Canada Under Globalist Control 

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Under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s federal regime, Canada has become a testbed or pilot program for the globalist experiment. Canada, like much of the Western World, has been under severe deconstructive challenge. All aspects of life have been subjected to a withering culture of critique. The new Canada that is emerging from the ruins of tradition is very much in line with the prototypical globalist program.

Klaus Schwab, the globalist founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF), essentially described the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution and The Great Reset as the events that will lead to the abolition of private property and the establishment of a new world order. Free market capitalism will be dispensed with in favor of stakeholder capitalism, a system in which governments and central banks, beholden to the WEF, will dictate to citizens and private businesses what they should think, how they should behave, and what their priorities should be. In this dark future “you won’t be allowed to own any private property and your only recourse will be to live in a state of permanent dependency on a small number of rich elitists who own everything.”

The WEF has come to the fore of late because of brazen public statements by Klaus Schwab. In 2017, Schwab boasted, for instance, that almost the entire Canadian Cabinet was under the sway of the WEF as a vast number of its current composition was made up of former WEF young leaders. He proudly states that the WEF has “infiltrated” governments all over the world. Schwab explicitly mentions Canada: “I have to say, when I mention now names, like Mrs. (Angela) Merkel and even Vladimir Putin, and so on, they all have been Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum. But what we are very proud of now is the young generation like Prime Minister (Justin) Trudeau. … We penetrate the cabinet. So yesterday I was at a reception for Prime Minister Trudeau and I know that half of his cabinet, or even more than half of his cabinet, are actually Young Global Leaders.”

This raises some questions about how the WEF, an institution that citizens are not able to vote for, has had a disproportionate influence on the policies adopted by the Canadian government at every level. Although the WEF is but one of a vast constellation of globalist non-governmental organizations (NGOs), it is an insidious example of how globalist institutions, very much aligned with George Soros’ open borders ethos, can have a profound influence on the way we are governed.

A global system characterized by open borders, stakeholder capitalism, transhumanism, and a whole litany of other transformative measures as promoted by Mr. Schwab’s WEF, George Soros’ Open Society, and the Anglo-Jewish American ruling class, is already at work in the United States, Canada, Britain, the wider anglosphere—and throughout Europe. Scott Howard, in one of his meticulously substantiated articles, states that Mr. Schwab has been “at the nexus of much of the transhumanist-globalist Hivemind activity and its future direction, and it is worth looking more deeply at Schwab, the World Economic Forum, and the tentacle-like connections that span the globe with the aim of totally enveloping it.” Mr. Howard further states that the WEF’s partners and affiliates “include virtually every major player in not just the globalist agenda more broadly but who form the power nucleus of the dominant faction of transhumanists pushing the world in its current awful direction.”

Interestingly, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) seemingly endless eastward expansion brings with it the very same destructively transformative globalism. The current, ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine can be seen as the exemplification of a war between globalism and the nation-state. Globalists see “Putin as the symbol of white identity and populism in the world, and they want to knock Russia out of the world stage.” Incidentally, Larry Fink, CEO of the multi-trillion-dollar investment management corporation Blackrock, acknowledged Vladimir Putin’s Russia thwarting globalist designs. Mr. Fink stated that the Russian invasion of Ukraine “has put an end to the globalization we have experienced over the last three decades.”

It is telling and predictable, therefore, that Canada’s official stance vis-à-vis the Russia-Ukraine war is in lockstep with the globalist position: “Canada and Ukraine are steadfast partners and close friends. Alongside its international partners and allies, and in solidarity with the government and people of Ukraine, Canada unequivocally condemns Russia’s decision to recognize the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in Ukraine. Russia’s action constitutes a brazen violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence, and demonstrates a blatant disregard for international law.”

In his examination of the ideas of George Soros and his mentor, Karl Popper, Historian Ricardo Duchesne states that “opposition to European ‘tribalism’ and ‘nationalism’ is the single most important aim and function of the Open Society Foundations.”

The great impediment to the globalist open society is any form of self-assertion by nations or peoples, especially White Europeans. Author Michelle Malkin, in Open Borders Inc, writes “Remember: national self-determination is the pesky ‘obstacle’ in the path to Soros’s open society.” [Michelle Malkin, Open Borders Inc., (Washington D.C.: Regnery, 2019), p.51] And the scale of this self-determination does not seem to matter to our hostile elites: whether it is Canadian Truckers, American patriots, or the Russian state, they are all viewed with hostility. The weapons used against these enemies only vary in degree. Self-assertion by the White majority population in Canada is dealt with in a variety of ways including mass migration, financial pressure, censorship, unpunished mass criminality, miseducation, physical/political violence, and mass media.

Political theorist Alexander Dugin similarly states that one of the tactics used to bring about The Great Reset is the “widespread use of “demonization,” “de-platforming,” and network ostracism (cancel culture) against all those who hold views different from the globalist one (both abroad and in the U.S. itself).”

Karl Haemers, in his article entitled “The not-so-friendly folks at the World Economic Forum,” states quite rightly that Chrystia Freeland is not only a WEF Board member, she is also currently the deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister of Canada. As Mr. Haemers points out, she negotiated major global oligarchic control “free trade” agreements such as the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with the European Union, and the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement; Freeland also wrote a book entitled Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else.  

Miss Freeland’s status as a WEF board member has been written about in the Canadian mainstream press as well, albeit in a limited way. In an article appearing in the National Post in 2021, the writer emphasizes a glaring conflict of interest: Miss Freeland currently sits on the WEF board of trustees while still being deputy prime minister of Canada and minister of finance.

The WEF internal news has praised Canada’s generosity as far as refugee and immigrant acceptance is concerned. The utopian visions of refugees integrating seamlessly into Canada, however, is a deluded fantasy, a pipe dream. Many of those admitted at great cost to the Canadian taxpayer end up on the street, in shelters, and without the skills or means to enter the workforce. In a recent government report, it was shown that after 10 years of being in Canada 45 percent of refugees were on welfare.

In an article from 2018, the WEF praised Canada for its openness to international students from India: “With the US and the UK slowly shutting their doors, Canada has flung its open, and Indian students are rushing in. In 2017, Indian students who secured Canadian visas increased by almost 60% from a year ago, according to official data. In all, Indian students received 83,410 of the 317,110 Canadian study permits granted during the year.”

Both Mr. Trudeau and Ms. Freeland have mouthed WEF talking points while speaking publicly about how the Covid-19 pandemic has presented a tremendous opportunity to transform Canada. They are well on their way to ensuring perpetual electoral hegemony by importing a new electorate. There are many risks as screening safeguards were removed: those accused of terrorism, criminality, and other seditious offenses are able to maintain and even gain citizenship.

The media in Canada is also on the take: the mainstream media in Canada along with certain social media influencers have been bought and paid for. They operate as the mouthpiece for the current federal regime.

In its 2019 budget, the federal government rolled out nearly $600 million in subsidies for select media outlets that obtain the federal government’s approval. The latest $600 million cheque is meant to fill a blind spot in exerting government influence over the Canadian print and online media. … By handing nearly $600 million directly to select newspapers, the government isn’t doing anything new. It’s just extending the control that it had over other mediums, to traditional mainstream newspapers.

To dole out the cash, the Liberals created a handpicked panel, giving the bailout an appearance of distance from direct partisan intervention. Unsurprisingly, the panel was stacked with Liberal allies, some quite openly so.

Recently, high-level briefing notes for a WEF meeting about The Great Reset, that took place on 8 December 2020, were obtained through Access to Information by Rebel News. The documents were provided to Chrystia Freeland, who was minister of Global Affairs Canada at the time. Freeland co-chaired the meetings along with officials from Japan, the Netherlands, South Africa, Google, and Goldman Sachs. The documents euphemistically state the WEF’s aim to use COVID-19 pandemic instability to restructure society, cancel oil and gas development, and censor the Internet. Initiatives that are well underway in Canada under the WEF-Trudeau federal regime.

While this article has attempted to establish that Canada’s government has been infiltrated by WEF-aligned politicians and bureaucrats, it is by no means a fully comprehensive accounting. In subsequent pieces, the present author hopes to document how transnational globalist entities are pursuing policies that are anathema to the interests of the historic Canadian nation.

Gunnar Alfredsson describes himself as a “writer and researcher based in frozen totalitarian Canadia, some crassitude.”

Rollock’s Bollocks: Interrogating Anti-Racism and Contemplating the Cargo-Cult of Critique

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Here’s an astonishing fact: the White mathematician Claude Shannon (1916–2001) contributed more to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) than all Blacks who have ever lived. But then so did the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920). And the Jewish mathematician Emmy Noether (1882–1935), which is even more astonishing. Jews have always been a tiny minority of the world’s population and men have always dominated mathematics, yet one Jewish woman in a short lifetime outperformed the teeming masses of Africa and the Black-African Diaspora over millennia. Blacks have never mattered in math or any other cognitively demanding field. But Jews have mattered hugely, in both good and bad ways.

Outstanding Black contributions to academia

How can this be so, if we’re all the same under the skin? Well, if we’re all the same under the skin, it can be explained only by some malevolent force suppressing the huge intellectual potential of the Black community. In other words: White racism has held Blacks back. And the left are very happy with that explanation. Of course, on a leftist reading, the Jewish Emmy Noether overcame not just racism but also sexism to make her giant contributions to STEM. And if she overcame a double handicap, you’d expect rather more Black men to have overcome their single handicap and matched or surpassed her achievements. They haven’t. But I have to admit that Blacks have made outstanding contributions in some academic fields. Indeed, the Black female academic Nicola Rollock has done things that I would strongly doubt any reader of the Occidental Observer or Unz Review could match, let alone surpass.

Dr Rollock emitting bollocks

Indeed, Dr Rollock reminds me of Claude Shannon, the White genius whom I mentioned above. When he created the hugely important field of information theory, he taught us how to cram the maximum of data into the minimum of signal. And what has Dr Rollock taught us? She’s taught us how to cram the maximum of pretension into the minimum of words. But few people would be able to apply her teaching. Here, for example, is the title of one of her papers: “The Invisibility of Race: Intersectional reflections on the liminal space of alterity.” Are you not awed by that title? I am. And do you not confess your utter inability to match or surpass it? I do. In particular, I’m awed and humbled by her phrase “the liminal space of alterity.” If you think it’s easy to get so much pretension into so few words, I’d invite you to try it for yourself. “The liminal space of alterity” is a shining example of what I’ll call Rollock’s bollocks — “bollocks” is a crude British term for “nonsense” most famous from its use in the title of the Sex Pistols’ album Never Mind the Bollocks (1977) (it literally means “testicles”).

“Bespoke one-to-one executive coaching”

There’s much more of Rollock’s bollocks in “The Invisibility of Race” itself, which was first published in 2012. Her paper was part of a special “Critical Race Theory” issue of the academic journal Race, Ethnicity & Education and helped Dr Rollock begin a lucrative career being paid large sums of White taxpayers’ money to tell Whites in Britain how evil and oppressive they are. In those days, “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) was little-known to the general public but was already flourishing in British academia. The so-called Conservative government that came into power in 2010 did nothing to reverse its rise. Dr Nicola Rollock has risen with it. She now runs a “consultancy” that sucks in White money to spew hatred of Whites. Here are the details at her website:

Overview of services offered:

  • Speaking engagements including keynote addresses & panel debates
  • Advice on the design & delivery of small scale and national projects
  • Editorial guidance & strategic oversight on draft project reports, research proposals and other documentation
  • Guidance on the design of equality & diversity policies, action plans and objectives
  • Design & delivery of workshops to improve understanding of race, racism & racial justice
  • Research & project management (including delivery focus groups, interviews, surveys, questionnaires)
  • Bespoke one to one executive coaching aimed at improving critical understanding and application of racial justice

Current consultancy:

Dr Rollock holds a number of advisory roles including with the Wellcome Trust, the British Science Association and the Home Affairs’ Select Committee. She is Senior Adviser (Race & Higher Education) to the VC [Vice-Chancellor] of the University of Cambridge and also works closely with a number of schools providing strategic oversight and guidance to their plans to improve the experiences of Black and minority ethnic pupils and staff. (“Consultancy and Research” at Dr Rollock’s website)

Dr Rollock is an “expert” in race and CRT, you see. She has unique insights into the pathologies of Whiteness and understands that the failure of Blacks to achieve their sky-high potential is explained by only one thing: White racism. If you want an example of her expertise, try the opening of that paper “The Invisibility of race: Intersectional reflections on the liminal space of alterity.” And marvel as Dr Rollock soars into the intellectual empyrean, effortlessly deploying words of four, five and even six syllables:

I make use of the Critical Race Theory tool of chronicling (counter-narrative) to help demonstrate the complex, multifaceted and often contradictory ways in which ambitions for race equality often represent lofty organisational ideals within which genuine understanding of racism is lacking. … Drawing on Wynter’s (1992) theorisation of the concept of marginality, Ladson-Billings and Donnor 2008, 373) posit that racialised others occupy a ‘liminal space of alterity’ [alas, it isn’t Rollock’s bollocks after all] that is, a position at the edges of society from which their identities and experiences are constructed. They remain at the margins through acts and frequent reminders from dominant groups that regardless of achievement, qualification or status they are locked in ‘the power dynamic and hierarchical racial structures’ that serve to maintain unequal order in society (Ladson-Billings and Donnor 2008, 372).

Yet Wynter (1992) insists that rather than regarding this space as a site of dismal subjugation, those excluded from the centre can experience a certain profound analytical insight that is ‘beyond the normative boundary of the conception of Self/Other’ (Ladson-Billings and Donnor 2008, 373). In other words, it is precisely from this position in the margins that racialised others are able to acquire not simply an ‘oppositional world-view’ (hooks 1990, 149) but what might be understood as a unique surround vision that is able to recognise and deconstruct the multifaceted contours of Whiteness and therefore advance the broader objectives of the racial justice project. Such an all-encompassing analytic perspective is particularly important to challenge and move beyond the not seeing nature of Whiteness that works to perpetuate a racially inequitable status quo: “One of the most powerful and dangerous aspects of whiteness is that many (possibly the majority) of white people have no awareness of whiteness as a construction, let alone their own role in sustaining and playing out the inequities at the heart of whiteness.” (Gillborn 2005, 9)

While recognising and fully supporting the centrality of liminality to advancing a ‘counter-hegemonic discourse’ (hooks 1990, 149 [the lower-case hooks is not a typo; just another academic race hustler), I seek in this article to provide an extension to these debates by arguing that the very notion of what might be framed as liminality as resistance is wholly context dependent. That is to say, the field in which racialised others are operating, the tools or resources at their disposal, the support mechanisms available to them and the relative power of other actors present within the social space or field fundamentally impacts and brings into awkward tension the extent to which occupying a site in the margins becomes advantageous. As such, the arguments presented are located in an understanding, informed by CRT, that racism operates as normal in everyday life (Delgado and Stefancic 2001; Tate IV 1997) and can, in part, be understood through the various forms of capital — to borrow from Bourdieu — that are positioned as having status and legitimacy within formally sanctioned spaces of, for the purposes of this article, the education system which I am taking in its broadest sense to include the academy. (“The Invisibility of race: Intersectional reflections on the liminal space of alterity,” as published in the “Special issue: Critical race theory in England” of Race, Ethnicity & Education, 15 [1], pp 65-84)

If you’re a masochist and want more of Rollock’s bollocks, simply follow the link to her paper. But I must admit that I’m touched by a certain pathos in “The Invisibility of Race.” Like so much work in the humanities, it was written by someone who is desperate to be thought intelligent and insightful, but is gnawed by the soul-sapping knowledge that, in fact, she isn’t intelligent or insightful. Touchingly, Dr Rollock emerges from her cloud of obscurantist ink when she does exactly what Steve Sailer would predict a Black woman like her would do, namely, write about her hair. But she also raises the tantalizing prospect of a fascinating new topic for Black women to endlessly dissect and discuss, namely, their bottoms:

Attending an independent girls’ school, I became embedded in discourses of femininity that were predominantly white and middle class. I was teased to the point of anxious self-consciousness about the shape and size of my bottom; my skirt not so much as A-line as awkward pencil-cut thanks to my derriere. Hair was also a subject of white curiosity. How often did I wash it? How long did it take to style and in moments that struck an as yet unanalysed peril in my heart, could they touch it? While white girls flicked their hair or dried it in seconds under the dryer when we went swimming, I and the other Black girls attempted to restore ours to some natural order before, the job yet incomplete, being barked back into hurried lines by impatient gym teachers. (“The Invisibility of race: Intersectional reflections on the liminal space of alterity”)

Yes, there is indeed pathos in that prolix and pretentious paper. But there’s also poison. Dr Nicola Rollock obviously bears deep resentment about how White Britain failed to treat her Black bottom and Black hair with due respect and reverence. And she wants revenge on behalf of her bottom and hair. Critical Race Theory (CRT) is her chosen route to revenge on Whites. I would call CRT a cargo cult, an academic equivalent of the strange religious movements that appeared in Melanesia, Papua New Guinea and other backward regions, particularly during the Second World War. For example, when the American military began to use bases in Melanesia, primitive tribesmen were awed by the sight of large and noisy aircraft landing with lavish cargoes of food, clothing, medicine and other goods. The tribesmen reasoned that, by imitating the appearance and behavior of American soldiers and flight-controllers, they too could conjure such cargoes from the heavens. They dressed in imitation army uniforms, carved rifles and headphones from wood, sat in imitation control-towers and waved imitation signal-paddles on imitation runways. After all, the Americans were obviously using magic and invoking supernatural forces with ritual gestures and costumes, so why couldn’t Melanesians do the same?

A cargo-cult in action: appearance will control reality

Well, they couldn’t do the same because they didn’t understand what they were seeing and they were wrong in their belief that appearance will control reality. Advanced White technology isn’t based on ritual gestures and costumes, but on the acute insight and prolonged effort of White geniuses like Isaac Newton, Joseph Priestley and James Watt, who exposed and explored the hidden world of atoms and the electromagnetic spectrum or learned to master metal, fire and other natural resources. Melanesian tribesmen were millennia behind the Whites who came to their islands. Wooden headphones don’t work and waving signal-paddles on a scraped-out runway in the jungle won’t bring a heavily laden C-47 Dakota roaring from the sky. But cargo-cults are not confined to obviously backward places like Melanesia and Papua New Guinea. A very similar psychology, accompanied by similarly earnest and ineffectual rituals, is evident in vast swathes of modern academia. When academics like Nicola Rollock explore “the liminal space of alterity,” they’re performing rituals not with paddles but with polysyllables. Primitive tribesmen imitated the American military; Rollock and company are imitating genuine scholars. In neither case does the imitation have any effect: the gestures and costumes don’t summon bounty from the heavens. The tribesmen don’t get cargo and the academics don’t get truth.

Riddled with resentment, ravenous for revenge

But then leftist academics, unlike Melanesian tribesmen, aren’t really sincere in their cult. As I’ve pointed out again and again, leftists do not pursue truth, justice and equality for all races. No, they use lies about Whites to pursue revenge on Whites and the enslavement of Whites. Here are two more high priests in the cargo-cult of anti-racist academia:

In this essential two-part lecture, Dr Kennetta Hammond Perry and Professor Kehinde Andrews will draw on historical fact to demystify the notion that the Western economy owed its bounty to scientific advancements, industry and democracy — and was instead built on violence, slavery and colonialism. (The Guardian at 200: Windrush histories and mythologies of race in Britain, Online workshop at The Guardian, 19th May 2021)

The resentment-riddled and revenge-ravenous Professor Kehinde Andrews on a children’s website at the BBC

The resentment-riddled and revenge-ravenous Dr Kennetta Hammond Perry emitting anti-White bollocks at Youtube

Note the words “essential two-part lecture.” According to the Guardian, it’s essential that Whites in Britain are lectured by two Black cargo-cultists that Whites are innately evil and exploitative, while Blacks and other non-Whites are innately virtuous and vulnerable. Of course, this leftist insistence on the innate evil of Whites and the innate virtue of non-Whites contradicts the leftist insistence on the oneness of humanity. But so what? The cargo-cultists of anti-racism are employing what George Orwell called doublethink, or the “power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

Free to soar into the intellectual empyrean

Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948) describes how the cargo-cult of Marxism fails to summon anything from Heaven, but very successfully summons a great deal from Hell. It is, after all, much easier to destroy than to create. Black cargo-cultists like Dr Nicola Rollock, Dr Kennetta Hammond Perry and Professor Kehinde Andrews are incapable of creating a civilization, but are working hard to destroy one. But you won’t find posturing, prolix and poisonous Blacks like them in Chinese universities. The cargo-cult of Marxism brought Hell to China in the twentieth century, but China’s famines were not overseen by Jews and Georgians like the famines inflicted by communism on Russians and Ukrainians.

The Chinese are in control of their own destiny and aren’t funding any Chinese-hating cargo-cult of critique. The White West needs to start acting like communist China. We have to end Rollock’s bollocks and send White-hating charlatans like Nicola Rollock where they belong: to Black nations where their bottoms and hair can receive all due respect and reverence. And where their innate genius can soar into the intellectual empyrean, free at last of the cruel chains and whips of White supremacy and White racism.

Ukraine, Part II

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Having in my previous article outlined the political and ethnic shenanigans leading up to the Ukraine conflict, this article examines in some granular detail the current progress of the war in light of what appears to be previously recognized limitations in the Russian logistics chain and the development of their war doctrine, including the use of nuclear weapons.

Observers of the Ukraine war have been surprised at the initial Russian movement towards Kiev, then its apparent retreat, until we see a current Russian force disposition amounting to a belt running interior to the southern, eastern, and northern border of Ukraine, not much more at its furthest than 100 miles in all positions from the Russian or Belarus borders.

In addition, it seems obvious that either due to a distaste for causing civilian casualties or a simple lack of capability, the Russians have been able to take few Ukrainian cities outside of the near Donbass and, most recently, Mariupol.

However, clues to what is going on and what may happen next may appear in a group of not-well-publicized articles written by U.S. military defense specialists.

In a little noticed article in War on the Rocks, Alex Vershinin, a recently retired Lt. Col. In the U.S. Army, “pointed out in 2021 that the Russians, in contrast to the Americans and NATO, have very limited logistics capabilities. He estimated that the logistical chain of a Russian invasion, say of the Baltics, would be limited for a significant period of time to a range of an incredibly short 45 miles from the Russian border. This, he says, is due to the fact Russia has an extreme shortage of road transport as compared to Western armies. In Russia, the main transport is by rail. Unfortunately for Russia, Russia uses the wide 1.520 mm gauge railway, while the rest of Western Europe, including the Baltics, uses the narrow 1.470 gauge railway. Accordingly, anything shipped by rail must undergo significant border delays while bogies are exchanged, not only creating delay but offering an ample targeting opportunity for enemy forces. In that “delay time,” Vershinin postulated, NATO could bring its rapid-deployment reinforcements into play, creating a much more difficult struggle for the Russians.

How does this impact the Ukrainian war? Although Ukraine uses the same gauge railway as Belarus and Russia, like most European countries, all the rail hubs are in the major cities. The principal rail hubs of intersecting rail lines appear to be Kiev and Kharkov, neither of which the Russians have yet been able to take, apparently afraid of being bogged down in another Stalingrad. However, without access to the cities through which the rail lines run, can the Russians actually supply their troops adequately with rail? According to a recent Bloomberg article by Mark Champion, “How Ukraine’s Rail Network Threw Russia’s Military Off Track,” not likely:

Ukraine — unlike Western Europe — uses the same gauge of railroad as Russia. That infrastructure, though, can’t be used to bring supplies until troops control the towns that sit on them, in particular key junctions such as Kharkiv, Sumy and Chernihiv in the north, or Kherson, Mykolaiv and Zaporizhzhia in the south. …

The problem for Russia is that its military needs to take major cities to access the rail network, Vershinin [cited above] said by telephone from Virginia. “The other problem is that the Russians have not brought enough manpower,” he said. “This is a huge country, and every time they need to take a city they also have to leave force behind to hold it.” That means the military also can’t yet run out temporary pipelines to deliver fuel, because they don’t control the territory and can’t rely on locals not to destroy them. Instead, oil tankers have to be sent by road, putting further stress on a limited resource.”

In Ukraine, Russian units have had to travel long distances from supply depots. That isn’t necessarily a failure, but it means there have to be pauses in an advance to allow supplies to catch up. That creates a special problem for Russia because its military carries three times as many artillery pieces and multiple launch rocket systems as the U.S. military does. Reloading just the rocket launchers of a Russian army — units of which there are several in Ukraine — takes as many as 90 trucks per volley, based on Vershinin’s math.

“Once Russian forces control the railroads, they’ll be able to move fuel, ammunition, and equipment to the front much more efficiently [emphasis added], according to Roger McDermott, a Russian military specialist at the Jamestown Foundation, a U.S. think tank. That suggests even darker times ahead for the Ukrainian armed forces and civilians on the receiving end. Despite the “mystifying lack of planning,” the Russian military historically has tended to make early errors and then learn quickly from them, according to McDermott, who also works at the Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.[2] “If you get hold of one of the old Soviet maps of the rail structure, you can start to make sense of why they are putting so much importance on a place like Kharkiv,” McDermott said. “Once they have the rail hubs and can control the rail roads, they can start to fix a lot of the problems they’ve had.”

If not, the only alternative is supply by trucks, which puts the Russians almost in the same place as they would be had they invaded the much smaller Baltics with their nasty, narrow-gauge track. Unfortunately, in addition, most of the big highways go through cities, even if the Russians had enough trucks. Going “off road” in the muddy springtime is unlikely.

A look at the present Russian-conquered territory would appear to provide indirect evidence for this logistical thesis. The Russian-acquired territory resembles a fringe, or ring, lining the border of the Ukraine — almost from Odessa on the West, along the Black Sea coast to the Russian border (Mariupol is the last Ukrainian city to fall on that border), and up from the Black Sea along the Western border of Russia through part — though not yet all — of the Donbass, with an additional northern strip extending somewhat north of Kiev. Crucially, as noted, except for Mariupol, no cities, and thus no railroad hubs, have yet been taken. This belt varies in width, but appears to approximate 50 to 100 miles at the maximum. This disposition of Russian success would appear to accord with the logistical issues noted in the above-cited article.

Of course, over time, as supplies are moved forward, the Russians can move deeper into Ukraine, railroad or no railroad, if they can neutralize the remaining Ukrainian armed forces.

On top of these problems, the Russian Army at the time of its entry into Ukraine and now is on a peacetime, rather than a wartime, footing. Not only is the army thus smaller in gross numbers that it would be if put at full-strength wartime footing, but the reduction in strength, as is common in many armies, is expressed in a way that makes offensive operations even more difficult than a mere uniform shortfall of troops would suggest. Specifically, in contrast to, say, 50 years ago, the bulk of troops are brought to the front in armored vehicles. It typically takes a crew of two to man these vehicles (apparently these buggies are more complex to drive than a Honda). The carriers can hold eight soldiers, which leaves 6 combat infantryman that dismount and commence fighting. Many armies, of which to its regret the Russian Army appears to be one, maintains its reduced peacetime force not by reducing the number of armored personnel carriers, but by keeping the personnel carriers constant and removing infantry. So if there are so few troops that there are only 3 or 4 men per APC, given that a minimum of two will have to be non-combat-infantry drivers, that leaves only two, instead of eight, infantrymen per-APC.

Thus, a 50 percent reduction in troop levels to achieve a peacetime force level can reduce actual combat infantry by an astounding 2/3rds— instead of 6 infantrymen per APC, you now have only two. Plus the ubiquitous two drivers, of course. If you toss in a repairman or two — these vehicles seem constantly to be breaking down — plus men to drive the oil tankers to refuel the vehicles, you have a significant reduction in combat capability. This supposition has been confirmed by the many captures or kills of such vehicles containing only 3 to 4 persons — essentially “ghost” APC’s as it were.

Did Putin, a former FSB (not Army) man realize this? Were his senior military leaders too afraid to inform him? Putin appears to be oblivious, showing more concern for his domestic poll ratings than for the military requirements of the invasion. In late April, Putin had the opportunity to extend the contracts of existing soldiers for a year, while adding a new cohort of 130,000 soldiers. Despite the reported rage of his generals at the decision, he refused. So the veterans will soon be returning home to be replaced by green conscripts. Shades of Vietnam’s one-year rotations?

Moreover, Putin seems to have rejected out of hand a declaration of full mobilization, which could raise north of a million potential soldiers in addition to those already conscripted. Fighting a significant war with less than significant means has never been a good idea, and may not work out well for the Russians either.

Nevertheless, the Russians appear to be grinding on, though at the edges, within their apparently limited logistical leash.

But if the Ukrainian army is resupplied (adding insult to injury, by railway, of course) from the West, its firepower and combat effectiveness will presumably increase substantially just as the Russians finally mover their supply sources up far enough to allow them to move farther in.

A foretaste of this is exemplified in a Wall Street Journal report by Thomas Grove, March 5, 2022, in which he reports that Ukraine is starting to strike the logistics hubs just inside the Russian border to disrupt Russian supply even through their already too-short logistical supply line. Ominously, these strikes may become much more effective if US supplies get through:

The Institute for the Study of War said in a report that Ukrainian forces will likely continue to conduct cross-border strikes to disrupt Russian logistics, possibly with drone or missile strikes. But new weapons that the Ukrainians will receive from the West are much more powerful than anything they or the Russians currently have, raising the possibility of more strikes deeper inside Russian territory. (Emphasis added.)

See also: Kateryna Stepanenko, Karolina Hird, and Mason Clark, “Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 4, 2022,” May 4, 2022, Institute for the Study of War.

Thus, to defeat the Ukrainian armed forces, or perhaps, as the Wall Street Journal indicates, to avoid defeat itself, the Russians will need, among other things, to interdict the massive supplies of high-quality armament coming in from the West, primarily by rail, or risk a completely new and more dangerous kind of war against an enemy with a bunch of nasty weapons presumably not anticipated in the Russian war plans.

Romania, Slovakia, and Poland (the three countries other than Hungary that, apart from Belarus and Russia, border Ukraine) are permitting re-supply through their countries, which presents a significant logistical challenge for the Russians. How are the Russians likely to interdict these shipments?
Plan A would be for the Russians, from long distance, via conventionally armed missiles or air power, to bomb each of the rail lines near but inside the Ukraine border to keep all the rail lines permanently disabled. I have seen no analysis of how much materiel this would take and how likely it is to be accomplishable.

Plan B would be to take advantage of the fact that the West uses 1.435 mm narrow-gauge track, whereas Ukraine (like Belarus and Russia) uses 1.520 mm wide gauge track. This means that each train incoming from the West to Ukraine needs to stop for quite a while, while the whole train is crane lifted up and the underlying wheeled bogies are changed to the proper gauge. (See the video at “Ukraine wants to connect to Europe in 1.435mm” — Mediarail.be — Rail Europe News). Russia could thus wait until trains were halted, changing their bogies at or near the border. This would afford Russians the time for a leisurely and, presumably, more accurate and devastating strike on actual supply trains. This could in theory simply wipe out any and all incoming freight trains without the nuisance of the intensive bombing required to permanently disable track.

The countermove of course would be for Poland, Slovakia, and Romania to construct 1.520 gauge railways a few miles into their national borders and change bogies there. The temptation for the Russians would be to bomb inside those NATO countries, giving rise to a potential NATO Article 5 response, leading to a significant escalation. Oh-oh. The brilliant Poles already thought of this. As we sit today, a 1.520 gauge track goes from Lviv in Western Ukraine to the Eastern Polish rail terminal at the city of Przemyisi. (For pictures of the beautiful, restored [so far, until Russian bombing] rail station, see the previous link.) So, perhaps the sneaky Poles would change bogies in Przemysi, not at the Ukraine border. Whoa! Do the Russians bomb that straight off and trigger NATO Article 5? Or do the Ruskies wait until Putin gets angry and then trigger Article 5, not to mention destroying a lot of historic architecture to boot?

In evaluating the likelihood of such sustained pinpoint conventional attacks, one must note that the accuracy of modern missiles and other armament depends heavily on microchips. It is not clear if the Russians have their own foundries from which they can re-supply these super accurate missiles. If not, then the sanctions regime — interdicting microchip supply from Japan, Taiwan, the United States, and Western Europe (think ASML) might result in the Russians being completely out of weaponry once their existing inventory was depleted. This would impede their ability to conduct the precise strikes required for Plans A or B.

Note this excerpt from a recent RAND report setting forth RAND’s analysis of current Russian military thinking regarding escalation to nuclear weapons:

One report [citing certain Russian-language sources], for example, noted that the maintenance of a stockpile of tactical nuclear weapons is, in part, a means to respond to a large-scale (i.e., not localized to a single region) NATO conventional aerospace attack involving thousands of cruise and ballistic missiles, and that Russian tactical nuclear weapons could be used in the early phases of such a war. The lack of ability to respond in kind to a conventional aerospace attack with precision munitions has been described as NATO’s “escalation dominance,” because Russia, given the assumption of inferiority in precision munitions, platforms, and enabling infrastructure, could be faced with the choice between capitulating on unfavorable terms or escalating to nuclear use with the accompanying risks of mutual assured destruction that would bring. As a result, since 2011, Russia has been attempting to reduce the quantitative imbalance by rebuilding its own conventional long-range strike capability and capacity as a form of nonnuclear deterrence. Clint Reach, Vikram Kalambi, and Mark Cozad, Russian Assessments and Applications of the Correlations of Forces and Means, RAND (2020), at p. xiii, RAND_RR4235.pdf

This implies that Russia may not be able to effectuate Plans A or B, since it appears — according to its own analyses — not to have sufficient precision conventional capability.

Indirect evidence suggests this situation may be playing out now. There is no evidence more than two months into the war that the Ukrainian railway passage to the West has suffered serious interdiction. In fact, the ISW report cited above notes as of May 4:

Russian forces intensified airstrikes against transportation infrastructure in Western Ukraine on May 4 but remain unable to interdict Western aid shipments to Ukraine. Six Russian cruise missiles hit electrical substations near railway stations in Lviv and Transcarpathia (the southwestern Oblast of Ukraine) on May 4.[1] A senior US defense official reported that Russian aircraft conducted 200 to 300 airstrikes largely targeting transportation infrastructure in the last 24 hours.[2] The US official added that these Russian strikes are likely intended disrupt Ukrainian transportation capabilities and slow down weapon re-supply efforts but have been unable to do so. (Emphasis added.)

Thus, it might be concluded that, for one reason or another, the Russians are incapable of executing Plans A or B. Now it is worth mentioning that the reports from ISW may be less than fully accurate as regards Russian victory or defeat, given that it is a think tank founded and operated by the notorious Kagan family (of which Victoria Nuland is an in-law). However, it certainly gives a bird’s eye view into how the Neocons see the future of this war proceeding — direct attacks on Russia never contemplated during 8 years of US aid to Afghanistan. This all could be very bad news. For everybody, including the West. Even for those at ISW’s and RAND’s Washington DC office.

Plan C. If Plans A and B fail or are impracticable, another tactic the Russians would be tempted to use, which would be consistent with publicly announced Soviet military doctrine pre-1982 (see V.D. Sokolovskii, Soviet Military Strategy; translated by RAND Corporation for the U.S. Air Force, 1963, at 411), would be the much easier task of dropping tactical nuclear weapons on railways near to border, as well as highways.[1] This would accomplish two objectives: First, due to the greater power of the nukes, a handful of not very accurate bombing runs or missile hits would take out the entire surrounding railroad. Second, the bombing would create a radioactive radius around all border rail facilities which would impede border crossings by rail (or road). This tactic was discussed in Soviet Military Strategy, at 414, where it was noted that a likely strategy in a war involving tactical nuclear weapons would be the laying down of an entire radioactive belt, which would prevent troop passage until the radioactivity died down. This (plus a no-fly zone) would effectively cut off supply to the Ukraine from the west.

If, in response, NATO ground troops massed to attack Ukraine, Russia would then presumably lay down a nuclear “field of fire” to create a radioactive band stretching from the Baltic to the Belarus border consistent with old Soviet nuclear war doctrine (Ibid.). This might prompt NATO to invade through pleasantly radiation-free Belarus, thus bringing Belarus (and undoubtedly Russia) directly into the war. At that point, even Putin’s restrained 2020 doctrine of nuclear weapon use would permit any and all use of nuclear weapons, as a defense of the homeland. The result probably would be strategic-level nuclear strikes on any concentrated NATO ground formations, plus supply depots.

Since much of the supply to the NATO troops would presumably also go by rail, the best way to disrupt NATO troop movements and re-supply would be the nuclear destruction of European cities such as Warsaw and Berlin, since such cities are the principal railroad hubs, the destruction of which would cripple movement of supply by rail.

Needless to say, the nuclear bombing of Warsaw, Berlin, Munich, Prague, etc. with 500 kiloton warheads, wiping out, in addition to the railways, a good part of the civilian population of those historic cities, including, let it be said, a lot of newspaper editors and “talking heads,” would further escalate the war, perhaps uncontrollably.

In addition, to the extent any supplies were coming directly from the US to mainland Europe, the use of missiles and submarines to interdict and sink sea freighters and air-to-air missiles to destroy air transport in flight would further escalate matters. The consternation inside Western capitals might trigger unpredictable responses.

Thus, the very weakness of Russian conventional forces — either in accuracy or in inventory of weapons, if that proves to be the case — could lead it to the use of tactical nukes, with unpredictable consequences. And even if current Russian armament is enough to effectuate Plans A or B, what if, once the inventory is run down, Russia is unable to replenish the inventory due to, as noted above, sanctions on various hi-tech components such as microchips.

What a contrast to Joseph Stalin! What comparative humiliation! Stalin methodically prepared for a massive war in which he assumed the Soviet army supplies would have to be replenished solely from Soviet sources. He spent 8 years building up — with assistance from such Western companies as Ford (which was of course also helping Hitler!) — a massive vertically-integrated production system, from mines and oil, to factories for all components, all replacement parts, to finishing factories for all types of armament; in addition, during the war, substantial R&D continued, further enhancing Russian-made weaponry.

It is said that Russia still has significant inventories of relevant weapons, and that the Ukrainian war has reduced Russian stockpiles by only 20%. But after 10 more months, 20% goes to 100%. In contrast to Stalin, therefore, it appears that Putin’s infrastructure preparation may have been amateur hour. A display case of fine looking weaponry good for 8 or 9 months, with nothing in the back room for spares. He may have been misled into believing the war would be so short that existing supplies were more than ample. If so, he made the same disastrous mistake, ironically, of which Hitler, in the reverse position, has been accused.

The tragedy will be if, instead of inducing negotiation or retreat, this situation impels Putin to up the ante to the nuclear level.

A wise statesman such as Kennedy or Nixon would give Putin a path of face-saving retreat, through some negotiated settlement that met some, if not all, of Putin’s relatively modest pre-war demands. However, our leaders are neither wise nor statesmen. Not only are they effectively refusing to negotiate — still demanding the Crimea! — they now accuse Putin of war crimes and assert that they will prosecute him if they win. Astounding. They appear to be leaving Putin the choice between (1) national and personal humiliation and possible harassment and jail time (remember Saddam Hussein anyone?) and (2) nuclear war. We may have met our man. He may well just choose Monty Hall’s door number (2) and “let ‘er rip.” Personally, at least, what does he have to lose?

Hey, wanna buy a condo in New York City?

Or, on reflection, would a shack in Tierra del Fuego with a real deep basement and about 4,000 cans of Spam and bottled water be more to your taste?

NOTES:
1/ Sokolovski states “In a future World War the basic weapons in ground theatres will be nuclear weapons, used primarily with operational and tactical missiles and front line air forces (bombers, fighter bombers, and fighters). In addition, Strategic Missile Forces and the Long Range Air Force will deal nuclear blows to targets in the zone of the advancing fronts.” pp. 410-411.
2/ Roger N. McDermott specializes in Russian and Central Asian defense and security issues and is a Senior Fellow in Eurasian Military Studies, The Jamestown Foundation, Washington DC, Senior International Research Fellow for the Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO), Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and Affiliated Senior Analyst, Danish Institute for International Studies, Copenhagen. McDermott is on the editorial board of Central Asia and the Caucasus and the scientific board of the Journal of Power Institutions in Post-Soviet Societies. He recently wrote The Reform of Russia’s Conventional Armed Forces: Problems, Challenges and Policy Implications (October 2011).

 

The Generational Divide in Eastern Europe: The Soviet Boomers

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In the West, we spend a lot of time endlessly debating the various generations and their voting patterns, values, and economic niche in our societies. While there are exceptions to any rule, certain generalizations have come into focus about the Silent Generation, the Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials and the Zoomers.

But what about in Eastern Europe? Do they have a similar generational divide?

Well, again, in the West, this generational divide was created mostly as a result of the cultural revolution of the 60s. Generations before then certainly differed in their views and their historical circumstances, but something changed from the 1960s onwards that divided the population into distinct cultural cohorts. The equivalent occurred in the East during the late 80s and the early 90s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the cultural revolution that occurred in its aftermath. Once again, everything in Slavland revolves around the USSR and people’s relationship to it, memory of it, and attitude towards what it represented.

The Soviet Generation is basically anyone who came of age in the Soviet Union and spent their formative years as a part of that system. These people generally have a nostalgia for the USSR that is tied both to their memories of their halcyon youth as well as a general support for the actual economic, social, and political system in which they lived. This is partially explained by the fact that the late Soviet Union was generally a stable, crime-free and an all-encompassing cradle-to-grave nanny-state. More than any other generation, the Soviet Generation is largely monolithic in its views and attitudes because their source of information was standardized and they did not have access to alternative media. This makes analyzing them quite easy, although it makes conversing with them rather tedious at times — you know what they’re going to say before they even formulate the thought in their heads.

It is worth mentioning that these people are often pejoratively referred to as the Sovok Generation, and when people in Eastern Europe refer to “sovoks” or the state of being “savok-like” they are referring to Soviet attitudes, values, and ways of doing things. It’s not a very nice word, but it’s also not quite at the level of being a curse or a slur. It is used in much the same way as the phrase “Ok, Boomer” is used by Millennials to deride their parents’ generation and their values.

A sovok, of course, is a broom in Russian and for some reason, it became popular to refer to Soviet nostalgists as sovoks, probably because of their tendency to deny that anything bad was happening during Soviet Union days. As an example, if someone were to bring up the existence of the archipelago of gulags in Siberia that the Soviet Union had created, the sovok would deny that such a thing existed and simultaneously insist that the people in them deserved to be incarcerated before just sweeping the discussion under the rug, as it were.

Anyway, because of their demographic weight, almost all culture in Eastern Europe revolves around them and their views on the world and their tastes. Because they remain committed and dedicated TV watchers, all official propaganda is broadcast with them in mind. As a result, you get non-stop state-funded dramas about World War II that play on repeat almost continually, with barely any commercial breaks. Spend some time living with these folks and you get used to the non-stop rat-at-tat of machine-gun fire wafting through the paper-thin commieblock walls and angry German barking noises coming from the TV. It is only interrupted occasionally by those god-awful “narodinye” music concerts that feature singers in their 60s singing love songs from better days and commercials advertising laxatives and the services of private health spas.

Hey, what can I say? The TV people clearly know their target demo.

Furthermore, there has yet to be an Obama-like politician (in Russia at least) who demonstrated the power of social media and internet outreach to younger folks to produce an electoral landslide in his favor, although Alexey Navalny came close. TV remains the powerhouse of political campaigning because it targets the largest, most consistant voting bloc in the country. As a result, all politicians promise to increase pensions, social benefits, and other socialist policies aimed at people in their 50s and above. Post-Soviet old-timers also have an economic interest in being pro-Communist/Socialist considering that they now collect checks from the government to fund their retirement — something that they were promised during the ancien régime and which they hold modern politicians accountable for delivering on.

In contrast, pro-Soviet sentiment is virtually non-existent in the post-Soviet generation that comprises the younger age demographic. They generally view the red flag with a sense of unease and associate it with stagnation, corruption and repression. The official state cult of World War II and the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany and her allies does not resonate with the youth, but, again, it resonates quite deeply with the Soviet Generation, who was raised on it. In the 70s and into the 80s, the Soviet government, which had been surprisingly quiet about World War II, started leaning into WWIIism once the Marxism and building a socialist utopia thing began to lose resonance with the public. As for why the Soviet state was loath to embrace WWIIism initially, it may have been because they had incorporated many of the countries that they had fought against into its empire. Unlike the Allies, the Soviets sometimes demonstrated a Realpolitik attitude towards reincorporating and reusing old cadres from the various vassal state that they had conquered which led to lower-level Nazi officials finding official employment in the newly-reformed Stasi, for example. It was all that or it was the embarrassment that the Soviet state felt at the scale of destruction that they had suffered. Or maybe the idea simply hadn’t crossed their minds yet or it was rejected by party elites for being too “militarist” or “imperialist” or “bourgeoise.”

Regardless, the two-headed Russian eagle has yet to move past World War II and her eye remains firmly fixed on the past, fighting the last century’s wars over and over again in her own mind. Russia cannot form a vision of the future because she has not yet reconciled with her past.

Since we’re on the topic of demographics and World War II, it’s worth pointing out that the war did indeed blow a giant hole in the Slav population. But, if reproductive rates had remained consistent in the years following the war, this wound could have healed over in short order and the body of the people could have recovered in a few generations time. Instead, because of the Soviet industrialization policy, the aquifer that produced fresh Slavic souls was deliberately destroyed with the destruction of Slavic villages where families traditionally had upwards of 8 children or more through collectivization policies implemented by the government. Peasants were herded into the cities to begin their new lives as proletarians and to repent of their wicked kulak ways. The housing crisis, plus the Soviet cultural reforms which encouraged feminism and women’s rights along with the suppression of religion all worked towards contributing to the demographic slump that occurred soon after. In this sense, the Soviet situation almost exactly mirrors what occurred in the West, and in the United States, in particular. A baby boom following the war, followed by a steep drop-off, which left a huge demographic cohort dwarfing the subsequent ones that followed. Just like in the US, the Soviet Boomers grew up in a time of relative peace and plenty. Jobs grew off of trees as the Soviet Union needed anyone that they could get their hands on to rapidly build new cities, new factories, new roads and new missiles. When this all came to an end following the collapse of the USSR, the Soviet generation was left shell-shocked and many lost all that they had worked for. Previous generations were largely self-reliant and relied on the social safety net provided by their large families and village communities. But the Soviet generation, whether they had a choice or not, actually believed the promise that the state made to take care of them. As a result, they were the first generation to abandon the concept of large, nuclear and extended families and embraced the nanny-state whole-heartedly. They have become a huge burden on the post-Soviet economy with their constant trips to state-subsidized clinics and demands for ever-increasing pensions paid for by a much smaller working-age demographic.

Most Soviet old-timers have also retained bits and pieces of old Soviet propaganda in their minds, although these have been warped by time and the revisionist efforts of Neo-Sovietist writers and propagandists. Nikolai Starikov stands out as a shining example of this new form of Soviet apologism and revisionism, although it has become a veritable cottage industry in the countries of the former Soviet Union.

As a result, Soviets have a rather eclectic list of likes and dislikes that don’t make any sense from a Western perspective. For example, they hate Solzhenitsyn, whom they view as a traitor and they love Stalin, whom  they view as the savior of Russia. Oh and they also hate Lord of the Rings for its anti-industial themes and because they believe that Sauron and Mordor represent the USSR — which they might, actually, come to think of it. But the controversy around the Lord of the Rings and its publication in the USSR is a story for another time. Soviet Boomers generally vote either for the Communists or for Putin, depending on whether they’re feeling particularly peeved at the government during that election cycle or not. As a rule, they are very concerned with economics first and foremost, and in particular, economic self-sufficiency. At heart they are autarkists, and nurse a burning hope for the Soviet promise of one day overtaking the West in the production and efficient distribution of widgets.

In short, their worldview and preferred political platform, in a nutshell, is economic nationalism (although they abhor the use of that particular N-word), cradle-to-grave big government socialism, and worshipping at the altar of the secular state religion of WWIIism.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t point out that the Soviet generation has a bizarre view of history and largely views the twentieth century through a conspiratorial lens. Please strap in for this next part and try to follow along as best you can. Most Soviet old-timers believe all of the following points simultaneously, even the ones that contradict one another. And so, without further ado:

  • Jews are not to be trusted. (Stalin condemned the Jews as being saboteurs of the Socialist project and the USSR subsequently supported the Arabs and their fight against Israel.)
  • Jews are very clever and have a lot to teach Eastern Europeans
  • Jews are responsible for the Russian Revolution and the carnage that followed.
  • Lenin had some good ideas.
  • Lenin was a secret Jew.
  • Hitler was a secret Jew funded by the United States and Great Britain.
  • Stalin was an enemy of the Jews and killed by the Jews.
  • Anti-Semitism is wrong and the Soviet Union was not anti-Semitic.
  • The Soviet Union saved the Jews from Hitler (and that’s a good thing).
  • The Jews destroyed the Soviet Union.
  • The Jews murdered the Tsar, but the Tsar was oppressing the people so he had to go.
  • The gulags are a myth.
  • The gulags were necessary to weed out traitors to the Soviet Union.
  • “Your great-grandfather was sent to the Gulags”.
  • Solzhenitsyn lied about the Gulags and was a traitor.
  • Stalin was a Russian patriot.
  • National-Socialism is abhorrent and evil.
  • Social-Nationalism is what made the USSR great.
  • The Soviet system was just and fair.
  • The Soviet Union stole wealth from Russians and redistributed it to the other socialist republics.
  • Ethnicity is not important, Socialism can establish world peace.
  • The Turks are a race of criminals and scoundrels.
  • Gorbachev was a traitor to the Soviet Union.
  • Comrade Andropov was a swell guy.
  • Krushchev was a drunk Ukrainian peasant.
  • Zhukov should have succeeded Stalin.
  • The KGB were just NKVD and Chekha thugs.
  • “I had many friends in the KGB.”

And on it goes.

Overall, they’re a mixed bag, to put it lightly. On the one hand, there is nothing wrong with economic nationalism and one could even make the argument for implementing some elements of socialism to raise living standards as part of a populist political platform. On the other hand, these ideas are simply not enough to form a romantic and uplifting message that captivates the hearts of the younger generations and chart a new civilizational course for Eastern Europe. What’s worse, these relatively sound and grounded ideas are tarnished by their constant and deliberate association with the Soviet Union.

In much the same way that myopic nationalists in the West deliberately associate their good ideas with the toxic brand of the Third Reich, so too do the old-timers in the East poison the well by associating the re-opening of Russian factories and social conservatism with gulags and secret police dragging people out of their apartments in the middle of the night.

Furthermore, they, like their Baby Boomer counterparts in the West, consider themselves the pinnacle of human evolution, and generally have an attitude of knowing better and being better than any generation that came afterwards. Their children and grandchildren (if they have any) will point out that everything built by their generation is ugly, which the eternal Sovok will, of course deny in much the same way that Western Baby Boomers demonstrate a peculiar appreciation for the sprawling strips malls and vacant parking lots that they built in the West.

More than anything, the Soviet Generation is terrified of being called the N-word and go to great lengths to extol the virtues of “the friendship of nations” that they supposedly successfully built in the USSR. They will frequently point out that there was no ethnic conflict in the Soviet Union, because Soviet values had defeated ethnic chauvinism by giving humanity a common goal and mission: efficient widget production and generous pensions, basically. If you point out that the Soviet Union achieved and maintained this uneasy peace through its military might, well… be prepared to have the N-bomb hurled at you.

And then, of course, one can’t help but notice the rather schizophrenic messaging around the war in Ukraine. See, you have young Russian nationalists with Slavic rune patches…

… or insignia derived from right-wing video games and fantasy novels ….

… shooting at Neo-Nazi mercenaries with SS Black Sun patches who are on the payroll of a Jewish oligarch.

And then you have Soviet pensioners coming out to welcome the militias of Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics by waving the red Soviet Flag. Lenin, of course, created the modern state of Ukraine to weaken Russia. Putin himself mentioned this fact in his speech declaring war on Kiev and called for the “de-communization” of Ukraine!

But they wave their red flag regardless. And then the mayor of Mariuple goes on to declare that a statue to the Soviet granny who came out of her home and waved a red flag at Ukrainian troops (viral video) will be built in the center of town!

This is Eastern European meta-political schizophrenia at its finest. I can only shrug and laugh at this point. Hopefully you find it as amusing as I do.

And of course, both sides also routinely accuse the other of being Nazis in their official propaganda. Sergei Lavrov just recently announced that, unbeknownst to everybody, Hitler was actually Jewish and that Jews are the real anti-Semites. He was then quickly condemned by Jews, who as a community, accuse Putin and his government of being Fascists and prefer to support the Jewish president of Ukraine. Lavrov’s statements are sure to raise eyebrows in the West, especially among members of the Dissident Right. But, if you had understood that Lavrov and most of the people in the Kremlin and the bureaucracy are Soviet Boomers, you could have basically set a timer and put your feet up while waiting for him to drop the obligatory “Hitler was a secret Jew anti-Semite” line. All I can say is that a lot of things become clearer about modern Russia when you understand the Sovok Mindset™.

Anyways I could write volumes upon volumes about the Sovoks and their Lies, but I feel that at this point I should tone down the criticism a bit and point out that compared to the generations that followed, these guys are the only ones holding the line against the onslaught of Western neoliberal values that the youth are so eager to gobble up and copy. Fundamentally, we have to conclude that they are simply a product of the informational environment that they grew up in. They cannot hate the Soviet Union because they grew up in it and to reject it is to reject decades of conditioning and hard work dedicated towards realizing the promised Socialist utopia. It’s easy to make fun of them and their beliefs, but they did not have the internet growing up, and they had to reconcile the whispered warnings of their far wiser parents’ generation and the realities of having to adjust and make a living in the Soviet system. They saw themselves as the Generation That Was Promised — as modernizers that would usher in an era of peace and plenty. When this vision crashed and burned, they reached out and clung to whatever they could to give them some sense of grounding and purpose. They did their best to rationalize irreconcilable realities and historical meta-narratives and as a result, their worldview is schizophrenic, to say the least.

What’s more, they seem incapable of realizing that their worldview is not universal and simply not shared by subsequent generations or those who lived outside the territories of the USSR. New ideas and geopolitical realities bounce off of them as their worldview has already firmly cemented and is continually reinforced by state propaganda geared at keeping them happy, leaving little room for doubt or deeper thinking to change their accepted vision of reality. Their vision of the future is myopic, as it is simply based on a nostalgia for the past.

In conclusion, in much the same way as the fate of the West is largely in the hands of the post-war generation, who still retains some semblance of wealth and electoral power, so too is the current political situation in Russia largely dominated by the needs, concerns and worldview of the Soviet Boomers. Funny enough, both of these demographic groups in the East and the West have more in common with one another then they care to admit.

God help us all.

Thoughts on Britain’s “Rwanda Plan”

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“It seems fair to conclude that Jewish organizations have uniformly advocated high levels of immigration of all racial and ethnic groups into Western societies and have also advocated a multicultural model for these societies.”
Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique

 On April 14, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson outlined a remarkable immigration agreement with the nation of Rwanda. Under the agreement, “everyone who enters the UK illegally will be considered for resettlement to Rwanda,” where their asylum cases, should they wish to make one, will be processed. Even if a migrant is granted asylum, he or she will be encouraged to remain in the east African nation for at least five years. If their application is refused, Rwanda will offer them permanent residence, prompting Johnson to speak of “tens of thousands” of migrants who will be permanently removed from Britain in the years ahead. In return for taking Britain’s unwanted migrants, the UK government has offered Rwanda an initial payment of £120 million in cash and investment. It’s the kind of policy that would have prompted Enoch Powell, who always championed a policy of incentivized repatriation, to nod in agreement.

Despite its surface level appeal, however, those furthest to the right have expressed suspicion of the measure as yet another conservative sop, intended to mask spiralling legal migration and the fact the UK’s new points-based immigration system seems designed to keep numbers high. I agree with this suspicion. I also believe, however, that the Rwanda scheme is important in terms of setting a precedent that can eventually be built upon. We should be absolutely clear here that, at the level of first principles, what is proposed by Johnson is a step forward in population removal and the rejection of the idea that non-White migrants have a fundamental right to live among Europeans. To employ the well-worn Lenin adage, our ideas must probe with bayonets: When they find mush, we should push. I believe it is worthwhile pushing the Rwanda scheme. Concurrently, when the bayonet meets with strong resistance, we should pause and examine the nature of the obstacle. 

Jewish Objections

One of the most outspoken opponents of the Rwanda plan in recent weeks is Larry Bottinick, an American Jew and the UN Refugee Agency’s current envoy to the UK. Bottinick’s lack of ties to the British people hasn’t prevented him from prolific and outspoken interference since the announcement of the plan. His main point of attack seems to be accusations that the plan will become “eye-wateringly expensive” and that it could “violate international law.” He told the Associated Press “There’s nothing in international law that says you have to ask [for asylum] in the first country you encounter. UNHCR understands the frustration of the U.K. government on that, and is not in favor of Channel crossing, of course. We think there’s more effective ways and more humane ways to address this.” By “effective and humane” he means doing nothing at a time when “more than 4,500 migrants have crossed the English Channel from France to Britain in small boats … four times more than the total this time last year.” Bottinick’s real fear seems to be that these migrants will never be allowed to settle in the UK, telling one skeptical interviewer that his understanding of the Rwanda plan is that “Once they’re in Rwanda they won’t be brought back to the UK. … You’re trying to deter them from coming.”

Bottinick has claimed that the Rwanda plan, the primary aim of which is to prevent migrant crossings of the English Channel in small boats organized by smugglers, won’t do anything to prevent people smuggling. I suppose it might be a coincidence or the simultaneous deployment of the Royal Navy to patrol the Channel for migrant boats, but in the nine-day period immediately after the plan became public knowledge, there were no migrant crossings in the English Channel. It’s clear that such attempts to enter Britain will seem radically less attractive to migrants if they result not in walking the streets of Notting Hill, but rather those of Kigali or Muhanga. This relates to the truth that the ultimate goal of the vast majority of even genuine asylum seekers to the West (to the extent that they do in fact originate in a country experiencing violent conflict or where they personally experience persecution) is not to find peace and security, but to take advantage of the chaos in their country in order to fulfil their pre-existent material ambition of living among Europeans and deriving any benefit that might entail. The basic principle of international refugee law contains, and approves, this ambition implicitly. It is the unspoken enshrinement of what we might call the international right to live among White people. This is why we see the widespread phenomenon of so-called asylum seekers passing through a dozen or more perfectly safe and welcoming countries in order to reach their chosen Northwest European destination, selected from the global map in the same way you’d pick your prize at a fairground. It’s also why we see the outlandish examples of Africans crossing an ocean, trekking across Latin America, and presenting themselves in the United States where they claim asylum.

Larry Bottinick

Rwanda has three times the intentional homicide rate of the UK, low by African standards, but not quite the asylum seeker’s desired prize. If the Rwanda plan was put into full effect, migrant crossings of the English Channel would become almost non-existent — a fact that seems to deeply alarm Mr. Bottinick. Bottinick’s ideas on the outcome of the Rwanda plan aren’t just wrong, of course, they’re also deeply hypocritical. In previous employment, according to one legal document, Bottinick worked as a “Senior Resettlement Officer,” in Tel Aviv, during which time he participated in a working group designed to “work to facilitate the departure to third countries to be determined of some 16,000 Eritreans and Sudanese under various programmes, including sponsorship, resettlement, family reunion and labour migration schemes.” Under Bottinick’s watch at least 4,500 Africans were removed from Israel to third-party nations, apparently without the process becoming “eye-wateringly expensive” or resulting in an increase of illegal immigration or asylum applications.

Another significant objection to the Rwanda plan has been raised by Enver Solomon, Chief Executive of the UK’s Refugee Council. Solomon’s name has the air of a Dickensian villain, which is about the only English connection he really has since he’s the son of a Jewish father and a Muslim mother. Shortly after the plan was announced Solomon wrote:

We are appalled by the Government’s cruel and nasty decision to send those seeking sanctuary in our country to Rwanda. … Sending people seeking asylum to be processed abroad will do absolutely nothing to address the reasons why people take perilous journeys to find safety in the UK. It will do little to deter them from coming to this country, but only lead to more human suffering and chaos – at a huge expense of an estimated £1.4 billion a year. Far from enabling people to rebuild their lives, we know from where this has been done by other countries, it only results in high levels of self-harm and mental health issues and can also lead to people ending up back in the hands of people smugglers. We urge this Government to immediately rethink its plans, which are in such stark contrast to what every Conservative Prime Minister since Churchill has sought to do by providing a fair hearing on British soil for those who claim asylum. Instead, the Government should focus on operating an orderly, humane and fair asylum system, and developing safe routes such as humanitarian visas, rather than harming lives and destroying our reputation as a country which values human rights.

Enver Solomon

I must applaud Mr. Solomon for his literary talent in crafting mendacious, manipulative propaganda. Every trick in the book is present here. Consider, for example, the emotive language “cruel and nasty.” Look also at the many diversions, like it “will do absolutely nothing to address the reasons why people take perilous journeys to find safety in the UK.” Is it the responsibility of the UK to address internal stability in every nation on earth? Isn’t the presumption that some people are incapable of governing themselves “imperialist thinking”? Apparently not when you can use to it pry open borders. He then proclaims that sending migrants to Rwanda will lead to “high levels of self-harm and mental health issues.” Why? The missed chance to see Buckingham Palace or the Beatles Museum? Aren’t these people fleeing war zones and death threats? The UK government has stressed that Rwanda is a “fundamentally safe and secure” location, perfectly suitable for the relocation of people in genuine distress. If you are thrown into distress because you missed out on Piccadilly Circus and instead find yourself in another situation in which you will be safe and cared for, then perhaps you weren’t in that much peril and need in the first place. Finally, and predictably, there is the coup de grâce — an appeal to abstract values so near and dear to the the British (and completely missing among Jews re Israel): “our reputation as a country which values human rights.” And yet Solomon himself has previously described Britain not as a country which values human rights but which is typified by “empty rhetoric” and “nationalist posturing.” Mr. Solomon is indulging in a cynical and petty moral blackmail.

Following in the footsteps of Enver Solomon’s screed, the Guardian published an open letter by a collective of “rabbis and members of the British Jewish community,” spanning Orthodox, Reform, Masorti, and Liberal sects of Judaism. The offended postmodern Israelites complained that

we are utterly appalled by the government’s inhumane plans to send asylum seekers to Rwanda for offshore processing. Such a policy flies in the face of Jewish values, and would be a cruel, moral failure to those in urgent need of protections. It is particularly disturbing that such plans have been announced shortly before our community celebrates Passover, a festival where Jews recall our journey to safety from Egypt. As we prepare to read the story of Exodus, it is deeply unsettling that the government is seeking to deprive the opportunity of freedom to those fleeing modern-day tyrants. Such proposals also bring to mind unpleasant memories of the overseas internment of Jewish refugees in the second world war. This policy was a grave error: we urge the government to learn from this historic mistake, uphold international refugee law and ensure all those seeking safety in the UK are treated with dignity and respect. If the government is serious about preventing small boat crossings, it should act to introduce safe and accessible routes to sanctuary in the UK. Seeking to replicate Australia’s disastrous offshoring system in Rwanda, a country frequently condemned for its appalling human rights record, would be a terrible abdication of responsibility. We urge the government to instead stand up, fulfil its moral duty, and protect, not punish, those fleeing conflict and persecution.

Oy vey indeed. Our Hebrew friends are deeply distressed that the Rwanda plan reminds them of ancient stories that involve talking shrubs, sticks magically being transformed into snakes, and self-parting oceans. It’s almost criminal that Britain’s civil servants hadn’t considered this possibility when drafting the plan. In all seriousness, however, we see here precisely the same rhetorical tactics employed by Bottinick and Solomon. Again we see the emotive language, “cruel” and “inhumane.” It’s disparaged as a “moral failure,” and a “terrible abdication of responsibility” and “moral duty.” It’s an affront to “Jewish values” — values that are somehow missing in Israel which has deported thousands of African refugees to Canada against their will.

It’s cynical and petty moral blackmail another illustration of the power of moral imperatives in making Westerners act against their self interest. Cynical because, try as I might, I can’t find these same people issuing similar statements in the aftermath of Israel’s eviction of its Africans under Bottinick. You might argue that that’s because these are “English Jews” concerned with what’s happening in England, but that doesn’t add up either. The main author of the Guardian piece is Edie Friedman, who’s from Chicago, in yet another example of an American Jew bleating shamelessly about values she feels native Britons should adhere to.

In fact, much as with the American situation, almost everywhere one looks in the context of British refugee and migrant organizations, Jews are found in leading roles. The executive director of British Red Cross is Zoe Abrams, who has said she is “profoundly concerned” about the Rwanda plan and, echoing Bottinick, Solomon, and the Guardian complainers, added that “the financial and human cost will be considerable.” She wants the UK to accept “at least 10,000” migrants, and claims “We’re an island, but we can afford to be more generous, and as Global Britain — we should be.” Boris Johnson recently complained that refugee policy in the UK in recent years has been bogged down due to opposition from an “army of politically motivated lawyers,” but unmentioned is the fact that most British “refugee lawyers” filter through the University of London’s Refugee Law Initiative, founded and directed by the Jew David Cantor, and led academically by “Senior Lecturer in Refugee Law” Sarah Singer.

Christian Complicity

Aside from Jews, outspoken nonsense has also gushed forth from the Church of England, in the form of its abysmal Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. I’ve previously written of Welby:

At the heart of this disease is the Archbishop of Canterbury and leader of the Church of England, Justin Welby, a man who looks like ten minutes of manual labor would actually kill him. He is the definition of all that is wrong in modern Man. Setting aside his uninspiring physical presence, Welby is a literal bastard, his mother Jane Portal having cuckolded her husband, the alcoholic Jew Gavin Welby (born Bernard Weiler) with her boss, Sir Anthony Montague Browne. The result of these chaotic origins is that Archbishop Welby/Weiler/Browne has fled entirely from any sense of meaningful identity, asserting in 2016: “I know that I find who I am in Jesus Christ, not in genetics, and my identity in him never changes.” If Welby limited himself to personal genetic oblivion there might not be a problem. A problem does, however, emerge, when Welby uses his position and influence to attack those who do pursue their interests. In 2016, when Nigel Farage told the press that sex attacks by migrants were “the nuclear bomb” of the EU referendum, Welby/Weiler/Browne told MPs in the home affairs select committee that he “utterly condemned” Farage for an “inexcusable pandering to people’s worries and prejudices, that is giving legitimization to racism.” If that wasn’t bad enough, Welby/Weiler/Browne, who has confessed to struggling with his mental health, appears to have an almost Freudian desire to replace the Jewish father he thought he had with the current Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis. Welby/Weiler/Browne has taken to accompanying Mirvis on numerous excursions, echoing the Rabbi’s sentiments on almost every subject.

For once, however, Welby seems to have taken the lead. While Mirvis has yet to say a word on the Rwanda plan, Welby has decided to speak for his deity, announcing that the plan is “the opposite of the nature of God.” I personally think Welby’s motivations for opposing the plan might be a little more earthly than heavenly. A recent London School of Economics study found that while native Britons are spending less and less time in Welby’s churches, “Migrants into the UK are more than three times more likely than natives to attend a religious service weekly, or to pray daily.” Welby probably thinks he’s boosting his pious flock, but it’s not quite so simple. It was reported by The Week last November that the Church of England was merely helping asylum seekers “game the system” by converting to Christianity. A Home Office source was quoted as describing the way in which asylum seekers would “show they are committed Christians” and can then “argue that their new faith would put them at risk in their home country.” The Telegraph reported that “thousands” of asylum seekers had been “welcomed into the Anglican faith in recent years, with clergy even given written guidance on how to navigate the Home Office system.”

Several newspapers pointed to a tribunal decision on an anonymous asylum case in 2017 that suggested an “improbably large” number of Iranians attending the Liverpool Anglican Cathedral cast doubt on whether they were all “genuine converts.” In other cases, asylum was granted after conversions were deemed authentic — normally after evidence of the very regular church attendance of the kind described above (three times more than native Brits). Modern British Christianity exists only as a left-wing immigration assistance body. It’s most notable conversion in recent years is that of Emad Al Swealmeen. He was denied asylum in 2014, then had a sudden road to Damascus moment which resulted in his baptism a year later. In 2017 he was “confirmed” to the applause of hundreds of idiots in Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral. Four years later this confirmed Christian prematurely detonated a bomb in the name of Allah, intended for a military remembrance event in the heart of Liverpool. I wonder if Archbishop Welby considers whether assisting such people, and making a mockery and a fraud of his religion, is “the opposite of the nature of God.”

Conclusion 

Surrounded by hostile forces, there is a temptation within our camp to adopt contrarian stances towards almost everything emanating from mainstream politics. There is a lot of context around the Rwanda plan which is far from ideal and is in fact contemptible. The Rwanda plan has been introduced by Home Secretary Priti Patel, who recently sought after the interests of her own ethnic group by signing the Migration and Mobility Partnership (MMP), a deal that has been instrumental in the dramatic rise of Indian immigration to Britain. The immigration profile of the UK since Brexit has been transformed, with a huge drop in east European migration, and a large increase in non-EU migration, especially from India and China. Much of this migration is in the form of student visas for Chinese and Indian students, which might lead commentators to assume that this is a “temporary” migration problem that doesn’t result in long-term settlement. A comprehensive study of the relevant figures in 2015, however, found that trends consistently show “a majority of students were not going home. For the past three years the estimated inflows of students has been significantly higher than the number of self-reported former students estimated to be leaving.”

Britain has a massive legal immigration problem, and the Conservative party seems to be cynically playing to its audience. The party is traditionally the choice of rural England, while Labour is the choice of the industrial heartlands and the major cities. By curbing east European migration through Brexit, the Conservatives removed visible migration from rural areas where these migrants were occupying jobs in agriculture and food production. Legal migration is less visible to rural England, since it tends to flow in large part to the universities and workplaces of the major cities, which are regarded as fully multicultural anyway. As such, simply through geography and demography, Boris Johnson and Priti Patel can increase migration while giving the opposite impression to their key voters. The Rwanda plan is in many respects another part of the ploy, since it gives off an air of being hardline and appeals to the instinct of Conservative voters to want to tackle illegal immigration.

Those of us looking on at this charade from a radical Right perspective have a difficult choice to make. Do we support such charades knowingly and opportunistically, in the hope that it is something that could be built upon culturally and politically? Or condemn it honestly as a legislative hoax, and make no inroads at all in terms of the political landscape? I suggest probing with bayonets, but without getting your hopes up.

The Northman

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The Northman is a cinematic depiction of Viking society in the late ninth century. Co-written and directed by Robert Eggers (who previously directed two horror movies) and starring Alexander Skarsgård (who had long been interested in Viking history and mythology and was instrumental in getting Eggers involved), it is a refreshing attempt at historical realism in an age where having an all-White cast is seen as culturally subversive. Worse for our current cultural literati, it provides a positive portrayal of what would be seen as extreme “toxic” masculinity among White men at a time when emasculated White men are common throughout the media. Surprisingly perhaps, the film has gotten excellent mainstream reviews, with many commenting on its stunning visual qualities (it was filmed in Northern Ireland) and its gripping storyline. I completely agree. It kept me enthralled from beginning to end. If you want to see the movie, I suggest not reading this until after you’ve seen it. Lots of plot giveaways.

What interests me here is how accurately the film comports with Viking culture as presented as a prototypical Indo-European culture in Chapter 2 of my book, Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition.

Swearing an Oath

Fundamentally, The Northman is a tale of revenge—a common enough human emotion, but here with the added twist that Amleth (the main character, played by Skarsgård) has sworn an oath to avenge his father, King Aurvandill. Aurvandill had been killed by his brother, Amleth’s uncle Fjölnir who then seized the king’s wife and property.  Revenge is thus Amleth’s all-encompassing duty.

It is difficult for us to imagine the importance and seriousness of swearing a public oath in a religious ceremony in traditional Indo-European (I-E) culture. I-E culture was fundamentally individualist—one of the two powerful strands of Western European individualism, along with northern hunter-gatherers. And within I-E cultures, reputation, in this case as an 0ath-keeper) is far more important than kinship in determining one’s status. Thus avenging his father is an absolute, religiously tinged duty, far more important than, say, seeking a quiet family life. Duty above all else.  At the end of the movie, Amleth has succeeded in escaping his uncle’s farm where he and others had been held as slaves and after killing many of his uncle’s people, including his eldest son Thorir, his wife (Amleth’s mother, played by Nicole Kidman), and her young son by Fjölnir, Gunnar. But he hadn’t killed his uncle, so he goes back to his uncle’s farm for the final confrontation, despite earnest pleading from his pregnant (with twins) wife to accompany her to safety among anther branch of Amleth’s kin.

Oaths were a central component of the Männerbund (other terms: korios, comitatus), “the warrior brotherhood bound by oath to one another and to their ancestors during a ritually mandated raid.”[2] The formation of voluntary war-bands held together by oaths, camaraderie, and a common self-interest was a fundamental characteristic of these chiefdoms. This was a time when social status and rank were still openly determined by one’s heroic deeds and by the number of followers or clients one could attract and retain.[4]

In the absence of kinship ties, reputation becomes the standard for relationships. Andrew Fraser notes that oath-taking was and remains a peculiarly English pre-occupation, so much so that “the commonplace spectacle of Third World immigrants reciting oaths of allegiance at naturalization ceremonies is calculated to warm the hearts of WASPs committed heart and soul to the constitutionalist creed of civic nationalism.” Oath-taking is a public affirmation that is fundamentally about one’s reputation. It is, of course, a bit of WASP egoism to assume other peoples have a similar sense of public trustworthiness:

WASPs are trusting souls. For that very reason they can be exploited easily by those who promise one thing and do another. … Mass Third World immigration imposes enormous risks upon Anglo-Saxon societies grounded in unique patterns of trusting behavior that evolved over many centuries. If newcomers do not accept the burdens entailed by the civic culture of the host society—most notably the need to forswear one’s pre-existing racial, ethnic and religious allegiances—they are bound to reduce the benefits of good citizenship for the host Anglo-Saxon nation. (Andrew Fraser, The WASP Question (Arktos, 2011), 57, 64)

All evidence indicates that these groups will not forswear such allegiances, any more than Jews have forsworn their ethnic and religious allegiances despite centuries of living among Europeans.

Berserkers and Shape-Shifting

Two characteristics of I-E culture apparent in the film that always struck me are the berserkers and shape-shifting. Young boys “had to go out and become like a band of dogs or wolves—to raid their enemies.”[1] All young men went out on raids as part of their initiation into the group. Berserkers attacked their enemies in a trance-like frenzy that is apparent in several scenes. Emotional intensity at a fever pitch that was embedded in religion. Odin the god of the Männerbünde is also the “god of battle rage.”[5].

The concept is connected to a belief in shape-shifting wherein the soul is disengaged from the body and can roam as a wolf or a bear, at which time it can engage in superhuman heroic deeds. Snorri Sturluson, the medieval chronicler of the Norse sagas, writes: “Woden’s men went without hauberks [armor] and raged like dogs or wolves. They bit their shields and were strong like bears or bulls. They killed men but neither fire nor iron hurt them. This is called berserkgangr.”[6] Young men were initiated into the Männerbünde by mock hanging and were taught berserker techniques.[7]

Amleth as a Berserker

Amleth as a Shape-Shifting Berserker becomes a wolf.

Hypermasculinity of Norse Society

Indo-European culture was far from sexually egalitarian—what one might term “hyper-masculine.” Lotte Hedeager’s Iron Age Myth and Materiality: An Archaeology of Scandinavia, AD 400–1000 paints a picture of a completely militarized society in which male sexual penetration was a marker of power, while being penetrated was, for a male, the ultimate insult.[9] Accusing a man of having been sodomized was a grievous accusation, with the same penalty as for murder. Older males lacking the power or ability to penetrate took on the status of women and were even ridiculed by slaves. Women were seen as legitimate spoils of war and raiding, and such women were typically enslaved.

This is relevant to the plot of The Northman: Amleth’s mother, Queen Gudrún, was originally captured by Amleth’s father, Aurvandill, whom Gudrún describes as a rapist whom she passionately hated. When Aurvandill is killed by his brother Fjölnir, she becomes Fjölnir’s wife and bears him a son. She has much more positive feelings toward Fjölnir than for Aurvandill. Women as spoils of war.

The following passage from Hedeager gets at this hyper-masculine, completely militarized culture that appears to have been characteristic of I-E culture in northwestern Europe at least from 2500 bc until the Middle Ages:

In the extremely competitive and aggressive Scandinavian society in which blood feuds were taking place everywhere, often lasting for many years and several generations …, the concept of honour evolved around reputation, respect and prestige [i.e., not one’s place in a kinship group. as was typically the case in non-individualist cultures]. Social life and reputation were hierarchically organised and arranged according to dominance and submission, powerful and powerless. At the bottom of the social scale, female thralls [slaves] were routinely subjected to rape and traded as sexual subjects. In the account of a Viking market at Volga in 922, the Arab diplomat Ibn Fadlan describes how the Vikings (the Scandinavian Rus) regularly had sex with their slaves, often in public, and in groups of both sexes. This activity took place both in front of potential buyers and their own formal partners, whether wives or girlfriends, who seemed unaffected … . Rape of a free woman, however, was a serious matter … .

Within this social hierarchy, power was explicitly connected with metaphors for penetration—by the sword, penis, or tongue. Those who penetrated—with words, with weapons, or with the phallus—were the powerful (“males”); those who became penetrated were the powerless (“females”). In a social setting, sexuality provided a symbolic code for dominance and submission, throwing light on power and thus status differences … . The most severe accusations in the Old Norse society evolved around “effeminacy” and penetration, implying that sexuality and hostility were two sides of the same coin.[10]

I was surprised by the scene toward the end when Amleth reveals himself to Gudrún as her son. I expected Gudrún to be overjoyed at seeing her long-lost son, but instead she lashed out at him and admitted that she had asked Fjölnir to kill Aurvandill and Amleth, and that she prefers Fjölnir and their new son Gunnar. Amleth kills her after she attacks him, and he accidentally kills Gunnar. Assuming this could actually happen, it would indicate that despite the relatively low position of women, they could seek power by influencing men. The evolutionary psychology of her choice is a bit muddled; both Amleth and Gunnar are her sons and if anything, she should choose to favor the older (because he is already of reproductive age), but I suppose the hatred engendered by Aurvandill raping her overshadowed everything else—an example where a proximal mechanism (hatred of being raped, attraction to another’s relative kindness) trumps ultimate evolutionary logic. She was a prize in the fratricidal war between Fjölnir and Aurvandill, but apparently Fjölnir was relatively kind to her. Nevertheless, within the context of the story, the audience had been led to see Amleth’s quest as noble, to hope for his success, and to see Fjölnir as evil. The sudden reversal toward the end is jarring.

I-E Social Mobility

Another point of intersection with traditional I-E culture is that social mobility was possible. Men who had talent as warriors could move up in the culture—essentially it was a free market culture based on military talent, either organizational or fighting ability. Here Amleth is chosen as a slave by Fjölnir because of his physique and presumed fighting ability, and later, Amleth is on the side of Fjölnir and Thorir in an extremely violent game (Icelandic: knattleikr) where players club their opponents to gain an advantage, quite possibly with lethal consequences. Amleth excels at the game and comes to the rescue of the young Gunnar who is about to be murderously clubbed by an opponent. As a reward, Thorir lightens Amleth’s work load, and he allows him to supervise others and to be married to the beautiful Olga with whom he had already developed a bond. But he tells Amleth that he will always be a slave.

This reminds us that I-E culture had a strong role for reciprocity rather than total despotism. At the heart of I-E culture was the practice of gift-giving as a reward for military accomplishment. Successful leaders were expected to reward their followers handsomely.[11] Oath-bound contracts of reciprocal relationships were characteristic of I-Es and this practice continued with the various I-E groups that invaded Europe. These contracts formed the basis of patron-client relationships based on reputation—leaders could expect loyal service from their followers, and followers could expect equitable rewards for their service to the leader. This is critical because these relationships are based on talent and accomplishment, not ethnicity (i.e., rewarding people on the basis of kinship distance) or despotic subservience (where followers are essentially unfree). But progress from slave to completely free was slow, and, according to some scholars, could take several generations. Amleth will always be a slave in Fjölnir’s eyes.

Another thing that surprised and frankly horrified me was the aftermath of a successful raid on a Rus fortified village when many of the villagers were herded into a thatch-roofed building and then burned alive. The raiders made off with booty and some slaves (presumably the able-bodied men and desirable [fertile]  females) but seem to have murdered the rest—men, women, and children. Such behavior was not typical of many of the I-E groups that invaded Europe. Instead of simply raiding, conquering I-E groups typically developed settled among the people they conquered and developed relationships of domination and subordination between the new military elites and the conquered peoples, providing protection in return for service. This is a prescription for feudal-type societies dominated by military elites with mutual obligations to the people they dominate, but in which kinship ties between elites and the people they dominate are relatively unimportant and ultimately permeable. But the raid on the Rus village is not intended as a permanent settlement, with disastrous consequences for the villagers

*   *   *

The Northman depicts a society that is quite foreign to contemporary sensibilities. It’s unlikely many of us would want to live in it—unless one was able to be a male in a successful Männerbund. But, as it is said, uneasy lies the head that wears the crown—a lesson that could hardly have been lost on Fjölnir. In any case, there’s no denying that the society selected for strong men—something we definitely need now.

The deep question is how such a violent, hierarchical culture developed eventually into the highly egalitarian Scandinavian cultures we see today. My short answer is that the I-E’s dominated a far more egalitarian hunter-gatherer majority and that the latter eventually came to dominate the area—a theory spelled out in Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition. 

[1] Ibid., 239; emphasis in text.

[2] Ibid., 364.

[3] Duchesne, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, 398.aa

[4] Ibid.

[5] Hans-Peter Hasenfratz, Barbarian Rites, trans. Michael Moynihan (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2011; original German edition, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany: Verlag Herder, 1992), 49.

[6] Michael Speidel, “‘Berserks’: A History of Indo-European ‘Mad Warriors,’” Journal of World History 13, no. 2 (1992): 253–90, 253–54.

[7] Hasenfratz, Barbarian Rites, 64–65.

[8] Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language.

[9] Lotte Hedeager, Iron Age Myth and Materiality: An Archaeology of Scandinavia, AD 400–1000 (London: Routledge, 2011).

[10] Ibid., 115–18.

[11] Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, 238.

[12] Ibid., 303

[13] Ibid., 343.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Duchesne, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, 438.

[16] Ibid., 379.

[17] Interestingly, Duchesne describes Stalin as a classic despot. Stalin, from Georgia, is said to have had a despotic Oriental personality, surrounding himself with “slavish characters” and continuing to need “choruses of public approval to reinforce his ego.” Duchesne, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, 424.

[18] Herodotus, Histories 7, 136.

http://www.bostonleadershipbuilders.com/herodotus/book07.htm

[19] Haak, et al., “Massive Migration from the Steppe Was a Source for Indo-European Languages in Europe.”

[20] Kristian Kristiansen, et al. (“Re-Theorising Mobility and the Formation of Culture and Language among the Corded Ware Culture in Europe, Antiquity 9, no. 356 (2017): 334–347.

[21] Haak et al., “Ancient DNA, Strontium isotopes, and osteological analyses shed light on social and kinship organization of the Later Stone Age, Proceedings of the national Academy of Science 105, no. 47 (November 25, 2008): 18226–18231

[22] Ibid., 343.

[23] Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, 343.

 

Recent Research on Race Realism

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Race and Evolution: The Causes and Consequences of Race Differences
Stephen K. Sanderson
Self-published, 2022

Stephen Sanderson is the author, coauthor, or editor of sixteen books in twenty-two editions and some seventy-five articles in journals, edited collections, and handbooks. He is a retired professor of sociology and is quite unusual within his discipline for applying evolutionary principles to the study of society. His latest offering, dedicated to J. Phillippe Rushton, Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, combines a useful summary of the best in recent research and theory regarding human racial differences (seven chapters) with applications to such topics as the history of slavery, liberal stereotype theory, social stratification by color, the history of human accomplishment, the rise of Northeast Asia, and the decline of Africa (six chapters); a final chapter discusses policy options. Being an American, the author devotes special attention to Whites and Blacks, but includes information on other races wherever helpful.

Sanderson begins his book with several epigraphs that indicate his awareness that he is stepping into a very politically incorrect minefield. These two are well worth pondering in the present context where woke ideology—an ideology based on moral judgments and equitable outcomes rather than science and facts—reigns supreme in universities, the media, and corporate culture:

A good society is one that permits a maximum amount of objective pursuit of truth and beauty, and this pursuit should be undertaken “irrespective of the consequences.” Such inquiry may lead to the discovery of “inconvenient facts,” but it must be undertaken nonetheless. We cannot know in advance whether the knowledge we create or discover will support or contradict certain moral positions already held. And “philosophies incongruent with the pursuit of a reduction in misery should be permitted since the basis of rationality is strengthened through argument,” and “all opinions, however obnoxious or however passionately held, [should] be heard and subjected to the test of rational criticism.” Barrington Moore, Jr.

Political thinking, especially on the left, is a sort of masturbation fantasy in which the world of fact hardly matters. George Orwell

The first section of the book, entitled “Foundations of Race Realism,” will be well-trodden ground for regular readers of The Occidental Observer, so I shall be brief. The first chapter defends the biological reality of races by providing a point-by-point refutation of two high-profile formal statements of social constructivism, one issued by the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in 1998 and the other by the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA) in 1999. The author explains what is wrong with “Lewontin’s fallacy,” i.e., the inference of the unreality of race from the fact of greater genetic variation within than between racial groups. He quotes some older texts to show that the concept of race was not invented by eighteenth century European colonialists, as the AAA and many antiracists maintain. A good example of the lengths to which some people will go to deny reality is the AAPA’s declaration that “human traits known to be biologically adaptive do not occur with greater frequency in one population than in others.” Sanderson marvels that this is “obviously false and a rather astonishing statement for a biological anthropologist to make,” giving a few simple examples. The chapter closes with an account of how cluster analysis of population genetic data can reliably identify “four to six major racial groups.”

Chapter Two explains the inadequacy of non-biological explanations for differences in racial outcomes, including discrimination, the lingering effects of slavery, and systemic racism. The best of these theories focuses on the higher rates of fatherless households among Blacks than Whites, but the explanation for this difference lies ultimately in racial biology after all.

Chapter Three summarizes evidence for genetically based racial differences in average intelligences. American psychometric data showing an average White IQ of about 100 and an average Black IQ of 85 has now accumulated for over a hundred years. In the course of childhood, the degree to which environment can explain such differences steadily declines, disappearing entirely by around age fourteen. Most damning for the social constructivist position, however, is that Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) now make it possible to identify specific genes that contribute to intelligence, meaning that intelligence can be reliably (albeit not perfectly) predicted from biological data alone. One particularly telling statistic Sanderson cites is the correlation between the average IQ of the nations of the world and the percentage of their population that is Black: –.808.

Many Black-White socioeconomic gaps disappear once IQ is controlled for, but one difference that does not is out-of-wedlock births. In his fourth chapter, Sanderson explains race differences in sex, reproduction and family patterns, summarizing Rushton’s evidence for high mating effort/low nurturance among Blacks and low mating effort/high nurturance among Northeast Asians, with Whites intermediate. He demonstrates that fatherless homes are common in Africa and among Blacks worldwide, not something unique to post-World War II America.

Chapter Five discusses race differences in personality and temperament. In the American context, the most important are that Blacks have significantly higher levels of antisocial personality as well as higher time preference than Whites (i.e., Blacks are more likely to place less value on returns receivable or costs payable in the future and hence more likely to accept immediate rewards rather than wait for larger returns at a later date and more likely to take out disadvantageous long-term loans with immediate up-front payouts). Confusingly, the author systematically switches the terms “high” and “low” time preference; one hopes this mistake can soon be corrected through the print-on-demand system.

Chapter Six explains racial differences in law-abidingness, including violent crime, civil disorder (mob violence), and political corruption. Such differences are in large part a consequence of differences in intelligence and time-preference.

Chapter Seven outlines the historical development of racial differences following the migration of early humans out of Africa and into colder climates where getting through the winter required planning ahead. There is also a discussion of Life History Theory and the r-K continuum (basically the continuum from high mating effort/low nurturance to low mating effort/high nurturance).

The six chapters which make up Part 2 of Race and Evolution apply the race realist perspective to particular issues. Chapter Eight provides a brief history of New World slavery, including regional comparisons, arguing it was fundamentally an economic rather than a racial institution: “Europeans did not choose Africans as slaves because they considered them biologically inferior, but because Africa provided a huge supply of labor that could be transported to the New World more cheaply than slaves drawn from, say, India or China.”

Chapter Nine discusses racial stratification around the world, showing that Blacks have the lowest average socio-economic status in multiracial societies everywhere. The author explains that the phenomenon of “pigmentocracy”—where increasingly light skin is found the higher one goes up the socio-economic scale—results from a hierarchy of ability: “Lighter skinned people are regarded more highly because they are more talented.”

Ever since psychologist Gordon Alport published The Nature of Prejudice in 1954, “stereotypes” have been a staple of social constructivist discourse, the assumption being that they are unreliable. But this has never been demonstrated. In Chapter Ten, Sanderson summarizes the findings of a series of studies published since 2012 by social psychologist Lee Jussim and colleagues. They found a high positive correlation between racial, ethnic, and gender stereotypes and empirical reality. For instance, in one study comparing stereotypes with US Census data, correlations ranged from .27 (already moderately significant) to .96, with a mean as high as .83. Jussim et al. write that “stereotype accuracy correlations are among the largest and most replicable effects in all of social psychology.” This is no doubt because, over human evolutionary history, accurate knowledge of behavior patterns of social groups within one’s environment must have had considerable survival value, and thus been favored by natural selection.

Chapter Eleven demonstrates that the bulk of scientific discovery and other advances in human knowledge have been the work of European and European-descended men. Northeast Asians may have somewhat higher average intelligence, but they tend to produce highly conformist cultures where copying from accepted “masters” is inculcated and originality is frowned upon. Africa, of course, has produced nothing notable in scientific discovery.

Chapter Twelve discusses the recent rapid economic development of Northeast Asia and the dominance of Southeast Asian economies by the overseas Chinese.

Chapter thirteen contrasts this with the catastrophic fate of sub-Saharan Africa since decolonization and demonstrates the inadequacy of anti-colonial theories to explain it. The late Ghanaian economist George B. N. Ayittey has described the typical African post-colonial regime as a “vampire state.” Sanderson summarizes:

A vampire state is one run by crooks and gangsters who come to power either through rigged elections or coups d’état. Their leaders are functional illiterates who debauch all major government institutions: civil service, military, judiciary and banking system. They transform their countries into personal fiefdoms for the benefit of themselves, their cronies and tribesmen.

The author offers a brief tour of the continent filled with collapsing public services, universal corruption and bribery, civil wars, cannibalism, torture, a five hextillion percent rate of inflation (in Zimbabwe a few years ago) and outright genocide (in Rwanda). As he explains:

Before colonialism Africans had indigenous political institutions that were much simpler and more easily used to maintain order than those established by the colonists. The new colonial institutions were not natural to Africans and proved beyond their ability to manage effectively. Indeed, it took Europeans thousands of years to develop such institutions, . . . so it is no wonder that Africans did not understand them.

To this must be added that many who succeed in the ruthless world of African power politics have extremely antisocial personalities and are not really interested in economic development or the general welfare. They concentrate their efforts on enriching themselves at the expense of the countries they govern, displaying “a massive failure to adhere to social norms, no regard for truth, a lack of remorse or feelings of guilt, extreme aggressiveness, impulsiveness and recklessness, and an unusually weak moral sense.”

The final chapter of Race and Evolution is devoted to policy, explaining the failure of racial preferences, the lack of any evidence for the alleged benefits of “diversity,” and the many powerful objections to slavery reparations. Sanderson agrees with law professor Amy Wax’s position that “outsiders’ power to change existing [dysfunctional Black family] patterns is severely limited; the future of Black America is now in its own hands.” Yet he notes that the choices Blacks have to make are constrained by their own biological nature. Some Blacks do make good choices and prosper as a result, but these are generally those with above-average intelligence and an absence of antisocial character traits. Many others are unlikely ever to make better choices than they are making now.

Sanderson agrees that America needs a “national conversation on race,” as advocated, e.g., by Bill Clinton and Howard Schultz (the CEO of Starbucks), but unlike them he understands that it will do no good as long as knowledgeable race realists are banned from participation. As Arthur Jensen and J. Phillippe Rushton have written:

There is a need to educate the public about the true nature of individual and group differences, genetics, and evolutionary biology. Ultimately, the public must accept the pragmatic reality that some groups will be overrepresented and others groups underrepresented in various socially valued outcomes. The view that one segment of the population is largely to blame for the problems of another segment can be harmful to racial harmony. Equating group disparities in success with racism on the part of the more successful group guarantees mutual resentment.

Racial equality of outcome is not achievable, but race relations could be greatly improved if the biological reality of racial differences were understood by more people.

There is not a lot of original material in Sanderson’s Race and Evolution, but I am not aware of any other single volume which summarizes so much useful information about race between two covers. It could do a great deal of good if made widely available. Is there any chance it will be? The author is currently trying to get an e-book version published on Amazon. For the time being, you can order the book directly from him for $12 US plus $4 US shipping (domestic) or 10 EUR plus 7 EUR shipping (outside the United States). Write to:

Stephen Sanderson
460 Washington Road, Apt. G-3
Pittsburgh, PA 15228

E-mail: sksander999@gmail.com

The author also maintains a website at www.stephenksanderson.com.