A new basis for Russian foreign policy?

From a recent Asia Times column by Spengler:

By mid-century the population of a political entity that in 1980 seemed destined to rule the world will have fallen by a half (in the case of Ukraine and Moldova) to a quarter (in the case of Russia). What remains of Russia stalks the world scene like a man whose terminal cancer leaves him no motivation save amusement and revenge.

In the same article, Spengler makes some interesting but highly debatable points about Christianity. The pagan element of Christianity, Spengler claims, is a handicap, not an advantage.

Christianity appeared as the gravedigger of traditional society, calling individuals out from their nations into a new people of God. Where it compromised too deeply with traditional society, through syncretic adoption of pagan elements, ultimately Christianity failed, as in the ex-Christian, neo-pagan continent of Western Europe. Where Christianity liquidated the languages, culture and memories of its converts, it flourished, uniquely in the case of immigrants to the United States.

This strikes me as wrong-headed. The apparent failure of Christianity in Western Europe has to a large extent coincided with the abandonment of the pagan elements in Christianity. Initially, after conversion, European cultures were not radically altered by Christianity; their pagan character eroded only over centuries, so that even today, within living memory, one has been able personally to observe the disappearance of residual pagan customs in European cultures. (In recent times this has perhaps been the consequence of industrialization and urbanization as much as of Christian hostility, or rather Christian negligence.) For example, until two hundred years or so upper-class Europeans and Americans would challenge to a duel anyone who offered them a serious insult; this was a pagan survival, not the product of a Christian ethos.

Christianity, or at any rate "pure", New Testament Christianity (such as Simone Weil espoused), does not seem to provide a complete cultural blueprint in itself; it needs some particular, traditional culture as its foundation. It is too other-worldly to stand by itself. Its proper role is to inform and elevate traditional culture, not to replace it. A Christian culture that forgets about its need for a pre-Christian foundation is likely doomed. Christian charity, to take one notable example, is self-destructive unless it rests on a foundation of justice. However, the idea of justice is pre-Christian; New Testament Christianity has nothing to say about it.

If Spengler is correct that the American (Evangelical Protestant) form of Christianity has the best prospects, it will be because that form of Christianity will rely on Biblical Judaism to furnish a foundation in a particular traditional culture.

John Lukacs on nationalism

Lukacs' views from Democracy and Populism (Yale University Press, 2005):

Patriotism is defensive; nationalism is aggressive. Patriotism is the love of a particular land, with its particular traditions; nationalism is the love of something less tangible, of the myth of a "people," justifying many things, a political and ideological substitute for religion. Patriotism is old-fashioned (and, at times and in some places, aristocratic); nationalism is modern and populist . . . .

After 1870 nationalism, almost always, turned anti-liberal, especially where liberalism was no longer principally nationalist . . . . [p. 36]

. . . . One hundred and fifty years ago a distinction between nationalism and patriotism would have been labored, it would not have made much sense. Even now nationalism and patriotism often overlap within the minds and hearts of many people. Yet we must be aware of their differences—because of the phenomenon of populism which, unlike old-fashioned patriotism, is inseparable from the myth of a people. Populism is folkish, patriotism is not. One can be a patriot and cosmopolitan (certainly culturally so). But a populist is inevitably a nationalist of sorts. Patriotism is less racist than populism. A patriot will not exclude a person of another nationality from a community where they have lived side by side and whom he has known for many years; but a populist will always be suspicious of someone who does not seem to belong to his tribe . . . . [p. 72]

Since it appeals to tribal and racial bonds, nationalism seems to be deeply and atavistically natural and human. Yet the trouble with it is not only that nationalism can be anti-humanist and often inhuman but that it also proceeds from one abstract assumption about human nature itself. The love for one's people is natural, but it is also categorical; it is less charitable and less deeply human than the love for one's country, a love that flows from traditions, at least akin to a love of one's family. Nationalism is both self-centered and selfish—because human love is not the love of oneself; it is the love of another. Patriotism is always more than merely biological—because charitable love is human and not merely 'natural.' Nature has, and shows, no charity. [p. 73]

Lukacs sees nationalism as central to the history of the last century and a half. Stalin, for example, to Lukacs seems to have been essentially a nationalist, who relied on communism mainly because the communists (especially in Eastern Europe) were the only people who could be relied upon to obey him. Lukacs also regards "Americanism" as basically an American nationalist creed, not as patriotism (p. 161). Nationalism is not an entirely bad thing: where there is no allegiance to institutions, as for example in Latin America, populist nationalism is the only uniting force. But nationalism is a crude and dangerous basis for social cohesion, because of its "inevitable components of hatred and fear" (p. 164).

(See also Michael Gove: The virtue of the nation-state)

Steyn on the future of Europe

Conservative columnist and author Mark Steyn sometimes says unwise things (such as in his recent recommendations that the United States should topple the Syrian government), but is frequently very insightful. Here he is being interviewed about the likely shape of things in Europe 20 years from now.

. . . you'll be switching on the TV, you'll be looking at scenes of burning and conflagration and riots in the street. You will have a couple of countries that are maybe in civil war, at least on the brink of it.

You will have neofascists' resurgence in some countries and you'll have other countries that have just been painlessly euthanized in which a Muslim political class has effectively got its way without a shot being fired—and large numbers of people, particularly young people, have left those countries and have moved on to whoever will take them.

. . . . there are really three groups of people in Europe among the native Europeans and they're split three ways. Some of them will decide to fight and turn to Neo-Fascism and some of them will just convert to Islam because it's going to win and they'll talk themselves into figuring they can be Muslim light and it won't make much difference and others will just head to sea . . . .

On why Europeans, generally more skeptical than Americans about the compatibility of Islam and democracy, seem so nonchalant about admitting large numbers of Muslim immigrants:

If Islam is incompatible with democracy, that's not a problem for Iraq, it's a problem for Belgium, you know, because Iraq until, you know, a few months back had no democracy to lose. They can easily adjust to the way it's always been.

For Belgium or for Denmark or for the Netherlands, they've got real democracies and they are likely to lose . . . . I think at some level there's something else going on there, too, that a lot of these [European] countries, you know,—we talk about the Middle East, democratize the Middle East - we forget Spain was a dictatorship 30 years ago, Portugal, a little over 30 years ago, Greece, same 30 years ago.

Italy and Germany and France, you've got to go back half a century, but in essence the idea of living under non-democratic regimes is not foreign to these people and I think they think of themselves, their identities less as Europeans are less bound up with ideas of liberty than it is for the U.S. You know, the U.S. is an ideological project in a way that Italy isn't and so I do think that also accounts for part of the way they look at it.

On the adoption of Islamic dress by European women:

It's certainly happening in some cities. I heard it anecdotally from two friends in the space of a week and I thought it was very interesting that in both cases—one woman extremely wealthy, well-to-do and the other woman just happens to be a poor divorcee living in a part of town that is rapidly Islamifying—but they both reported the same experience—you put on a head scarf and, you know, you don't have to wear the burka, but you look, in other words, you don't look like a full Wahabi woman from Saudi Arabia, but you look like say, an Egyptian lady or a Jordanian. You wear the head scarf and a head to toe dress or you're not showing bare legs, bare arms, uncovered hair. They were stunned at how much more relaxing it was to stroll across the park, stroll to the corner store. They suddenly felt far more secure, they felt far more safe, they weren't jeered at for being an infidel whore or anything—and I would imagine that, you know, it's not actually that big a stage from sort of passing for Muslim in the street to actually embracing it in some kind of way of residual way at least nominally for the advantages of a quiet life.

"EU Referendum": BNP is the new mainstream

This is a must-read article for anyone interested in British politics. Richard North, the astute editor of the blog "EU Referendum", begins by listing a number of Labour politicians who have warned in recent months that there is a groundswell of support developing for the extreme-right British National Party among working-class English whites, who feel forgotten about or betrayed by the Labour Party that formerly represented them. North backs this up with an array of respectable election results for the BNP in recent British elections; in particular, he notes that in the 2004 European Parliament elections, the BNP and another so-called "fringe" party, UKIP, between them scored 32.6% of the vote.

Parties which can do this well at the polls should no longer be dismissed as irrelevant. Yet that is precisely what the mainstream British media persist in doing, North observes. "[N]ewspapers (and other media organs) which were once the bellwether of public opinion have so far diverged from their readers, listeners and viewers that they now represent the opinions only of themselves." And the political class (perhaps because they get their information from those media) has "lost the ability to 'read' its own electorate." An editorial in the latest Sunday Telegraph blithely asserts that "No reasonable person disputes that . . . the British National Party is repellent." But, repellent or not, the BNP is the sole party that is seen to be serious about dealing with the growth of militant Islam in England—a growth that has now, for example, produced 30 simultaneous Islamic terror plots that MI5 says it knows about. The BNP, North concludes, is not only becoming representative of the actual opinion of the British public, as opposed to that of its élites; it is becoming the only party representative of that opinion.

It is leaving our politicians and their parties like beached whales, stranded on the shores of their own ignorance, complacency and arrogance, supported by a media which itself has completely lost the plot.
      That puts us in uncharted waters but, amazingly, the politicians still think they are in command. So insulated from reality are they that they haven't even begun to realise that they are heading for the rocks and that the passengers have disconnected the wheel from the rudder.

Another triumph of Canadian justice

According to Stéphane Massinon of the Halifax Daily News, Cory Wright, to be charged today in the first-degree murder of a U.S. Navy sailor, also stabbed another man 14 times waaaay back in 2002. At that time, he attacked barber Matthew Barton, continuing to stab him once he had fallen to the ground, and knifing Barton's girlfriend's shoulder for good measure. Barton had apparently asked Wright to leave a party he was giving. The prosecution requested a 12-year sentence for Wright, but the Nova Scotia Supreme Court judge saw fit to give him 15 months (in addition to time already served), perhaps because Wright promised him that he would "turn his life around". This is why Wright was out on the street last Saturday, when the unidentified American sailor was stabbed, apparently while trying to break up someone else's fight.

U.S. wargames predicted Iraq mess

The National Security Archive of George Washington University has just released the declassified report of wargames held in 1999 by the United States Central Command (CENTCOM), then under General Anthony Zinni, which had the aim of assessing the potential outcomes of an invasion of Iraq. According to the National Security Archive, the After Action Report of the Desert Crossing wargames was a production in which a number of major government agencies, including both the State and Defense Departments, participated. The report drew pessimistic conclusions regarding the outcome of an Iraq invasion, some of which—for example, societal "fragmentation along religious and/or ethnic lines"—were "interestingly similar to the events which actually occurred after Saddam was overthrown." It "stressed that the creation of a democratic government in Iraq was not feasible", and regarded a pluralistic government including "nationalist leaders" as the best that might be expected. The consensus of the report's authors was that there would be no unilateral U.S. intervention "except under the most dire circumstances such as WMD use or catastrophic humanitarian disaster." The report stresses the need for extensive planning for the occupation phase of any intervention in Iraq, and that the report itself should be no more than a starting point for such planning.

Gen. Zinni retired shortly after the report was written. He has stated (see links provided at the NSA site) that the report was quickly forgotten by those agencies with an interest in Iraq, including CENTCOM itself.

(The NSA site gives prominence to what seems to be a later claim by Zinni that he envisaged an occupation force of 400,000 in Iraq, more than twice the number of troops actually sent in by Donald Rumsfeld. However, I did not see this number in the non-searchable After Action Report posted by the NSA. In fact, at one point, while discussing the perceived U.S. threat to Iran, the report refers to a force of "up to 300,000 ground troops in the region").

Europeans through Asian eyes

Here is a comment posted at Dhimmiwatch in response to an article by Paul Belien discussing the view that "Europeans who love freedom, [had] better emigrate", in view of the steady Islamization of that continent.

We see them here in Thailand all the time now. They look vaguely shell shocked, these Europeans. They come here with what wealth they have and open restaurants, try to start businesses or find something to do. Countries like ours that need foreign investment tolerate them. For now. At some point when we don’t need them any more they will be made to move on. But to where? They should settle in places like Australia or New Zealand where they can better fit in than in Asia. These people are the new Jews of the 21st century. The funny thing is when you ask them why they moved here they never mention they are displaced, they always talk about high taxes, too many rules, or something vague, they don’t even seem able to say why they don’t want to stay in their homes anymore. It is sad but we don’t want our blood polluted by their weak genes.

(I don't know whether this is representative of a significant slice of Thai or Asian opinion, though I suspect it is.)