Nothing Is Shocking

There is no shock any longer. We've had to invent novel sins (such as "racism" and "homophobia") into order to preserve our capacity for outrage, and therefore the thrill of violation. For this reason there are Jewish Nazis. The swastika for them is a sexual talisman, evoking concupiscence when the taboo is dead from continual transgression. Eventually, all such prurience ends in boredom & impotence. This impotence spawned the Marquis de Sade. When one becomes acclimated to de Sade, there is only either madness, or Faith.

What is Happiness

The following was written GetBig.com forum user Uberman during a conversation on Happiness








Post 1:

Happiness is linked to knowing because knowing is dominating controlling the environment, other life forms, whether they are vegetal or animal, which proves dominating underlies the feeling of happiness. Knowing, controlling, dominating, means better odds of survival, means being happy. Being happy is linked to knowing that you have better odds of survival than others.

Many people are happy believing in systems of beliefs that "work" (ie insure their survival and the survival of the loved ones who reinforce by their alliance with them their own survival) simply because..it works. It produces and cover their daily need for gratifications, chemical recipes of happiness in their brains that allow them to last one more day. Most people are happy because they follow daily routines that produce "well being" in their lives; they could’t tell why or how they got there, the conditions were just ideal for them, as simple as that.

Everything is just fine in their minds, everything has a meaning, an explanation, even what is unexplainable, which is reassuring. These beliefs also make them the good guys while giving a meaning to the enemies, the bad ones. It justifies everything geographically, temporally and emotionally. Look at how nihilist end -Vincent van Gogh, Nietzsche, Darwin etc, they all experiment with everything in life, atheism, nihilism, homosexuality, bisexuality etc; they all end crazy because the clear understanding of what is really "going on" actually drives anyone looking for a positive, pure, meaning of life to madness. Religions actually keep people away from madness and the will to destroy the absurd world, because if you re not part of the world, if you don’t participate, build, insure its survival, you re actually fighting to destroy it, life is binary, you either build or destroy, if you re not building, you re destroying. And good luck finding out for sure if someone is actually trying to create, help, or destroy.

Anyone interested in understanding nihilism / atheism and generally how we give a meaning to our lives should read Eugene Rose's work.

Post 2:

I'm still not finished reading the Bible so obviously I'd have a hard time saying i have "faith", and nowhere do i find humans or phenomenon that would allow me to find and hold it once and for all.  Actually it's a work in progress. Sometimes I feel like I start to understand what faith is, just to find I lost it the second after. It is indeed, quite an effort that is required, just like when you want to build muscles -naturally-.  I'm currently exploring the opposite side of faith, the dark side of the coin. Most self proclaimed atheists (atheism being "in" nowadays it's pretty smart to tell everyone you’re "in") claim religion and Christian-ism are a bunch of bulshits created to control them , failing to realize it is the anchor for a stable and productive life that keeps regenerating itself while atheism lead most people to stop breeding after several generations of believing in it. The funny is that they're also scared by sheer, unadulterated nihilism, which means they still hold Christian values deep inside their minds. They pretend to be atheist yet "believe" in the seven days of the week, have Christian names and so on. Be honest and push your reasoning to its most perfect nature; nihilist, then. Oh wait, nihilism causes one to want to end his life after a while. It means no more hamburgers, no more sex -or porn for most- no more TV, no more video games...no more hope for joy and happiness.

Post 3:

You don’t get it. smart, intelligent people, are unhappy because they realize how vain and bestial life is at its core. Only dumb people can "love" and "feel", aren’t drowning in their cynicism, this is why they procreate while "intelligent" people don’t, as simple as that. Again, intelligence has nothing to do with happiness; dumb people are often a lot more happier than smart people.

All our behaviors and thoughts processes are animalistic in the first place, we want kids for the same reasons other animal species "want offsprings". Fact is we don’t "want" shit, all of this is pre programmed behaviors, it's genetical. Those who "choose" not to have kids simply despise life and other living beings, they are sociopath and they want mankind to disappear. They all probably disappear, those who will stay will evolve to adapt to whatever happen on earth. As simple as that.

Oh BTW, mankind is divided into two main categories; poor dumb people who want to be rich, and smart rich people who want to stay rich and manipulate, dominate the poor and keep them below themselves.

Post 4:

Again, nobody is "happy", everyone is only pretending to be happy. Everyone knows there are too many people, not enough jobs. Everyone says he hates his job, yet does his best daily to prevent any newbie from being recruited, anyone from taking his place, even if it's a shity place. Everyone criticizes the boss in front of his colleagues, and criticizes his colleagues in front of his boss. And the boss knows it well.

Life is war. Everything is an instrument to wage war, words, feelings, happiness happen when you successfully dominate , kill, when you see others fail. Anger, frustration, sadness happen when you fail to dominate, are dominated. Hope is when you envision yourself or you offsprings dominating others.

There is no way mankind can last forever, our so called intelligence, consciousness -of being animals- are only other weapons to wage war against others.

Post 5:

"maturing/aging" = realizing you're an animal struggling for its survival against all the human competition. If you have money , if you re surrounded by "loved ones" -people who want you to succeed, dominate, where they weren't able to dominate so basically who live vicariously thru you- who give you advice on how to fuck people in the ass instead of being fucked in the ass by them, it's easier to cope... Others simply become violent, angry, jealous, or kill themselves realizing there is no justice or fairness in life, it's simply about adapting better than others and winning when they lose.
Having kids they can get money for your retirement, it's easier to defend yourself, survive in the specie if you create your own loyal group.

The funny is that ultimately our whole specie will get extinct anyway. So most people simply come to the conclusion, while i'm here, why not simply dominate blindly without caring about all these bullshit like religion, philosophy etc, -how useful are they for a poor man? it won't help him much, all of this is just a hobble for rich people who don’t have to survive daily killing others for a job and food- life is pain for everyone so lets be happy making others having a painful day. Now multiply this belief/behavior by 7, 8 9 billions of individuals.

Post 6:

Well I’ve written extensively on this subject months (years) ago, browse my post history, but I’d add this. 

Beauty, strength, money, all fade away, none of these strategies of survival last forever. It s what you do with what you have at the moment you have it that matters, it's how long you maintain your strengths, it's how you reverse your weaknesses, that matters. There are people who are good looking, rich, powerful, yet are unhappy. I think our society makes it a religion to "find happiness", not understanding how it works, in fact most people get sick of looking for something that simply doesn’t exist; constant happiness. People were a lot happier on a more consistent basis in the past it is a fact.  People in the past were not looking for happiness, but to please God. And they were happier.

Constant happiness? This is not what we have been designed for; happiness is just an emotion among many others. Life  is a roller-coaster of feelings. There are people who have been, felt, miserable all their lives but raised kids who dominate, are happier than others by a wide margin. The me generation has no clue about history, nor can envision the future; they’ll never reach the maturity to raise kids properly enough for them to survive.

Fact is happiness is more easily found for everyone following basic principles more than buying into the last trend that in order to steal money from your pocket will "reveal" you a shortcut to reach it.

There is a bigger picture, experience, at work, and you have to see beyond individuals.

Just consider the fact that once economies collapse, not matter how good looking or rich you are, if you are at the wrong place at the wrong moment, you're good looking body and its pockets full of money dont mean shit.

The Bible says only the humble, down to earth, who finds his happiness in the simplest things will be saved, will live long...will be part of tomorrow. Only he will have hopes. We are blades of grass, and some of them are greener than others. We are just toys in the hands of something bigger than us. Our "feelings" are not even ours per se, they're just strategies of survival genetically embedded in ourselves and we didn’t choose just like we didn't choose most of our physical attributes. Our only choice is to decide what to do with them.

Life is a challenge, an experience, full of traps and one needs a strong spiritual, mental discipline to go thru it without "failing". Many good looking, strong, rich people have died since the birth of mankind. Many of their genes have been saved and cross mixed generation after generation. Many dumb, ugly people have survived the same way; they were "inferior", still they still exist. The real question is, what is the point of all of this ? Are we just a bunch of randomly mixed, generated, strategies of survival, is the only purpose of our existences to struggle for survival against others individuals , against the weather, other animal species, who are as vain and lost as ourselves and who just want to dominate without having to be someone else slave?

I don’t believe that we re designed to be constantly happy or unhappy. Life as a human being is about more than that; it's about surviving whatever the way you survive. Now, a lot of people think that all strategies of survival are equivalent, that being a whore, a murderer, a robber, is justified and just as good as studying, working, etc if it allows you to survive, others aiming at the betterment of mankind until a perfect being is obtained believe that you have to constantly improve your thoughts and/or body it gives a meaning to their existences and to the process of reproduction in humans. When they choose not to fall for a sin, they see the difficulty of that choice as a step in the good direction.

It is also funny how some ugly people give birth to good looking kids and how good looking parents give birth to ugly kids. There are so many things we don’t understand.

Ultimately I think preppers have better odds of survival than yuppies from the cities.

On a side note I think that male beauty isn’t as fun as it seems to be. I'm quite handsome myself and the more I age the more I attract young girls teens and women of all ages, pretty surprising considering i was a very insecure pimple face when a teen. As a result, I have more and more occasions to seduce and be seduced by women of all ages who want the best partner to breed with. It actually makes my life harder, more painful, because most of these women when they figure I am married have a daughters, suddenly realizing they cant "have" me start to hate on me, because I won't be their lover. How many of them also hate on me because I am the one they would have loved to start a family with but "unfortunately" they ended with the skinny fat/ fat insecure asshole. So at first glance they all fall in love then quickly turn into w(b)itches as soon as you don’t answer to their attempts to flirt with you.

Because they’re little girls who aren’t used to not get what they want.

Anyway in most cases it only results in more troubles for me than anything. So, beauty definitely has its pros and...cons.

I am afraid it's all a lot more complicated than that; if only good looking, powerful, rich people were allowed to reign, be happy, most ugly , poor people would just kill themselves right? But life is a gigantic (infinite?) experience where anything can happen, and the result of this struggle for survival is "feelings", emotions that make us feel alive. It is fascinating how we create, fabricate, give, a meaning to things with our brains, when simply put, most of what exists, is "happening", is only struggle for survival by various life forms of all kinds.

There will be major events that will see the world population decrease massively, just like it happened countless times in the past.

The real question is... who is saved, and who isn’t, who adapts, who doesn’t. Where does all of this go. What do we want for our kids and grandkids.

Post 7:

Any over exaggerated, extreme activity , hobble, behavior, at some point destroys you more than it makes you healthier or fitter. Especially when it requires you to use drugs. I said it countless times, it's all fun and games until you reach your 40s/50s and you re lonely with a bad back, bad knees, bad elbows, ruined internal organs and so on. Life is a marathon not a sprint race.

I can understand fit, mostly ectomorph/mesomorph genetically gifted people of rich upbringing who spent their life working out -because they had the free time to do so- might come to the conclusion that they are some kind of ubermen whose shit doesn’t stink, still they often come across as complete douche-bags with nothing else in life but their fucking "competitions" "challenges" "records". I wouldn't be surprised if most of them came from dysfunctional families and were raised by either single mothers or fathers who lived vicariously thru them and got them into sports at an early age. Most of them are cynical, hypocritical and somewhat unable to feel anything for someone else but themselves. They come off as cold , scornful and hateful. It must be hard to constantly pretend being perfect, hard to never be satisfied with anything. Clearly childhood related issues.

Post 8:

Why would I? I have time to enjoy family and focus on my daughter, Wife also works part time, we save enough and have something to give our daughter... Sorry I don’t see the point -exhausted stressed colleagues who work 40 hours a week and can only say "good evening" to their dysfunctional families, then go watch TV and rush to bed, i know how it works- especially considering there are too many people, not enough jobs, that the phenomenon is increasing and will end with wars as it always does; is there a need to mention the millions of over-diplomed people i work with whose pieces of paper are worth trash ? Not only there are too many under qualified people, but at the same time there are more and more over qualified people, and we are actually DESTROYING jobs with  technological "progress". Sorry i don’t believe in your paradigm anymore. Also, to be honest, I hate the city and the fools who live there more and more. The less time i spend there the better i feel. I see all of this thru the eyes of the Bible, sooner or later it s going to explode and everything will somewhat be reset. Once it happens, it's not diplomas you're going to need. Oh, and working on improving your house and farming are actually the only kind of skills that are truly useful.

Societies based at 80% on services jobs are going nowhere when economies collapse. 80% of people will lose their jobs. You have to see long term. Also having kids just modifies everything in the way you see time, space and life in general.

Post 9:

The 1 % need the 99% to be the 1%. The point of life is not to be "enlightened", but to survive, adapt, dominate. The "enlightened" dalai lama wouldn't be shit if he didn’t have tons of people to serve him.

Post 10:

People marry to survive. To play the game, because they’ve been conditioned to do so. All behaviors are animal behaviors. Some survive better alone. Fact is, there is no point , purpose, to all of this. All life forms only follow blind predeterminate paths, behaviors, they don’t choose and simply reproduce subconsciously. All life forms have for only point in life to survive until they can reproduce, and every single human behavior just like any animal or vegetal behavior is a strategy of survival. There s no good or evil, there is what survives, and what doesn’t. Nobody cares about what doesn’t survives. Life is a free for all and you only feel good when you win. Most people goal in life is to win as much as possible instead of losing, because losing makes you feel bad. Most people lose, fail, constantly as there are more and more people on earth, and only 1% of them are winners. It means 99.9% of mankind is made of losers who hope to become winners. Their only goal in life is to win. At all cost. Some people haven’t been conditioned to marry in order to survive, some people have been conditioned to survive alone. Some people hate mankind, life, but stay alive just to destroy it and to benefit from all the good feelings it can provide them. Their motto is i didn’t choose to be here so at least let's enjoy it at all costs. None of this, makes sense; sense is just something we create but ultimately everything in life is all about killing or getting killed.

BTW the point of marrying someone and making alliance with others, families etc is to dominate in society. We're always dominating, or being dominated by someone else; most people when they leave an influence, are only doing it to submit themselves to another influence.

The more people there are on earth, the less people can stand each others. It s easier to appreciate others when they are few, when you need them because they are rare. When you live in cities full of people, you know you can replace anyone with anyone else, basically you realize nobody is unique, important, as you slowly realize we're just all copies, clones, of each others, all trying to make up bullshit unique personalities, characters, all influenced by the very same models, books, movies, characters.  The more people there are, the more people start to hate on each others, it is probably a subconscious , purely animalistic process which randomly leads the human race to purify itself from within with wars. In these wars it's not the good guys who win, it's the biggest assholes, the strongest ones, the smartest, fastest ones. Then they write history and make themselves the good guys. The more people you see everyday, the less you care about them this is the irony of living in cities, everyone wants its share of happiness , domination, all pretending to enjoy being with each others, when in fact deep inside themselves they want to jump at each others throats and are just calculating their next plays to fuck each others.

Life is a struggle, life is about survival, and everything that exists is strategy of survival. Happiness only and solely happen when you're winning. But even if you win, in the end, you lose. Your only solace is either to think at least my kids, grandkids, will dominate more than i did, or, for a growing number of people, especially nihilistic atheists, they think ; they , we, life, this ironical, cruel joke, will end one day anyway, so lets abuse everything as consequences don’t matter anyways.

All life-forms, animal, vegetal, species, die, disappear, are unable to adapt anymore at some point. Between the birth of life and its doom, it's all about constant war, constant struggle, constant pain for 99% of life-forms, especially humans who are conscious while vegetal and other animal species aren’t. They're born, they die, they simply don’t care. Again, humans are animals who are conscious of being animals. That makes them somewhat different from all other life forms on earth. Still their lives, existences, purposes, are conditioned by mostly all the same principles, rules than other life-forms. Our only difference is our ability to give a meaning, sense, to what we see, understand, but this ability is still in intrinsically in itself, just another strategy of survival among countless others.

Abortion of defective kids

Originally posted on MPCdot.com

In his book "A Farewell to Alms," Gregory Clark talks a lot about the Malthusian trap: the fact that, historically, when living standards rise, populations inevitably increase to swallow up the surplus wealth, pushing living standards right back down to subsistence level. To escape the Malthusian trap, you need a population that desires a high standard of living, and only has children when they can be raised at that standard.

While an emphasis on living standards is the requirement of Malthusian escape, that requirement is only met through reproductive restraint. On the surface, abortion might seem like a way to obtain that restraint -- have as much sex as you want and abort any excess kids. And humanity has a long history of infanticide, so it's not terribly unreasonable to expect this approach to work.

However, this is not at all what we see in the world, either today or in times past. Cultures which practice infanticide do not tend to escape the Malthusian trap, no matter their emphasis on material wealth. On the other hand, cultures which both emphasize high living standards and traditional Christian sexual morality have fared much better. I think there are two reasons for this.

First, I believe sexual restraint simply works better than abortion at curbing runaway reproduction. Rather than quenching sexual desire, sexual activity actually stimulates it; so if a country is laissez fare about its sexuality, and presents abortion as a kind of "get out of jail free card," there will be lots of sex, and while there will also be lots of abortions, it's simply human nature that childbearing will ultimately outstrip infanticide -- look at China, India, etc. On the other hand, a country which discourages infanticide tells its inhabitants that if they have sex, they will be liable for any resultant children; combine this with a requirement that sex only occur between married people who can afford to support any resultant children at a high standard of living, and you would expect said society to have fewer marriages overall, with those marriages occurring later in life and resulting in fewer children. The sexual passions are thereby kept in check, as is reproduction, and the nation escapes the Malthusian trap. This is exactly the phenomenon that Clark documents in the contrast between Europe and Asia leading up to the industrial revolution (although he did not explain it this way).

Second, I think you are infinitely more likely to have an industrial revolution -- that is, large increases in productivity -- when the sexual passions are restrained. Sexual activity can cost much more than the straightforward costs of child rearing. Single people seeking sex will spend inordinate amounts of time, energy, and money obtaining it. When society doesn't sacralize sex, it rapidly becomes everybody's favorite, all-consuming recreational drug. I think this is just common sense, the proof of which surrounds us. Feral women dressing like call girls and men devoting themselves to booze and "pickup" during their 20's and 30's are the clearest evidence of this cost, as is our increasingly sex-saturated media and popular culture. I think the growing narcissism of the facebook generation is a second order effect and also a huge waste of resources. (Really, who has time to cure cancer when there are skirts to chase and selfies to post?) This is in stark contrast to a culture of sexual sobriety. You can poke fun at Puritans and Victorians all you want, but they are the founding stock of our prosperity increases. A man who sees work simply as a way to fund his fornication will have a very different kind of career than a man who considers his vocation an opportunity to serve God, family, and country.

White people tend to think of abortion as a tradeoff between benefits to parents and society at the expense of murdered infants. Rabid pro-choicers aside (and even they are more talk than walk, I suspect), whites feel that there is something wrong about abortion. Does anybody really expect pro-choicers to make the case for tossing unwanted infants in the dumpster? I doubt it. But leaving unwanted children to die of exposure is historically commonplace. Even the most callous modern whites are far more sensitive about the rights of new members of society than our distant ancestors, they just don't realize it. Instead, they tend to focus on whether or not aversion to abortion is valid, and if so, in which circumstances, and to what extent. But why do whites have that feeling at all? I think that's the more interesting question. Here's my take:

Hunter-gatherer tribes have barbaric sexual morality and are rife with infanticide, but they also don't stockpile wealth and are constantly losing members to tribal warfare, so they never become malthusian. But I think that once a people begin to stockpile wealth through agriculture, they become haunted by the ghost of Malthus. Traditional Christian sexual morality provided a way out of the trap by changing man's relationship with his sexuality in a way that restrained population growth and freed energy to invest in productivity-increasing work. I believe that Christendom selected for an innate revulsion to infanticide by shunning (or stoning) those who didn't submit to its sexual norms. In my opinion, that's why Orientals can abort with abandon while even borderline white people like the Irish are disgusted by the practice -- it's more a result of breeding than it initially appears to be.

That the descendants of Christendom, with their aversion to abortion, have come to lead the world indicates that a disposition against infanticide is a survival benefit to the group. Allowing abortion might therefore be a Faustian bargain: we could be kicking the legs out from underneath the very table which supports prosperity. This may extend to anything that loosens traditional Christian sexual morality to some extent, i.e. contraceptives. At the very least, it seems to me that the three pillars of prosperity are reproductive restraint, preference for high living standards, and investments in technology -- and I think this is all undergirded by sexual restraint.

A commentator on Cochran and Harpending's blog noted that the past few generations in black America -- where thugs have many children by several baby mommas who support their spawn on welfare checks -- has been like a "Pitbull Breeding Experiment." I'm inclined to agree, and I see parallels in the possible unintended consequences of shifting abortion norms. Sexual passion is a powerful beast, we tamper with its yoke at our own peril.

Girls and Sons

getbig.com/boards user uberman

Girls and sons who have not been loved by their fathers seek attention once teens and adults to compensate for what they didn't have originally. Fathers either left them alone, or were distant most of the time and not encouraging them. Some even despised them which would shape their personality and the way they don't interact with others for the rest of their life.

They are extremist in everything they do, always looking exaggeratedly for attention, and have troubles adapting to society's rules, because they also have troubles defining their own identity and respecting authority and hierarchy.

Also, boys who got picked on by others during childhood and adolescence -often sons without a father figure- try to compensate by lifting weights, to develop muscles and survive in their male world. They re insecure because they re girly, childish, feminine having been raised by a single mom. They lift obsessively hoping it will transform them into men, to compensate for their lack of influence from a father figure that was not there. Unfortunately, they can get as big as they can it doesn't cure their insecurity and who they truly are, how they grew up being raised by a single mom. They are not as manly as other men whatever they do, and they often have a big lack of masculine presence they don't know how to balance, hence often being borderline homosexuals while trying to get their manhood back thru various manly activities (MMA, Cars, Weight Lifting, Etc). They are often the ones that, in order to get respect from other males will go the steroids route to get even "bigger" attempting to cure their insecurity , but being natural not being "enough", they still feel "too small", insecure, amongst other males. The lack of a father figure also often means they didn't have guidance to continue studies and are often working shitty manual jobs.

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Atheists don't want kids cause they don't want to face their animality, and their mortality; so they abuse leisure to forget about death. You end with people in their 50s who are lonely and have no offsprings, no access to eternity. At this point needless to say, it s too late; so they can only become cynical and sarcastic about people who have kids. Its immaturity, they don't accept the fact they re just animals, they want to keep thinking they re unique, gods themselves, not just a seed among billions of other seeds of the same root. Atheists generate atheists, who after some time stop reproducing, only believers accept, embrace their animal condition and give it a meaning, while atheists are lost and abuse everything without finding any kind of solace in love, a love they cannot understand anymore.

Osama Bin Laden: The Anti-Modernist

 

Saloforum.com user Angocachi:

I'm 50-some pages into Michael Scheuer's biography on Osama Bin Laden. Some notes that standout in my mind, because I had either been unaware of it or thought otherwise;

- Osama was Ayman Al Zawahiri's mentor and trans-formative figure and not the other way around. It's often been stated that Zawahiri was the brains behind Bin Laden, but this misconception was produced by Saud to try and pin Al Qaeda on an Egyptian rather than an Arabian millionaire. I'll cite loosely from an awesome list Scheuer gives to drive home the point that OBL was the brains, and Zawahiri a sidekick. Zawahiri wanted to overthrow the Egyptian government and march on Jerusalem, and this was his only goal before joining Bin Laden. He believed Jihadists should strike the near enemy, until Osama convinced him the prerequisite of striking the foreigners behind the anti-Islamic regimes. He believed in small secret organization rather than a highly public and 'too large to count the members of' organization until he met Bin Laden. Zawahiri believed they could only topple the secularist regimes by military coups, until Bin Laden convinced him of insurgency. Zawahiri was bordering on Takfirism before Bin Laden got a hold of him. Zawahiri was against publicity until Bin Laden showed him the importance of the media and spotlight. Zawahiri was a Qutbi until Bin Laden took him in. Zawahiri's EIJ failed and was broke, Bin Laden dusted him off and told him that the US was the force behind the Egyptian government and turned his focus on America.

It's true that Zawahiri is an intellectual, but Osama Bin Laden was a superb thinker as well. Al Qaeda was Bin Laden's vision, and it was Zawahiri who was shaped by him, not the other way around.

- Osama's mother may have been an Allawite or had Allawites in her family, Scheuer doesn't know but he's heard the rumors and the reasons behind them are intriguing.

- Osama's idols were Khalid Bin Walid, Nur Al Din, Saladin, and Ibn Taymiyyah.

- Osama went to an elite school as a boy. Compared to the brilliant students he attended class with he was average, but compared to the general populace he was a 1 in 50 student, according to his teacher.

- Osama was not a Qutbi or Takfiri. He did not believe in Qutbi's big ideas; that the Ummah had fallen back into paganism, that bad Muslims should be declared non-Muslims and fought, that Jihad is an offensive duty and the non-Muslim world had to be conquered. Osama wasn't about restoring Muslims to a pure Islam or eliminating heretics and non-fundamentalists. He wasn't about subjugating infidels, and he believed Jihad must be defensive.

- He's never advocated killing the Saudi family and in fact has admired a handful of them. Rather, he wanted to depose them and put them on trial... at last. There's no indication that he wanted to lynch them or have a shoot out with them, as the regime in Libya met its end.

- He was a Spartan and Survivalist, and believed a man should not provide comforts and luxuries for himself lest he grow lazy and cowardly. He shunned air conditioning and cold water, wanted to live as basic a life as possible. It wasn't a religious tenet, just a personal ethic.

- Like his father, he didn't believe in borders between Muslim countries. He was a true pan-Islamist.

- Michael Scheuer shits on a great number of other books, articles, public statements and films on OBL and AQ. He laments the knuckle-dragging demonization of OBL, poorly sourced accounts that rely on OBL's enemies to tell his story, and so on. He rejects Lawrence Wright's 'The Looming Tower" as naive and inaccurate, but still worth a look.

On the other hand, Scheur despises the Neoconservative commentators; Douglas Feith, Bernard Lewis, Charles Krauthammer, George Weigel, John Bolton, William Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Victor Hansen Davis. The Weekly Standard, Wallstreet Journal, Commentary, National Review, Frontpagemagazine and Powerline are all lying about Al Qaeda, and they're trying to divert public attention away from American foreign policy, especially toward Israel... Scheuer says.

Scheur gives his approval to Peter Bergen, Abdel Bari Atwan, Steve Coll, and Brynjar Lia.

The book is damn good.

Saloforum.com user Thomas777:

Bin Laden was an anti-modernist I believe - he told Mullah Omar that Afghanistan was important because the conditions there (and the simplehearted piety of the Pashtun people) allowed Islam to thrive in ways that it could not in more developed and ''normal'' operational theaters. Bin Laden also would frequently say that the caves and mountains (like Tora Bora) reminded him of his ancestral home in Yemen - and both were similar to the caves that the Prophet took to when he was blessed with revelatory visions.

Osama would watch television news a lot because as a man leading a war effort, he had to stay abreast of information and utilize propaganda to his advantage, but he otherwise disdained media and viewed the use and consumption of it as decadent and un-Islamic. It was noted that the only modern things he used/owned were televisions and his AK-47, as these things were both essential instruments of war.

Thomas777 II

Westboro Baptist Church & Gay Marriage

supplanter:
this is the cool new thing on facebook



supplanter:
something to do with homopervs

Asterion:
I'll have to look that up

Thomas777:
I prefer the swastika. Might not be cool or trendy, but that's ok

Asterion:
I couldn't find the meaning of it. I've seen the yellow equals on blue background up till now; what does red-and-pink signify

Thomas777:
Torn rectal tissue

Asterion:
Makes sense

NeoCornelio:
thomas, apparently Schmeisser has been doing drugs and having sex with one of the daughters of the phelps

NeoCornelio:
what do you make of this

Asterion:
"the Red take over of Facebook in support of the LGBT community against prop 8 and the arguments against Same Sex marriage"

Asterion:
Man, was my Facebook red! The Reds are revolting

popfop:
speaking of homopervs i was just reading about the robert hone case. two gay yuppies, both involved in gay equality stuff, and their houseboy drugged, sexually assaulted and murdered a straight house guest

Thomas777:
Schmeisser is a good man, Cornelio.

supplanter:
if schmeisser were to have joined wbc for shits and giggles he would be a good man.. seemed pretty into it and serious not too long ago

Thomas777:
Nothing wrong with being serious about WBC. They terrorize shabbos goy losers, Jews, fags, and other scumbags

supplanter:
wbc is a fed op

Thomas777:
I think WBC is silly, but whatever turns them on. Liberals and Neocons need to be shit on. Whoever is doing that is ok IMO

Thomas777:
I don't think they're a fed op. If they were a fed op, they'd be pulling Tom Metzger type stuff - advocating terrorism but curiously never being indicted

Thomas777:
WBC are just nutty holy rollers - their views are actually normal Baptist views. Its their stunts and media presence that is goofy, not their opinions

supplanter:
wbc has done more for gay rights and marriage in the past few years than what the homos have accomplished in thirty

popfop:
i think i agree with supplanter on this one

Thomas777:
Yes and no - people who back ''gay rights'' have serious problems. Its not like otherwise right-thinking people are swayed to this view by goofy stunts performed by Bible bangers

Thomas777:
I think guys sucking each others dicks in public like you see at the Folsom Street Fair is more disturbing to people than an old man and a few ladies holding signs making fun of homosexuals

popfop:
though on the other hand, it is interesting that they put themselves in the scapegoat position so all the lib hivemind rage is directed at them

popfop:
most videos of their protests show how ugly and disturbed their opponents are

Thomas777:
WBC exposes liberal bigotry anyway. Fags shouldn't care what Baptists think of them. If you're an atheist, who cares what other people think? Liberals are just self-righteous bigots who hate people who aren't like them. They're actually more like the Puritan extemists than WBC types are.

popfop:
people even petitioned the state department to have them listed as a terrorist group

popfop:
save us hilary clinton from the bad words!

Thomas777:
Christians should carry out ''terrorism'' - they're dropping the ball by not doing so.

Thomas777:
Americans are all basically atheistic - save for minority outlyers. Pious Protestants, a handful of believing Catholics, etc.

Thomas777:
This is why its hilarious that retardo goys claim people like George W Bush are Christian extremists. They think Yale men and country club Brahmins are a bunch of Theocrats. Its hilariously out of touch with reality


East Germany & Deutsche Demokratische Republik


popfop:
thomas, you read Honecker's autobiography?

Thomas777:
I've read excerpts from it, but not in its entirety

Thomas777:
Honecker is interesting because he was sort of a compromise between the tough and brutal KPD men like Mielke (and like Thalmann was) and the dour academics like Ulbricht. He was a consummately serious person. He personally hated Gorbachev, interestingly. The Sovs thought Honecker was too much a Stalinist, the West Germans thought he was too cozy with Moscow for comfort. Odd situation

popfop:
what do you make of the DDR?

popfop:
it seems they had a high standard of living for an Eastern Bloc country

Thomas777:
The DDR realized Sombart's vision of ''German Socialism'' is my take on it. This was combined with a Prussian heritage. That's what Communism in a ''pure'' sense looked like in practice - it was far more doctrinally Communistic than the USSR was after 1953

Thomas777:
The DDR had a reasonably high standard of living, and in the 70s, its per capita GDP exceeded that of England's working class. What killed the DDR was the internal situation in the USSR and the fact that the DDR was the literal front like of the Cold War - it couldn't sustain its military committment against NATO.

Thomas777:
I'll make the post you suggested this week

popfop:
cool, thanks

Thomas777:
When Trotskyites, Maoists, Chomsky accolytes and others claim that Marxism in the East Bloc was irreparably ''deformed'', they're talking literal shit. The DDR was a Marxist state. It cannot really be argued otherwise. It was anti-Jewish, authoritarian, and not particularly internationalist, but this was dictated by the global military situation - it was a state mobilized for war out of necessity. The DDR was nonetheless a ''real'' Communist country. Communism isn't something else - its not money-driven democracy, its not Maoist despotism, its not neo-feudal bartering in the Third World.

popfop:
i know Bertrand Russell wrote a book on socialism in the at the turn of the 20th century and had a whole chapter on Bismarck

popfop:
is this considered "German Socialism"?

popfop:
i think Trotskyism in practice would have just been hyper Jacobinism

popfop:
there's no way it would have been sustainable

Thomas777:
Bismark's Prussia was the foundation, sure - Sombart expounded this tendency further though. Spengler appropriated a lot of Sombart's thought, but tailored it to Conservative principles. Sombart himself was a Left-Hegelian, but he was also a German Nationalist. German Socialism to me is the culmination of Fitche - Hegel - Schopenhauer - Nietzsche - Sombart. Its a peculiar phenomenon. Americans don't really understand ''socialism''. They think ''socialism'' is old people demanding entitlements, Jesse Jackson hustling for federal pork, etc.

What is a Liberal Hick?

PLEASUREMAN - MyPostingCareer.com

I might write a piece on it someday if hicks ever interest me enough to do so.  For now, just a short note.

The defining characteristic of a hick is that, despite evidence that he is sheltered and insulated from anything more stimulating than a bingo game, he assumes otherwise because he owns a television and/or radio.  Were he to be aware of the outside world and his relative inexperience with it, he would cease to be a hick and instead would probably rise to the level of bumpkin.

I describe the hick as he is; I am neither for nor against him.  In a healthy society he is perfectly acceptable--if a little sure of ideas he has merely selected from a choice of two or three large print books.  But then, his conviction that his hamlet or town has really settled the ideal way for man to live is part of his charm--he's not one for very much novelty.

On the other hand, these very circumstances have left him vulnerable to pathological thinking--his mental immune system is very weak and the noise of mass society easily overrides it.  At best he stubbornly (but inconsistently) resists the propaganda, telling people that God does not want gay people to marry and that blacks were better off before the civil rights era, but the result is that his own children think he's bigoted and stupid.  He's never had to think about why or how his hick town functions, much less the world beyond his county line.

At worst the noise of mass society causes him to become more extreme than conventional liberals--he naively and eagerly accepts the new programming, and points his small-minded small town indignation at anyone who doesn't.  That indignation was an organic way to make sure people in town cut their lawns and didn't start trouble, but once the hick is infected with this mental virus he attacks anyone who cautions against his new programming.  You might get a liberal to admit that he feels safer, even though it's totally racist, now that his kid is in a white school.  The hick will double down and say he wishes his children were in an all black school so they could serve as role models on white privilege day (Louis CK was so right!).  The non-hick liberal is a reasonable hypocrite--the hick is just an idiot.

The problem is that the hick gets full exposure to mass society through the media, but his local customs and institutions aren't strong enough to defend against it.  This is predictable, because for most of the existence of hick habitats no such thing as mass society existed.  The hick as he was could only survive thanks to the gentleness of nature--a gale blowing from New York was barely a breeze by the time it reached him.  But now nature--mass society--is massive in its turmoil and destructive reach.  The hick is sure the storm will blow some wonderful nigger families into his area so he can show everyone how much he's learned from television.

And of course when trouble comes as a result of his naivete, he'll be the first to point his finger J'Accuse style and rage about racism.  He'd vote for the cornball nigga Obama twenty times if he could.  Hicks learn what they can learn (not much) and are then certain about it forever.  Therein lies the problem.

Dalai Lama on Cultural Genocide

From the messageboard MPC

The Dalai Lama speaking about Tibet in Geneva, Switzerland, on March 10, 1997:

"The unabated influx of immigrants to (our country), has the effect of overwhelming (our) distinct cultural and religious identity and reducing (my people) to an insignificant minority in their own country, amounts to a policy of cultural genocide"

Terrence Rhine:

I've always sort of respected real leftists who hate the Dalai Lama. They're being consistent; airhead Hollywood-type libs are going completely against their intra-national beliefs (anti-religion, anti-nationalism, socially liberal) when they gush over him because of their ditsy crush on Buddhism

PLEASUREMAN:

It's a good line to save for a dinner party where some friend of a friend pipes up about gay marriage:  "With all due respect, I have to side with the Dalai Lama on this one."

TAO:


The Dalai Lama is great for trolling because 99% of shitlibs believe he's this peaceful and gentle man who talks about tolerance and enlightenment and non-violence (which for them means he'll agree with all their poz and insanity) unlike that NAZI OLD BACHELOR from Rome, while in reality he's also a Horrible Bigot and Unacceptable Socially Regressive Individual.

Some old quotes:

"I feed birds, peaceful birds. I'm non-violent, but if a hawk comes when I'm feeding birds, I lose my temper and get my air rifle."

"But if someone has a gun and is trying to kill you ... it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun."

KhalidSheikhHorowitz:

The liberal doublethink on this issue is hilarious. Tibet was an agrarian, feudal, theocratic state before the Chinese invaded. Buddhists/Shintoists were banzai charging and launching kamikaze attacks throughout the Pacific War for the God-Emperor. Muslims stone adulterers, behead infidels and martyr themselves with regularity but no the neutered and emasculated caricature of Christianity that exists in the West, that's the real threat to liberal society.

Peace loving Buddhist 

Sinister Albanian Dwarf and Hateful Bigot

See also
Dalai Lama Lite

Zorba the Israeli

* Zorba the Israeli By Sh1ri L3v-Ar1 | Jul.08, 2008


"I expect nothing. I fear nothing. I am free," reads the epitaph on the grave of Nikos Kazantzakis, located in a cemetery in Heraklion on the island of Crete. Kazantzakis, of "Zorba the Greek" fame, is not merely an author, poet, translator, and philosopher - he is an institution.

His status as an institution extends beyond the borders of Greece. The International Society of Friends of Nikos Kazantzakis operates throughout the world in order to preserve his heritage. Among its activities is the publication of an annual journal and the organization of events focusing on the author and his work. The society was established in Geneva 20 years ago and has branches throughout the world, including in Syria, Egypt, Lebanon and of course Israel.

On Saturday evening, a few dozen people convened in the expansive, lovely home of Greek Ambassador to Israel Nicholas Zafiropoulos in Kfar Shmaryahu, at round tables on the pool patio. A Cretan-style meal was already laid on the tables, accompanied by ouzo-spiked lemonade. A small stage was set up on the side. This was the annual meeting of the Israeli branch of the International Society of Friends of Nikos Kazantzakis.

Established in 2005, the branch currently has about 20 members, who meet to talk about Kazantzakis and his work.

The first two annual lectures were delivered in a private home in Tel Aviv, but last year Zafiropoulos opened his home to the group, which returned for this year's annual event as well.

Breaking teeth

Daniel Dalyot, a geriatrician from Tel Aviv, founded the society's Israeli branch. "I've had an attachment to Greek culture since childhood," he says. "I received 'The Iliad' and 'The Odyssey,' as gifts and have loved Greek culture ever since. I first traveled [to Greece] when I was 16, and I love Greek music very much."

Dalyot is not alone. Many Israelis have fallen in love with Greek culture.

Many are attracted primarily to Greek music and food, but they are not the only draws. A growing number of Israelis in the arts, media, and other professions study Greek, travel to Greece frequently and draw inspiration from Greek culture.

Several members of the society study Greek with teacher Leon Siam, a singer and native of Thessaloniki who immigrated to Israel in the 1970s.

They listen to familiar Greek songs and study their lyrics. "It is an extremely difficult language," Dalyot says. "We are still breaking our teeth after a year." Screenwriter and film critic Kobi Niv, who attended the event on Saturday night and who studies Greek with Siam, explains, "I got involved with Greek culture via Aris San [a Greek singer who emigrated to Israel] and Yehuda Poliker [an Israeli singer-songwriter who is the son of Greek immigrants]."

Yehuda Melzer, publisher of Sifrei Aliyat Hagag (Books in the Attic) and a former philosophy professor, connected with Greek culture by means of his partner, Lily Eiss-Perahia, who divides her time between Israel and an Aegean island.

He spends two months a year on the island and has already befriended some of its prominent cultural figures, including director Theo Angelopoulos and a few writers.

"It's the combination of the landscape and the people," Melzer says. "Greeks have an endless ability to be happy, and we Israelis can only learn from them."

Nikos Kazantzakis was born in Heraklion on the island of Crete in 1883. He studied law at the University of Athens and, later, philosophy at The University of Paris-Sorbonne.

He translated Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Darwin and Henri Bergson into and wrote poems, stories, novels and diaries of his travels to Spain, Italy, Egypt, and Russia. Kazantzakis died in Germany in 1957 and was buried in his birthplace.

His most famous book, "Zorba the Greek," was published in 1946. Its appearance in English in the United States, in 1954, made its author a runaway success that exposed him to the rest of the world.

The novel was published in Hebrew long before Greece became a popular tourist destination for Israelis. In 1958, Hanoch Kalai's Hebrew translation of "Zorba the Greek" became the first title in Am Oved's Sifriya La'am (People's Library) imprint.

A new Hebrew translation by Amir Zuckerman was issued in 1995 with the book's original title, "The Life and Adventures of Alexis Zorbas."

The novel was also adapted into a monumental film starring Anthony Quinn, Alan Bates and Irene Papas.

The acclaimed novel depicted a friendship between a European intellectual and a miner, who was also a con-man, a potter and a santuri player - and above all an artist in living the good life with an expert ability to seize the day and realize his passions.

Zorbas became an adored figure in Western culture, and his prescription for life, passions and animal instincts were idealized. He came to represent all of Greek culture.

Kazantzakis wrote many books. "The Last Temptation of Christ" roused a storm of controversy when it appeared.

The novel presented Jesus as a human, flesh-and-blood figure who grappled with passions and with temptation.

In 1988, the film version of the book was released, directed by Martin Scorsese with a soundtrack composed by Peter Gabriel.

The film also provoked scandal and was banned in some countries.

On Saturday the novel was the subject of a lecture given by Kazantzakis society member Stelian Luznan. Luznan, an electrical engineer from Tel Aviv, spoke about the association between Kazantzakis's theological approach and the thinkers who inspired him - Buddha, Nietzsche and Lenin.

Kazantzakis is considered a national writer in Greece, and some consider him to be a nationalistic writer. He was a proponent of the use of the popular Greek spoken on the street, and engaged in frequent battles with Athens intellectuals after arriving there in 1906.

Some considered Kazantzakis to be a kind of Zorba himself. He drew his glorification of the instinctual, the passionate, from the philosophies of Nietzsche and Bergson. As a boy he attempted to work in the coal mines in Crete, where he befriended a full-of-life Macedonian named Yorgos Zorbas.

Kazantzakis was also a great fan of the Jewish people. He made many Jewish friends during his years in Europe. "He was fond of Jewish subjects and studied Hebrew with a rabbi in Crete," Dalyot says.

* Kazantzakis The Judeophile
from Selected Letters of Nikos Kazantzakis

Mussolini's Greek Island

Chapter 8 THE SOCIAL IMPACT OF OCCUPATION

The low status of poorer, especially unmarried women, made them vulnerable to sexual exploitation. The sudden rise in casual sex in return for food, threatened social conventions and the island’s clergy remonstrated about what they saw as the ‘vertiginous decline in morality’. Of the many girls and women who resorted to relations with Italian soldiers in order to survive, most were aware that there would be a high price to pay for transgressing taboos. But faced with starvation, unmarried women’s options were restricted; in a dowry-based marriage system, girls from destitute families had little prospect of any wealth in the future and stood much less chance of getting married after the war. The social importance vested in the dowry was such that some women refused to sell their embroidered linen dowries even when they were starving because, as they said, it had taken them years to make and they would not be able to do so again. Women’s poor prospects and social worth were undermined even further by the general indigence of the population and indeed it is likely that in some cases their own relatives sent them out to procure food from the Italian soldiers, in return for sex. (In fact, the practice existed elsewhere: in Italy, police reports gave evidence of families suffering from near-starvation who exploited their daughters in this way).

Although it was rumoured that Catholic women were more disposed to trading sex for food, which was ‘widespread’ in the town, Orthodox women were equally vulnerable. In fact, most soldiers had little contact with the majority of the Catholic population as they were garrisoned in Ermoupolis.Rigoutsos expressed shock that women from ‘good families’ resorted to ‘prostitution’, suggesting that on every level of society, no one was immune from the degrading consequences of famine. It was well know that, in the murky moral climate of a society in crisis, there were those who were ready to exploit this particular ‘market’, resulting from the Italian army’s demands for sex. These dealers were rated as the most amoral among Syros’s newly rich profiteers. According to Mihalis Stefanos, women were used to extract export permits from the Italians in exchange for a few scraps of food; the women then handed over the permits to the ‘irreproachable Greek operating behind the scenes’. Stefanos thought that the aim was to accustom the girl who returned ‘to be subjected to humiliation time and again, just to get something to eat for a short while’. He reviled his ‘fellow-citizens’ for their betrayal of their own society and nation. For him these men were traitors whose behaviour threatened the moral fabric of the island community. The perception that there was a link between the trade in permits and prostitution was common and came up in the first newspapers published after the occupation by the communist-led resistance group EAM. On the whole, the blame was cast on the women, and scabrous songs and jokes expressed the community’s disapproval of women who associated with the occupiers. Nevertheless there was an awareness that these transactions had ‘protected the lives of the women themselves and entire families’.

The harshness of sexual trading was mitigated in cases where men and women negotiated a stable agreement providing for their mutual needs, or were drawn together by genuine affection. One Orthodox interviewee, living in a village outside Ermoupolis during the occupation, was very reluctant to admit that she was a ‘housekeeper’ for an Italian soldier although this enabled her to survive after her brother and sister had died of starvation. But the scars of the past have still not been effaced and even today both she and her daughter are still reticent about the social stigma attached to her behaviour.

Who was Rasputin?

Matthew Raphael Johnson - Who was Rasputin?

A Review of Rasputin: Neither Devil nor Saint, by Dr. Elizabeth Judas

Of all the topics in Russian history that have interested me over the years, few were as mysterious as the relations between the Royal family and Gregory Rasputin. I knew a few things: first, that the tsarevich was sick with hemophilia, and Rasputin had some sort of ability to heal him. Second, I knew that Rasputin had some influence over policy. And third, I knew that Rasputin had little control over his libido. With this information, I began to dig deeper into the life of this mysterious man. Unfortunately, I began to realize just a quickly, that what I thought I knew about Rasputin was false.

Up until recently, revisionist material on Rasputin was very scarce. Among the patriotic elements in Russian society prior to the revolution, only the royal family itself seemed to have any use for him. Outside of a few rather sectarian circles presently in Russia, Orthodox people either dismissed him, or condemned him as a fraud.

Recently, Liberty and Life publishing in California released a small book on the life of Rasputin from one who actually knew the man, a certain Dr. Elizabeth Judas, who was the wife of Alexander Ivanovich, an officer in the tsar’s secret service. Furthermore, the author’s uncle was a major figure in the imperial government. For years, this manuscript has lain rather undisturbed, out of print for decades and completely ignored by mainstream Russia scholarship. Alas, I myself, though immersing myself in Russian history and literature until it poured from my ears, had never heard of this manuscript, nor had any other revisionist writer in this field writing in English.

I was able to read this volume in two sittings. Now merely because it is short (216 pages in large fonts), but also because it is a gripping story. Nothing anyone has told you about Rasputin has even a shred of truth to it. Rasputin was a victim of revolutionary politics from without, and anti-tsarist palace intrigue from within. In the final analysis, this is the conclusion of this book.

***

Through a series of very interesting events, events that themselves tell much of local politics in the early part of the 20th century, the author, as a young child, met the acquaintance of Rasputin while living in Siberia, where she had many relatives. She knew Rasputin long before the tsar did. It was the author’s uncle, Dr. Lebikov, who first suggested to the royal family that this rather charismatic wanderer (Rasputin was not a priest, nor a monk, nor did he ever have a desire to be ordained or tonsured) from Siberia be brought to the palace to pray for the ailing tsarevich, Alexei. Now, the tsarevich was sick, he suffered from acute pains in his stomach, he never had hemophilia, nor is there any evidence of this serious disease among his medical records, or even within the correspondence between Nicholas and Alexandra, which, by the way, was conducted in English.

The distracted royal couple had no difficulty in permitting this Siberian religious man entrance into the palace. Though his appearance, with long hair and beard, wearing traditional Russian peasant dress, did cause a stir among the nobility at court, many of which were incensed to find such a commoner at the palace.

A few things need to be said about this. The great flaw in Nicholas’s reign was his inability to control the powerful and obnoxious nobility (including other more distant members of the Romanov clan). This was no easy task. Not only did Nicholas have certain familial responsibilities towards them, they also were possessed of political power in their own right, as well as access to substantial fortunes. Nicholas illustrious father, Alexander III succeeded in controlling this element, which is in part explanatory of why terror activity and revolutionary politics substantially subsided during his reign. Of course, Alexander was very different from his son, being much larger and more intimidating, Alexander personally often used physical coercion to control the more restless members of the clan. Nicholas was not of this temperament, being more refined than his father, but he eventually paid for his lack of a hard line in this matter.

Furthermore, Nicholas was a Slavophile: this means, in a nutshell, that Nicholas believed that Russia’s strength was in her peasantry, her agriculture, the commune and the church, all of which Nicholas was attached to not merely as a political figure, but also as a Russian man. To Nicholas, Rasputin represented the best in the Russian peasant: hardy, simple, pious. Rasputin made a powerful impression on the royal couple.

Rasputin was religiously opposed to the use of hypnosis or any sort of “mesmerism” in religious life; he made this clear to the author on many occasions. There is no evidence that he was a part of any sect that used these techniques, nor is there any proof he was even aware of their techniques apart from reputation. Rasputin was able to calm Alexei during his times of physical pain, and it was in this that his services were important. Rasputin did not cure Alexei of anything, but though prayer, was able to soothe the nerves of the young heir. He never took any credit for his services, saying only that God is responsible for the alleviation of Alexei’s pain. Nor did rasputin seek any reward for his services, and was very quick to leave the palace when he was no longer needed. In fact, it is worth nothing htat Rasputin routinely left the company of the royal family with intentions to go back to Siberia. It was only through the pleading of the royal couple that he returned. A rather curious form of behavior for someone who was “power mad.” In fact, twice, Rasputin packed up to leave for his native land, but was enticed back by Alexandra who clearly needed Rasputin to soothe the tsarevich.

Consulting eyewitnesses, there is no evidence that Rasputin had any political agenda whatsoever. There is substantial reason to doubt he was even a monarchist, though he respected the reigning royal family. The author claims that rasputin told her that praying for ht tsar was wrong, and only the poor and needy should be prayed for. However odd this statement might be, it hardly reflects any belief in royalism.

It did not take long for Rasputin to make enemies. The first sin he committed was to foil an assassination attempt on the heir to the throne. Apparently, several members of the palace nobility were ordering one of Alexei’s nurses to rub a certain powder on his rectum. The nurse was told that this was a medication brought back from the Middle East to treat Alexei’s condition. Rasputin, suspicious, asked that it be analyzed, only to discover that it was poison. As soon as this concoction was no longer applied, the tsarevich’s illness disappeared. There is no question, in Rasputin’s mind after this, that there was a cabal in the palace against the young heir. Rasputin’s days were numbered, and he knew it. But it was this incident that sealed the bond of trust between the royal family and Rasputin.

It didn’t help matters when a certain Prince Felix Yusapov approached Rasputin, asking him to intercede with the royal family for the oldest Romanov daughter’s hand. Rasputin, after being offered a bribe, refused. Eventually the story began to circulate, and Prince Yusapov moved to England to avoid further embarrassment. From there, Yusapov began to circulate stories about Rasputin at the English press. Among his accusations was that Rasputin was a Jew, that he had an out of control libido, and that he was an alcoholic. From this time on (about 1909), the stories about Rasputin began to get their start.

The murder of Rasputin is also treated in this book, but one with substantial revisionist material. It is normally told that Rasputin was killed after nearly every conceivable form of killing had failed: from poison to bullets to drowning to beatings. Rasputin was murdered by a group known as the “Mad Gang,” a group of extremely high ranking but also very liberal nobles and politicians who sought the eventual overthrow of Nicholas (and the monarchy in general) and their own installation in power. Among whom was Duma president Rodzianko, Vladimir Purishkevich, and Prince Yusipov. Apparently, according to later police reports, Rasputin was aware of the reason the liberal Prince Yusipov wanted him at his house, though the cover story was to pray for his ailing wife. In several confessions from Yusipov, he said that he first wanted to poison Rasputin, but he refused to eat the cakes especially prepared for him, nor the wine; all of which was poisoned. Eventually, he simply shot Rasputin, and eventually dumped his body into the river Neva, where, according to the autopsy, he died of drowning. It was a rather quick affair, bereft of the drawn out will to live so popular among cinematographers.

***

Much of the upper nobility in St. Petersburg was frankly being converted to liberalism as the 20th century got started. Many of them resented the traditionalism of the Emperor (though a traditionalism strongly tinged with practical good sense), and certainly, the presence of an “uneducated hick” at court. It might be mentioned that Rasputin was not uneducated, though he certainly had strong peasant roots.

Many of the nobility through their weight behind the liberal reformers, and, slowly but surely, the upper reaches of the nobility were turning against Nicholas. The Emperor was surrounded by turncoats and traitors, each viewing himself as the future president of a republican Russia, or even as the next Emperor. It reached a point where, except for a few trusted intimates, Nicholas was unsure who he could trust. Ultimately, it was Rasputin and Alexandra. As proof of this, here is the official exoneration of Rasputin made by the revolutionary Provisional Government (i.e. the anti-tsarist government under Kerensky, prior to the Bolshevik takeover) in July of 1917:

    19 July 1917

    This testimonial delivered to Mikhail Mihailovich Leibikov certifies that not a single indication of Gregory Rasputin’s political activity was disclosed by the High Commission of Inquiry. The inquiry into the influence of Rasputin on the Imperial Family was intensive but it was definitely established that that influence had its source only in the profound religious sentiment of their Majesties. The only favor Rasputin accepted was the rental of his lodging, paid by the personal Chancellor of his Majesty. He also accepted presents made by the hands of the Imperial Family, such as shirts, waist-bands, etc. That Rasputin had no connections with any foreign authorities. That all pamphlets and newspaper articles on the subject of Rasputin influence and other rumors and gossip were fabricated by the powerful enemies of the emperor. This statement is given under the signature and seal of the Attorney General of the High Commission.

    V.M. Rudnev (signature)

The fact is that the Provisional Government, set up after the formal abdication of the Tsar in 1917, had full access to all the private and public papers of the Tsar, the Duma and all government ministries. Never has such an exhaustive commission into the form, behavior, structure and functioning of the royal government ever been attempted, and certainly, can never be again, given the full access to all records the Commission had (much of which was destroyed by the Bolsheviks for obvious reasons). They found, not only no moral problems with Rasputin, but also that the Imperial government maintained the highest standards in personal dignity while holding office. And all this from the sworn enemies of the Imperial government.

Significantly, the author reports many of the spiritual teachings of Rasputin. He never sought disciple, but he certainly attracted them, and one of his most ardent was the author. Now, here is where things get sticky. Though there is no direct evidence that rasputin was ever a member of one of the small sects that dotted the Russian landscape, some of his teachings are eccentric in the context of Russian Orthodoxy, a view the royal family was certain he espoused. Here, for example, are a few of the spiritual maxims Rasputin made central to his teaching (as reported by the author):

1. Be master of your own Will

2. Don’t worry

3. When in doubt, wait for light

4. Never show temper

5. Keep unpleasant opinions to yourself

6. Take all advice offered to you, but act on your own judgement

7. Be genuine and sincere

8. Understand your own powers

9. Understand your own weakness

10. Have faith in men and yourself

11. Love truth and justice supremely

12. Hold the eye of energy upon life’s ultimate goal

13. Seek light and life up to al light possessed.

According to the author, these were the central maxims of Rasputin’s life. Now, as nice as some of them are, there is a rather odd absence of any reference to God, the Trinity, the church or Jesus. The continued, undefined and deliberately vague use of such terms as “Will” or “the light” are certainly representative of sectarian and semi-gnostic views. He makes reference to faith (#10), but no reference to faith in God. #11 tells us who to love, and it’s not God, Christ, or anyone else. It is the vague and abstract words “truth” and “justice.” Of course, there are 13 maxims that made up his “commandments,” a number loved by Masons and other occultists. This is hardly the language of Russian monasticism, and therefore I remain highly suspicious of the author’s conviction that Rasputin was just a good, simple Christian. There is no mention of Rasputin ever receiving communion, going to confession or other practices normal to Orthodox life. This would explain the nearly universal suspicion of Rasputin exhibited by the upper clergy in the church, which the author fails to explain any other way.

In short, this book is a well done revisionist understanding of Rasputin from one of his ardent supporters and disciples. There is every reason to believe her most important points about the man, and his enemies, largely because they derives solely from eyewitnesses and police reports. For this reason alone, it is an extremely important book. It will not be taken seriously by scholars in “Russia studies,” for it proves one of the major points made by monarchists, then and now: that the nobility in St. Petersburg was anti-tsarist and viewed “parliamentary democracy” as merely a means to gain power under the ubiquitous slogan of “human rights.” Dr. Judas clearly, and though first hand accounts solely, bears this age-old contention out. The peasants were right after all: the tsar was good, his bureaucrats and nobles, bad. This refrain is to be found in peasant folk songs and dances from the 15th century onward, and Dr. Judas shows they were not too far off.

Rasputin was clearly not a bad man, but neither was he an Orthodox one. He spoke of Christ, but did not believe he founded a church. He told men to put their faith in one another rather than God. Nevertheless, had he been listened to, world history would be radically different. He was a quick-witted, educated and very practical man who strongly respected the royal family and wanted their protection, and nothing more. Rasputin correctly predicted that Russia’s entering into World War I would be the end of her, and this prediction, among other things, earned him the hatred of the Petersburg salon crowd. “Neither Devil nor Saint,” a very appropriate title.

*******

Reply from Majorie Rich

Dear Matthew:

It was a real pleasure to read you again. I enjoyed your review of Dr. Judas's book, but I do disagree with a lot of her claims, and will tell you why. All my quotes and remarks are from The Fall of the Russian Monarchy by Benard Pares who was Professor of Russian History, Language and Literature, University of Liverpool 1908-18 University of London 1919-36. In his Introduction he says: "I know of no period of history which is so rich in first-hand materials. That is, of course, due to the Revolution. It is true that a good many materials that I was following up have been lost for ever; for instance, being allowed to live with my regiment that I liked at the Russian front during the War, I found it easy to obtain a lien on the regimental records; but these, for the most part seem to have disappeared. On the other hand the Revolution opened access to a vast number of materials of infinitely greater value, many of which, without it, could hardly ever have been known to the public–private letters of the most personal kind passing between the chief actors in the period, diaries and other personal records. Here, as a student of history, I must pay the warmest tribute to Professor Michael Pokrovsky, the communist historian, to whom fell the priceless opportinity of making the greater part of this rich material accesible. Pokrovsky carried his extreme views into his historical studies, and they have now been discarded in the Soviet Union; but he had those instincts of scholarship which has always been so precious to the academic world of Russia, and in organizing the the work of research and publication under his leadership, he did not forget he was a historian."

I don't believe her claim that the young Alexis did not have hemophilia, and as you mentioned, there are many contradictions. It was through the boy's illness that Rasputin was brought into the palace. He may not have "cured" the illness, but there is no question that he brought relief from his pain. As his last nurse, Teglova, put it to Sokolov, "Call it what you will, he could really promise her (Empress) her boy's life while he lived." So it is easy to see why the Empress turned a deaf ear when Rasputin's many escapades were reported to the Tsar. And some. like the monk, Illidor, and the Bishop Hermogen, were dismissed and sent to different monasteries outside St. Petersburg. Lucas claims that Rasputin, as a Christian, was opposed to hypnosis. Pares wrotes; "Rasputin had already become a great preoccupation to-the principle Ministers. When Stolypin's children were injured by the attempt on his life in 1906, the Emperor had offered him the services of Rasputin as a healer. Later there was an interview between the two at which, according to the account that Stolypin gave to Rodzyanko, Rasputin tried to hypnotize this fine, sturdy and sensible man; Stolypin described how repulsive it was to him. He made a plain report on Rasputin to the Emperor. At the beginning of 1911 he ordered Rasputin out of St. Petersburg and the order was obeyed Stolypin's Minisater of Religion, Lukanov, on the reports of the police, ordered an investigation, and abundant material was forthcoming. From this time ,onwards, the Empress hated Stolypin." For Judas to claim that Rasputin had no political agenda, is ludicrous. All through Pares'book Rasputin brags about not only his sexual conquests, but his polital importance to the Tsar. He was no monarchist, and despised the nobility and declared them members of another race. Surprisingly, he and Count Witte, who held the same views, became friends, One thing I agree with then on, and that was, they both opposed the war and "English diplomacy." Pares says; "On Witte's side, with his rather obvious cunning and predilection for intrigue, it is almost certain that he would be one of the first to gauge Raspotin's political importance and to make use of it." I doubt that Prince Yussupov moved to England to "avoid embarrassment", but he moved there to attend Oxford. I remember that well, as he took an entourage of servants with him, quite unlike most college boys. I do not believe that any "Mad Gang" members killed Rasputin, but I do believe Prince Yussupov's account, plus and Rodzyanko's account in his "The Reign of Rasputin." However, I would not at all be surprised if the "perfidious Albion" didn't have a hand in it.

I was going to list some of the scandalous things that Rasputin did, and was investigated for, but I would run out of time and patience. Nowhere does Pares mention V.M. Rudnev, who gave the Duma findings, but Radzinky does in his "The Last Tsar." He says: "One of the most valuable materials for illuminating the personality of Rasputin was the observations journal kept by the surveillance established for Rasputin by agents of the secret police. The surveillance was both external and internal, and his apartment was under constant watch....Since the periodic press paid inordinate attention to Rasputin's unruliness, which became synonymous with his name, the investigation has given this issue proper attention. The richest material for illuminating this aspect of his personality came from that permanent secret surveillance of his apartment, which made it clear that Rasputin's amorous exploits did not go beyond nighttime orgies and young women of frivolous conduct and chanteuses, as well as with several of his suppliants....As far as his proximity to ladies of high society, in this respect the surveillance and investigation obtained no materials whatsoever." A far cry from Judas's claim. It did proves Rasputin a braggart." In pointing out the Tsar's weakness as a strong leader, does she think that historians blame Rasputin for the Revolution, so she wants to put the blame elsewhere.? That Revolution would have been carried out whether Rasputin had been born, or not. Not being a hard autocratic leader, the Tsar gained Sainthood. Pares saw the Tsar's diary, and his last entry. "Avdeyev was replaced by a Siberian Jew, Yurovsky, a man with a most sinister face and record. Nicholas notes in the last published entry in his diary," This specimen we like least of all."

You aptly called the spiritual maxims of Rasputin what they were. Thirteen, the number beloved of the Freemasons and other occultists. Dr. Judas could have known Rasputin all her life, but that s doesn't make her appraisal of him accurate. I have friends that have known George Bush all his life, and in spite of the damning evidence of his failure as a leader, still support him, and some even think he is intelligent I hope that this lengthy epistle hasn't bored you, as you know more about Russia than anyone I have ever read.

My best wishes to you and yours, Marjorie

Dear Majorie: You are very correct. However, I do think that Judas needs to be read, as she was an eyewitness after all. There can be no doubt that other eyewitnesses have contradicted her testimony. I am certain that Rasputin was not a Christian in any recognizable sense and this is the most significnat aspect of Judas’ book of all: even his greatest admirers, when sizing up his religious credentials, saw no room for Christ or even the Trinity in Rasputin’s words. MRJ

War of the Babies by Gary Brecher

This articles was originally published in Taki's Magazine on May 6, 2008.

What was the most important battle of the late 20th century? You could argue it was the one that took place on the southern border of Morocco on November 6, 1975. Of course, we’re not talking about another Stalingrad here. In fact, what happened that day isn’t usually called a battle at all. Its official name is “The Green March.” On one side were 350,000 unarmed Moroccan civilians carrying green (Islamic) flags, and on the other -- miles inside the border, because they were hoping not to have to confront any of the marchers -- was a shaky, demoralized token force of Spanish troops pretending to defend a former Spanish colony, the Spanish Sahara.

The Spanish Sahara hangs below Morocco where the Sahara meets the Atlantic like a crumbling brick wall. It was about the least desirable chunk of coastal Africa around, with no water to speak of and a tiny population, which is why the Spanish got it. By the time the European powers were ready to divide up Africa in the late nineteenth century, Spain had long since lost its glory and tended to get the scraps and leftovers.

But one thing we’ve learned over the last century is that on this crowded, hungry planet, there’s no such thing as worthless land. Spanish Sahara has proven that: in the 30 years it’s belonged to Morocco, big money has been made from the fishing off the coast and the huge phosphate mine at Bou Craa, a hundred miles inland.

That’s why the Moroccan King Hassan II, a wily old sultan with friends in the CIA, decided it was worth his while to ship all those loyal subjects down to Morocco’s southern border, hand out little green flags for the cameras, and send them across the border toward those Spanish troops.

The Moroccans had to think outside the traditional military-conquest box, for the simple reason that Morocco’s armed forces are pathetic. They’re so bad their only contributions to military history have been in the “slapstick comedy” department. For instance, the Minister of Defense once tried to have fighters from the Moroccan Air Force kill Hassan II by shooting down his Boeing 727 as it came home from a foreign trip. They failed. Seriously: jet fighters failed to intercept and destroy a big, fat, slow civilian airliner even when they knew its exact flight path. A military like that pretty much has to resort to unarmed conquest, because its chances in a fair fight are zero.

Of course the Moroccans had the advantage of facing a weak, dispirited colonial Spain just at the moment the Spanish dictator, General Franco, finally got around to dying. If you’re old enough to recall those early SNL seasons, you probably remember Chevy Chase’s running joke, “This just in: General Franco still dead!” The reason that joke worked is that it took the old General a long time to die, and that meant that greedy up-and-coming regional powers like Morocco had plenty of time to plan ways of getting their hands on former Spanish colonies.

It may not have been very exciting for combat fans, but it was an extremely effective invasion. The Spanish troops didn’t fire a shot. The marchers walked over the border, got sand in their shoes, shouted about how this sacred patch of waterless, flat desert was now an integral part of the Kingdom of Morocco, and went back home. And since then, the Spanish Sahara has been dominated by Morocco, although the local guerrilla army, POLISARIO, gave them some serious problems for a while.

What makes this weird episode my nominee for “Most Significant Battle of the Era” is that it showed the new way of winning disputed territory. If there’s one thing that we should have learned over the past hundred years, it’s that traditional armed conquests are getting less and less effective. This is one of the most surprising twists in all military history. All through the nineteenth century, the European powers, led by the British and French, took the land they wanted on the grounds that they had better military technology, transport and organization. Locals who disputed that notion tended to disappear as casualties of inevitable progress. And that was just an updated version of what had been happening all over the world for thousands of years: bigger, stronger tribes displace and wiped out weaker tribes whenever they could. That was the norm, even in pre-contact North America, where the Navajo were displacing the Ute in the American Southwest long before the white guys showed up.

Now, even though the balance in conventional warfare is if anything tilting further toward the first world, the technologically advanced and organized countries are in retreat, and the former victims are pushing back, not just claiming their old territories but infiltrating the former colonizers’ countries. What matters now is morale, national will. The Spanish didn’t have it, and the Moroccans did. So even though the Spanish troops could have wiped out those unarmed marchers, they failed to open fire. Weapons are only weapons if you’re willing to use them. A technologically advanced army without the will to fire is no army at all.

Only us dedicated war nerds seem to realize how weird this is, how totally unprecedented in military history. Until the 20th century, the problem wasn’t usually getting militarily superior forces to open fire -- it was getting them to stop before the weaker tribe, army or country was totally wiped out. I don’t know of a single case, before the 20th century, of a militarily superior tribe or nation lacking the will to defend its territory, or for that matter, take the territory of weaker neighbors.

The 20th century was the big turning point. New powers like Germany and Japan tried to imitate the older colonial powers of the 19th century and suffered total, disastrous defeat, even though they usually prevailed on the battlefield. That’s the weird lesson of the two world wars: military superiority in the narrow sense just doesn’t cut it any more. Despite the total battlefield dominance of the Wehrmacht (and to a lesser extent the Imperial Japanese forces), Germany and Japan ended the war not just without additional territory but with their home territories in ruins, their cultures gelded, their birthrates for generations to come among the lowest in the world.

Even the older colonial powers, Britain and France, finished the century in big trouble, without the will to resist the immigrants from the colonies they’d once ruled. We’re at a very strange moment militarily: our weapons still work but our will is gone.

The colonies that were established earliest are the most successful. For example, northern North America, now the U.S. and Canada, passed into permanent possession of the European settlers (or so it seemed, until recently). Two things determined this: first, they were settled in the 17th and 18th century, before conscience set in, and because most of the native population had been relatively tiny groups of hunter-gatherers (which also holds true for Australia, though it was settled much later). Everywhere else -- in Latin America, Africa, Asia -- the locals have been pushing back the colonizers without coming close to what old-style military theorists would call military superiority. That’s what we’re seeing now in South Africa, and more slowly in Europe and the southern United States. In other places, especially those colonized by the French (who were never as good at it as the Brits), huge colonial populations were totally eliminated, like the million-plus French residents of Algeria.

So there’s a shocking lesson that military buffs have been slow to face: military superiority doesn’t matter nearly as much right now as birthrate and sheer ruthless will.

Ah, birth rate -- funny how it’s become such a taboo subject for both Left and Right. The Lefties wouldn’t dream of telling third-world people to limit their baby-making, and most right wingers can’t bring themselves to endorse birth control even if it could slow the destruction of their own countries.

So birth rate is a weapon without a counter-weapon right now. So it tends to win. The Moroccans made it clear that the Green March was all about birth rate. The number of “volunteers” they sent to the border was 350,000, exactly the number of births per year in Morocco. So this was basically a ”Lebensraum” argument like the one the Germans tried earlier in the century. You might have heard about that one, a little dust-up called the Eastern Front. And you might be saying right now that if any policy ever failed decisively, it was the Nazis’ attempt to elbow themselves a little living space from Stalin. Which is totally true. But the Nazis tried it the old-fashioned way, with armed conquest.

To succeed in the post-1918 world, the world Woodrow Wilson dreamed up where “small nations” have rights even if they can’t defend them, you need to use slower, less obviously military methods, like birthrate and immigration. The classic example of this kind of slow conquest is Kosovo. The Serbs could always defeat the Albanians on the battlefield, even when outnumbered, but the Albanians had a huge advantage in the most important military production of all -- babies. According to the BBC, the birthrate of Kosovo Albanians 50 years ago was an amazing 8.5 children per woman.

The Serb/Albanian conflict offers damn near perfect lab conditions to prove my case that birth rate trumps military prowess these days, because the Serbs always beat the Albanians in battle, yet they’ve lost their homeland, Kosovo. Here again, we can blame Woodrow Wilson and his talk about “rights.” In places where tribes hate each other, a tribe that outbreeds its rival will become the majority, even if it can’t fight. So, after generations of skulking at home making babies, letting the Serbs do the fighting, the Albanians finally became the majority in Kosovo and therefore the official "good guys," being oppressed by the official "bad guys," the Serbs. At least that’s the way the nave American Wilsonian types like Clinton saw it. So when the Serbs fought back against an Albanian rebellion in Kosovo, and dared to beat the Albanians, Clinton decided to bomb the Serbs into letting go of Kosovo, the ancient heartland of a Christian nation that had spent its blood holding off the Turks for hundreds of years.

The Kosovo Albanians proved that military skill doesn’t matter, because they tried and failed to conquer Kosovo the old-fashioned way: armed rebellion by the Kosovo Liberation Army. It was a wipeout: local Serb militias, a bunch of tired middle-aged part-timers and cops, crushed the KLA. What happened next is a beautiful illustration of the way losers win these days: the Albanians took the bodies of KLA men who’d been killed in battle, stripped all weapons and ammo from them, and showed them to gullible Western reporters as victims of a Serb “massacre.” It was a massacre, all right, but only because the KLA couldn’t fight worth a damn. Alive and armed, they were a joke; dead and disarmed, they helped win Kosovo by making their side the "victims," which led directly to U.S. military intervention.

To win the way the Albanians won in Kosovo, you need to make a lot of babies. It’s that simple. And to see how it works, you have to drop the namby-pamby liberal idea that people only have babies out of “love.” In lots of places on this planet, baby-making is a form of weapons production.

In some places, it’s open policy. For example, in Palestine there’s an all-out birthrate war going on between the Palestinians and the Israelis. And one of the most frustrating things about this kind of struggle, from the Israeli perspective, is that the worse you make life for the people in the occupied zones, the more kids they have. The Gaza Strip, for instance, has one of the highest fertility rates in the world outside Africa, at 5.6 kids per woman.

The rate for Israeli overall is about 2.8 children per woman, high for a rich country. But the most amazing rates anywhere, even higher than for the Gaza Palestinians, are in the most extreme Zionist groups, the Haredi “ultra-orthodox” Jews. Until recently they averaged eight or nine children per woman. There was actually a big panic in the Israeli settler press when news hit that their rate had dropped to a mere 7.7 kids per woman.

That’s actually higher than the rate for Mali (7.38 per woman), which has the highest birthrate in the world.

The settlers don’t hide the fact that they’re producing as many kids as they can in order to change the demographics of “Greater Israel” in their favor -- above all to make sure the Palestinians never become the majority.

What’s interesting is that there were plenty of voices in the ultra-Orthodox community in favor of using Israel’s military superiority to settle the problem the old-fashioned way, by expelling or wiping out the Palestinians. Those people lost out; their leader, Meir Kahane, was assassinated by an Egyptian cabbie in New York, but he’d lost the debate long before he died. You just can’t get away with those methods these days, not even with every born-again Baptist Zionist in Texas backing you to the hilt.

If you want an example closer to home, just go to Northern Ireland where the Protestant majority the border was designed to maintain has been getting smaller and smaller, thanks to the higher birthrate among Catholics. As of 2001, the Catholics were about 46% of the population, up from 35% in 1961.

But as the dreaded “Catholic Majority” date approaches, a funny thing is happening up in Ulster: the Catholic birth rate is slowing down even faster than the Protestant rate. This always happens when a tribe breaks out of its slums into the middle class. This illustrates one of the real brain-twisters of contemporary demographic struggle: if you really hate the enemy tribe, the best thing you could do would be to make them rich. Rich people don’t have nearly as many kids. Of course there are exceptions like the Ultra-Orthodox Israelis, who are fairly well-off and just dedicated to making as many kids as possible, but generally, money distracts people from starting big families. So the old methods of keeping down the enemy tribe are usually counter productive. If the Ulster hotheads like Ian Paisley had had their way and kept the Catholic s down in the slums, their birthrate over the past 30 years would have been much higher and they’d be ready to stage a Kosovo-style “majority rule” coup like the Albanians did against the Serbs, complete with the USAF blowing up every television tower in Belfast like we did to the ones in Belgrade, just to teach those Serbs a lesson: “No TV till you let your little Albanian brother have Kosovo!”

Makin'em rich is the only way you’re going to settle the kind of conquest-by-immigration we’re seeing now in Europe and North America. Nobody will even say honestly how many illegal immigrants there are in the U.S. right now, but just from what I see driving to work, I’m inclined to go with the higher estimates, something up to 20 million people who snuck in from Mexico and points south looking for work.

As far as I know, nobody’s claiming the Latino immigrants decided to have a lot of kids as a way of reconquering Texas and California, the way the Israeli settlers are doing. La reconquista, if it happens, will be an unforeseen result of rising birth rates and falling death rates for countries like Mexico that are just moving up from the third world to, say, the second-and-a-halfth.

By 1970, Mexico was at that dangerous stage where there’s just enough basic medical care to keep people alive, so death rates are falling sharply, but people are still poor enough to want a lot of kids. Between 1970 and 2000, the Mexican population doubled, from 48 million to 98 million. So on one side of the Rio Grande you had a lot of young poor people, and on the other, a lot of money and companies eager for cheap labor. And a muddy little creek like the Rio Grande wasn’t nearly wide enough to keep those two groups apart.

As the population of Mexico increased and the living standard rose, the fertility rate actually went into an amazing dive, to the point that the rate for Mexican women now is only 2.39 kids per woman, just two places up from Israel’s 2.38.

And the only thing that’s brought the Latino birthrate down -- in their home countries, not among the ones who immigrated to the U.S. -- is getting enough money that peasant families start thinking of themselves as consumers, and get more excited about buying a new truck or a flat-screen TV than having little Jos.

This is all pretty slow to unfold, compared to traditional military conquest. Birth rate takes decades to have an effect; the Albanian victory in Kosovo is the result of birth rates from the mid-20th century. And in some parts of the world, like the US and Europe, immigrants have a history of being absorbed by the locals rather than sticking to the old tribal hatreds in the style of the Balkans and the Middle East. It’s a cultural deal, after all, not racial. Studies of the U.S. Hispanic population show that within a generation or two, most American Hispanics are ranting about policing the borders and keeping those damn immigrants out of the country.

What’s really weird -- and I can testify to this from my own experiences growing up -- is when the local culture infiltrates the immigrants, like the fact that Mexicans in the U.S. are deserting the Catholics and becoming born-again Protestants. Go to any of the younger, feister churchers in the U.S. like the Church of the Nazarene and you’ll see lots of Mexican families with plenty of kids, singing old Scottish hymns in Tex-Mex English. In fact, I ran into a really hilarious article by a U.S. Baptist writer who worried that the Baptist birthrate is going down while the Nazarenes are having babies at a rate of three-plus per woman. So the nightmare scenario that anti-immigrant bloggers are always predicting, where the U.S. turns into one giant Mexico, might end up being true in what you might call “racial” terms -- I mean, your second-grade class photo might be two-thirds Hispanic -- but those Hispanic faces would have absorbed a whole born-again American world picture that actually comes from the Scots-Irish who settled the American south hundreds of years ago.

This is one point where people’s anxiety over these slow, demographic conquests splits according to their real fears: do you just not want to see that kind of face when you go outside, or do you not want to import the culture of the immigrants’ home country? The whole debate right now is so censored, so totally dishonest on both sides, that nobody will come clean about which it is. I suspect for some people it’s the faces: they want the faces on their street to be the same shape and color they were when they were growing up. If that’s what you want, then no matter where you are, I can guarantee that if you’re rich enough to worry about things like this (as opposed to where your next meal’s coming from), then yup, you definitely have grounds for worry. People move around to where the food is, the money, the good grazing, the jobs. The Germanic tribes who moved in on Europe a couple millennia back took a more reasonable view; they called wars “the movements of the peoples.” The Huns push the Goths off the steppe, and boom! Next thing you know, the Goths are wiping out a Roman army at Adrianople.

The faces are going to change. We are in a new military-historical era, in which the only states with the sheer will to resist slow “conquest” by immigration were the Stalinist states. Of course they didn’t have much of a problem there anyway -- not too many immigrants trying to sneak into North Korea or the old USSR -- but even if they had faced real demographic challenge, they had the will to open fire. The Berlin Wall is a nasty case in point, where the will was used to stop people leaving.

But those Stalinist states are not exactly a growth industry these days, and no liberal democratic state has the will to shoot down unarmed people trying to get in (or out, for that matter). Even the Israelis, who are maybe the fiercest first-worlders on demographic issues, don’t shoot the poor Africans who cross to Beersheba for jobs in the cafes. They just send them back to Sudan to be shot there.

So the movement of the peoples, the slow demographic wars, are going to go on. We just don’t have a counter-move, except maybe bombarding poor people with money to stay home. Basically, no matter where you are, the complexions and the features you see on the streets are going to change. If it’s any consolation to face-fascists, Europeans got their licks in first, so to speak. Not many African-Americans around with pure African blood; not many Mexican Indians without some Spanish in them. So now the faces blend the other way.

For most people the real worry, if they were allowed to even say it out loud, is culture: if you’re French, you really don’t want Paris turning into Kinshasa, because let’s be honest, Kinshasa is a Hellhole. If you’re English, you don’t want London turning into Karachi, because Karachi is a nightmare. If you’re American, you don’t want Houston -- oh Hell, ever been to Houston? If you have half a brain, you don’t want Houston at all, the lousy sweatbox.

The thing is, most of the people who invaded from those places tend to agree with you. That’s why they moved in the first place. Nobody knows what a Hellhole the Congo is like a Congolese. I read somewhere that on the Congo riverboats, they have these slang terms for the different decks. The first-class deck they call “Europe.” The second-class deck is “China,” meaning not that great, but livable. The third-class deck is “Congo,” and nobody wants to be there, least of all the Congolese.

So to assess your situation in terms of the new conquests, you have to decide whether you’re in a Kosovo -- two tribes hating each other forever, turning out babies as weapons -- or that Congolese riverboat, where nobody wants it too “authentic” if they can help it. There’s a lot of blurring and overlap between those two models, sure. Take Northern Ireland: a lot of yelling, a lot of noisy tribal hate, but I just don’t think they have it in them to be another Kosovo. Too interested in TV and cars.

That’s what’s funny about the debate right now: the diehards in the U.S. and Europe wish we had the old ruthless will to seal the borders, but the “weakness” of the advanced countries generally works pretty well to turn the immigrants into immigrant-hating locals in a generation or two. The old model, bayonets on the border, isn’t even in the running. Time to face that fact. So the faces will change.

If you can handle these new faces, you’re likely to be surprised to see your “weak” American or European culture win out, slowly, un-gloriously but surely, and you may live long enough to see a whole new crop of pols who look like they just came from Karachi or Kinshasa until you turn the sound on and hear them ranting about how we need to get rid of all these damn immigrants.

Gary Brecher is the author of the book, The War Nerd. 

See also: Twilight of the Godless