Plato’s Racial Republic

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Plato

Plato
Republic (Robin Waterfield Trans.)
New York: Oxford University Press, 1994

Egalitarians have argued that notions of nation and race are largely modern constructs. Marxists in particular have typically claimed that Western ruling classes invented these ideas to consolidate the power of bourgeois states or as a mere pretext to divide the working class along (supposedly imaginary) racial lines and to oppress their colonial subjects.

It is then important to look at the actual record of discussion of tribe, nation, and race in our European tradition. In fact, hereditarian and ethnocentric themes have been present in Western thought from the beginning. An example of this would be Herodotus, the very first historian, who 2,500 years ago already defined being part of the Greek nation through four criteria: common religion, common blood, common language, and common custom.

In this article, I will give an account of racial and ethnic thought in Plato’s monumental philosophical treatise, The Republic, which is widely recognized as the founding text of the entire tradition of Western thought. I will demonstrate the following points:

  • Inequality: the idea that men are created unequal is absolutely pervasive throughout The Republic and is foundational to its ethics. Plato asserts that individuals have inborn differences in physique, personality, and intelligence, in addition to differences due to upbringing.
  • Heredity and eugenics: Plato notes that human differences are significantly heritable and so often refers to eugenic solutions to improve both society and elites, with explicit comparisons to animal breeding.
  • Patriotism: Plato argues that patriotism is a good and compares it with love for one’s family.
  • Greek racial/ethnic identity: Plato argues that “ties of blood and kinship” meant Greeks should not wage war on one another or enslave each other, reserving this for non-Greeks, and that their common identity should be cultivated through joint religious practices.

Plato’s Republic presents a powerful vision of an aristocratic racially-conscious state.[1] The ruling elite, known as the “guardians,” and to a lesser extent the wider citizenry would steadily improve themselves both culturally through education and biologically through eugenics. The elite would reach for the truth through constant reflection and dialectic, while both elite and masses would be conditioned through (civil-)religious education, being taught to consider the pursuit of these cultural and biological goods as a sacred moral imperative.[2] Read more

Will the Alt Right take over the Republican Party?

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Hillary Clinton’s Reno speech had plenty of ridiculous moments. The claim that Russia’s Vladimir Putin is behind the Alt Right is laughable, but one shouldn’t ignore its obvious pandering to neocons, many of whom are shilling for Hillary or, like Robert Kagan, are actually advising her on foreign policy. The rest of the neocons are staying with the Republicans for now, hoping she wins and that they can pick up the pieces.

If you want hostility with Russia, Hillary’s your candidate, as the always hilarious Hillary PR Team noted on Twitter:

In case you missed the speech, here is a 1½ minute version, with a special appearance from Pepe.

What I want to focus on is her (slightly less ridiculous) statement, “The de facto merger between Breitbart and the Trump Campaign represents a landmark achievement for the ‘Alt-Right.’ A fringe element has effectively taken over the Republican Party.”

Would that it were so. Breitbart is not the Alt Right. There are certainly some linkages, made possible by fuzzy definitions of the Alt Right which provide irresistible opportunities for politicians like Clinton to smear Trump. But we do not read on Breitbart the full-throated identitarian, explicitly White, race realist, and Judaeo-critical ideas that are the true hallmark of the Alt Right.

So what are the prospects for the Alt Right really taking over the Republican Party? First, perhaps the most important contribution of Trump’s candidacy, win or lose, is that he has destroyed the traditional Republican Party. The GOP, “dependent on a neocon media and foreign policy establishment and with a big business, pro-Israel donor base, is dead—and, in my view, it can’t be resuscitated.” This was a party completely out of touch with its base. Trump accomplished a hostile takeover, and it’s no surprise that the elites who have run the party, are not on board with this revolution. Read more

“The Past That Won’t Pass Away”; Ernst Nolte (1923–2016)

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On the occasion of the death of the renowned German historian and philosopher Ernst Nolte on August 18, 2016, there has been quite a few of both laudatory and critical comments about his work in the mainstream media in Germany and France. Nolte’s work on the link between Communism and National-Socialism stirred a great deal of intellectual commotion in academic circles in the United States and Europe in the late 1980s. Although in his works Nolte prudently avoids discussing the body counts of Jewish victims of National-Socialism, his novel approach to the study of contemporary history earned him praise from nationalist-oriented scholars — as well as a great deal of criticism from liberal and Marxist scholars. What follows below is the reprint of my review of his famous book Der europäische Bürgerkrieg, 1917–1945; Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus” (The European Civil War, 1917–1945; National Socialism and Bolshevism), published in 1989 in The World and I.

Nolte

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In German national consciousness, the years since the Second World War have been marked by a painful process of suppressing the National-Socialist past, as well as by a prodigious effort to readjust Germany to the model of exemplary liberal democracy. In the words of one German historian, Germany has functioned over the last forty years as a “negatively privileged nation.” One the one hand, it could boast unparalleled economic performance; on the other, its margin of maneuvering in the realm of foreign politics has been virtually nil. With the Soviet threat receding, and with Germany becoming the main economic actor in European Community, a number of German public figures have suggested that Germany should seek an equally important role in the political arena. Moreover, some European scholars and historians have contended that recent German history deserved to be studied in a wider historical context, one that would include the critical assessment of the role of the Allies during the Second World War. Read more

When Tanveer Met Asad: Vibrant Vignettes from the Modern West

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Is there such a thing as an admirable murderer? I’m not sure, but I do know a good candidate for the title: a New Briton called Tanveer Ahmed. He was the devout Sunni Muslim who drove hundreds of miles in March 2016 to hold a theological debate with a devout Ahmadi Muslim called Asad Shah.

The debate consisted of Tanveer stabbing and stamping Asad to death outside the shop owned by the latter in Glasgow. I don’t admire the murder, but I do admire Tanveer’s behaviour afterwards: he made no attempt to evade justice, pleaded guilty without hesitation, and happily accepted the long prison sentence that he received in August 2016. If Britain still had the death penalty, I’m sure that he would have accepted that just as happily.

Murderers for Muhammad

And why not? Like his hero Mumtaz Qadri, “The Martyr with a Machine-Gun,” he had committed murder for the noblest of reasons, defending the honour of the Prophet Muhammad and despatching a blasphemer to hell-fire. He had a subjective feeling of certainty and he acted on it in a way that has strengthened his version of Islam. Mainstream Muslims do not believe in rationalism, scepticism or liberal democracy. They marched in large numbers around the world to express their outrage at Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) and the Muhammad cartoons published in Denmark in 2005. They did not march to express outrage at the Charlie Hebdo massacre or the murder of Asad Shah.

Tanveer Ahmed in the Daily RecordMurderer for Muhammad: Tanveer Ahmed

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Jay Nordlinger’s virtue signaling

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Jay Nordlinger’s “Struggling” gives another glimpse of the cuckservative mindset at National Review (where Nordlinger is senior editor). A general theme is that the NR community is more civilized and more moral than those nasty Alt Right people. It begins with a complaint that Trump’s new campaign manager, Stephen Bannon, uses bad words in private to refer to establishment Republicans, quoting Betsy Woodroff of The Daily Beast.

Donald Trump’s new campaign boss — the guy white supremacists are so excited about — once described D.C.’s top Republicans as “cunts.” Stephen Bannon . . . used the phrase two years ago in emails with Breitbart reporter Matt Boyle. Bannon ran Breitbart at the time, and the two schemed about how to get activists to “turn on the hate” as part of a plan to “burn this bitch down.”

I suppose that what Bannon meant by using that word was approximately what we mean by calling Nordlinger and establishment Republicans cuckservatives — men who don’t have any balls, who have sacrificed their masculinity to the goal of joining liberals in the virtue signaling competition that is so typical (and unique) to Western cultures. Because that’s the thing, isn’t it. When it doesn’t come down to worrying about their jobs in a GOP re-fashioned by the Trump Revolution, the real horror that prevents them from endorsing the Alt Right is that they will be characterized as morally defective by the New York Times editorial board and other pillars of the establishment. Read more

Anthony Bourdain’s Gastronomical World View

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bourbain

Anthony Bourdain: Tasting what the world has to offer

News item: Turks in Germany not interested in assimilating.

So German Turks don’t want to be Germans. How shocking! It is so out of character. Muslims who don’t want to fit in? Really?

But what’s the big deal anyway? Hey, in Justin Trudeau’s Canada we don’t want anyone to assimilate. We want them to “integrate”. We want them to maintain their “identity,” and offer us the benefit of their traditions, their fresh perspectives, and their cuisine. Especially their cuisine. I mean, that is one thing that I learned from Anthony Bourdain. It is all about sampling a nation’s cuisine. That’s the litmus test of a nation’s and a culture’s worth.

“Oh, your country is guided by a barbaric seventh-century worldview? You oppress women? You support terror and jihad? No problem because the pita bread and the sweet coffee you serve is wonderful!” Read more

What to read? (Part 6): A White Character Survey; Envy in Literature and Politics (Part 2)

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saraceni

Carlo Saraceni (“The Fall of Icarus”) 1606, oil

Physical blindness and the verdict of ignorance, meted out to envious politicians in Dante’s epic poem, can often be bliss.  Eyelessness can have advantages, as demonstrated by the blind, poor, uneducated, self-effacing, albeit very intelligent seer, Tiresias, who is brought to the court of King Oedipus, only to announce to him his eyeless future of blind destiny (vv 364-377).

For that matter willful ignorance and dismissal of the brainwashing curriculum in the modern educational system in the US and EU can be a sign of a healthy state of mind. What on earth is to be seen in the political process in multicultural America and Europe today? What good can be learned in multiracial colleges in Europe, whose program consists of lessons on White man’s guilt? For centuries, in order to avoid envy-inducing temptations, high-IQ young introspective White European males opted for monastic life. The harmful side of monasticism was that it prevented good genes to be passed on to future offspring, thus leaving the political arena open to an array of genetic and character misfits: the bad, the ugly and the envious.

Lengthy is the list of authors, usually associated with the heritage of cultural conservatism, who have prodded into the roots of envy-driven politicians. Highly envious politicians are usually very cunning individuals, with above average IQ, possessing, in addition, good skills at camouflaging their moral sleaziness with an aura of tearful humanitarian palaver. They also excel at expressions of sympathy for the plight of their future prey.

This brings to mind is the huge literature on so-called Jewish social mimicry, aka “trickster-do-good-Jews” (“Mauscheljuden”), popularized in National Socialist Germany by the works of Theodor Fritsch and Arthur Trebitsch, and scores of other writers. Read more