A more refined feast of blood
April 28, 2017 § 34 Comments
In the comments below Patrick observes:
A free and equal nation needs mass murder and micromanagement to match the mood. Blood and control are the secret ingredients. Kim Jong Un is a philistine with a pathetically unrefined recipe.
This is a good point.
Lets define a liberal regime to be a regime which explicitly professes liberal principles as its governing political doctrine.
We can roughly divide liberal regimes into two kinds. One sort of liberal regime is – at least as seen by outsiders[1] – overtly tyrannical and violent.
Another sort of liberal regime is – at least according to its own self-assessment[2] – a bastion of freedom and equality of rights, as long as you aren’t the wrong sort of person.
The extent to which these two sets are coextensive is left as an exercise.
Of course in carrying out the exercise it is probably only fair to observe that nations under overt existential threat are stuck drinking their blood-of-tyrants from plastic cups; whereas more fat, dumb, and happy nations can afford to drink their blood from fine crystal and scientific beakers.
[1] Wikipedia: “North Korea officially describes itself as a self-reliant socialist state and formally holds elections. Critics regard it as a totalitarian dictatorship.”
See also here.
[2] http://www.numberofabortions.com/,
https://zippycatholic.wordpress.com/2012/07/27/global-warming-and-the-hiroshima-bombing/
Zippy Catholic 
“We can roughly divide liberal regimes into two kinds.”
Yes, perhaps, but I keep it simple and singular. They all require a blood sacrifice. NK requires the blood of the already born, the West prefers the blood of the unborn. I don’t fully understand it, but perhaps an incoherent system must have an idol to sacrifice too? I call it throwing virgins in a volcano. We have to appease the gods of liberalism.
In the US, there are no liberals in and off themselves, they exist only in opposition to “the others.” It’s a bit like atheism, a non believer simply non believes and goes about their business, but atheists must attack Christians and a God they don’t believe in, in order to give substance and structure to what is an incoherent and illogical non belief system. One cannot prove the non existence of Something one believes does not exist, so you just have to throw a lot more virgins in the volcano.
insanitybytes22:
That says it succinctly.
And the specific thing that liberals (selectively) do not believe exists, is authority.
Zippy,
Are there any political ideologies that you would describe as modernist, but not liberal?
Ian:
I don’t remember the Arab nationalist Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein being expressly committed to freedom and equality, but it was definitely modernist. There are probably illiberal but modernist African regimes. I don’t know Italian fascism well enough to say off the top of my head.
But it is true that politically speaking liberalism enjoys a broad hegemony among the modernists: that is, I don’t think it is too farfetched to call liberalism the political expression of modernism.
But wait! America is free, equal, and totally non-violent! Except for that slavery thing, then that abortion holocaust.
But otherwise, totally free and equal!
What do you mean by modernist but not liberal?
[…] Source: Zippy Catholic […]
Ignacy:
What I mean by a liberal regime I described in the OP.
“Modernist” isn’t nearly as well defined, but I suppose I was thinking of secular nations (the nation-state itself being a rather modern form) organized along irreligious or syncretist utilitarian lines with modern (ish) infrastructures and militaries, etc; that general sort of thing. So the confessionally Islamic regimes in the Middle East are not modernist because they are not secular; neither secular-Arabic nor Islamic regimes are liberal specifically except to the extent they actually profess liberal principles.
I described in a previous post the at least abstract possibility of non-liberal but modernist political doctrines which attempt to assert some particular understanding of authority while prescinding from religious questions. Liberalism is just one particular doctrine of authority within this set of at least abstractly possible modernist doctrines of authority.
That’s interesting: even the examples of modernist but not liberal regimes are very much influenced by liberalism. In the case of fascism, for example, it’s been often described as a Marxist heresy.
Ignacy,
In my own mind, I tend to think of modernism (as it relates to politics) as any ideology that takes some contingent, this-worldly good and makes it into the ultimate good and standard by which all political decisions are judged. This standard could be freedom, the individual, the state, race, etc. Liberalism would then be a particular species of modernism that makes freedom the ultimate good. Fascism might be a separate species of modernism that makes the state the ultimate good. In contrast, political ideologies that regarded religion and the transcendent good as the ultimate basis and final standard of political society would be anti-modernist ideologies. This would include traditionalist Christianity, but also Islam.
I’d be interested in Zippy’s take though.
Ian:
Certainly. Everyone is influenced by the gravity well.
Ah, missed Zippy’s latest comment before posting mine.
Zippy, would you describe the Alt-right as liberal? Certainly modernist, but I don’t know if they explicitly profess any commitment to freedom, consent of the governed, etc.
Ian:
The Current Year alt right is a moving target. There is a lot of ostensible rejection of equality when considering the human race as a whole, combined with a lot of ranting about how important things like free speech are and how awful it is that SJW’s censor, etc. It has definitely made its peace with secularism, sodomy, etc. It is possible that it will birth an illiberal modernist political philosophy, but it is far too secular/syncretist to have any real prayer of becoming antimodernist. Moldbug for example is really modernist through and through from what I’ve seen, despite the occasional one-liner that might make you want to cheer.
I don’t really care much if some folks object to calling nazism (for example) “liberal”. The nazis were explicitly socialist, Mein Kampf explicitly endorses freedom and equal rights among the herrenvolk, Hitler was democratically elected and denounced monarchy, etc etc. It doesn’t much matter if some folks want to give different labels to “liberalism fat dumb and happy” vs “liberalism under existential pressure”, as far as I am concerned. Each has its own mountain of corpses, as just the most obvious in the long lists of atrocities and offenses.
Ian,
I think it depends on the faction of the alt-right you are referring to. Vox Day has been progressively sounding more and more like Zippy, even going so far as (in recent posts) to call “religious freedom” a bunch of anti-Christian garbage and call out usury as one of the critical pieces of how the elites enrich themselves at society’s expense.
Mike T:
I think the “alt right” as currently constituted cannot unify. Much like “neoreaction” or the “manosphere” it is really just united by rejection of Current Year middle-muddle SJW liberalism, the faults of which are typically understood to be liberalism improperly construed as opposed to liberalism per se. The name may persist but at this point there isn’t any thing well defined and unified enough to persist.
Speaking of usury, I ordered a copy of the FAQ for Pope Francis and had Amazon send it to the Vatican.
Patrick:
Great idea. Maybe I’ll send him a hundred or so to pass out to whomever HH pleases.
I suppose folks who have read the on line version can legitimately post reviews, since it is the same content.
Mike T.,
I guess I think of the alt-right as mainly centered around Richard Spencer and Radix, The Right Stuff, and Greg Johnson and Counter-Currents, so that’s more or less what I had in mind when I asked my question.
I used to have a broader conception of the alt-right as basically the contemporary secular non-mainstream right. In my mental scheme of things, I would have included the neoreactionaries within its ambit.
But my perception is that over the past year or two, the term’s usage has narrowed to those who regard race as the foundation of society, so I don’t really think of the neoreactionaries as belonging to the alt-right any longer. I’m not familiar enough with Vox Day to know how he fits into the scheme.
At any rate, regardless of exactly the extent of what counts as alt-right, I agree with this from Zippy:
I don’t think the alt-right represents a destination in itself, but a natural evolution of what remained of the American right as our society changed. When one looks at the world stage, it’s hard to draw a conclusion other than the age of national interests is resurgent (ie, history is going back to normal). The Western establishment is the last great exporter of ideology as foreign policy exercise, and that’s one reason I expect China and Russia to eventually emerge victorious over us. A nation that sacrifices its interests in the pursuit of ideology invariably annihilates its internal public goods.
Modern society has done an excellent job of infantilizing the masses, so it should come as no surprise that many in the alt-right make too much of game, race, etc. I think it is a serious strategic error for traditionalists (not to be confused with “conservatives” aka right-liberals) to treat this as something to be opposed, rather than attempt to guide it. Right-liberals frequently mock the alt-right over its attempts to talk about authority, tradition and many other concepts that traditionalists support. I think it is best to see the alt-right as a child that is waking up to the reality that he has terrible parents and is having to learn how to be a man on his own without social support. You have a choice: try to be a godfather or try to be that jerk who sits there and casts only judgment and scorn.
Zippy’s buddy Slumlord made that point more eloquently about what game really means or could mean to the right. It is a groggy awareness of having been systematically lied to and now you see a lot of truth, but what to do with that truth? That is where guidance comes in.
I never thought of meatless Fridays as the last vestige reminder of authority. No wonder they threw it out.
Of course in carrying out the exercise it is probably only fair to observe that nations under overt existential threat are stuck drinking their blood-of-tyrants from plastic cups; whereas more fat, dumb, and happy nations can afford to drink their blood from fine crystal and scientific beakers.
It’s worth remembering that Hitler’s mass murders were very Progressive and Scientific for its time. If anything, the modern variation employing abortion to reduce the numbers of unfit and certain races is less Efficient.
Mike T:
An alternative framing is that you can pat people on the head and tell them how understandable it is that they are swimming in perversity and error, or you can be straight with them and tell them what you really think. Personally I think the latter is ultimately more respectful than the former.
In my experience the desire for patronizing head pats is a cafeteria desire. We want to be patted on the head for our own perversities, but those people over there need to be called out.
Thats one reason why I focus on errors, not on the people making them.
I’m not looking for head pats. I am saying you have a choice: you can either sit there and just snark at them (aka the W4 approach) or you can try to correct them.
Mike T.,
How receptive is the alt-right to guidance and correction from traditionalists? My impression is: not very.
For example, Jim Kalb (neither a snarky writer nor a fire-eater) was a contributing editor for the fledgling Alternative Right website when Spencer started it back in 2010. There he advocated for a more traditionalist point of view (see here and here for a couple early articles he wrote for them). However, the crowd there wasn’t very receptive to his point of view, and he didn’t last long.
Regarding the idea that websites like W4 should avoid mockery and snark directed at the alt-right: maybe so, although aren’t these sort of tactics exactly what the alt-right itself advocates as being the most effective at persuading people?
“Maybe I’ll send him a hundred or so to pass out to whomever HH pleases.”
I saved a lot on postage by ordering from amazon.it. I think im going to get one for my bishop and the seminary rector, too.
How receptive is the alt-right to guidance and correction from traditionalists? My impression is: not very.
I thought about how to answer this, and I think a demonstration from Zippy’s comment section might be more educational. Read this back and forth between Zippy and Aethelfrith that ends here.
Zippy: traditonalist.
Aethelfrith: cuckservative with traditionalist tendencies.
My observation is that a lot of “traditionalists” are really just repentant right-liberals who have a more right-wing veneer.
Regarding the idea that websites like W4 should avoid mockery and snark directed at the alt-right: maybe so, although aren’t these sort of tactics exactly what the alt-right itself advocates as being the most effective at persuading people?
In a sense, they try, but fail miserably because they completely miss the dark humor of the alt-right’s memetic warfare. One of the reasons the left hates alt-right memetic warfare so much is that it is typically hilarious compared to the earnest, self-serious garbage that the left and mainstream right tends to share online. The alt-right specializes in a form of mockery that makes its enemies a joke that even non-alt-right folks can laugh at. Even my mainstream right relatives laugh every time they see something as simple as “you can’t run, you can’t hide, you get helicopter ride” and its effect on earnest leftists.
Mike, I don’t wish to go to battle over the alt right, but one problem they have is their hypocrisy and incoherence. It’s like trying to nail jello to the wall. That’s a strength in “memetic warfare,” but it’s not a foundation for anything else, it can’t build something solid.
The alt-right has problems, but hypocrisy and incoherence are not major ones. At times, some of its members would probably be better if they were a little more of both.
Under what possible circumstances would a little MORE hypocrisy and incoherence be a good thing?
I suppose if the principles are bad than hypocritically acting good might be a good thing; I think it was David Warren over at Essays in Idleness, though he may have been quoting somebody else, once remarked that the vast majority of folks he’d met were better than their religion; only Christians were consistently worse. That still wouldn’t make more incoherence desirable, though.
Under what possible circumstances would a little MORE hypocrisy and incoherence be a good thing?
Richard Spencer sometimes veers into that territory with his justification of abortion and such.
It is better to stop being wrong than to profess what is wrong and fail to carry it out.
It is, but sometimes it is “good enough” when people are spared the consequences of your beliefs. I don’t think any Jew would have minded Hitler developing an unprincipled exception on babies that allowed their infants and young children to escape the Holocaust.
We seem to be comparing
1) Convincing yourself and others that it is good to commit moral atrocities, to
2) Committing moral atrocities.
Or perhaps debating coddling and being nice to people who do the former, because they are so much better than some third group.
In the spirit of not coddling my readers, I’ll just say that I think that is a load of crap: a passive aggressive wheedling plea that sure, (1) is inexcusably wrong, but it is our kind of inexcusably wrong.
I’m not pleading for anything on his behalf. In fact, I meant what I said about him as a criticism, not a defense. It’s a round about way of saying that on some of the issues, he’s just wrong and he’s sufficiently consistent in how wrong that if he were incoherent in his beliefs he might actually take the right stance by accident from time to time.
[…] cause mass murder. What causes mass murder is the crushing impact of the liberal commitments of governing regimes , ruling classes, and whole populations as these social forces come crashing into […]