

Of the additional names Grok suggested as great figures that could be added to the list, namely, Mary Wollstonecraft, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Hannah Arendt. I only added Foucault, who has obviously played a huge role in recent decades, the most widely read author in academia, whom I had meant to add. I added Simone de Beauvoir to stand as the foremost feminist, author of The Second Sex in 1949, a text widely seen as a cornerstone of feminist philosophy. I replaced Russell Kirk with Eric Voegelin. This list includes 27 European, 3 Chinese, 2 Jews, 1 Indian, and 1 Tunisian, Khaldun, who is already listed as a historian.

  • Confucius (551–479 BCE) – Chinese
  • Mozi (c. 470–391 BCE) – Chinese
  • Plato (c. 428–348 BCE) – European
  • Aristotle (384–322 BCE) – European
  • Kautilya (c. 350–283 BCE) – Indian
  • Han Feizi (c. 280–233 BCE) – Chinese
  • Polybius (c. 200–118 BCE) – European
  • Cicero (106–43 BCE) – European
  • Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) – Tunisian
  • Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) – European
  • Jean Bodin (1530–1596) – European
  • Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) – European
  • Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) – European
  • John Locke (1632–1704) – European
  • Montesquieu (1689–1755) – European
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) – European
  • Edmund Burke (1729–1797) – European
  • Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) – European
  • Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821) – European
  • Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) – European
  • Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) – European
  • John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) – European
  • Karl Marx (1818–1883) – Jewish
  • Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944) – European
  • Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) – European
  • Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) – European
  • Leo Strauss (1899–1973) – Jewish
  • Eric Voegelin (1901–1985) – European
  • Michael Oakeshott (1901–1990) – European
  • Simone de Beauvoir (1908 –1986) – European
  • Russell Kirk (1918–1994) – European
  • John Rawls (1921–2002) – European
  • Michel Foucault (1926–1984) – European
  • Jürgen Habermas (1929–present) – European

XXVII. Most Decisive and Tactical Battles in History

I asked Grok to evaluate the accuracy and completeness of this list. “Do you agree that this list is reasonably accurate in identifying the most decisive as well as tactically significant battles in history? I calculate that Europeans fought in 35 out of the following 39 battles (the ones with an asterisk * are the battles fought between non-Europeans.) Which crucial ones I left out, and which ones should not be included in this list?”

The list I compiled referred to Europeans but not Americans. Grok listed 7 “omissions that could arguably belong on a list of decisive or tactically significant battles”, namely, “Plataea, Manzikert, Sekigahara, Trafalgar, or Kursk for broader scope”). It listed 5 battles “that might not belong” in this list, namely, “Thermopylae (less decisive), Barbarossa (too broad), or Cambrai/Omdurman (less globally pivotal)”. Grok also observed that “Yarmouk involved Byzantine (European) forces, contradicting its asterisk.”

It said that the list “is an impressive and well-considered compilation of some of history’s most decisive and tactically significant battles, spanning ancient times to the modern era. It includes battles that shaped empires, altered the course of civilizations, or showcased brilliant (or disastrous) military tactics”.

I accepted Grok’s evaluation except its view about the Battle of Sekigahara (1600), which “decided the unification of Japan under Tokugawa Ieyasu, ending the Sengoku period and ushering in centuries of stability.” If this battle were to be included, we would have to include many battles that “decided the unification” of major European countries.

After I compiled the 42 battles listed below, I asked Grok to i) identify with an asterisk * the non-Europeans, ii) to indicate which side won in these battles, and to italicized the battles (they amount to only 4) in which both sides fighting were non-Europeans.

  • Battle of Marathon, 490 BC
    • Sides: Greeks (Athens and Plataea) vs. Persians*
    • Outcome: Greek victory
    • Note: Persians were a non-European empire from Asia (* on Persians).
  • Salamis, 480 BC
    • Sides: Greeks (Greek city-states) vs. Persians*
    • Outcome: Greek victory
    • Note: Persians were non-European (* on Persians).
  • Battle of Plataea, 479 BC
    • Sides: Greeks (Greek city-states) vs. Persians*
    • Outcome: Greek victory
    • Note: Persians were non-European (* on Persians).
  • Maling, 342 BC
    • Sides: Chinese (State of Qi) vs. Chinese (State of Wei)
    • Outcome: Qi victory
    • Note: Both sides were non-European (Chinese states during the Warring States period, * on both).
  • Battle of Issus, 333 BC
    • Sides: Macedonians (Alexander the Great) vs. Persians*
    • Outcome: Macedonian victory
    • Note: Persians were non-European (* on Persians).
  • Gaugamela, 331 BC
    • Sides: Macedonians (Alexander the Great) vs. Persians*
    • Outcome: Macedonian victory
    • Note: Persians were non-European (* on Persians).
  • Lake Trasimene, 217 BC
    • Sides: Romans (Roman Republic) vs. Carthaginians*
    • Outcome: Carthaginian victory
    • Note: Carthaginians were from North Africa (* on Carthaginians).
  • Cannae, 216 BC
    • Sides: Romans (Roman Republic) vs. Carthaginians*
    • Outcome: Carthaginian victory
    • Note: Carthaginians were non-European (* on Carthaginians).
  • Battle of Metaurus, 207 BC
    • Sides: Romans (Roman Republic) vs. Carthaginians*
    • Outcome: Roman victory
    • Note: Carthaginians were non-European (* on Carthaginians).
  • Ilipa, 206 BC
    • Sides: Romans (Roman Republic) vs. Carthaginians*
    • Outcome: Roman victory
    • Note: Carthaginians were non-European (* on Carthaginians).
  • Battle of Zama, 202 BC
    • Sides: Romans (Roman Republic) vs. Carthaginians*
    • Outcome: Roman victory
    • Note: Carthaginians were non-European (* on Carthaginians).
  • Pydna, 168 BC
    • Sides: Romans (Roman Republic) vs. Macedonians
    • Outcome: Roman victory
    • Note: Both sides were European.
  • Carrhae, 53 BC
    • Sides: Romans (Roman Republic) vs. Parthians*
    • Outcome: Parthian victory
    • Note: Parthians were a non-European empire from Asia (* on Parthians).
  • Pharsalus, 48 BC
    • Sides: Romans (Caesar’s faction) vs. Romans (Pompey’s faction)
    • Outcome: Caesar’s victory
    • Note: Both sides were European (Roman civil war).
  • Teutoburg Forest, 9 AD
    • Sides: Romans (Roman Empire) vs. Germanic tribes
    • Outcome: Germanic victory
    • Note: Both sides were European.
  • Chalons, 451 AD
    • Sides: Romans (Western Roman Empire) and Visigoths vs. Huns* and allies
    • Outcome: Roman-Visigoth victory
    • Note: Huns were a non-European nomadic group from Asia (* on Huns).
  • Walaja, 633 AD
    • Sides: Arabs* (Rashidun Caliphate) vs. Persians* (Sassanid Empire)
    • Outcome: Arab victory
    • Note: Both sides were non-European (* on both).
  • Yarmouk, 636 AD (assumed from context, as “Yarmouk” alone is incomplete)
    • Sides: Arabs* (Rashidun Caliphate) vs. Byzantines
    • Outcome: Arab victory
    • Note: Arabs were non-European (* on Arabs).
  • Tours, 732 AD
    • Sides: Franks (Frankish Kingdom) vs. Arabs* (Umayyad Caliphate)
    • Outcome: Frankish victory
    • Note: Arabs were non-European (* on Arabs).
  • Hastings, 1066 AD
    • Sides: Normans (Norman French) vs. Anglo-Saxons (England)
    • Outcome: Norman victory
    • Note: Both sides were European.
  • Battle of Manzikert, 1071 AD
    • Sides: Byzantines vs. Seljuk Turks*
    • Outcome: Seljuk victory
    • Note: Seljuk Turks were non-European (* on Seljuks).
  • Crécy, 1346 AD
    • Sides: English vs. French
    • Outcome: English victory
    • Note: Both sides were European.
  • Battle of Agincourt, 1415 AD
    • Sides: English vs. French
    • Outcome: English victory
    • Note: Both sides were European.
  • Panipat, 1526 AD
    • Sides: Mughals* (Babur) vs. Delhi Sultanate* (Ibrahim Lodi)
    • Outcome: Mughal victory
    • Note: Both sides were non-European (Indian subcontinent, * on both).
  • Cajamarca, 1532 AD
    • Sides: Spaniards vs. Incas*
    • Outcome: Spanish victory
    • Note: Incas were non-European (South American, * on Incas).
  • Leipzig, 1631 AD (assumed First Battle of Breitenfeld, as “Leipzig 1631” is ambiguous)
    • Sides: Swedes and German Protestants vs. Holy Roman Empire (Catholic League)
    • Outcome: Swedish-Protestant victory
    • Note: Both sides were European.
  • Rocroi, 1643 AD
    • Sides: French vs. Spaniards
    • Outcome: French victory
    • Note: Both sides were European.
  • Vienna, 1683 AD
    • Sides: Holy Roman Empire and allies vs. Ottoman Turks*
    • Outcome: Holy Roman victory
    • Note: Ottomans were non-European (* on Ottomans).
  • Poltava, 1709 AD
    • Sides: Russians vs. Swedes
    • Outcome: Russian victory
    • Note: Both sides were European.
  • Rossbach, 1757 AD
    • Sides: Prussians vs. French and Holy Roman Empire
    • Outcome: Prussian victory
    • Note: Both sides were European.
  • Valmy, 1792 AD
    • Sides: French (Revolutionary forces) vs. Prussians and Austrians
    • Outcome: French victory
    • Note: Both sides were European.
  • Ulm, 1805 AD
    • Sides: French (Napoleon) vs. Austrians
    • Outcome: French victory
    • Note: Both sides were European.
  • Battle of Trafalgar, 1805 AD
    • Sides: British vs. French and Spanish
    • Outcome: British victory
    • Note: Both sides were European.
  • Leipzig, 1813 AD (Battle of the Nations)
    • Sides: Coalition (Russia, Prussia, Austria, etc.) vs. French (Napoleon)
    • Outcome: Coalition victory
    • Note: Both sides were European.
  • Waterloo, 1815 AD
    • Sides: Coalition (Britain, Prussia, etc.) vs. French (Napoleon)
    • Outcome: Coalition victory
    • Note: Both sides were European.
  • Gettysburg, 1863 AD
    • Sides: United States (Union) vs. Confederate States
    • Outcome: Union victory
    • Note: Both sides were European-descended (North American context).
  • Battle of Sedan, 1870 AD
    • Sides: Prussians and German states vs. French
    • Outcome: Prussian victory
    • Note: Both sides were European.
  • Omdurman, 1898 AD
    • Sides: British-Egyptian forces vs. Mahdists* (Sudanese)
    • Outcome: British-Egyptian victory
    • Note: Mahdists were non-European (* on Mahdists).
  • First Battle of Kiev, 1941 AD
    • Sides: Germans (Nazi Germany) vs. Soviets (Soviet Union)
    • Outcome: German victory
    • Note: Both sides were European.
  • Midway Island, 1942 AD
    • Sides: United States vs. Japanese*
    • Outcome: American victory
    • Note: Japanese were non-European (* on Japan).
  • Stalingrad, 1942–1943 AD
    • Sides: Germans (Nazi Germany) vs. Soviets (Soviet Union)
    • Outcome: Soviet victory
    • Note: Both sides were European.
  • Battle of Kursk, 1943 AD
    • Sides: Germans (Nazi Germany) vs. Soviets (Soviet Union)
    • Outcome: Soviet victory
    • Note: Both sides were European.

XXVIII. 100% of Inventions between mid-1700s and 1860s

Grok agreed with this list, replying: “Yes, it is accurate to say that White men of European ancestry were responsible for 100% of the listed inventions between the mid-1700s and 1860s, based on historical attribution. This reflects the socio-economic and technological context of the period, centered in Europe and its offshoots.”

  1. Flying Shuttle – Invented by John Kay (English, 1733). European, White male.
  2. Spinning Jenny – Invented by James Hargreaves (English, 1764). European, White male.
  3. Steam Engine – Improved significantly by James Watt (Scottish, 1760s-1770s), building on earlier work by Thomas Newcomen (English). European, White males.
  4. Cotton Gin – Invented by Eli Whitney (American of European descent, 1793). White male.
  5. Telegraph – Developed by Samuel Morse (American of European descent, 1830s-1840s), with contributions from others like William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone (English). All European or of European ancestry, White males.
  6. Portland Cement – Patented by Joseph Aspdin (English, 1824). European, White male.
  7. Bessemer Process – Developed by Henry Bessemer (English, 1856). European, White male.
  8. Battery – Invented by Alessandro Volta (Italian, 1800). European, White male.
  9. Locomotives – Pioneered by George Stephenson (English, 1814-1820s). European, White male.
  10. Power Loom – Invented by Edmund Cartwright (English, 1785). European, White male.
  11. Arkwright’s Water Frame – Invented by Richard Arkwright (English, 1769). European, White male.
  12. Spinning Mule – Invented by Samuel Crompton (English, 1779). European, White male.
  13. Henry Cort’s Puddling – Developed by Henry Cort (English, 1780s). European, White male.
  14. Gaslighting Arc Lamp – Early gas lighting by William Murdoch (Scottish, 1790s); arc lamp by Humphry Davy (English, 1802). Both European, White males.
  15. Tin Can – Patented by Peter Durand (English, 1810). European, White male.
  16. Spectrometer – Developed by Joseph von Fraunhofer (German, 1810s). European, White male.
  17. Camera Obscura – Known since antiquity, but modern photographic use advanced by Louis Daguerre (French, 1830s) and others. European, White male.
  18. Electromagnet – Invented by William Sturgeon (English, 1825). European, White male.
  19. Mackintosh Raincoat – Invented by Charles Macintosh (Scottish, 1823). European, White male.
  20. Matches – Friction matches by John Walker (English, 1826). European, White male.
  21. Typewriter – Early version by Henry Mill (English, 1714), but practical typewriter by Christopher Latham Sholes (American of European descent, 1860s). White males.
  22. Blueprints – Cyanotype process by John Herschel (English, 1842). European, White male.
  23. Hydrogen Fuel Cell – Discovered by William Grove (Welsh, 1839). European, White male.

XXIX. Almost all the Greatest Painters

Going by the amount of space allocated to the greatest artists in reference works, encyclopedias, and dictionaries, as decided upon by generations of men with the requisite knowledge and taste for great art, Murray estimated that the absolute number of great visual artists in the West is far higher than the combined number of the other civilizations: 479 for the West as compared to 192 for China and Japan combined (with no significant figures listed for India or the Arab World).

A crucially missing factor in Murray’s statistical assessment, however, is that it leaves out a most peculiar characteristic of Western art: its exhibition of a continuous proliferation of highly original artists with new artistic styles, new ways of projecting images on a flat surface, new conceptions of light, new standards of excellence, and new conceptions about nature and man—in contrast to the non-Western world, where aesthetic norms barely changed, or where artists were invariably inclined to follow an established convention without breaking new aesthetic paths. Paintings in both China and Japan occurred within a cultural matrix that encouraged standardization and regularity, rather than unpredictability and freshness. New trends consisted in breaking from the regimented traditions of one’s age by reviving and putting new life into early traditions.

This time I decided to make the list as comprehensive as possible before asking Grok any questions. I included two of the greatest Chinese painters as well as two Japanese painters, focusing on the early Chinese painters, as the most original, but adding a Japanese from a later period in reflection of his prominence outside Japan. I asked Grok: “Is this list an accurate representation of the greatest painters in history?” I also asked Grok to describe briefly why these names are considered among the greatest and most original painters.

Grok acknowledged that the “list includes many of the most celebrated painters across different cultures and eras” but mentioned some “notable absences”, in abstract painting and female painters, namely, Jackson Pollock, Frida Kahlo, Mary Cassatt, and Wassily Kandinsky. It said that the list suggested “a possible bias toward Western male painters or pre-20th-century figures”, omitting “key figures from other regions (e.g., no Indian, African, or pre-Columbian American artists) and underrepresented groups.”

I believe this list did not need any changes; it is already a very strong representation of the greatest painters; adding painters from “underrepresented groups” would lower its quality.

  • Gu Kaizhi (c. 344–406)
    Why Great: A foundational figure in Chinese painting, Gu Kaizhi pioneered expressive figure painting and narrative scrolls. His delicate brushwork and focus on capturing the spirit (rather than just the form) of his subjects set a standard for East Asian art.
  • Wu Daozi (c. 680–760)
    Why Great: Known as the “Sage of Painting” in Tang Dynasty China, Wu Daozi revolutionized Chinese art with dynamic, flowing brushstrokes and a sense of movement that brought figures to life, influencing centuries of ink painting.
  • Giotto (c. 1267–1337)
    Why Great: Giotto broke from medieval flatness, introducing naturalism, emotion, and three-dimensionality to Western art. His frescoes, like those in the Scrovegni Chapel, laid the groundwork for the Renaissance.
  • Jan van Eyck (c. 1390–1441)
    Why Great: A master of oil painting, Van Eyck’s meticulous detail and use of light (e.g., Arnolfini Portrait) transformed Northern European art, making him a key figure in the Early Renaissance.
  • Masaccio (1401–1428)
    Why Great: Known as the “father of Renaissance painting,” Masaccio introduced linear perspective and realistic human anatomy (e.g., The Tribute Money), pushing art toward greater naturalism.
  • Sesshū Tōyō (1420–1506)
    Why Great: A Japanese Zen monk and ink painter, Sesshū blended Chinese influences with a minimalist, expressive style. His landscapes (e.g., Winter Landscape) are revered for their spiritual depth.
  • Sandro Botticelli (c. 1445–1510)
    Why Great: Botticelli’s lyrical style and mythological themes (e.g., The Birth of Venus) epitomized Florentine Renaissance ideals, blending grace with emotional resonance.
  • Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519)
    Why Great: A polymath, Leonardo’s mastery of sfumato, anatomical precision, and innovative compositions (e.g., Mona Lisa, The Last Supper) made him a quintessential Renaissance genius.
  • Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528)
    Why Great: Dürer brought Renaissance techniques to Northern Europe, excelling in engravings and woodcuts (e.g., Melencolia I) with unmatched detail and intellectual depth.
  • Raphael (1483–1520)
    Why Great: Raphael’s harmonious compositions and idealized beauty (e.g., School of Athens) defined High Renaissance perfection, balancing grace and clarity.
  • Michelangelo (1475–1564)
    Why Great: A titan of the Renaissance, Michelangelo’s monumental frescoes (e.g., Sistine Chapel ceiling) and sculptures showcase his unparalleled ability to convey power and emotion.
  • Titian (c. 1488–1576)
    Why Great: The Venetian master’s use of color, loose brushwork, and emotional depth (e.g., Bacchus and Ariadne) shaped the course of Western painting.
  • Correggio (1489–1534)
    Why Great: Known for his illusionistic frescoes (e.g., Assumption of the Virgin) and soft, sensual figures, Correggio influenced Baroque and Rococo art.
  • Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516)
    Why Great: Bosch’s surreal, fantastical visions (e.g., The Garden of Earthly Delights) offered a unique, moralistic take on human folly, unmatched in imagination.
  • Matthias Grünewald (c. 1470–1528)
    Why Great: His visceral, emotional works (e.g., Isenheim Altarpiece) convey intense spirituality and suffering, distinct from Renaissance idealism.
  • Hans Holbein the Younger (c. 1497–1543)
    Why Great: A master of portraiture (e.g., The Ambassadors), Holbein’s precision and psychological insight made him a standout in Northern Renaissance art.
  • Tintoretto (1518–1594)
    Why Great: Known as “Il Furioso,” Tintoretto’s dramatic compositions and bold use of perspective (e.g., The Last Supper) bridged Renaissance and Baroque styles.
  • El Greco (1541–1614)
    Why Great: His elongated figures and vivid colors (e.g., The Burial of the Count of Orgaz) fused Byzantine and Western traditions, prefiguring Expressionism.
  • Pieter Brueghel the Elder (c. 1525–1569)
    Why Great: Brueghel’s detailed scenes of peasant life and allegorical landscapes (e.g., The Hunters in the Snow) offered a unique, earthy perspective.
  • Caravaggio (1571–1610)
    Why Great: Caravaggio’s dramatic chiaroscuro and raw realism (e.g., The Calling of St. Matthew) revolutionized Baroque art with emotional intensity.
  • Frans Hals (c. 1582–1666)
    Why Great: Hals’ lively brushwork and vivid portraits (e.g., The Laughing Cavalier) captured personality with a spontaneity rare for his time.
  • Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571) (Note: Primarily a sculptor, not a painter)
    Why Great: Though best known for sculpture (e.g., Perseus with the Head of Medusa), his artistic versatility and Renaissance flair are notable.
  • Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640)
    Why Great: Rubens’ dynamic, fleshy figures and vibrant colors (e.g., The Descent from the Cross) defined Baroque exuberance.
  • Claude Lorrain (c. 1600–1682)
    Why Great: A pioneer of ideal landscapes (e.g., Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba), Claude’s atmospheric light influenced later painters like Turner.
  • Diego Velázquez (1599–1660)
    Why Great: Velázquez’s masterful realism and complex compositions (e.g., Las Meninas) made him a giant of the Spanish Golden Age.
  • Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669)
    Why Great: Rembrandt’s mastery of light, shadow, and human emotion (e.g., The Night Watch) set a benchmark for psychological depth in art.
  • Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675)
    Why Great: Vermeer’s luminous interiors and subtle detail (e.g., Girl with a Pearl Earring) showcase an unmatched mastery of light and texture.
  • Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699–1779)
    Why Great: Chardin’s quiet still lifes and genre scenes (e.g., The Ray) elevated the everyday with exquisite simplicity and realism.
  • Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792)
    Why Great: A leading portraitist of 18th-century Britain (e.g., Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse), Reynolds blended elegance with intellectual depth.
  • J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851)
    Why Great: Turner’s revolutionary use of light and color (e.g., The Fighting Temeraire) anticipated Impressionism and modern abstraction.
  • John Constable (1776–1837)
    Why Great: Constable’s naturalistic landscapes (e.g., The Hay Wain) captured the beauty of the English countryside with emotional sincerity.
  • Francisco Goya (1746–1828)
    Why Great: Goya’s dark, satirical works (e.g., The Third of May 1808) bridged Romanticism and modernity, exploring human suffering and power.
  • Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849)
    Why Great: Hokusai’s woodblock prints (e.g., The Great Wave off Kanagawa) brought Japanese ukiyo-e to global prominence with dynamic composition.
  • Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863)
    Why Great: A Romantic leader, Delacroix’s vivid color and movement (e.g., Liberty Leading the People) inspired later generations.
  • Jean-François Millet (1814–1875)
    Why Great: Millet’s dignified depictions of peasant life (e.g., The Gleaners) brought social realism to French art.
  • Gustave Courbet (1819–1877)
    Why Great: Courbet’s bold realism (e.g., The Stone Breakers) rejected idealism, paving the way for modern art.
  • Édouard Manet (1832–1883)
    Why Great: Manet’s provocative works (e.g., Olympia) bridged Realism and Impressionism, challenging artistic conventions.
  • Claude Monet (1840–1926)
    Why Great: The founder of Impressionism, Monet’s focus on light and atmosphere (e.g., Impression, Sunrise) redefined painting.
  • Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919)
    Why Great: Renoir’s vibrant, joyful scenes (e.g., Luncheon of the Boating Party) epitomized Impressionist sensuality.
  • Georges Seurat (1859–1891)
    Why Great: Seurat’s pointillist technique (e.g., A Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte) introduced a scientific approach to color and form.
  • Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890)
    Why Great: Van Gogh’s emotive brushstrokes and bold colors (e.g., The Starry Night) made him a pioneer of Expressionism.
  • Paul Cézanne (1839–1906)
    Why Great: Cézanne’s structural approach to form and color (e.g., Mont Sainte-Victoire) laid the groundwork for Cubism.
  • Gustav Klimt (1862–1918)
    Why Great: Klimt’s ornate, symbolic works (e.g., The Kiss) blended Art Nouveau with psychological depth.
  • Edvard Munch (1863–1944)
    Why Great: Munch’s haunting explorations of anxiety (e.g., The Scream) defined Expressionism’s emotional power.
  • Henri Matisse (1869–1954)
    Why Great: Matisse’s bold use of color and form (e.g., The Dance) spearheaded Fauvism and modern art.
  • Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)
    Why Great: Picasso’s invention of Cubism (e.g., Les Demoiselles d’Avignon) and relentless innovation reshaped 20th-century art.
  • Max Ernst (1891–1976)
    Why Great: A Surrealist pioneer, Ernst’s dreamlike collages and paintings (e.g., The Elephant Celebes) expanded artistic boundaries.
  • René Magritte (1898–1967)
    Why Great: Magritte’s witty, surreal images (e.g., The Treachery of Images) challenged perceptions of reality.
  • Salvador Dalí (1904–1989)
    Why Great: Dalí’s eccentric, hyper-realistic Surrealism (e.g., The Persistence of Memory) made him an icon of modern art.

XXX. Designed all the Most Beautiful Cars

I simply said to Grok, “Car afficionados believe that white men designed all the most beautiful cars in history, many of which are listed below.”

While Grok agreed that “it’s an impressive list of cars, no doubt—icons of design and engineering that have left a lasting mark on automotive history,” it pointed out that “most of these cars come from mid-20th-century Europe and America, a time when the auto industry in those regions was indeed dominated by white male designers…The industry reflected the demographics of its era: heavily male, heavily European or American, and thus predominantly white…And if we widen the lens beyond this list—say, to Japan’s Mazda Cosmo (1967) or Toyota 2000GT (1965), designed by talents like Satoru Nozaki—diversity creeps in.”

I kept the list as it was but asked Grok to organize it chronologically.

  1. 1935: Alfa Romeo 8C 2900
  2. 1937: Mercedes-Benz 540K
  3. 1938: Bugatti Type 57SC Atlantic Coupe
  4. 1938: Delahaye 165 Cabriolet
  5. 1939: Alfa Romeo 6C 2500
  6. 1939: BMW 328 Roadster
  7. 1946: Delahaye 135 MS ‘Narval’
  8. 1949: Cadillac Club Coupe
  9. 1952-1953: Alfa Romeo 1900 C52 Disco Volante
  10. 1953: Porsche 550 Spyder.
  11. 1954: Lancia Aurelia B20 GT
  12. 1954: Maserati A6GCS Berlinetta
  13. 1954: Mercedes-Benz 300SL.
  14. 1955: Citroën DS
  15. 1956: BMW 507
  16. 1957: Ferrari 250 GT Coupé Speciale
  17. 1960: Austin Healey 3000 MK1
  18. 1960: Aston Martin DB4 GT Zagato
  19. 1961: Ferrari 250 GT California
  20. 1961: Lincoln-Continental 4-Door Hardtop
  21. 1962: Facel Vega
  22. 1963: Chevrolet Corvette
  23. 1963: Citroën DS Cabriolet
  24. 1964: Aston Martin DB5
  25. 1964: Maserati 3500 GTI Vignale Spyder
  26. 1965: Bizzarrini 5300 GT Strada
  27. 1965: Jaguar E-Type
  28. 1967: Alfa Romeo 33 Stradale
  29. 1967: Buick Riviera
  30. 1967: Ferrari 275 GTB/4
  31. 1970: R/T Dodge Challenger.
  32. 1971: Lamborghini Miura SV
  33. 1972: Opel Rekord Coupe
  34. 1972: Volvo 1800E

XXXI. The Greatest Mountaineers

I left this list as it was, without any non-European name. I am aware that some non-Europeans came along with the Europeans, contributed to the endeavor, and became great climbers in their own right, but my focus is on initiative, leadership, and originality. My initial list included descriptions of the achievements of these men and their nationalities, but I decided to Grok’s neater presentation.

  • 1786: Michel-Gabriel Paccard and Jacques Balmat
    • Nationality: Duchy of Savoy, France
    • Achievement: First ascent of Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in the Alps.
  • 1865: Edward Whymper
    • Nationality: British
    • Achievement: Led the first ascent of the Matterhorn in the Pennine Alps.
  • 1938: Heinrich Harrer
    • Nationality: Austrian
    • Achievement: First ascent of the North Face of the Eiger, known as the “last problem” of the Alps.
  • 1953: Edmund Hillary
    • Nationality: New Zealander
    • Achievement: First confirmed ascent of Mount Everest, the world’s tallest peak.
  • 1954: Achille Compagnoni and Lino Lacedelli
    • Nationality: Italian
    • Achievement: First ascent of K2, the second highest peak in the world.
  • 1978: Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler
    • Nationality: Italian (Messner), Austrian (Habeler)
    • Achievement: First ascent of Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen in 1978; Messner later soloed Everest in 1980.
  • 1985: Richard Bass
    • Nationality: American
    • Achievement: First to climb the Seven Summits (highest peaks on each continent: Aconcagua, Denali, Kilimanjaro, Elbrus, Vinson, Kosciuszko, and Everest).
  • 1987: Jerzy Kukuczka
    • Nationality: Polish
    • Achievement: Second person to climb all 14 eight-thousanders, 13 without supplemental oxygen, completed in 1987.
  • 1990: Tim Macartney-Snape
    • Nationality: Australian
    • Achievement: Climbed Mount Everest from sea level at the Bay of Bengal without supplemental oxygen.
  • 2005: Edmund Viesturs
    • Nationality: American
    • Achievement: Climbed all 14 eight-thousanders without supplemental oxygen, completed in 2005.
  • 2009 onwards: Simone Moro
    • Nationality: Italian
    • Achievement: Made the first winter ascents of four eight-thousanders, starting with Makalu in 2009.

XXXII. Founders of all the Disciplinary Fields of Knowledge

Possibly the greatest accomplishment of Europeans has been the founding of all the fields of human knowledge: Geology, Astronomy, Botany, Biology, Sociology, Anthropology, Archeology, History, Philosophy, Physics, Chemistry, Psychology, Geography, Political Science, Economics, not to mention many sub-fields. My criteria for the founding of a discipline include clear differentiation and conceptualization of the discipline as a field in its own right, with its own “founding” treatises, methodologies, and objects of knowledge. The identification of individuals who made insightful geological, botanical, economic, psychological or biological observations is not enough.

I asked Grok to “list the individuals, two or three, responsible as ‘founders’ of the following disciplinary fields of knowledge, as distinctive fields with their own unique concepts, methodologies, and treatises: Geology, Astronomy, Botany, Biology, Sociology, Anthropology, Archeology, History, Philosophy, Physics, Chemistry, Geography, Political Science, and Economics.”

The list Grok provided is reasonably good, except that it misses a few of the real founders for other figures who contributed major insights but were not the originators of the discipline. Therefore, I decided to delete the names I disagree with, and to add the names I think were true founders in italics.

Geology

  • James Hutton: Known as the father of modern geology, he developed the theory of uniformitarianism, which posits that Earth’s processes occur gradually over time.
  • Charles Lyell: Built on Hutton’s ideas, popularizing uniformitarianism and influencing modern geological thought through his work Principles of Geology.

Astronomy

  • Claudius Ptolemy: Developed the geocentric model of the universe, which dominated astronomical thought for over a millennium
  • Nicholas Copernicus: Revolutionized astronomy by proposing the heliocentric model
  • Galileo Galilei: A pioneer of modern astronomy, he used the telescope to make groundbreaking observations, supporting the Copernican theory.

Botany

  • Theophrastus: An early contributor, often called the father of botany, he wrote extensively on plant classification and description in ancient Greece.
  • Carl Linnaeus: Established the modern system of binomial nomenclature, laying the foundation for systematic botany.

Biology

  • Aristotle: Made early systematic observations of living organisms, influencing the study of life for centuries.
  • Andreas Vesalius (1514 – 1564): Revolutionized biology by publishing De Humani Corporis Fabrica, a detailed anatomical text based on human dissections, founding modern anatomy.
  • Robert Hooke 1635 – 1703: Discovered cells and wrote one of the most significant books in scientific history, Micrographia.

Sociology

  • Auguste Comte: Coined the term “sociology” and developed a systematic approach to studying society.
  • Emile Durkheim: Established sociology as a scientific discipline with works like The Rules of Sociological Method.
  • Max Weber: Contributed key concepts like the Protestant work ethic and theories of bureaucracy.

Anthropology

  • Franz Boas: Known as the father of American anthropology, he emphasized fieldwork and cultural relativism.
  • Lewis Henry Morgan: Pioneered the study of kinship and social evolution, influencing early anthropology.

Archeology

  • Christian Jurgensen Thomsen (1788-1865):
  • Jens Jacob Worsaae (1821-85):
  • William Flinders Petrie (1853-1942): Developed systematic excavation and recording methods, foundational to modern archeology.

History

  • Herodotus: Often called the father of history, he wrote the first narrative history in Histories.
  • Thucydides: Advanced historical methodology with a focus on evidence and causality in History of the Peloponnesian War.
  • Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886): His emphasis on primary sources and on “as it actually happened” laid the groundwork for the professionalization of history.

Philosophy

  • Parmenides: His focus on what it means to be laid the foundation for metaphysics.
  • Socrates: Laid the groundwork for Western philosophy through his method of questioning and dialogue.
  • Plato: Founded the Academy and wrote influential dialogues exploring ethics, politics, and metaphysics.
  • Aristotle: Systematized philosophical inquiry across numerous fields, shaping Western thought.

Physics

  • Galileo Galilei: Pioneered experimental physics and kinematics, laying the groundwork for classical mechanics.
  • Isaac Newton: Formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation, foundational to classical physics.

Chemistry

  • Robert Boyle (1627-1691): Known for Boyle’s Law and early work distinguishing chemistry from alchemy.
  • Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794): The father of modern chemistry, he established the law of conservation of mass and clarified the role of oxygen in combustion.

Geography

  • Eratosthenes: Calculated the Earth’s circumference and pioneered early geographic measurement.
  • Ptolemy (2nd century): In his Geography he rationally explained the principles and methods required in mapmaking and produced the first world map.
  • Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859): Integrated physical and human geography through extensive exploration and observation.

Political Science

  • Aristotle: Analyzed political systems in Politics, providing a foundational framework for the field.
  • Niccolò Machiavelli: Authored The Prince, offering a pragmatic approach to political power and governance.

Psychology

  • Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920): Established the first experimental psychology laboratory, marking the birth of psychology as a science.
  • William James (1842-1910): Influenced modern psychology with his work Principles of Psychology, emphasizing functionalism.

Economics

  • Richard Cantillon (1680-1734): His Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général is the first comprehensive treatise on economics, earning him the title of the “father of economics”.
  • François Quesnay (1694-1774): His Tableau Économique is regarded as a precursor to modern input-output analysis and circular flow models.
  • Adam Smith (1723-1790): Authored The Wealth of Nations, laying the foundation for classical economics.

XXXIII. Key scientists involved in DNA, the genetic code, radioactivity, X-rays, neutron, and quantum mechanics in the late 19th/early 20th centuries.

Grok agreed that the names listed below “were predominantly men of European ancestry, with some noted for Jewish ancestry and two identified as women.” 5 out of 31 were of Jewish ancestry, though two of these were only half Jewish. Grok categorized the scientist by discovery.

DNA and Genetics

  • Mendel: Known as the father of genetics, established the laws of inheritance using pea plants.
  • Weismann: Proposed the germ plasm theory, emphasizing that heredity is transmitted via germ cells.
  • Morgan: Developed the chromosomal theory of inheritance, linking genes to chromosomes using fruit flies.
  • Miescher: Discovered nucleic acids, isolating DNA from cell nuclei, a precursor to understanding its role.
  • Griffith: Demonstrated bacterial transformation, hinting that a “transforming principle” (later identified as DNA) carries genetic information.
  • Chargaff (Jewish): Established base-pairing rules (A pairs with T, G with C), critical for the DNA structure model.
  • Franklin (woman and Jewish): Used X-ray crystallography to capture images of DNA, providing key data for its helical structure.
  • Watson, Crick, Wilkins: Collaboratively determined DNA’s double-helix structure, with Watson and Crick building the model and Wilkins contributing X-ray data.
  • Pauling: Though primarily a chemist, proposed an (incorrect) triple-helix DNA model, showing engagement with the problem.
  • Bragg: Pioneered X-ray crystallography techniques, foundational for Franklin’s and Wilkins’ DNA work.

Radioactivity

  • Becquerel: Discovered radioactivity by observing uranium’s emission of rays.
  • Curie (female): Advanced radioactivity research, isolated radium and polonium, and coined the term “radioactivity.”
  • Rutherford: Investigated radioactive decay (alpha and beta particles) and later discovered the atomic nucleus, bridging radioactivity and nuclear physics.

X-rays

  • Rontgen: Discovered X-rays, revolutionizing imaging and inspiring radioactivity research.

Neutron

  • Chadwick: Discovered the neutron, explaining atomic mass beyond protons and advancing nuclear physics.

Quantum Mechanics

  • Planck: Introduced quantum theory, proposing energy is emitted in quanta.
  • Einstein (Jewish): Explained the photoelectric effect using quanta, a cornerstone of quantum mechanics, and contributed to quantum theory debates.
  • Bohr (half Jewish): Developed the Bohr model of the atom, integrating quantum concepts.
  • Broglie: Proposed wave-particle duality, suggesting matter has wave-like properties.
  • Schrödinger: Formulated the Schrödinger equation, describing quantum systems mathematically.
  • Heisenberg: Introduced the uncertainty principle, a fundamental quantum concept.
  • Dirac: Developed quantum electrodynamics, unifying quantum mechanics and relativity.
  • Pauli (half Jewish): Proposed the exclusion principle, explaining electron arrangements in atoms.
  • Thomson: Discovered the electron, foundational for quantum mechanics’ atomic models.
  • Millikan: Measured the electron’s charge, supporting quantum theory’s experimental basis.
  • Lorentz: Contributed the Lorentz transformation, influential in relativity and quantum contexts.
  • Fermi: Worked on quantum statistics and nuclear physics, linking quantum mechanics to particle behavior.

XXXIV. ALL the Greatest-Original Children Stories

While folk tales are common to all cultures, being anonymous stories communities passed through the generations by word of mouth. Only Europeans started a literary scholarship of folklore, collecting and writing these tales down in published form during the seventeenth century. The Grimm brothers, Jacob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm (1786-1859), with their background in philology, meticulously recorded the tales exactly as the people told them, writing down every variation and publishing about 300. Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) not only collected tales but wrote dozens of original fairy tales, leading some to argue that he invented the literary fairy tale of pure fantasy about magical characters. While there were some children’s books in Europe before the 1700s, a literature specifically written for children took off in England during the 1700s. The list below, apart from including a few tales by the Grimm brothers, and fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen, including Aesop’s Fables dating back to ancient Greece, covers primarily major children’s books of the 1800s and 1900s, before diversity mandates began to degrade children’s literature.

  • Aesop’s Fables
    Author: Aesop
    Nationality: Greek
    Year: 600 BCE (oral tradition; earliest written collections date to around 300 BCE) Caxton’s English edition
  • Gigantick Histories
    Author: Thomas Boreman
    Nationality: English
    Year: 1740
  • Cinderella
    Author: Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
    Nationality: German
    Year: 1812
  • Snow White
    Author: Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
    Nationality: German
    Year: 1812
  • Hansel and Gretel
    Author: Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
    Nationality: German
    Year: 1812
  • Phantasmion
    Author: Sara Coleridge
    Nationality: English
    Year: 1837
  • The Little Mermaid
    Author: Hans Christian Andersen
    Nationality: Danish
    Year: 1837
  • The Emperor’s New Clothes
    Author: Hans Christian Andersen
    Nationality: Danish
    Year: 1837
  • The Ugly Duckling
    Author: Hans Christian Andersen
    Nationality: Danish
    Year: 1843
  • Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
    Author: Lewis Carroll
    Nationality: English
    Year: 1865
  • The Story of a Bad Boy
    Author: Thomas Bailey Aldrich
    Nationality: American
    Year: 1870
  • Through the Looking-Glass
    Author: Lewis Carroll
    Nationality: English
    Year: 1871
  • Around the World in Eighty Days
    Author: Jules Verne
    Nationality: French
    Year: 1872
  • Black Beauty
    Author: Anna Sewell
    Nationality: English
    Year: 1877
  • Treasure Island
    Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
    Nationality: Scottish
    Year: 1883
  • Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    Author: Mark Twain
    Nationality: American
    Year: 1884
  • The Jungle Book
    Author: Rudyard Kipling
    Nationality: British (born in India)
    Year: 1894
  • The Tale of Peter Rabbit
    Author: Beatrix Potter
    Nationality: English
    Year: 1902
  • Peter Pan
    Author: J.M. Barrie
    Nationality: Scottish
    Year: 1904
  • White Fang
    Author: Jack London
    Nationality: American
    Year: 1906
  • Anne of Green Gables
    Author: L.M. Montgomery
    Nationality: Canadian
    Year: 1908
  • The Wind in the Willows
    Author: Kenneth Grahame
    Nationality: Scottish
    Year: 1908
  • The Nicest Girl in the School
    Author: Angela Brazil
    Nationality: English
    Year: 1909
  • The Secret Garden
    Author: Frances Hodgson Burnett
    Nationality: British-American
    Year: 1911
  • Pollyanna
    Author: Eleanor H. Porter
    Nationality: American
    Year: 1913
  • The Velveteen Rabbit
    Author: Margery Williams
    Nationality: British-American
    Year: 1922
  • Madeline
    Author: Ludwig Bemelmans
    Nationality: Austrian-American
    Year: 1939
  • The Little Prince
    Author: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
    Nationality: French
    Year: 1943
  • Stuart Little
    Author: E.B. White
    Nationality: American
    Year: 1945
  • The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
    Author: C.S. Lewis
    Nationality: British
    Year: 1950
  • The Martian Chronicles
    Author: Ray Bradbury
    Nationality: American
    Year: 1950
  • Charlotte’s Web
    Author: E.B. White
    Nationality: American
    Year: 1952
  • The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet
    Author: Eleanor Cameron
    Nationality: American
    Year: 1954
  • The Lord of the Rings
    Author: J.R.R. Tolkien
    Nationality: British
    Year: 1954–1955
  • Old Yeller
    Author: Fred Gipson
    Nationality: American
    Year: 1956
  • The Cat in the Hat
    Author: Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel)
    Nationality: American
    Year: 1957
  • How the Grinch Stole Christmas!
    Author: Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel)
    Nationality: American
    Year: 1957
  • Calico Captive
    Author: Elizabeth George Speare
    Nationality: American
    Year: 1957
  • The Weirdstone of Brisingamen
    Author: Alan Garner
    Nationality: English
    Year: 1960
  • Green Eggs and Ham
    Author: Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel)
    Nationality: American
    Year: 1960
  • Where the Red Fern Grows
    Author: Wilson Rawls
    Nationality: American
    Year: 1961
  • A Wrinkle in Time
    Author: Madeleine L’Engle
    Nationality: American
    Year: 1962
  • Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
    Author: Roald Dahl
    Nationality: British
    Year: 1964
  • Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
    Author: J.K. Rowling
    Nationality: British
    Year: 1997

XXXV. Identified the Cosmological and Geologic Time Periods.

While the concept of cosmological time evolved from 20th-century physics and astronomy, and no one “inventor” can be said to have originated a particular time period, it is possible to name scientists whose work is associated with the conceptualization of particular epochs. Similarly, although the conceptualization of geologic time periods is rooted in the development of the science of geology, the principles of stratigraphy first developed by Nicolas Steno (1669), and refined by many geologists later on. we can identify particular names associated with each geologic period. Of all the names listed below, Abdus Salam is the only scientist with non-European ancestry, born in Pakistan. Seven names have Jewish ancestry, and twenty-three are of European ancestry.

Cosmological Time Periods

  1. Planck Epoch
    • Time: 0 to ~10⁻⁴³ seconds after the Big Bang
    • Description: The earliest phase, where quantum gravity dominated, and all fundamental forces were unified. Physics as we know it doesn’t fully apply.
    • Originator: Named after Max Planck, who developed the theoretical framework for quantum mechanics and defined the Planck scale in the late 19th/early 20th century. The concept emerged from quantum theory and general relativity integration efforts.
  2. Grand Unification Epoch
    • Time: ~10⁻⁴³ to ~10⁻³⁶ seconds
    • Description: Gravity separated from the other forces, which remained unified (strong, weak, electromagnetic). The universe was a hot, dense soup of energy.
    • Originator: This phase stems from Grand Unified Theories (GUTs), proposed in the 1970s by physicists like Howard Georgi and Sheldon Glashow, building on earlier unification ideas.
  3. Inflationary Epoch
    • Time: ~10⁻³⁶ to ~10⁻³² seconds
    • Description: A rapid exponential expansion of the universe occurred, smoothing out irregularities and setting the stage for structure formation.
    • Originator: Alan Guth proposed cosmic inflation in 1980, revolutionizing cosmology by explaining the universe’s uniformity and flatness.
  4. Electroweak Epoch
    • Time: ~10⁻³² to ~10⁻¹² seconds
    • Description: The electromagnetic and weak forces were still unified. The universe cooled as it expanded.
    • Originator: Linked to the electroweak theory by Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam, and Steven Weinberg (1960s-1970s), unifying these forces mathematically.
  5. Quark Epoch
    • Time: ~10⁻¹² to ~10⁻⁶ seconds
    • Description: Quarks, leptons, and photons dominated as the universe cooled enough for the strong force to separate.
    • Originator: Named from particle physics developments, with George Zweig and Murray Gell-Mann proposing quarks in 1964.
  6. Hadron Epoch
    • Time: ~10⁻⁶ seconds to ~1 second
    • Description: Quarks combined to form hadrons (protons, neutrons). Most matter-antimatter pairs annihilated.
    • Originator: Also tied to Gell-Mann and Zweig’s quark model, with the term “hadron” coined by Lev Okun in 1962.
  7. Lepton Epoch
    • Time: ~1 second to ~10 seconds
    • Description: Leptons (electrons, neutrinos) dominated after most hadrons annihilated. Neutrinos decoupled.
    • Originator: Emerged from particle physics; no single originator, but builds on lepton classification from the mid-20th century.
  8. Nucleosynthesis Epoch
    • Time: ~10 seconds to ~20 minutes
    • Description: Protons and neutrons fused to form light nuclei (hydrogen, helium).
    • Originator: George Gamow, Ralph Alpher, and Robert Herman developed Big Bang nucleosynthesis theory in the 1940s, predicting elemental abundances.
  9. Recombination Epoch
    • Time: ~380,000 years
    • Description: Electrons and nuclei combined to form neutral atoms, making the universe transparent to light (cosmic microwave background forms).
    • Originator: Predicted by Alpher and Herman in 1948, confirmed by Penzias and Wilson’s 1965 discovery of the CMB.
  10. Dark Ages
    • Time: ~380,000 years to ~150 million years
    • Description: A period of darkness before stars formed, with only neutral gas and CMB radiation.
    • Originator: Term coined later by cosmologists; no single originator, but tied to post-recombination studies.
  11. Reionization Epoch
    • Time: ~150 million to ~1 billion years
    • Description: First stars and galaxies formed, reionizing the neutral hydrogen with ultraviolet light.
    • Originator: Concept developed in the 1990s-2000s from observations (e.g., by the Hubble Space Telescope) and theoretical work on star formation.
  12. Stellar Era (Present Era)
    • Time: ~1 billion years to present (~13.8 billion years)
    • Description: Stars, galaxies, and planets dominate, with ongoing structure formation.
    • Originator: Broadly understood through Edwin Hubble’s 1920s work on cosmic expansion, refined by modern cosmology.

Geologic Time Periods

Eons

  1. Hadean Eon (~4.6–4.0 billion years ago)
    • Description: Earth’s formation, no preserved rocks, intense bombardment.
    • Originator: Term coined by Preston Cloud in 1972, reflecting a “hellish” early Earth.
  2. Archean Eon (~4.0–2.5 billion years ago)
    • Description: Early crust, first life (microbes).
    • Originator: Named by James Dana in 1872, from Greek “archaios” (ancient).
  3. Proterozoic Eon (~2.5 billion–541 million years ago)
    • Description: Oxygen buildup, multicellular life emerges.
    • Originator: Proposed by William Logan in 1857, formalized later; “protero” means “earlier life.”
  4. Phanerozoic Eon (541 million years ago–present)
    • Description: Visible life flourishes, complex ecosystems.
    • Originator: Named by George Chadwick in 1930, from Greek “phaneros” (visible) and “zoe” (life).

Eras (Phanerozoic Eon)

  1. Paleozoic Era (541–252 million years ago)
    • Description: “Ancient life” – invertebrates, fish, early plants.
    • Originator: John Phillips named it in 1841, based on fossil succession.
  2. Mesozoic Era (252–66 million years ago)
    • Description: “Middle life” – dinosaurs, first mammals.
    • Originator: Also John Phillips, 1841, noting a transitional fossil record.
  3. Cenozoic Era (66 million years ago–present)
    • Description: “Recent life” – mammals dominate.
    • Originator: John Phillips, 1841, for the modern fauna.

Periods (Phanerozoic Eon)

  1. Cambrian Period (541–485 million years ago)
    • Description: Cambrian Explosion, diverse marine life.
    • Originator: Adam Sedgwick named it in 1835 after Cambria (Wales).
  2. Ordovician Period (485–443 million years ago)
    • Description: Marine diversification, first corals.
    • Originator: Charles Lapworth, 1879, after the Ordovices tribe in Wales.
  3. Silurian Period (443–419 million years ago)
    • Description: First land plants, jawed fish.
    • Originator: Roderick Murchison, 1835, after the Silures tribe in Wales.
  4. Devonian Period (419–359 million years ago)
    • Description: “Age of Fish,” early tetrapods.
    • Originator: Sedgwick and Murchison, 1839, after Devon, England.
  5. Carboniferous Period (359–299 million years ago)
    • Description: Coal forests, amphibians thrive.
    • Originator: William Conybeare and William Phillips, 1822, for carbon-rich deposits.
    • Subdivisions: Mississippian and Pennsylvanian (North American terms by Henry Shaler Williams, 1891).
  6. Permian Period (299–252 million years ago)
    • Description: Pangaea forms, ends with mass extinction.
    • Originator: Roderick Murchison, 1841, after Perm, Russia.
  7. Triassic Period (252–201 million years ago)
    • Description: Dinosaurs emerge, recovery from extinction.
    • Originator: Friedrich von Alberti, 1834, for a three-part rock sequence in Germany.
  8. Jurassic Period (201–145 million years ago)
    • Description: Dinosaurs dominate, first birds.
    • Originator: Alexandre Brongniart, 1829, after the Jura Mountains.
  9. Cretaceous Period (145–66 million years ago)
    • Description: Flowering plants, ends with dinosaur extinction.
    • Originator: Jean-Baptiste d’Omalius d’Halloy, 1822, for chalk (Latin “creta”).
  10. Paleogene Period (66–23 million years ago)
    • Description: Mammal radiation, early primates.
    • Originator: Moritz Hörnes, 1853, for “older recent” life.
  11. Neogene Period (23–2.58 million years ago)
    • Description: Modern mammals, hominids evolve.
    • Originator: Moritz Hörnes, 1853, for “newer recent” life.
  12. Quaternary Period (2.58 million years ago–present)
    • Description: Ice ages, human evolution.
    • Originator: Jules Desnoyers, 1829, for recent deposits.

XXXVI. Invented all the extreme sports

I just asked Grok to organize in a numbered format the following extreme sports, with a brief description of the nature of each sport, and the nationalities of the men associated with their origins. This is based on Grok’s reply.

  1. Highlining
    • Description: Tightrope walking on a strap at elevated heights, typically with a harness for safety.
    • Origin: Pioneered in the early 1980s by American climbers Adam Grosowsky and Jeff Ellington in Yosemite National Park, California.
  2. Free Solo Climbing
    • Description: Climbing rock formations without ropes or assistance beyond a chalk bag and shoes.
    • Origin: Paul Preuss (Austria, 1886–1913) is credited with promoting a purist climbing ethic in the early 20th century that resembles modern free soloing. Alex Honnold (USA) popularized it with his famous 2017 free solo of El Capitan.
  3. Downhill Mountain Biking
    • Description: Racing down steep, rough terrain on a mountain bike.
    • Origin: Downhill mountain biking emerged in the 1970s in Northern California, USA, when a group of cyclists, including Gary Fisher, Joe Breeze, and Charlie Kelly, began modifying bikes to race down fire roads on Mount Tamalpais.
  4. BASE Jumping
    • Description: Jumping from fixed objects (Building, Antenna, Span, Earth) with a parachute.
    • Origin: Modern BASE-jumping traces back to Carl Boenish (USA), who in 1981 coined the term and made it a recognized sport by jumping from El Capitan in Yosemite with a parachute.
  5. Ice Climbing
    • Description: Scaling ice formations like frozen waterfalls or snow-covered peaks.
    • Origin: Ice climbing evolved from mountaineering in the European Alps. Oscar Eckenstein (UK, 1859–1921) is often credited with early innovations.
  6. Cliff Diving
    • Description: Jumping from high cliffs into water.
    • Origin: Cliff diving has ancient roots in Hawaii, where King Kahekili (1737–1794) reportedly leapt from cliffs to prove his bravery. Modern cliff diving was popularized by figures like Orlando Duque (Colombia) in competitive formats.
  7. Wing Walking
    • Description: Standing on a plane’s wings during flight as it performs stunts.
    • Origin: Wing walking began in the 1920s as a stunt in post-WWI barnstorming shows in the USA. Ormer Locklear (USA, 1891–1920) is credited as the first to perform it publicly.
  8. Freshwater Diving (Cave Diving)
    • Description: Exploring submerged cave systems underwater.
    • Origin: Modern cave diving was pioneered by Sheck Exley (USA, 1949–1994).
  9. Volcano Surfing
    • Description: Sliding down volcanic slopes, often on a board.
    • Origin: Volcano surfing (or volcano boarding) was popularized in the 2000s by Darryn Webb, an Australian.
  10. Big Wave Surfing
    • Description: Surfing massive ocean waves, often over 20 feet high.
    • Origin: Big wave surfing originated in Hawaii, with George Freeth (USA, of Hawaiian descent, 1883–1919). Later, Greg Noll (USA) pioneered riding giant waves at Waimea Bay in the 1950s.
  11. Freestyle Skiing & Snowboarding
    • Description: Performing aerial tricks and maneuvers on skis or snowboards, often in terrain parks or halfpipes.
    • Origin: Freestyle skiing emerged in the 1960s in the United States, with skiers like Wayne Wong and John Clendenin popularizing trick-based skiing in the 1970s. Snowboarding’s freestyle form followed in the 1980s, driven by Jake Burton Carpenter.
  12. Waterfall Kayaking
    • Description: Paddling over waterfalls in a kayak, often involving significant drops and turbulent waters.
    • Origin: Evolved from whitewater kayaking, with Tao Berman setting notable records in the 1990s and 2000s, including a 98.4-foot waterfall descent in 2007 in the United States.
  13. Big Mountain Skiing / Snowboarding
    • Description: Skiing or snowboarding on steep, ungroomed terrain, typically in remote backcountry areas.
    • Origin: Big mountain skiing traces back to the 1970s, with Bill Briggs making the first ski descent of the Grand Teton in Wyoming, USA, in 1971.
  14. Ice Cross Downhill
    • Description: Racing down an icy track with jumps, turns, and obstacles on skates.
    • Origin: Created by Red Bull in 2000, with the inaugural event held in Stockholm, Sweden, in 2001.
  15. Skydiving
    • Description: Jumping from an aircraft and free-falling before deploying a parachute.
    • Origin: Modern skydiving as a sport developed in the 1950s, building on earlier feats like Raymond Young’s first recorded free-fall jump in 1919 in the United States.
  16. Canyon Swinging
    • Description: Swinging from a rope or cable across a canyon.
    • Origin: Popularized in the 2000s as an adventure tourism activity, notably in Queenstown, New Zealand.
  17. BMX
    • Description: Bicycle Motocross, involving racing on dirt tracks or performing tricks in skateparks with specialized bikes.
    • Origin: Originated in the late 1960s in California, USA, when Scot Breithaupt organized the first BMX race in 1970.
  18. Extreme Skiing
    • Description: Skiing in extreme conditions, such as steep slopes, deep powder, or remote locations.
    • Origin: Attributed to Sylvain Saudan who in the 1960s and 1970s made pioneering descents of steep Alpine slopes.
  19. Freestyle Motocross
    • Description: Performing aerial tricks and stunts on a motocross bike, often during jumps.
    • Origin: Developed in the 1990s in the United States, with pioneers Jeremy “Twitch” Stenberg and Mike Metzger.

Conclusion

We could go on but these lists are more than enough to convey the supreme achievements of Europeans. In our age of immigrant DEI, which is destroying the West, these lists should become an indispensable part in the protection and affirmation of European identity and heritage. Carry them around, and overwhelm the anti-whites with them.

Contemporary Italian Dissident Thought: The Importance of Masculinity and Heroism

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Adriano Scianca, Carlomanno Adinolfi, Francesco Boco, Andrea Anselmo, Guido Taietti, Alberto Brandi
Polemos Editrice, 2024

Despite the rise of computer translation technology, language remains a significant barrier to the sharing of important ideas. Italy is home to an active identitarian scene with its own print and web publications, but most sympathetic English speakers’ acquaintance with it is limited to having heard a bit about Casa Pound—an important component of the Italian dissident right, but not the whole. Recognizing the desirability of broadcasting their message beyond the borders of Italy, five prominent activists arranged for publication of a small anthology of their writings in English last October under the title Italian Vanguard: Ideas for Future Predators.

Important influences on the Italian identitarian movement include Nietzsche, Marinetti, Evola and the French nouvelle droite, especially Guillaume Faye. They reject liberal capitalism and the monotheistic tradition, and much that goes under the label “conservative” in the English-speaking world. Many find inspiration in the myth of Prometheus, the Titan who stole fire from Olympus. Accordingly, they are critical of any tendency to set limits to technological advance—an attitude they consider un-European. (This is not, of course, equivalent to denying that technology can and has been put to harmful uses.)

By way of introduction, we shall look at the essay “Stay Superhuman” by Carlomanno Adinolfi. Signore Adinolfi is an electrical engineer who has written three novels in the fantasy genre and contributed to the nationalist website Il Primato Nazionale (www.ilprimatonazionale.it) since 2005.

Today’s dominant ideology is fond of appeals to “humanity,” a concept useful to egalitarians since it tends to strip actual persons of all that distinguishes them. But a closer look reveals the ease with which these supposed humanitarians can deny the human status of all who oppose them. During Italy’s “years of lead,” a time of political turmoil which lasted from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, leftist terrorist groups proclaimed the slogan “killing a fascist is not a crime,” always with a tacit reservation of the left to decide for themselves who was a fascist. The attitude persists: in February 2023, an Italian “anti-fascist” was arrested for participating in an armed assault on Hungarian citizens taking part in a demonstration. Sympathizers back home got her elected MEP, whereby she acquired parliamentary immunity for her past actions! A license for violence appears the natural result of the cult of humanity. Americans will remember the “punch a Nazi” kerfuffle of a few years ago as an expression of the same mentality.

During the First World War, Italian soldiers adopted the motto “it is better to live one day as a lion than a hundred years as a sheep.” But not everyone agrees with this sentiment, of course. Lions can be scary. Adinolfi sees the dominant ideology of the West as

a great attempt to repress all the “fierce” qualities of the human being. A man who is too masculine is a “toxic male chauvinist;” a child who stands up to the bully by beating him up instead of reporting him to the teacher is punished more severely than the bully himself; a street fight, especially if it happens for political reasons and one dares to have “certain ideas,” is likely to be punished with a disproportionate number of years in prison. This is the path followed, if only unconsciously, by all the crazy vegans and environmentalists who blame hunting, horse racing, [and] bullfighting. The standard bearers of “do-gooder” egalitarianism fear and viscerally hate those ancestral instincts that since the dawn of Man have always elevated the aristoi above the masses.

It is true, of course, that civilization requires channeling and placing limits upon violent human instincts. But it is an illusion to believe they can be made permanently unnecessary and done away with. Life will always remain a struggle, and the heroic virtues will never become obsolete. Adinolfi cites an illustration from Italian history: Garibaldi’s “expedition of the thousand.” His men were denounced as pirates, but they freed and unified Italy when negotiation was failing.

Masculinity, as Jack Donovan has written, derives from the tasks men had to perform in our primary environment of evolutionary adaptation, the hunter-gatherer band: defending territory and overcoming threats from other groups, resource scarcity, and environmental stresses. But modern man has become a victim of his own success, providing so much security and so many resources that the experiences of danger and want have been forgotten. As a result, the masculine virtues that made civilization possible are no longer valued, and they atrophy: “When man no longer has to deal with risk, when from a wolf he turns into a house dog, he is destined to decline.”

Adriano Scianca, another contributor to Italian Vanguard, writes with sensitivity of how primitive masculinity is subsumed and elevated but not eliminated within a flourishing civilization:

Man loves more to found civilizations that to abide by their laws. If subjected too long to given order, he withers. This is why the tendency to gather in a Männerbund, a manly community—gangs, militias, fraternities—manifests itself so often in history. Of course, the gang clashes with another symbolic form of men’s power: fatherhood, i.e., the laws of the city. The band of brothers thrives where the father is missing, no longer there or not there yet, thus at the beginning or end of civilization. When the father is there and performs his function, the brothers feel like sons first and foremost, the bond with the father prevails over that with each other. In order not to wither, civilization must hold the two dimensions together. If the gang prevails, it is anarchy; if the father dominates, it is an oppressive power that stifles individuality. The gang must be organically integrated into the Law.

Adinolfi himself writes of the need to maintain a balance between the dynamic force of the conquering gang and the static force of civilization which must rein in barbaric impetuosity so that it does not overreach and civilization degenerate into anarchy.

He finds a disturbing precedent for today’s human self-domestication in an event of late antiquity:

In the 4th century, Emperor Constantine canceled military service from the political cursus honorum. To become a magistrate, governor, senator, one no longer had to go serve in the legions. As a result, a resident army of barbarians was formed, which was no longer bound to the fortunes of Rome.

Simultaneously, the empire came to be ruled by a class of soft and fearful bureaucrats, and Rome’s end was not far off. Mussolini knew better; he was fond of saying: “One can go from the tent to the palace provided one is prepared to go from the palace to the tent.”

A careful study of today’s ruling humanitarian and egalitarian ideology reveals a firm determination to destroy every attachment presupposed by what Jack Donovan has called the way of men: family, clan, nation, borders, identity. Our task is to safeguard these essential human goods. Adinolfi does not believe “conservatism” can provide a useful model:

Complex dynamic systems, whether biological or mechanical, in attempting to regulate themselves “dampen” certain behaviors so that their output does not become unstable, so that the system always remains controlled. While the progressive is the sworn enemy who wants to kill the noble predator, the conservative is the control valve that seeks to tame and depower it.

Egalitarianism has not simply been ‘taken too far’; it is fundamentally false and pernicious, and we must seek its total overcoming.

Other essays in Italian Vanguard offer meditations on the work of Ernst Jünger, space as the frontier for future human endeavor, and a challenging philosophical meditation on potentiality (“Dynamis: A Philosophy of Force”).

Guido Taietti is perhaps the contributor best known in the English-speaking world due to his appearance at 2023’s Scandza Forum and 2024’s American Renaissance Conference. I have reviewed his book Political Witchcraft here.

In the present volume he offers some thoughts on the concept of heroism in Western thinking. He points out that in a vast, thinly populated country such as Russia, retreat can serve to stretch an enemy’s supply lines and thus contribute to victory, as it did against Napoleon in 1812. In the West, however, a retreat of even 25 miles may involve the loss of an entire city with its population. Hence the ideal of the sacrificial hero on the model of Sparta’s Leonidas.

Today, however, the West is dominated by liberal capitalism, an inherently antiheroic way of thinking based on rational decision making with a view to individual utility. From liberalism’s point of view,

nothing is more absurd than dying for a cause, losing the material good par excellence, the one which makes possible the enjoyment of all others for the sake of something that does not even potentially offer a material benefit (a ‘cause’). Of course, the need for heroes can be considered a rational choice from the point of view of society if one postulates the existence of a mechanism that reasons in collective terms.

Heroism thus presupposes the reality of the collective. It is an aspect of the sacred, anti-economistic dimension of life. The struggle against liberal economism is thus the sacred and heroic struggle par excellence.

White Dreams and the Politics of Cold Turkey: The Internecine Proclivities of White People

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It was two thousand years ago that the Roman writer Juvenal warned us to beware of our dreams coming true. An attractive Roman noblewoman may go to great lengths in her self-adornment only to discover how intensely she is hated by her less physically endowed female companions. Comes the time when the envy of her less attractive entourage turns her accomplished dreamlife into a living hell. Likewise, a wealthy praetor when travelling with his body guards outside Rome stops indulging in his fame and ruminates how not to get mugged by highway robbers instead. The philosopher and lawyer Cicero was the best orator in the Roman empire whose self-complacency eventually cost him the loss of his head by the jealous would-be emperor Mark Antony. His handsome colleague and client, the famous theater actor Quintus Roscius was forced to forfeit his narcistic self-adulation having been obliged to spend most of his backstage life dodging lawfare for his tax evasion. Had he lost the presidential election, despite his phenomenal combative spirit in fighting the DOJ’s Bolshevik-inspired trumped-up charges, president Trump would be by now en route to federal penitentiary.

“Be careful what you wish for” is a fine English expression which lacks a verbal and conceptual equivalent in other European languages. It does, however, reflect the very opposite of grandiose dreams come true. Maybe the best medicine for a livable life is the suppression of free will as preached by the ikons of cultural pessimism, Emile Cioran and Arthur Schopenhauer. Squashing free will and suppressing all political appetites may be also the best answer for an aspiring public figure given that at some point in time his legacy will only be remembered as a criminal enterprise. Over the course of time the unity of opposites leads to the paradox of unintended consequences and unanticipated political disasters. It is only a matter of time that a ruler’s erstwhile stardom will be labeled a crime, or even worse that his name will be chiseled out as damnatio memoriae. Which option to choose; keep a low profile and live one’s life in self-abnegation? Or dwell in an overdrive promethean hubris-like self-delusion of working for the greater good? Ten, hundred, or five hundred years later a politician’s achieved goals will be the target of public demonization. Tearing down the statues of Confederate heroes is just the latest example of unintended consequences that must have slipped the mind of Jefferson Davis and R.E. Lee. The distinction between good and evil is just a matter of individual judgment in accordance to the dominant lie of a given epoch. Even a popular English proverb that “every cloud has a silver lining,” which has a better graphic equivalent in the French language, à quelque chose malheur est bon (“out of bad comes good”) sounds grotesque. It can’t be a solace for a politician sentenced to death for his lost war, nor can it bring relief to a heretic preaching untimely beliefs. With the increasing racial replacement in the U.S. the founding fathers Jefferson and Hamilton will soon be featured in school curricula as the architypes of White Evil, all ready to join the club of hundreds of the damned ones, including the proverbial Hitler and his ilk.

It is a great merit of behavior geneticists and evolutionary biologists to single out the prime role of heredity, particularly when it comes to our political choices when facing off a hostile outgroup. The study of the genetics of race can also help us much in uncovering a sociopathic would-be loudmouth within our own ingroup. Due to the steady bolshevization of social science studies since 1945, it should not come as a surprise why the research in these fields has been avoided like the plague in the Western school curriculum. The good news is that the post-WWII gigantic egalitarian multiracial scam, whether in its communist or liberal form, is falling apart. The decades-long official U.S. Soviet-inspired multiracial-DEI- affirmative action-woke policies  are showing their dysfunctional and destructive results in an all social, economic, and military realms. Even its erstwhile supporters are increasingly becoming aware of it..

Ingroup infighting

Is a racially homogenous society based on meritocratic and hierarchical principles i.e., that everybody must have his own due (suum cuique) the best answer? The works of dozens of prominent geneticists have confirmed that ingroup members are biologically predisposed to flock to their kind, especially when a threat of aggression from outgroups looms. How is it then that more Whites since time immemorial have been killed by people who were in fact their own ingroup members (whatever labels they were using) than by hordes of invading outgroups? Why deny that the entire history of white Europe and America, despite their cultural braggadocio, is largely a history of civil wars? Wishful thinking about the expulsion of all non-Whites, or a putative establishment of secessionist all-White statelets in the U.S. or E.U. will likely lead to another round of mutual inter-White incriminations and civil wars. Also worth pointing out is that non-White and non-European outgroups perceive the history of interminable inter-European wars very differently from how European nations perceive their dispute with similar neighboring outgroups.

Policies based on identity, however romantic they sound, are based on the exclusion of alterity. All of us define our Selves only in comparison to the Other. Example? There is not a single nation in Europe that has been spared from murderous wars with its next-door European neighbor. Very likely White infighting will continue unabated even if all 30 million non-Whites in Europe and over 150 million non-Whites in North America were miraculously to disappear. Alas, birds of feather do not always flock together. In fact, any conflict becomes the more gruesome the less visible racial, linguistic and cultural lines exist between two neighboring groups sharing the same DNA. On the other hand, the more geographically distant nations are from each other, the more likely they will tolerate their mutual differences. As a rule, each ingroup perceives its next door similar as an affront, as a denial or as a caricature of its own identity, as was amply shown during the recent bloody conflict between Serbs and Croats. “The closer we are to the Other”, writes Alain de Benoist, “the more violently we will fight against him, because the very fact of his proximity makes his Otherness all the more scandalous.”

In their turn non-White, non-European observers and scholars, let alone millions of low-IQ non-White migrants flooding Europe and America must be scandalized and bedeviled by disputes between European nations. Historical disagreements resulting in bloody wars between genetically similar Irish and English, between Basques and Castilians, between, Germans and Poles, between Hungarians and Romanians, between Flemings and Walloons must appear to them as a sign of the insanity of the White man. This is the subject White homeland advocates have failed to address. A well-researched work on the sociobiology of civil wars between European nations is sorely missing.

At the heart of interminable inter-White ingroup disputes and civil wars one must single out the destructive role of millennia-long Judeo-Chistian-Islamic monotheism. The catastrophic results of the Abrahamic dogma have been the main engine of European ingroup civil wars, both in their theological and ideological versions. Belief in the existence of only one God presupposes the belief in only one political truth and the rejection of other possible truths. Civil wars among White Europeans, stretching from the first Christian emperor Constantine to the Second World War, all the way to the current war between genetically similar Russians and Ukrainians, have their roots in secularized forms of Christianity. By contrast, old Romans and Greeks, although waging merciless wars against foreign tribes never imposed their diverse deities and their own political beliefs on conquered tribes. In fact, they often borrowed gods from conquered tribes and had them added to their own pantheon.

One can sing the praises of ancient Roman religious tolerance, but the Greco-Roman civil wars amidst the same polytheistic ingroups were not very divine at all. One does not need to recap he Thirty Years Peloponnesian war between the racially same Athenians and Spartans. Very likely similar inter-White carnage will continue in our postmodernity even if all non-White citizens were forced to depart from Europe and America.

One can justly condemn the jealous Jewish god Yahve and his totalitarian ukases against the unchosen ones: “The Lord your God will cut off before you the nations you are about to invade and dispossess” (Deuteronomy 12:29-32). The secular version of this old Yahve’s decree comes now as a free pass for the IDF serial killings of Arabs in the Gaza Strip. Neither have the Christians lagged much behind in their killing sprees within their own racial ingroup, each ingroup sect or clan claiming to hold the only appropriate master key to the Christian heaven. “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” (Luke, 14:26). The Russo- Ukrainian conflict is just the latest Gentile secular offshoot of the monotheist Judeo-Christian- inspired mindset.

Wern Graul (1905–1984): Christian Desecration of the Oak Tree

One must rightly be shocked with ancient Christian and Jewish preachers and their liberal and communist commissars preaching once upon a time the Gospel of antipaganism and lecturing on the importance of antifascism today. But the pagan ingroup and inter-clan violence is also full of gory scenes. Hundreds of historical and mythical texts testify to it. The egotistic Titan Saturn, in order to preserve his sole rule on his global turf did not hesitate a minute to devour his son, the future god Zeus. In the much-vaunted Iliad, the pagan hero Achilles drags the desecrated body of Hector along the walls of Troya, causing discomfort among pagan Troyan mourners worshiping the same gods (The Iliad, Book XXII) . Ovid’s Metamorphoses depicts an orgy of ingroup violence such as when the Balkan-Thracian king Tereus rapes his wife’s sister Philomela and cuts her tongue off in order to prevent her from going public about the crime. Orestes kills her mother Clytemnestra for her cheating on his father and her husband Agammemnon. Neither would have the foundation of the ancient pagan city of Rome been possible without having jealous Romulus kill his brother Remus.

Francisco Goya (1746–1828): Saturn devouring his son

In the study of modern political and academic self-censorship and woke witch-hunts against free thinkers in the EU and the US it is imperative to study Ovid’s bloody allegory of human, subhuman and transhuman transformations.

The cases of more secular and historically recorded ingroup savagery are timeless and countless. The emperor Nero had his mother killed. His lifelong mentor the wealthiest man in Rome, the philosopher Seneca, who liked to brag stoically about modesty and tolerance, was subsequently killed by Nero — his former imperial pupil. Emperor Marcus Aurelius, much eulogized in history books for his compassion and magnanimity toward his defeated foes must have badly misdirected his stoic genes; his son, the emperor Commodus, was the foremost sexual pervert in the Roman empire. Shakespeare’s dramas also abound in ingroup and intrafamilial killings, mostly by the rulers suffering from mental or sexual deformities, as illustrated in his play Richard III. Shakespear’s king Richard is not a far cry from many contemporary White nationalists in the US and Europe parading themselves as undisputed future leaders daydreaming about how to save the West.

And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover
To entertain these fair well-spoken days
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days. (Act 1, Scene 1)

White dreams turned into the tragic opposite following 1945. But even if Hitler and Mussolini and similar or sympathetic politicians in Europe and the U.S. of that epoch had won the war, or at least won the day, their dreams would have materialized by now into something entirely different. White dreams caused by acid or crack can help in arresting or even reverse the flow of time, but the aftermath is never pleasant.

……………………..

Further reading:

  1. Alain de Benoist, “Violence sacrée guerre et monothéisme”, Krisis (33/April 2010).
  2. Hervé Coutau-Bégarie “A quoi sert la guerre?” Krisis (34/June, 2010).
  3. Gaius Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, edited by J. Rives (Penguin Classics, 2007).