The Other Imperial War

 

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Russia's invasion of Ukraine has held the world spellbound. Not since the Yugoslav wars has Europe seen such a conflict on its doorstep. The massive land-driven invasion brings to mind images of WWII.

Polish tanks in Cieszyn, Czechoslovakia

As always in the fog of war, propaganda is flying on all sides. The first European conflict of the social media age has whipped up the western world into a frenzy of virtue-signaling.

 

Berlin, Paris, Sydney

 

Steve Sailer reports:    

The Metropolitan Opera said it would cut ties with Russian artists or institutions “allied” (to use state-funded NPR’s word) with President Vladimir Putin. … In Wales, an orchestra removed Tchaikovsky. … The University of Milano-Bicocca postponed a series of lectures on Fyodor Dostoevsky “to avoid any controversy.”

The great vodka pour-out

Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire signed an executive order directing state-run liquor stores to stop selling Russian products. Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Utah have done the same.  … FIFA has banned Russia indefinitely, meaning the country won’t be able to compete for the World Cup. The International Paralympic Committee has also banned Russian athletes.

What prides itself as the “United Nations of cat federations” (FIFe) has banned Russian-owned and Russian-bred cats from all competitions because it “cannot just witness these atrocities and do nothing.”

 

 Corporate world flees Russia

Russia's 'imperial' ambitions have shocked the West. Images of bombs falling on homes, tanks rolling through cities, dead children on stretchers—it is appalling. 

So appalling, in fact, that it is easy to forget the murder and mayhem perpetrated by that other great imperial power these last 80 years. As 'Physicist Dave' puts it, 

'Try to name all the countries that have been attacked, invaded, bombed, conquered, or had their governments overthrown by the US just during your lifetime.

Really — get a piece of paper and try to write them all down.

There are so many that I bet that you cannot even remember them all.'

 

We will take up the challenge.

U.S. patrols the Pacific

America's imperial adventurism has become so omnipresent on planet Earth these last three-quarters of a century that we hardly seem to notice it.

In condemning the suffering caused by Mr. Putin's war, most Americans seem oblivious to the fact that their own tax dollars support a world-spanning empire that has its claws sunk into every inch of the globe, spying, prying, arming, meddling, funding, bombing, and starving. The 80-year 'Pax Americana' has come at an unimaginably heavy cost.

 

We thus propose to scrub off the blue and yellow greasepaint, just for a moment, and to remember that other long, long imperial war.

 

 

I. The Cold War

 

As the two big teams jockeyed for position on the planetary chessboard for half a century following WWII, the U.S. developed a mortal fear of anything even remotely redolent of socialism, be it near or far.

 

This led to regular covert and overt U.S. action against democratically-elected governments and in favor of dictators pledging allegiance to free-market capitalism.

 

 

A stroll down memory lane…

 

 

Why We Profile

(We are offline due to a much-needed research period at the moment, so we've decided to re-publish some earlier pieces you might have missed the first time.)

Calling 911 on black people may soon be a crime in parts of Michigan, Oregon and New York (h/t Steve Sailer ).  Why are Afro-Americans profiled so endlessly? We took a look at the data, and here's what we found.

[Re-post, original post here.]

In the outcry following the recent acquittal of Floridian George Zimmerman in the shooting death of an Afro teenager, many in the black community have voiced their displeasure.  Canadian graduate student Matthew Simmermon-Gomes is one:

What I do know is what it’s like to be a Trayvon Martin. To be suspect. I do know what it’s like to be followed by staff in a nice clothing store; to be stopped by police for walking down the street; to endure the thousand micro-aggressions and the hundred fearful looks, the patronising astonishment coupled with quiet indignation at my education or erudition. I know, in other words, what it is to be a person of colour in a world that privileges whiteness.

So, Where Does Multiculturalism Work?

Englischer Garten, Munich

Today's progressives have a seemingly unshakeable belief in the doctrine of Multiculturalism. All societies should be a zesty mix of different melanin levels, languages, religions, and cuisines. Anything else would be not only immoral, but boring.

Despite Putnam's evidence that diverse neighborhoods make everyone living in them less happy, this unflappable belief in the tonic effects of diversity seems to have gripped the modern leftist with claws of steel. 

U.N. Migration Representative and diversity evangelist Peter Sutherland

So we ask him: What is an example of a diverse society that actually works? To which we in the West may aspire?

Rue Polonceau, Paris, 2015

As it turns out, Multiculturalism is not such an easy beast to wrangle.

But we aim to try, to once and for all get our harpoon into that elusive animal: the Diversitopia on which we, in the West, may model ourselves.



Where to find it?

The Progressive Project: Re-Colonizing Africa

We shall save you from yourselves

The film The Black Panther has been taking Hollywood by storm. Progressives in particular are excited:

The film is set in Wakanda, a fictional technologically advanced country in East Africa which was never colonized. For people of African descent, the kingdom of Wakanda finally brings a searing question—what if the colonists hadn’t arrived and Africa had been allowed to develop unencumbered by international influence?—to the big screen.

Africa unchained

Is it true? Would an un-colonized Africa have given the world an advanced, high-tech utopia?

We at TWCS are not so sure. 

Two generations after colonialism ended, alarmed that Africa seemed to be sinking rather than swimming, Tony Blair gathered a 17-person commission to examine the question:

One more commission for Africa

When former colonies across the globe began in the 1960s to prepare themselves for independence, nobody was that worried about Africa. The anxiety was all for Asia. 

That was barely four decades ago. Today Africa is the poorest region in the world. Half of the population live on less than one dollar a day. Life expectancy is actually falling. People live, on average, to the age of just 46. 

… Africa is the only continent in the world which is stagnating. Why has it fallen so far behind?

Optimism 

African poverty and stagnation is the greatest tragedy of our time. Poverty on such a scale demands a forceful response. … Africa requires a comprehensive ‘big push’ on many fronts at once.  

Investing for economic growth means rebuilding African health and education systems, many of which are now on the point of collapse.

From the World Food Conference in 1974, at which Henry Kissinger declared 'In ten years no child shall go to bed hungry,' to the UN Millennium Summit in 2000, which vowed to end world hunger by 2015, Westerners have long been wringing their hands over this continent.

A Wakandian renaissance?  On the contrary, it seems the further colonialism recedes into the past, the more desperate Africa's situation becomes. 

Fifty years after independence, then, Tony Blair, Bob Geldof et al. have in effect produced a 464-page manifesto calling for...

...the re-colonization of Africa. 

On what do we base this claim?

Weapons of Mass Migration: Are You a Target?

Reaction to Trump's threat to turn off the migrant tap

Donald Trump's proposed immigration policies--though moderate by the standards of any other era in U.S. history--are spurring an unprecedented wave of outrage.

The immense waves of migrants (legal and illegal) pouring into the U.S. and Europe are, say his opponents, a blessing, a gift, even the only way to survive.

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Is it true? 

Today there are a quarter of a billion people living outside their home countries--the most ever recorded in human history. But these mass movements aren't happening by chance-- far larger forces are at play.

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We live in an era where demographic weapons are in fact being lobbed around the globe, disturbing the fragile ecosystems of human societies, in some cases threatening to topple them. 

Who is in the line of fire? Can one make oneself less of a target? 

Africans flood into Europe;  Latin Americans flood into the U.S.

How? 

Governments Are Us

Harper's Weekly, 1869

David Brooks has a history lesson for Donald Trump (via Steve Sailer):

The Trump story is that good honest Americans are being screwed by aliens.  …  This is a tribal story.  

Somebody is going to have to arise to point out that this is a deeply wrong and un-American story. The whole point of America is that we are not a tribe. We are a universal nation, founded on universal principles, attracting talented people from across the globe, active across the world on behalf of all people who seek democracy and dignity.

Naturalization ceremony, 2010

This lovely fiction from Mr. Brooks is as quaint as it is ahistorical. But it does go back a fair way. Not as far as our founders, bequeathing a nation 'to ourselves and our posterity.' Not as far as our first naturalization act, in 1790, extended to 'free white persons of good character.' 

Not as far as Thomas Jefferson, quoted by Alexander Hamilton:

Not multiculturalists

'The opinion advanced in [Jefferson's] The Notes on Virginia is undoubtedly correct, that foreigners will generally be apt to bring with them attachments to the persons they have left behind; to the country of their nativity, and to its particular customs and manners. 

'They will also entertain opinions on government congenial with those under which they have lived; or, if they should be led hither from a preference to ours, how extremely unlikely is it that they will bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism? 

'There may, as to particular individuals, and at particular times, be occasional exceptions to these remarks, yet such is the general rule.'

The idea that the U.S. was meant to become a League of Nations avant l'heure dates back to the mid 19^th century, when America's first nativist party, the 'Know-Nothings,' agitated against Catholic immigrants (both Irish and German). They were  lambasted by people like George Julian, VP candidate:

'Know Nothingism . . . tramples down the doctrine of human brotherhood. It judges men by the accidents of their condition, instead of striving to find a common lot for all, with a common access to the blessings of life.' (1)

By the 1912 presidential election, Woodrow Wilson was currying favor with his new electorate by trumpeting:

'America has, so to say, opened its doors and extended its welcome to men who were Americans everywhere in the world. She has invited all the free forces of the modern civilized peoples to come to America where men can be free, and where all free forces can unite and forget all their differences of origins.' 

Wilson-style multiculturalism: No Asians or Blacks, thanks

But even a 'proposition nation' man like Wilson wasn't a true multiculturalist—he did not extend this welcome to Blacks or Asians:

'The whole question is one of assimilation of diverse races. We cannot make a homogeneous population out of people who do not blend with the Caucasian race.'

These days, things have gone so far that we're being told that not letting masses of Mexicans or Africans into our countries is the equivalent of turning away the Jews in 1940, or runaway slaves in 1840.

Forcing Africans to be governed by their own: Worse than slavery

This is an astounding statement. Forcing a Mexican to be governed by other Mexicans, or a Senegalese to be governed by other Senegalese, is akin to committing genocide upon them. What a statement on the governing abilities of Mexicans or Senegalese! Perhaps Jefferson was onto something after all…

The 'magic dirt' theory, of course, says that once these foreigners set foot on our soil, they are suddenly blessed with the qualities that have allowed us to govern ourselves so successfully all these years.

Coming to take part in the Great Democratic Experiment

But we at TWCS suspect that, on the contrary, Jefferson was right—Governments Are Us. 'That temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism' has not been equally distributed on Planet Earth. 

We mostly rule ourselves now--the age of empire is over.  If we rule ourselves badly, that's because we are somehow ill-equipped to handle the running of a large, modern representative state.

(Formerly 'Failed States Index')

So if we few in well-run countries usher in the many fleeing ill-run countries,  what will be the result? Is it possible such people will recreate the conditions they've created in their own countries, right here on our soil? If so, we should be very, very careful which groups we let in the door.

What is the evidence?

The Past is a Real-Talking Country

California recently scrapped plans for a 'John Wayne Day' when his 1971 race-realist comments on Afro-Americans came to light:

High plains realtalker

'We can’t all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks. I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.'

At the same time, Princeton students are demanding the Woodrow Wilson School be re-named, U. of Missouri is petitioning to remove Thomas Jefferson's statue, and San Fran's School Board president has even said he'll re-name every school bearing the title of a slave owner.

It is surely any people's right to wipe out the names of past heroes who ruffle current mores. We've seen Stalin and Lenin statues come crashing down in Eastern Bloc countries since the wall fell.

But Stalin and Lenin were proper génocidaires who oversaw the repression, imprisonment, torture, and death of tens of millions. Washington and Jefferson were founders of their nation who, uncontroversially in their time and place, owned slaves.

Good-bye, Enver Hoxha; Albania, 1991

But even if one were to convince them that slaveholding was not controversial in those days, this John Wayne dust-up opens a whole new can of worms. Are California's civic leaders even dimly aware of the kind of realtalk in which nearly all our prominent men of yesteryear engaged?  We fear they are not. 

May we gently remind them that When an out-group seemed to under-perform, or over-perform, or just act differently, people noticed.  

And commented.

Such was the way of the world--and still is, in most of the world. Only ethnic NW Euros seem to have caught the disease that pushes them to sing the praises of 'diversity' while at the same time loudly claiming we're all exactly the same.

The multiculturalist's conundrum: 

Why can't we be different yet exactly the same? 

As more and more decisions must be made about naming holidays, schools, bridges, airports, highways, erecting and demolishing statues... How shall our civic leaders be expected to cope? If they start subjecting each historical figure to the 'didn't say anything that offends me today' test, they are in for some sore and cruel disappointment.

We at TWCS would very much like to help them. First, by acquainting them with the fact that the past was, indeed, a real-talking country, as the quotations we are about to share will show. 

Another Californian realtalker 

Second, by helping them step into their ancestors' shoes, in order to pick out what is simple observation of difference (as painful as that may be for us to hear today), and what is real bigotry.  

We propose five categories of historical realtalk (some of which overlap in our quotes):

• Banal my-group preference
• The More Able remarking upon the Less Able
• The Less Able remarking upon the More Able
• Us remarking upon the otherness of Them
• True bigotry

We focus on two out-groups with whom ethnic Europeans have long been in contact: Sub-Saharan Africans and Jews.


So which kinds of old-style realtalk can our city fathers forgive, and which should have them tearing down statues?

Crashing the Gates: A Crash Course

Storming the Hungarian border at Hogros, Serbia, September 16th, 2015

(Or, The European Migrant Crisis: A Reader.)

From the Pope to the E.U. to the U.N., the narrative has taken shape: 'Millions of refugees fleeing war-torn regions are flooding into Europe, and we must take them all in.'  If one doesn't embrace it whole-heartedly--and many Europeans do not--one is 'vile,' 'shameful,' and 'spreading hate' (to quote German chancellor Angela Merkel).  Such closed-minded bigots need to open their hearts and homes.

We here at TWCS argue that there is much more to the story. From our privileged perch here in continental Europe, we enjoy access to scores of local news stories which haven't seeped into the international media. So as with the Charlie Hebdo massacre, we're taking a slight detour from our normal blogging in order to give a press round-up we hope some may find useful. From our seat in the very front row, we humbly invite you to join us on a tour of the less-reported sides of this epochal event. But kindly buckle up first.

Why Re-Colonization? Commonweal Orientation

Driving in Varanasi, India

(Part II of two)

Europe and the U.S. are both being overrun with illegal immigrants from the South. We recently asked the question, 'Why?' One answer, we've found, could be the former's higher levels of Future Orientation. This ability to fully conceive of and plan for the future creates societies that are the envy of the world.

 Africa's illegal aliens flood into Europe;  Latin America's flood into the U.S.

But we also argue that a second quality is drawing the masses to Euros' doors. We call this trait Commonweal Orientation. Where it is found in abundance, safe and prosperous societies seem to flourish. So what is it, and why has it been so unevenly distributed on Planet Earth?

Why Re-Colonization? Future Orientation

Mongongo tree and fruit

Each day, the Kung San walked long distances to the mongongo groves to collect their fruits.  

Once he asked a tribesman why nobody had ever made an attempt to grow mongongo trees near some of the permanent water holes where the tribe resided.  "You could do that if you wanted to," he replied, "but by the time the trees bore fruit, you would be long dead." --Anthropologist Richard Lee

(part I of two)

At independence, 50 years ago, optimism for the tropics was high. No one could have dreamed that half a century later, a massive movement for re-colonization would be afoot--led not by Africa's leaders but by her masses.

1960: Demanding Europeans leave Africa; 2014: Africans demanding to be let into Europe

We have looked at some of the reasons that the global South wants into Teutonic countries.  But the real appeal is broader.  Globally, tropical peoples are trying to migrate to lands run by temperate peoples.

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Like a baby trying to crawl back into the womb, the formerly colonized are coming back to their old foreign masters and begging (or demanding) to be ruled by them again.

One year of African boat people = a city the size of Venice. Can Europe absorb them all?

Why?

We propose two major reasons: Future orientation and Commonweal orientation.  These two qualities, we argue, are plentiful in the North but in short supply in the South, where their opposites (Short-Sightedness and Clannishness) can be found in abundance.

Today we shall focus on the former: Future orientation. We argue that the shortage of this trait in warmer climes has prevented these societies from developing the way they wish to. This is why, two generations after independence, millions are voting with their feet to place themselves back under Euro rule.

We also argue these traits follow tropical peoples long-term, which is why North America's centuries-old African population has never assimilated. This too, we shall show, should be a cautionary tale for European deciders on immigration.

So what is the evidence to back up our assertions?