World War Two
Published 14 Nov 2024Millions of Germans continue to be expelled from their homes in Central and Eastern Europe. They run a gauntlet of violence, robbery, and even murder before arriving in the shattered remains of Berlin. By the end of 1945, the Allied Powers have at least agreed that further expulsions must be “orderly and humane”. But isn’t that a contradiction in terms?
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November 15, 2024
The Final Solution to the German Question
November 3, 2024
QotD: Minutemen
Ten years ago, America’s right-wing paramilitaries were so anti-government, they thought that driver’s licenses were an unbearable infringement on their liberties. Now they’re out on the border HELPING THE FEDS ENFORCE THEIR REGULATIONS. What the hell’s up with that?
Granted, there’s not necessarily much overlap between the two groups. But one has supplanted the other in the mass media, the public imagination, and the affection of the right-wing radio hosts — and so help me, I think I miss the days when I felt a certain kinship with the crazies.
Jesse Walker, “More ’90s Nostalgia”, Hit and Run, 2005-07-28.
August 28, 2024
H.R. McMaster dishes on Trump’s first term in office
In Reason, Liz Wolfe covers some of the head-scratchers former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster revealed about working for Donald Trump:
What might a second Trump White House be like? In his new book, At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, who served as national security adviser to Donald Trump (for one year), characterizes Oval Office meetings as “exercises in competitive sycophancy” where advisers would greet him with lines like “your instincts are always right” or “no one has ever been treated so badly by the press”.
Trump, meanwhile, would come up with crazy concepts, and float them: “Why don’t we just bomb the drugs?” (Also: “Why don’t we take out the whole North Korean Army during one of their parades?”)
This is one man’s account, of course. McMaster’s word should not be taken as gospel, and some of his frustration might stem from his dismissal, or his foreign-policy prescriptions being at times ignored by his boss. But it’s a somewhat revealing look behind the curtain at policy-setting in a White House helmed by an especially mercurial commander in chief, who “enjoyed and contributed to interpersonal drama in the White House and across the administration”.
It also shows how quickly Trump fantasies have percolated through the Republican Party, namely the “let’s just bomb Mexico to get rid of the cartels” line, which Trump has been toying with since roughly 2019 (or possibly more like 2017, after he chatted with Rodrigo Duterte, former president of the Philippines, who had promised to kill 100,000 drug traffickers during his first six months as president). A few years prior, in 2015, he had suggested that Mexico was sending rapist and drug-traffickers across the southern border, and that we’d need to build a wall between the two countries, but it wasn’t until nine American citizens were killed in Mexico that Trump trotted out the idea of declaring cartels foreign terrorist organizations and using military might to eradicate them.
Trump’s line from 2019 has now become standard fare, notes The Economist: The Republican primary debates included lots of tough talk on Mexico, specifically on the bombing front, with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis claiming he’d send special forces down there on Day One. Right-wing think tanks have embraced the messaging, with articles headlined “It’s Time to Wage War on Transnational Drug Cartels”. Taking cues from other members of her party, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene asked why “we’re fighting a war in Ukraine, and we’re not bombing the Mexican cartels”. Whether it’s economic protectionism (10 percent across-the-board tariffs, with 60 percent tariffs imposed on Chinese imports) or Mexico-bombing, Trump has near-magical abilities to get other members of his party to accept something previously regarded as absurd.
July 27, 2024
More Kamalamentum
At Spiked, Fraser Myers examines what he calls “Kamala’s Ministry of Truth”:
Did I just fall out of a coconut tree? How else to explain the dizziness so many of us are feeling at the speed of Kamala Harris’s coronation – and at the contortions now being performed to present her as the saviour of the beleaguered Democrats, if not of American democracy itself.
Within 48 hours of Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the US presidential race on Sunday, Vice-President Harris had clinched enough delegates, donors and Democratic power-brokers to ensure her an unchallenged, uncontested path to becoming the Democratic nominee to face Donald Trump this autumn. The last dominos to fall, Barack and Michelle Obama, today offered a full-throated endorsement of Harris, claiming she has the “vision, the character, and the strength that this critical moment demands”.
Since Harris emerged as the frontrunner, the Democrats’ media cheerleaders appear to have been gripped by a nasty bout of Kamalamania. “Kamala Harris will be the 47th President of the United States. Democracy will survive”, declared one Hollywood celeb. She brings the “political power of joy” and “effervescent vibes” to US politics, according to a New York Times columnist. CNN reporters have been gushing over her choice of hoodie and sneakers. As Jenny Holland wrote on spiked earlier this week, the media are eager to present Harris as “Martin Luther King, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, all rolled into one”.
We need to remember who we’re talking about here. The newly anointed Democratic nominee was someone few believed could win the presidency, only a few weeks ago. Indeed, this is widely understood to be behind the Obamas’ hesitancy to back her – and Biden’s own reluctance to hand over the baton to his veep.
It’s not hard to see why. Harris is a politician who exudes negative charisma. She speaks like a cross between a Calfornian self-help guru – her favoured aphorism is “What can be, unburdened by what has been” – and a primary-school teacher who enjoys a few too many glasses of wine at lunchtime. She laughs and cackles at inopportune moments, often to herself. At times, her speech is as incoherent as the mentally frail Joe Biden’s. Who could forget her nonsensical remarks last year at a White House function in which she asked: “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” Good luck translating that into English for swing voters in Pennsylvania.
We know that Harris is unpopular with the public, because she has been tested before. Her campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2020 had to be suspended two months before the first primary vote in order to avoid total humiliation at the ballot box. Nationally, Harris was polling at just three per cent. Even in her home state of California, she could only muster eight per cent. Yet now she is about to become the Democratic contender for the White House, with zero input from the public or the party grassroots.
At Founding Questions, Severian responds to a few questions from readers about the Kamala Harris candidacy and what it might indicate about what is happening behind the scenes among the Democratic movers and shakers:
My read is that 2024 is going to be Fortified to hell and back — that’s a certainty — but the extent of the Fortification, and probably its eventual outcome, is tied to the Robber Barons. I agree with William Briggs or whoever it is who suggests a “Thermidorian faction” (I prefer “competent fraction”) of Juggs within the Apparat who are trying desperately to slam on the brakes. IF they can do it — and I’m honestly not sure they can, not at this late date — it’ll be because the Robber Barons put the resources behind it.
I get a sense that there are more than a few Robber Barons making their peace with the BOM. There are, of course, a lot more Robber Barons who hate him and will never reconcile themselves to him … but that doesn’t mean they want Kamala Harris as President. As I wrote in the comments yesterday, if they’d wanted Harris as President, she’d be President by now. Pretty much all the Uniparty’s current problems go away if Biden resigns the Presidency, and if they can force him to drop his reelection bid, they can certainly force his resignation — he’s out in five months no matter what, so why not pass the reins to Harris? She’d be in a far, far stronger position going into 2024 as the incumbent.
No, really. I know that sounds badly wrong to people in contact with Reality, but look at it from the dumbass perspective. The Media has been telling us for four years that the Biden Administration is the greatest ever. Despite your lying eyes, there’s no inflation, no border crisis, no crime problem, and so forth. Harris is going to try to take credit for that on the campaign trail, of course, but it rings a weensy bit hollow coming from a Vice-President. From Madam President xzyrzelf, though? Different story. At least, that’s how the dumbfucks out there in Normie-land would see it, and those are the stupid bastards who will be voting in the fall.
As Vice-President, she gets no credit for the Biden Administration’s accomplishments (I know, I know, stop laughing) … but she gets tarred with all their failures, plus her fuckups as “border czar” (that’s gonna be fun), plus her role in the very obvious and ongoing coverup of Dementia Joe’s galloping dementia.
Make her President, and all that shit goes away. For her first official act, she appoints someone, anyone, as the new “border czar”, and tells that persyn to fall on xzheyr sword. Or, better yet, just never mention the border again. Tell the Media to blast nothing but Historic First Female President!! shit from now until Fortification Day. They will be happy to comply, and it’ll drive most of the bad news off the front page.
This is such a no-brainer that there are only two possible explanations for why they haven’t done it: Either they’re even more terrifyingly stupid than they seem, and so it never occurred to them; or it did occur to them, but Kamala Harris is such a repulsive retard that they can’t risk it — despite it all, Chomo Joe and his galloping dementia are still, somehow, the safer bet.
My guess is that, as Pickle Rick posited the other day, they all give her a pro-forma endorsement, then quietly pull the funding plug. They all pretty much have to endorse her at this point, if for no other reason than the Spiteful Mutants are already going to go apeshit in Chicago; an actual primary fight might burn the city to the ground.
But who knows? These are Juggs. Plus, as I’ve written, this is their moment — every grievance group in AINO will be going for it, as the Uniparty in general, and Harris in particular, will have to promise them the earth and stars to keep them onside. Consider that she has to get both the Bagels and their shekels, and the Pali-bros, in order to make the whole thing go. That would test the political skill of a Metternich, to say nothing of a woman who literally slept her way to the top. She can’t blow ’em all, so she’s going to have to deliver the goods in some other way.
It’ll be a hoot, that’s for sure. Keeping an eye on the funding is probably the best indicator we have.
And in an answer to a different reader:
Welcome to Late Soviet America. Expect a lot more of this, as obvious, ham-handed repression is SOP for flailing, collapsing regimes. We’ve entered the Andropov / Chernenko phase of the festivities, when the phrase “decrepit old man” refers to both the “leader” and his nation. And yeah, I realize that makes Kamala Harris the fake and gay Gorbachev, but that’s actually pretty close — Gorby, too, destroyed what was left of his country because he really believed in all that “openness” and “democracy” bullshit they taught him at the Higher Party Academies. Harris is a far worse moonbat race-baiter than even Bathhouse Barry ever dreamed of being; we’ll get the whole Gorby-Yeltsin-we’re fucked decade in about six weeks once she’s Fortified into office.
And on the power politics uncertainties for both America’s allies and adversaries when it’s not clear exactly who is in charge in Washington DC, the temptation to press a temporary advantage may become overwhelming:
Had Brandon resigned, it wouldn’t be ideal for the Juggs — Harris is still largely holding the bag for Chomo’s failures — but it’d be a hell of a lot better than this, because at least there is someone nominally in charge. Putin or Xi or whoever can pick up the phone and demand to speak to President Harris, and at the very least, he can be assured that President Harris will remember their discussion a few hours later. She might decide to do some incredibly stupid shit, of course — in fact that’s almost guaranteed — but at least Xi, Putin, whoever will know that it’s a bad decision …
… and not just some random drooling lunacy by a guy who thinks it’s 1971 and he’s sticking it to Corn Pop. If anything, the problem just got worse, because they’ve all but openly admitted what everybody already knew: We’re under the Do Long Bridge. There ain’t no fuckin’ CO. But now, instead of just ignoring Harris as per usual when decisions have to be made by … well, by whomever, now they pretty much have to loop her stupid ass in, even though she has no official power to make anything happen. They’ve added yet another layer of retarded dysfunction to an already FUBAR process.
And at The Free Press, Suzy Weiss explains a few Kamalamemes that her campaign has decided to “lean into” (note that the rest is behind a paywall):
→ Kamala is brat, Biden is boots, please God send the asteroid today: I’ve learned the hard way — and by that I mean my parents once asked me what “WAP” meant — that certain things should never be explained with words. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it embarrasses everyone.
That’s how I feel about the whole Kamala-is-brat thing. Brat is a good album about partying and getting older and having anxiety that was released earlier this summer by Charli XCX. But it’s since been adopted by too-online and very young people as a personality, and by Kamala Harris’s campaign as a mode to relate to those very young people. Her campaign is leaning into the whole green look of the album to try and win over Gen Z, and generally recasting her many viral moments—”You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” “I love Venn diagrams” “What can be, unburdened by what has been” — as calling cards. It’s like when Hillary went on Broad City, only this time more cringe.
And now we have Jake Tapper and Greg Gutfeld grappling with the “essence” and the “aesthetic” and overall vibe of brat girl summer. We used to be a serious country. We used to make things.
Here’s the thing about Kamla: she is hilarious and campy, but unintentionally so. Any goodwill that her goofy dances or weird turns of phrase garner should be considered bonus points, not game play. Was there ever any doubt that Fire Island would go blue? We’ve been debating whether Kamala’s meme campaign is a good move for her prospects in the Free Press Slack, and here I’ll borrow from my older and wiser colleague Peter Savodnik: “There is nothing more pathetic than an older person who cares what a younger person thinks is cool”.
→ Boomer behavior: While Kamala’s campaign is being run by a 24-year-old twink with an Adderall prescription, J.D. Vance’s speechwriter seems to be a drunk boomer who just got kicked out of a 7-Eleven. Vance, appearing this week at a rally in Middletown, Ohio, riffed, “Democrats say that it is racist to believe … well, they say it’s racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today, and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too.” Crickets. Horror. Major “Thanks, Obama” energy. There was also a bit on fried bologna sandwiches and a lot of “lemme tell you another story”. The guy is 39 but sounds older than Biden.
Fresher, 35-to-60-year-old blood is exactly what we’ve been begging for. Let the boomers boom, let the Zoomers zoom. Kamala and J.D.: act your age.
June 18, 2024
US “birthright citizenship”
Theophilus Chilton argues against the legality of “birthright citizenship”:
One of the benefits of Donald Trump’s involvement in politics over the last ten years has been that it opened up a robust national discussion about an issue that up until recently had been largely ignored by the political class. This discussion is about so-called “birthright citizenship”, the idea that whenever a foreign national (regardless of legal status and with a very few exceptions) has a child on American soil, this child automatically becomes an American citizen from birth. This approach to citizenship has been the de facto (though not de jure) approach to the issue of “anchor babies”, the children of illegal aliens who come to the United States so that they can have their children here, thus allowing the parents to remain as well, usually helping themselves to generous American benefit monies.
Defenders of unrestricted birthright citizenship – primarily found among liberals, establishment GOP types, and the more uninformed types of libertarians – adamantly argue from the 14th amendment’s Citizenship Clause that birthright citizenship is not only legal, but is in fact constitutionally protected, and is what the 14th amendment has meant all along. They often try to buttress their arguments by appealing to English common law with its historical provisions for birthright citizenship. However, is this sort of “swim a river, fill our quiver” approach really what the 14th amendment meant? Is it really what English common law, which forms the basis for much of our own law and constitutional interpretation, historically upheld? The answer to these questions is, “No”. Let’s look at some of the history behind this issue.
The crux about which the discussion revolves is the Citizenship Clause found in the 14th amendment, Section 1,
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
More specifically, what is at issue is the phrase, “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof”. Clearly, the clause was not intended to convey American citizenship to an unlimited pool of children born to aliens on American soil. If this had been the case, then the phrase under discussion would not have been included. Obviously, some limits were intended, those circumscribed by the intent of being “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”.
So what were these limits? Typically, it will be pointed out that the limits due to this jurisdictional issue were that citizenship was not being conveyed to children born of ambassadors and others aliens employed by their foreign governments, nor was it being conveyed to members of various Indian tribes which exercised sovereign powers within their own territories (this latter was rescinded by an act of 1924 which granted Indian tribes full American citizenship). Were these the only restrictions on birthright citizenship intended by the author and debaters of the 14th amendment?
No, actually. Let’s understand what the original intention of the 14th amendment was, which was to grant American citizenship to former black slaves and their children, and to prevent these newly freed citizens from being denied citizenship rights by certain of the southern states. That’s it. This was made clear by Sen. Jacob Howard, who authored the amendment in 1866, who clearly provided the intent for this section of the amendment,
Every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is, by virtue of natural law and national law, a citizen of the United States. This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons. It settles the great question of citizenship and removes all doubt as to what persons are or are not citizens of the United States. This has long been a great issue in the jurisprudence and legislation of this country.
Clearly, other classes of foreign citizens were intended besides the children of ambassadors and other diplomatic personnel. Indeed, Howard’s statement appears to be quite all-encompassing – if taken at face value, it would appear that he did not even intend the 14th amendment to grant citizenship to the children of foreign nationals here legally, much less to those here illegally.
June 10, 2024
Elite contempt for democracy is fuelling anti-immigration “far right” sentiment in the west
Even for people who are generally happy with robust immigration, the numbers being recorded (or, more likely, under-recorded) in Canada, the United States and Europe are far too high to pretend that the new arrivals will quickly integrate into their new countries, and they are generally not being encouraged to do so anyway. Complaints to the people who have enabled these massive inflows — at best — are waved off or ignored, but often are seized upon as examples of hateful far-right xenophobia to be punished and suppressed:
Not so long ago, as many of us reeled from the political earthquakes of Brexit and Trump, it seemed sensible for responsible mainstream political parties to adopt tighter immigration control to keep the populist right at bay. Mass migration in Europe had led to a far-right resurgence; in the US and UK, Trump and the Johnson-era Tories seemed to grasp this and moved to co-opt the anti-immigrant fervor. Democracy was working to accommodate a shift in the public mood.
Or so it seemed. Nearly a decade later, something else has happened: an immigration explosion. In response to a volatile public mood, Western elites actually intensified their policy of importing millions of people from the developing world to replace their insufficiently diverse and declining domestic populations.
The recent figures from the US, UK and Canada are mind-blowing. The graphs all look like a hockey stick, with a massive spike in the last three years alone. Under Trump, the average number of illegal crossings a year was around 500,000; under Biden, that has quadrupled to two million a year — from a much more diverse group, from Africa, China and India. To add insult to injury, Biden has also all but shut down immigration enforcement in the interior; and abused his parole power to usher in nearly 1.3 million illegal migrants in 2023 alone. The number of undetained illegal migrants living in the US has thereby ballooned under Biden: from 3.7 million in 2021 to 6.2 million in 2023, according to ICE. If a fraction of those millions turns up for asylum hearings, I’ll be gob-smacked.
Canada has seen something similar. For much of the 21st century, Canada had around 200,000 to 300,000 immigrants a year; but in the last two years, this has nearly doubled. In Britain, the same story. In 2015, the year before Brexit, net migration (the numbers of people immigrating minus the number emigrating) was 329,000; in the last two years, it has more than doubled to over 700,000. And whereas most immigration before Brexit was from the EU, today, immigrants from the developing world outnumber European immigrants by almost 10 to 1. For those Brits who voted for Brexit to lower the number of foreigners in the country, it’s been surreal.
If you want to understand why Biden keeps trailing in the swing states, why the Tories are about to be wiped out in a historic collapse, and why Trudeau is at all-time low in approval at 28 percent, this seems to me to be key. As the public tried to express a desire to slow down the pace of demographic change, elites in London, Ottawa, and Washington chose to massively accelerate it. It’s as if they saw the rise in the popularity of the far right and said to themselves: well now, how can we really get it to take off?
This week, CNN ran a poll on Biden and immigration. Here’s what they found: in May 2020, only one percent of Americans put immigration as their top concern — in 15th place among issues; in May 2024, 18 percent put it first. In 2020, Biden edged Trump by one percent on who was best to tackle the border crisis; four years later, Trump is ahead on the issue by 27 points. As a coup de grâce, CNN also found that foreign-born Americans preferred Trump to Biden on immigration by 47 to 44 percent. Turns out that this immigrant’s worries are widely shared by my fellow new Americans.
Biden, of course, is now desperately scrambling to salvage something from this disaster. This week, he contradicted himself by saying he has the unilateral capacity as president to shut down the border, and attempted to blame the GOP for the problem. Yes, the GOP was unhelpful and cynically political earlier this year — but that won’t muddy the waters for most voters who have been conscious for the past three years. But I am grateful nonetheless to hear the president echo what the Dish has been saying for years now, and for which I was routinely called a racist:
To protect America as a land that welcomes immigrants, we must first secure the border and secure it now. The simple truth is there is a worldwide migrant crisis, and if the United States doesn’t secure our border, there is no limit to the number of people who may try to come here, because there is no better place on the planet than the United States of America.
Now that didn’t hurt, did it? But why did he keep telling us there was no crisis for the last three and a half years? And why would anyone trust a re-elected Biden to enact this if he had a Congressional majority? I sure don’t.
Even under Biden’s “crackdown”, he is still prepared to admit at least 1.75 million illegal immigrants a year! Last week, Chuck Schumer declared that the ultimate goal was to legalize every single illegal immigrant — because Americans are not having enough children. Without open borders, of course, our economy wouldn’t look so good: in the last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, foreign-born workers gained 600,000 new jobs, while native-born Americans lost 300,000. But don’t you dare mention the “Great Replacement Theory“!
May 23, 2024
“[O]fficial justifications for mass migration often have a creepy, post-hoc flavour about them”
While it sometimes seems that there can’t possibly be mass migration issues other than here in Canada and along the US southern border, eugyppius reminds us that all of the Kakistocrats in western countries are fully in favour of more, and more, and even more inflow without restriction:
You might have noticed that mass migration to the West is a huge problem.
It is very bad for native Westerners, because it promises to transform our societies utterly, in permanent ways and not for the better. Curiously, it is also far from great for the centre-left political establishment responsible for promoting mass migration, because it has inspired a vast wave of popular opposition and filled the sails of right-leaning, migration restrictionist parties with new wind. Mass migration is also bad for taxpayers, for domestic security, for the welfare state, for many other aspects of the postwar liberal agenda and for our own future prospects. In short, mass migration is bad for almost everybody and everything.
There is a reason that nations have borders, and this is much the same reason that we have skin and that cells have membranes. You won’t survive for very long if you can’t control what enters you.
Despite the obvious fact that mass migration is bad, our rulers cling to migrationism like grim death. Given a choice between disincentivising asylees and intimidating, browbeating and harassing the millions of anti-migrationists among their own citizens, our governments generally choose the latter path, even though it is obviously the worse of the two.
Additionally unsettling, is the fact that official justifications for mass migration often have a creepy, post-hoc flavour about them. They sound much more like excuses dreamed up after the borders had already been opened, rather than any kind of reason mass migration must occur. When the migrationists really started to go crazy in 2015, for example, we were told that border security was simply impossible in the modern world and that infinity migrants were a force of nature we would have to deal with. That didn’t sound right even at the time, and since the pandemic border closures we no longer hear the inevitability narrative very much, although – and this is very bizarre to type – there is some evidence that high political figures like Angela Merkel believed it at the time. It is well worth thinking about why that might have been the case.
Another excuse that doesn’t make very much sense, is what I’ll call the refugee thesis. We’re told that millions of poor people are forced to endure terrible conditions in the developing world and that it is our moral burden to improve their lot by granting them residence in our countries. That might convince a few teenage girls, but it cannot withstand scrutiny among the rest of us. To begin with, the population of global unfortunates is enormous; the millions of refugees we have already accepted, and the millions that our politicians hope to welcome in the coming years, represent but a vanishing minority – a rounding error – compared to the vast sea of human suffering. It is like trying to solve homelessness by demanding that those in the wealthiest neighbourhoods make their spare bedrooms available to the indigent. Even more telling, however, is that the push to welcome migrants comes precisely as conditions in the developing world have dramatically improved. When things were much worse, we sealed our borders against the global south; now that they are much better, we hear all about how unacceptably inhumane it is to leave the migrants in their native lands.
Other post-hoc arguments, especially those falling in the yay-multiculturalism category, are even less serious. That we need more diversity to “spark innovation” (whatever that means) or that our local cuisines stand to benefit from the spices of the disadvantaged, are excuses of such towering stupidity, that you will lose brain cells thinking about them. As with the refugee narrative, nobody said crazy stuff like this until the migrants had already begun arriving on our shores. And there is another thing to notice about the multiculticult too. This is its blatant flippancy. The premise seems to be that migration is no big deal bro, but also too there are these cool exciting and totally random upsides, like improved local Ethiopian food offerings. It is the very definition of damning with faint praise.
The rest, sadly, is behind the paywall.
May 9, 2024
How the First World War Created the Middle East Conflicts
The Great War
Published Dec 8, 2023The modern Middle East is a region troubled by war, terrorism, weak and failed states, and civil unrest. But how did it get this way? The map of today’s Middle East was mostly drawn after the First World War, and the war that planted many of the seeds of conflict that still plague Israel, Palestine, Iraq, Syria and even Iran today.
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April 11, 2024
QotD: North America will never be a “bicycle” culture
Regarding bicycles, they, like motorcycles, have long since transformed from “a means of locomotion” to “a lifestyle”. Note that I’m only talking about AINO here. Everyone has heard that “more bicycles than people in the Netherlands” factoid, and Euros do seem to love them some bikes, but I haven’t spent enough time over there to say much about it. Here in the Former America, though, anyone who rides a bicycle past age 16 falls into one of two broad groups: 1) they’re nature lovers who want to be out in the countryside but for various reasons can’t take up hiking, or 2) they’re preening, posturing, virtue-signaling, passive-aggressive assholes. The latter outnumber the former about 5,000 to 1.
I’m deliberately discounting bicycles as a means of locomotion, you’ll notice, because look: America is a car society. Our cities are designed for cars. Indeed, given the vast distances involved over here, cars are what make our lifestyle possible. Europeans who haven’t been here, or who only visit the big tourist pits like NYC and LA, don’t get this. Even if you’ve seen the maps, it doesn’t really register until you experience it. I’m just guessing here, for purposes of explanation, but it really does seem to be the case that if it were possible to hop in your car and drive two hours due east from downtown Paris, you’d pass through three or four countries. There are lots of American cities where, if it were possible to hop in your car and drive two hours straight from downtown, you’d still be in that same city. The continental US is just mind-bogglingly huge; only Russians and maybe Australians share our mental maps. When you’ve got daily commutes that run an hour, hour and a half on freeways, setting anything up with bicycles in mind is just ludicrous.
Severian, “Cars, Bikes, Motorcycles”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-25.
March 27, 2024
QotD: Roman imperial strategy
There’s a useful term in the modern study of international relations, called “escalation dominance”. What escalation dominance means is that in any sort of conflict, there’s a big game theoretic advantage to being the one who decides how nasty it’s going to be. Ancient wars usually moved slowly up a ladder of escalation, from dudes yelling insults at each other across the border, to some light raiding and looting, to serious affairs where armies made an actual effort to kill and subjugate each other or conquer land.1 Highly mobile forces tended to work best at the lower rungs of the escalation ladder, and Rome frequently allowed conflicts to stay simmering at this level. But the existence and loyalty of the legions meant that it was their choice to do so, because they could also choose to slowly and inexorably march towards your capital city killing everything in their path and doing something truly unhinged when they got there, like building multiple rings of fortifications or a giant crazy siege ramp in the desert. And, paradoxically, the fact that they could do this meant that they didn’t have to as often. Thus the threat of disproportionate escalation became the ultimate economizing measure, by preventing wars from breaking out in the first place.
If deterrence fails and you have to fight, then the next best way to economize on force is by making somebody else do the fighting for you. In the late Republic and early Empire, much of Roman territory wasn’t “officially” under Roman rule. Instead, it was the preserve of dozens of petty and not-so-petty kingdoms that, on paper at least, were fully independent and co-equal sovereign entities.2 Rome actually went to some effort to keep up the charade: the client rulers were commonly referred to as “allies” [socii], and Rome took care never to directly tax or conscript their citizens. But, to be clear, it was a charade. If any of these “allies” ever wanted to leave the alliance or conduct any sort of independent foreign policy, he would not continue to be a king for long. Oftentimes the legions wouldn’t even have to show up — the terrified citizens of the client kingdom would overthrow and execute their wayward ruler themselves, in the hopes that Rome might thereby be induced not to make an example of the citizenry.
What was the point of all of this complicated kabuki theater? Once again, it’s about economy of force, this time on both the “input” and the “output” sides of the great machine of the state. On the input side: efficient government is hard to scale. Roman provincial governors were legendarily corrupt, and could get up to all kinds of mischief out there without supervision. Having a Roman ruling a whole bunch of non-Romans was also bound to cause resentment: it could lead to rebellions, or worse, tax-evasion. All of these problems were solved by pretending to have the barbarians be ruled by one of their own, a barbarian king. He could collect the taxes, and suppress revolts, and generally keep an eye on things. Moreover, as a fellow barbarian, he would know better how to keep his subjects in line, and would be less likely to commit an awkward cultural blunder. On the output side, he could also deal with border raids and other low-intensity threats. This exponentially magnified Roman military power, because it meant that instead of being stuck on garrison duty, spread out along the frontiers, the legions could be concentrated in a strategic reserve. They could then be deployed for “high intensity” operations in some remote part of the empire without worrying that they were thereby leaving the borders unguarded: operations like conquering new lands, or persuading a rebellious client kingdom that their interests lay with Rome.
If you can’t make somebody else do the fighting, then the next, next best thing is to carefully choose the time, circumstances, and location of the fight. Ideally you would muster a heavy concentration of your own forces and confront the enemy while they’re still dispersed. Ideally the ground would be thoroughly surveyed, well understood, and perhaps even prepared with static defenses. Ideally your own forces would have ample supply and good lines of communication, and your opponent would have neither of these things. It was to all these ends that in the second of the periods Luttwak surveys, the Romans built the limes3 — a massive system of defensive emplacements. These extended for thousands of miles around almost the entire frontier of the empire, but the most famous portion was Hadrian’s Wall.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire by Edward Luttwak”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-11-13.
1. This is actually also true of modern wars, and if you think you have an exception in mind, you may just not know the history that well. For instance, the current war in the Donbass wasn’t really a surprise invasion, but is best viewed as the latest and most violent stage of a conflict that’s been slowly ratcheting up for a decade.
2. Were you ever confused by who exactly this King Herod guy in the Gospel stories was? Why was there a king and also a Roman governor? He was precisely one of these client rulers!
3. Pronounced “lee-mays”, not like the fruit.
February 29, 2024
Arizona GOP pushes to legalize hunting down suspected illegal immigrants with deadly force! Film at 11!
Chris Bray reports on this utterly abhorrent piece of proposed legislation that will literally condemn any brown person in the state of Arizona to be murdered out of hand by evil red-hatted Trump supporters … or will it?
Republicans in the Arizona legislature have advanced a bill that would allow anyone in the state to just casually gun down any migrant anytime they feel like that filthy brown person might be trespassing. You can trust that this is really happening, because it’s in the news.
Delightfully, Axios reporter April Rubin trained at the New York Times. Here’s how she starts this story:
Arizona Republicans are advancing a bill that would allow people to legally kill someone accused of attempting to trespass or actively trespassing on their property.
The big picture: The legislation, which is expected to be vetoed if it reaches the state’s Democratic governor, would legalize the murder of undocumented immigrants, who often have to cross ranches that sit on the state’s border with Mexico.
These monsters, they’re legalizing the murder of undocumented migrants.
So, as always, let’s read the actual bill:
A person in lawful possession of property can threaten deadly force, or potentially use deadly force, in response to an act of criminal trespassing: You can go out on your property with a gun and tell a trespasser to get lost.
But Subsection B is the key to the actual use of deadly force, and journalists aren’t saying anything about it (emphasis added): “A person may use deadly physical force under subsection A only in the defense of himself or third persons as described in sections 13-405 and 13-406,” existing sections of Arizona state law. The bill explicitly references an existing legal standard for the use of deadly force.
February 14, 2024
The ARRIVESCAM scandal will probably not matter politically for Trudeau
If there’s one thing we should have learned about Justin Trudeau, it’s that he’s got world class Teflon coating when it comes to any kind of scandal that would destroy other politicians. Despite the auditor-general’s scathing report, it’s very likely that Trudeau’s remaining popularity won’t take any measurable hit:
It is into this context that we insert Karen Hogan’s Monday report on the government’s ArriveCan app.
Hogan looked into the government’s troubled COVID-19 ArriveCan app and found nothing.
Actually nothing. The auditor’s exact words: “The Canada Border Services Agency’s documentation, financial records, and controls were so poor that we were unable to determine the precise cost of the ArriveCAN application.” That means the accountant whose job it is to tell taxpayers what the government is spending money on, could not complete her task. Why?
Well, she also said, “That paper trail should have existed … Overall, this audit shows a glaring disregard for basic management and contracting practices.” The auditor general could not tell taxpayers what the app cost, who decided who got paid, who did the work and what the money was ultimately spent on.
Mob contracts have more detail than the auditor general was able to piece together for her ArriveCan report. But, then again, mobsters keep two books.
The Canadian Border Services Agency appears to have burned, lost or had several goats eat pertinent records that pertain to Canadian taxpayers spending tens of millions of dollars on a phone app that never worked, kept no one safe, and has mostly come to symbolize an Ottawa where no one really feels accountable to anyone.
As someone who regularly sat down with the civil service to discuss transfer payment agreements a fraction of the size of the almost $60 million — or more, who knows?! — that is speculated to have been spent on ArriveCan, this fails to pass any kind of credibility test. ArriveCan was a priority government initiative in 2020 and 2021. We were trying to get the border back open. The tourism sector was on the brink. The idea that this was a couple rogue CBSA agents who were just funnelling taxpayer dollars to a firm with whom they had connections is a convenient, but drastically incomplete, telling of the story.
Tens of millions of dollars disappearing in a matter of weeks-to-months, and no one in the civil service asked a question? No one in the minister’s office got a briefing on the app’s progress? There isn’t a single PowerPoint deck anywhere in the government? The civil service — especially the federal civil service — issues CYA memos to cover bathroom breaks but no one had any earthly idea what tens of millions of dollars going out the door on a priority government initiative were being spent on?
It is to laugh.
February 5, 2024
Sitzkrieg on the southern border
Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds on the stand-off between Texas governor Greg Abbot and President Joe Biden over the flood of illegal immigrants coming across the US-Mexican border:
So the war over the border between Texas and the Biden Administration is now in the “Sitzkrieg” stage. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has essentially declared war on illegal immigration. He invoked Article I Section 10 of the United States Constitution, which forbids states from declaring war except when “actually invaded” (or in such imminent danger as to admit of no delay) and, by implication, allows them to declare war when that happens. He also invoked the Guarantee Clause of Article IV, which requires the federal government to protect the states against invasion.
Abbott’s legal argument is that since he’s being invaded, he’s entitled to respond, and since the federal government is defaulting on its obligations it has no business – it’s basically stopped from – complaining. There was a lot of huffing and puffing at the time, with members of Congress calling on President Biden to federalize the Texas National Guard and the like, but basically, nothing happened. The Supreme Court vacated an injunction forbidding the Border Patrol from cutting the barbed wire that Texas had installed along the border, but – contrary to many media reports – didn’t rule that what Texas had done was illegal, or order Texas to stop policing the border.
Now not much is going on. The big complaints about immigration are mostly coming from outside Texas, places like New York City where illegal immigrants beat police with impunity, being released without bail after being arrested. (The usual endgame for this sort of thing in other societies has been death squads, organized either by police or by police-adjacent groups, taking out those whom the legal system cannot or will not control; we’ll see what happens in New York City.)
But next month Texas’s law allowing the state to apprehend and effectively deport illegals will go into effect, and that’s when the sitzkrieg is likely to end. Following are my (very) preliminary thoughts.
To me what’s astonishing is how unpopular with everyone the immigration policies of the Administration – and a good chunk of the GOP – are. Open borders are unpopular with blacks, whites, rural and urban voters, and, really, just a vast bipartisan majority. But like “climate change”, another priority of the ruling class without matching popular support, the borders stay open.
Why? Because our ruling class seeks, in Bertolt Brecht’s famous phrase, “to dissolve the populace and elect another”. As Elon Musk tweeted:
Musk’s comments met with the usual outrage, but Democrats have pretty much touted this as the plan for years. Indeed, it goes back to Ruy Teixeira’s “Emerging Democratic Majority” strategy, though it’s been accelerated in recent years. (And Teixeira himself has retreated from that plan). Sure, naturalization takes years – though they may speed that up, as it’s just a matter of statute – and there have also been some moves to allow non-citizens to vote anyway. Think that’s unlikely? Maybe, but how many things are happening these days that seemed impossibly unlikely a few years ago? And it’s a long game; a bunch of Democratic voters in 5 or 6 years will suit them fine.
January 27, 2024
Flashpoint: Texas
Theophilus Chilton wonders if you’re ready for a full-blown Constitutional crisis:
I’m sure that by now, we’re all aware of what is continuing to take place down in Texas. Far from backing down in his standoff with FedGov over the seizure of Shelby Park in Eagle Pass and subsequent expulsion of federal agents, Gov. Abbott has directed the state’s National Guard to continue interdicting illegal immigrants. Indeed, in response to the recent SCOTUS decision allowing the Feds to dismantle the razor wire Texas installed, they’ve simply installed more, in direct defiance of the wishes of the Regime. The Regime has now responded by giving Abbott and Texas an ultimatum — restore control of the park to the Federal government by the afternoon of January 26, or … well … something. Whether the governor ultimately continues to tell the Feds to get bent remains to be seen, but so far the trend is looking pretty good.
Of course, it helps that — for once — Republicans across the country have actually found a little courage to support doing what’s right. As of writing this, the Republican governors of 25 other states have all issued statements of support for Texas’ position. Hence, there are now an outright majority of states whose executives (who control their various National and State Guards) are publicly backing Texan efforts to secure our border. Many of these governors have explicitly cited the Biden administration’s continued abandonment of the federal government’s constitutional duty to protect the several states from invasion and the constitutional right of the states to act in their own defence as sovereign entities in their own right.
Needless to say, this is a constitutional crisis that would not have been conceivable even twenty years ago (well, except for this one movie that seems to have been amazingly prescient). Since 1865, the doctrine of absolute federal supremacy has been in force and the balance of power between the state and national governments has inexorably trended in Washington, DC’s favour. Occasional spurts of opposition to the contrary, most of the previous incipient talk by states about “reining in the federal government” generally proved to be all words and no action. On a few things (e.g. marijuana legalisation), the Regime allowed states to “oppose” federal policy if these were policies that the Regime wanted to change anywise but couldn’t “officially” at the federal level. But on anything that was a true Regime priority, FedGov brooked no dissent. So it is now, but the calculus has changed. What would have been impossible in 2003 is now on the verge of happening in 2023.
This all highlights the fundamental illegitimacy of our current federal government. There is no moral or legal case to be made to justify the actions of the Biden administration. The federal Constitution both enjoins the federal government to protect the states from foreign invasion (which being overrun with millions of foreigners breaking our laws most certainly counts as) and also grants the states the right to protect their own borders and sovereignty. Instead of doing this, the Biden administration has been purposefully inviting hordes of migrants to enter this country. Indeed, this is being encouraged in contravention to statutory federal law as well. Further, if Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is correct (and he almost assuredly is), the administration has even been partnering with criminal cartels to smuggle illegals into this country. All in all, there is absolutely no justification to be credibly made for the Regime’s actions and anyone who supports them are in opposition to the Constitution, the laws, and the people of this land.
Despite the fevered ravings of various progressive “Christians” on social media, the moral argument for allowing the Regime to throw the gates open is nonsense. Indeed, the whole attempt to craft a “biblical” argument for open borders is simple-minded and ignorant of the relevant scriptural and historical context. Simply put, the Bible’s approach to “the stranger” falls into line with common ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean modes of hospitality that were meant to “tame” the foreigner and integrate him into a society, thus preventing him from causing disruption to that society. If that couldn’t be accomplished, then the “inhospitable foreigner” was either to be expelled or eliminated. Needless to say, this applied only to individuals or small family groups — large masses of foreigners attempting to enter an ancient country would have been rightly recognised as an invasion and dealt with accordingly.
However, the illegitimacy of the current Regime and its actions alone can’t explain why the Republicans have closed ranks so precipitously. After all, Republican politicians are not exactly known for their intestinal fortitude when faced with opposition of any kind. Yet, even Northeastern moderate squishes like New Hampshire’s Chris Sununu have signed onto supporting Texas in this. Something changed that has caused the GOP, almost as a whole, to support this, either openly or tacitly.
December 18, 2023
QotD: A short history of the (long) Fifth Century
The chaotic nature of the fragmentation of the Western Roman Empire makes a short recounting of its history difficult but a sense of chronology and how this all played out is going to be necessary so I will try to just hit the highlights.
First, its important to understand that the Roman Empire of the fourth and fifth centuries was not the Roman Empire of the first and second centuries (all AD, to be clear). From 235 to 284, Rome had suffered a seemingly endless series of civil wars, waged against the backdrop of worsening security situations on the Rhine/Danube frontier and a peer conflict in the east against the Sassanid Empire. These wars clearly caused trade and economic disruptions as well as security problems and so the Roman Empire that emerges from the crisis under the rule of Diocletian (r. 284-305), while still powerful and rich by ancient standards, was not as powerful or as rich as in the first two centuries and also had substantially more difficult security problems. And the Romans subsequently are never quite able to shake the habit of regular civil wars.
One of Diocletian’s solutions to this problem was to attempt to split the job of running the empire between multiple emperors; Diocletian wanted a four emperor system (the “tetrarchy” or “rule of four”) but what stuck among his successors, particular Constantine (r. 306-337) and his family (who ruled till 363), was an east-west administrative divide, with one emperor in the east and one in the west, both in theory cooperating with each other ruling a single coherent empire. While this was supposed to be a purely administrative divide, in practice, as time went on, the two halves increasing had to make do with their own revenues, armies and administration; this proved catastrophic for the western half, which had less of all of these things (if you are wondering why the East didn’t ride to the rescue, the answer is that great power conflict with the Sassanids). In any event, with the death of Theodosius I in 395, the division of the empire became permanent; never again would one man rule both halves.
We’re going to focus here almost entirely on the western half of the empire […]
The situation on the Rhine/Danube frontier was complex. The peoples on the other side of the frontier were not strangers to Roman power; indeed they had been trading, interacting and occasionally raiding and fighting over the borders for some time. That was actually part of the Roman security problem: familiarity had begun to erode the Roman qualitative advantage which had allowed smaller professional Roman armies to consistently win fights on the frontier. The Germanic peoples on the other side had begun to adopt large political organizations (kingdoms, not tribes) and gained familiarity with Roman tactics and weapons. At the same time, population movements (particularly by the Huns) further east in Europe and on the Eurasian Steppe began creating pressure to push these “barbarians” into the empire. This was not necessarily a bad thing: the Romans, after conflict and plague in the late second and third centuries, needed troops and they needed farmers and these “barbarians” could supply both. But […] the Romans make a catastrophic mistake here: instead of reviving the Roman tradition of incorporation, they insisted on effectively permanent apartness for the new arrivals, even when they came – as most would – with initial Roman approval.
This problem blows up in 378 in an event – the Battle of Adrianople – which marks the beginning of the “decline and fall” and thus the start of our “long fifth century”. The Goths, a Germanic-language speaking people, pressured by the Huns had sought entry into Roman territory; the emperor in the East, Valens, agreed because he needed soldiers and farmers and the Goths might well be both. Local officials, however, mistreated the arriving Goth refugees leading to clashes and then a revolt; precisely because the Goths hadn’t been incorporated into the Roman military or civil system (they were settled with their own kings as “allies” – foederati – within Roman territory), when they revolted, they revolted as a united people under arms. The army sent to fight them, under Valens, engaged foolishly before reinforcements could arrive from the West and was defeated.
In the aftermath of the defeat, the Goths moved to settle in the Balkans and it would subsequently prove impossible for the Romans to move them out. Part of the reason for that was that the Romans themselves were hardly unified. I don’t want to get too deep in the weeds here except to note that usurpers and assassinations among the Roman elite are common in this period, which generally prevented any kind of unified Roman response. In particular, it leads Roman leaders (both generals and emperors) desperate for troops, often to fight civil wars against each other, to rely heavily on Gothic (and later other “barbarian”) war leaders. Those leaders, often the kings of their own peoples, were not generally looking to burn the empire down, but were looking to create a place for themselves in it and so understandably tended to militate for their own independence and recognition.
Indeed, it was in the context of these sorts of internal squabbles that Rome is first sacked, in 410 by the Visigothic leader Alaric. Alaric was not some wild-eyed barbarian freshly piled over the frontier, but a Roman commander who had joined the Roman army in 392 and probably rose to become king of the Visigoths as well in 395. Alaric had spent much of the decade before 410 alternately feuding with and working under Stilicho, a Romanized Vandal, who had been a key officer under the emperor Theodosius I (r. 379-395) and a major power-player after his death because he controlled Honorius, the young emperor in the West. Honorius’ decision to arrest and execute Stilicho in 408 seems to have precipitated Alaric’s move against Rome. Alaric’s aim was not to destroy Rome, but to get control of Honorius, in particular to get supplies and recognition from him.
That pattern: Roman emperors, generals and foederati kings – all notionally members of the Roman Empire – feuding, was the pattern that would steadily disassemble the Roman Empire in the west. Successful efforts to reassert the direct control of the emperors on foederati territory naturally created resentment among the foederati leaders but also dangerous rivalries in the imperial court; thus Flavius Aetius, a Roman general, after stopping Attila and assembling a coalition of Visigoths, Franks, Saxons and Burgundians, was assassinated by his own emperor, Valentinian III in 454, who was in turn promptly assassinated by Aetius’ supporters, leading to another crippling succession dispute in which the foederati leaders emerged as crucial power-brokers. Majorian (r. 457-461) looked during his reign like he might be able to reverse this fragmentation, but his efforts at reform offended the senatorial aristocracy in Rome, who then supported the foederati leader Ricimer (half-Seubic, half-Visigoth but also quite Romanized) in killing Majorian and putting the weak Libius Severus (r. 461-465) on the throne. The final act of all of this comes in 476 when another of these “barbarian” leaders, Odoacer, deposed the latest and weakest Roman emperor, the boy Romulus Augustus (generally called Romulus Augustulus – the “little” Augustus) and what was left of the Roman Empire in the west ceased to exist in practice (Odoacer offered to submit to the authority of the Roman Emperor in the East, though one doubts his real sincerity). Augustulus seems to have taken it fairly well – he retired to an estate in Campania originally built by the late Republican Roman general Lucius Licinius Lucullus and lived out his life there in leisure.
The point I want to draw out in all of this is that it is not the case that the Roman Empire in the west was swept over by some destructive military tide. Instead the process here is one in which the parts of the western Roman Empire steadily fragment apart as central control weakens: the empire isn’t destroyed from outside, but comes apart from within. While many of the key actors in that are the “barbarian” foederati generals and kings, many are Romans and indeed (as we’ll see next time) there were Romans on both sides of those fissures. Guy Halsall, in Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West (2007) makes this point, that the western Empire is taken apart by actors within the empire, who are largely committed to the empire, acting to enhance their own position within a system the end of which they could not imagine.
It is perhaps too much to suggest the Roman Empire merely drifted apart peacefully – there was quite a bit of violence here and actors in the old Roman “center” clearly recognized that something was coming apart and made violent efforts to put it back together (as Halsall notes, “The West did not drift hopelessly towards its inevitable fate. It went down kicking, gouging and screaming”) – but it tore apart from the inside rather than being violently overrun from the outside by wholly alien forces.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Rome: Decline and Fall? Part I: Words”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-01-14.