2.10 Reactor Core

Carlyle rising! For the final issue of the very visual Volume 2 of Radish, the Carlyle Club is pleased to present the climactic culmination of our spring series of genuine reactionary propaganda.

Retreating to Issue 9? Click here.

Contents

1. Reactor Core
2. Julius Evola and Political ‘Progress’
3. Lothrop Stoddard and the Golden Dawn
4. ‘Equality’: Working As Intended
5. Immigration Reform: A Historical Perspective
6. coming soon

Reactor Core

There’s something happening here,
What it is ain’t exactly clear.

Buffalo Springfield

Something’s in the air — or maybe it’s in the water supply, but either way, recently we’ve seen a remarkable rise of attitudes and ideas that are frankly anti-democratic, or at least profoundly skeptical of popular government.

This is a good thing, of course. These ideas, whether they’re based on history, biology, or esoteric philosophy, form the core of reactionary thought — the essence of the Dark Enlightenment.

Unsurprisingly, Mencius Moldbug (that ancient neocameralist red dragon) was the first to identify the trend, in ‘Democraphobia goes (slightly) viral.’ (‘Democraphobia’ being progressive libertarian Will Wilkinson’s dismissive term.)

Moldbug points us in the direction of ‘Beyond Folk Activism’ (2009; follow-up here) by 36-year-old seasteading pioneer and former Google engineer Patri Friedman, who remarks that while “democracy is the current industry standard political system,” it is “ill-suited for a libertarian state” and has “substantial systemic flaws” — notably, that “democracy is a flawed method for choosing” among ideas, “because politicians respond to incentives too.”

All right, so he’s not quite ready to bring back colonial rule, but it’s a start.

Moldbug also recommends ‘The Education of a Libertarian’ (2009; follow-up here) by 45-year-old anti-college billionaire and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who confesses: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” and identifies “the great task for libertarians” as finding “an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called ‘social democracy’.”

Well, you know those crazy libertarians: they hate us for our freedoms — no, wait, that’s Muslims or something. Libertarians hate us for our democracy. Also, they’re clearly a bunch of racists — like economist Arnold Kling, who in 2008 dared to suggest that competitive government, where “people take leaders as given, and they select jurisdictions,” might just be better “at satisfying the desires of the governed” than democratic government, where “people take jurisdictions as given, and they elect leaders.”

Michael Lind’s rebuttal in the ultra-progressive Salon (2011) is typical enough: something something slavery, something something civil rights, and therefore:

The dread of democracy by libertarians and classical liberals is justified. Libertarianism really is incompatible with democracy. Most libertarians have made it clear which of the two they prefer. The only question that remains to be settled is why anyone should pay attention to libertarians.

(Apparently, the alternative to democracy is autocracy, which is the same as tyranny. Aristotle wept.)

But this isn’t about libertarianism (Carlyle’s “anarchy plus a street-constable”), though I must refer the reader to Frank Karsten and Hans-Hermann Hoppe anyway.

Consider the incredible essay ‘America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution’ (2010; book-length treatment here and follow-up here) by professor of international relations Angelo M. Codevilla.

The ruling class’s appetite for deference, power, and perks grows. The country class disrespects its rulers, wants to curtail their power and reduce their perks. The ruling class wears on its sleeve the view that the rest of Americans are racist, greedy, and above all stupid. The country class is ever more convinced that our rulers are corrupt, malevolent, and inept. The rulers want the ruled to shut up and obey. The ruled want self-governance. The clash between the two is about which side’s vision of itself and of the other is right and which is wrong. Because each side — especially the ruling class — embodies its views on the issues, concessions by one side to another on any issue tend to discredit that side’s view of itself. One side or the other will prevail. The clash is as sure and momentous as its outcome is unpredictable.

In this clash, the ruling class holds most of the cards: because it has established itself as the fount of authority, its primacy is based on habits of deference. Breaking them, establishing other founts of authority, other ways of doing things, would involve far more than electoral politics.

(That’s one for careful reading.)

Arnold Kling (2010) comes right out and calls Codevilla’s essay “neo-reactionary,” listing three “core beliefs that I share with the neo-reactionaries.”

1. “At its worst, Progressive ideology is an ideology of power. It justifies the technocratic few infringing on the liberty and dignity of the many.”
2. “At their worst, Progressives are intellectual bullies. They delegitimize rather than attempt to persuade those who disagree with them.”
3. “American government has become structurally less libertarian and less democratic in recent decades.”

And here’s Lee Harris, writing for Stanford University’s Hoover Institution (‘The Tea Party vs. the Intellectuals’, 2010).

A government of the people, by the people, and for the people cannot perish from the earth, because none has ever existed on the earth. Orwell’s Animal Farm famously tells us that some animals (humans included) will always be more equal than others, which means that every society that has claimed to be a democracy has in fact been managed by an elite, or juggled among a competing group of elites. Sometimes the elite has governed openly, sometimes covertly. Even in ancient Greece, critics argued that the veneer of popular democracy was merely a mask for the cynical manipulation of plutocrats. Twentieth century thinkers such as Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, and Robert Michels have argued that every functioning society will inevitably be governed by a ruling class, just as every business enterprise will be governed by its executives — it is what Michels has dubbed “the iron law of oligarchy.”

(These last two are covered by Moldbug in ‘Race: a modest proposal.’)

Or check out Charles Stross’ recent discovery (2013).

Something has gone wrong with our political processes, on a global scale. But what? It’s obviously subtle — we haven’t been on the receiving end of a bunch of jack-booted fascists or their communist equivalents organizing putsches. But we’ve somehow slid into a developed-world global-scale quasi-police state, with drone strikes and extraordinary rendition and unquestioned but insane austerity policies being rammed down our throats, government services being outsourced, peaceful protesters being pepper-sprayed, tased, or even killed, police spying on political dissidents becoming normal, and so on. What’s happening?

Here’s a hypothesis: Representative democracy is what’s happening. Unfortunately, democracy is broken. There’s a hidden failure mode, we’ve landed in it, and we probably won’t be able to vote ourselves out of it.

(Moldbug’s take here.)

Robert Kaplan thinks the world is marching toward anarchy. Larry Littlefield is preparing for institutional collapse. Ann Barnhardt lays out a timeline for societal disintegration.

Michael Jonas explores the downside of diversity — in the Boston Globe. Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew remarks that “in multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.” From Hungary to Greece, the dreaded fascism is once again on the rise in Europe. So Rachel Maddow decides to give Richard Spencer’s unusually attractive brand of white nationalism a national audience.

Meanwhile, according to a recent survey of registered voters, 29 percent of Americans (including 44 percent of Republicans) agreed that “an armed revolution in order to protect liberties might be necessary in the next few years.” Another 5 percent are “unsure.” Only 47 percent of Americans (and 31 percent of Republicans) disagreed outright with the statement.

The statement that an armed revolution might be necessary in the next few years.

Surely something is happening here. What could it be? That’s the basic question we sought to answer — or at least visualize — in this, the final issue of Radish, Volume 2.

As always, gentle reader, we leave the final judgment up to you.

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Stockholm burns, and the government issues parking tickets.

Julius Evola and Political ‘Progress’

“There is evidence,” promises Joshua Kurlantzick of the Council on Foreign Relations (“the nation’s most influential foreign-policy think tank” — Jim Lobe), “that over time democracy provides better social welfare, such as longer life expectancy, lower infant mortality, more social and political freedoms.” Except, of course, in South Africa and Zimbabwe, where democracy, “social and political freedoms,” and the end of white supremacy actually brought staggering drops in life expectancy. And then there’s the Congo, and — hold on, where in Africa has democracy ever brought longer life expectancy? And how? What does voting have to do with living longer?

Oh, and I couldn’t help but notice, Mr. Kurlantzick, how you snuck in “political freedoms” — meaning, basically, democracy — under “social welfare.” So your argument can be simplified a bit: Democracy is good because democracy provides democracy.

Look, democratization — and political ‘progress’ in general — has nothing whatsoever to do with technological advancement, which is what’s actually responsible for longer life expectancy, lower infant mortality, and so on. Science and technology advance over time because, since the printing press, it’s difficult to destroy existing knowledge, so each generation of scientists builds on the last. “If I have seen further,” said Sir Isaac Newton, “it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” This has nothing to do with ‘liberty,’ ‘equality,’ diversity, or democracy. Newton himself was a fundamentalist Christian who enjoyed having counterfeiters hanged. Americans landed on the moon not long after the civil rights movement, but it was Nazi rocket scientists who put them there, not black people.

I could go on, but Mencius Moldbug covered all this perfectly in ‘Sam Altman is not a blithering idiot,’ so there would be no point. Instead, please enjoy two posters, inspired by Radish 2.6.

PDF available here.

That caption, again:

Various forces have attempted to set up a defense against the disorder of our age. This is a useless effort, unless the disease is dealt with at its very roots. These roots are to be found in the subversion introduced in Europe by the revolutions of 1789 and 1848. The subversion has long since taken root, so much so as to appear obvious and natural in the majority of existing institutions.

Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins

PDF available here.

Caption:

The various aspects of the contemporary social and political chaos are interrelated and there is no real way to effectively oppose them other than by returning to the origins. To go back to the origins means, plainly and simply, to reject everything that in any domain (social, political, or economic) is connected to the “immortal principles” of 1789 [that is, the French Revolution].

Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins

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The oh-so-scary men and women of the Golden Dawn.

Lothrop Stoddard and the Golden Dawn

Ta-Nehisi Coates isn’t the only colored Atlantic writer with an ignorant opinion of Lothrop Stoddard to share: in ‘The End of White America?,’ Hua Hsu calls The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy a “brief for racial supremacy,” full of “rationalized hatred” — which proves he either didn’t read past the cover, or simply couldn’t understand a book about race that (a) won’t pretend race doesn’t exist/isn’t biological, and (b) won’t blame everything bad that ever happened on white people. We can safely assume that Mr. Hsu, like all ‘anti-racists,’ avoids that “rising tide of color” as much as possible in his own life. The punchline here is journalistic integrity.

Here is a fair sampling of the most popular comments on Hua Hsu’s 2009 article.

• “It’s the white man! That is increasingly becoming the racist mantra of the 21st century.” (56 up-votes)
• “Never mind that the evil white man has provided every good thing, jobs, industries, and the highest standard of living to the world. Never mind that. Have to demonize him because not to means the truth of Asians’ failures to contribute would be exposed. There are Asians who are now openly claiming they invented everything, that everything is made in China, and that they invented it all. Revisionist history at the hands of the CPC and part of their plan to destroy the white culture they are so envious of.” (80 up-votes)
• Reply to a black commenter who was displeased with the “racist” commentary: “We ship your kids from your poverty-stricken schools and pay for their education with our tax dollars and bring them to our schools. And this is how you thank us? Go back home to Africa where you belong. The worst mistake we made was bringing you over here. Time to go back to your poverty-stricken third-world homeland and see how well you do without us white people to carry your burdens.” (63 up-votes)
• Similarly: “Without white people, how will you spew your brilliance in a blog? You see, without white people, you wouldn’t have little things like computers and electricity.” (42 up-votes)
• Clearly a Stoddard fan: “I predict that before the end of this decade — as the white man is eclipsed — we will see war as never before seen on earth. Huge countries with centuries of pent-up hatred and criminality such as China & India will burst forth armed and with unstoppable numbers. If you all think the world created by the white man is evil, just wait until you see what happens to planet Earth when Asians are in charge.” (44 up-votes)

An interesting collection indeed… Anyway, inspired by Radish 2.7, here’s a fun Lothrop Stoddard/Golden Dawn poster in classic Carlyle Rising style.

PDF available here.

That caption, again:

Mighty racial tides flow from the most elemental of vital urges: self-expansion and self-preservation. To condemn the former as “criminal” and the latter as “selfish” is either silly or hypocritical and tends to envenom with unnecessary rancor what objective fairness might keep a candid struggle, inevitable yet alleviated by mutual comprehension and respect.

Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy

Stoddard was referring to the “mighty racial tides” of Japan, and the colored races in general, asking that the white world exercise “objective fairness.” Today, the racial roles might be reversed, but the lesson is more important than ever.

Join the Golden Dawn! Meet fascist hotties!

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According the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s David Horsey, being given the vote by white people fed up with your terrorism is the black equivalent of landing a man on the moon.

‘Equality’: Working As Intended

A student’s bid to become associate vice president of diversity and inclusion at Northwestern University was derailed last Wednesday over accusations that his status as a white heterosexual male would make it impossible for him to perform the position’s duties. …

“This university is not ready, in any capacity, for a heterosexual white male to be in charge in any way of diversity and inclusion,” said [Ian] Coley [a student on the Associate Student Government Diversity and Inclusion Committee], according to the Daily Northwestern.

“I don’t know if any university is,” he reportedly added.

Campus Reform (May 17, 2013)

All animals are equal
But some animals are more equal than others.

George Orwell, Animal Farm

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is on a mission: to “stop and remedy unlawful employment discrimination” so that America can finally realize the EEOC Vision™ of “justice and equality in the workplace” — a bargain at 370 million taxpayer dollars per year.

Here’s how it works: in January 2012, Pepsi agreed to pay over three million dollars to settle a charge of “race discrimination” filed by the EEOC as part of a “national government crackdown” on “hiring policies that can hurt blacks and Hispanics” (Washington Post). You see, Pepsi was hiring people who had never been arrested, which is racist, because such a huge percentage of black people are criminals:

EEOC officials said the company’s policy of not hiring workers with arrest records disproportionately excluded more than 300 black applicants.

As part of the settlement, Pepsi had to offer jobs to the black people they excluded, who are described by the EEOC as “victims” of the company’s background check policy.

Here’s a fair sampling of the most-rated comments at Yahoo! News.

• “If a disproportionate number of black applicants have been arrested vs whites then the indication is that the black community has a problem, not that Pepsi has a problem.” (638 up-votes, 41 down-votes)
• “Right. Instead, let’s punish WHITES for having LOWER arrest and conviction rates. That’ll teach them to be good citizens!” (468 up-votes, 32 down-votes)
• “As a small business owner, I refuse to hire criminals no matter what color they are. I run a business, not a self-help charity. Wake up people! Federal government has gotten way too big and out of control.” (397 up-votes, 27 down-votes)
• “How is it ‘disproportionate’ if there are more blacks with records than whites? How is that Pepsi’s fault?” (439 up-votes, 30 down-votes)
• “Pepsi is a MAJOR SPONSOR of the National Basketball Association… I demand that the EEOC investigate the TOTALLY DISPROPORTIONATE employment in that industry. I WANNA SUE!!!!” (218 up-votes, 15 down-votes)
• “This country is going down the tubes.” (21 up-votes, 0 down-votes)

Now the EEOC is following up on last year’s success by suing a South Carolina BMW plant and Dollar General, “the largest small-box discount retailer in the United States,” for the same, er, “crime” (using criminal background checks).

“With its newly issued enforcement guidance,” said Reuben Daniels, director of the EEOC’s District Office in Charlotte, “the EEOC affirmed its longstanding position that criminal records screening may have a disparate impact on African-Americans and Latinos, and that arrests alone are not predictive of criminal conduct” (Fox Carolina). And so the Doctrine of Diversity inches ever closer to the Beyond Parody event horizon.

Interestingly, in March 2012, the Washington Times reported that a surprising 97 percent of bus and train operators at the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority are black. (D.C. itself is 51 percent black.) And this “homogeneity,” according to interviews with current and former Metro workers,

is a proxy to a clubby culture of favoritism in which merit has little to do with promotions, and accountability, such as noting safety violations, is a career death knell. In typical examples, court and Metro records show, a black man who spent eight years in prison for dealing PCP was promoted to a high-level management position soon after his release, and whites in the same positions as blacks with far less seniority are inexplicably paid less. …

It is a culture in which a white male engineer near completion of a Ph.D. was passed over for a management position in favor of a black man who was barely literate, multiple staffers said. …

White and Hispanic employees who allege discrimination have found a deaf ear at Metro’s civil rights office, whose 17 employees are black. …

By the way, the chair of the EEOC is a black woman.

Dozens said white workers, especially women, were openly subject to racist and sexist remarks without repercussion — behavior that drove many targets to seek transfers or leave the agency. All said they have been inexplicably passed over hundreds of times for promotions to positions such as station manager while others with less seniority passed them by.

“I was the only white woman in car maintenance out of 338, and they made my life miserable,” Ms. Whorton said, adding that colleagues once electrified a track circuit on which she was working and laughed. “Nothing happened to them.”

And so on and so forth. Here are a few popular comments on the article.

• “I think that the only thing more remarkable than this story is the TOTAL lack of coverage by any other media outlet.”
• “Well, I think everyone knows by now that ‘diversity’ is just code for discrimination against white males. Can you image the squealing that would go on in any job where whites made up 97 percent of the workforce?”
  • “We don’t have to imagine it. We see it every day in the newspaper, on the TV news, on news websites and on pathetic Liberal rant-rags like HuffPo.”
• “White and Hispanic employees who allege discrimination have found a deaf ear at Metro’s civil rights office, whose 17 employees are black. I burst out laughing when I got to the end of that sentence. ha ha… How about contacting the EEOC?”
• “What goes unsaid is how many racist Blacks in Metro know exactly what the situation is and zealously take advantage of it. This is a clear example of racist Blacks terrorizing Hispanics and Whites knowing they can get away with it because Metro absolutely condones racism by Blacks toward other races. Where is the Justice Department and why aren’t they arresting and prosecuting the leaders of this Department? You know, the Justice Department is run by a Black man. Did I just answer my own question?”
• “Gosh, say it isn’t so! Why, the DC Metro system is the absolute epitome of a Gov’t run organization with every facet of the ‘Civil Rights’ culture showcased for all to see, and you mean to tell me that it’s turned into a racist, sexist organization dominated by blacks who are hostile to Whites, Hispanics, Women, and any form of competence? It’s like every racist trope ever spouted has come home to roost.”
• “There is nothing new here. Blacks are not capable of governing themselves or anybody else. See Uganda, the Congo, Somalia, Nigeria, etc. in Africa, Haiti in the Caribbean, and even Detroit and East St. Louis in this country.”
• “Wherever blacks control the government you’ll find endemic incompetence. It’s not unexpected. The average black worker has a median IQ substantially lower than the average white worker. Is this heretical? In this politically correct society it is. The only solution is for intelligent people to avoid living in a community governed by people who are going to destroy that community. Is there any community governed by black in the world that is successful?”
• “If the voters in a city want to run the place like Zimbabwe, let them, but not with our money. Let the revenue sharing stop. Grants, subsidies — whatever you want to call it — done, over. No more squeezing wealth out of the civilized United States to prop up stone age chaos.”
• “This is the ongoing third-worldization of the U.S. that apparently cannot be stopped until the breakup of the nation along racial lines.”

I eagerly await an EEOC lawsuit against the D.C. Metro, which for some strange reason* has not happened yet. In the meantime, please enjoy this little poster, based on a quotation I found in Pat Buchanan’s book The Death of the West.

*I guess they’ve got better things to do, like fighting the “wage gap between men and women,” which according to a June 10 press release by the EEOC “still exists,” making women earn “77 percent of men’s wages” — and yet has been described as a “myth” by — let me see — CBS News, Fox Business, the Huffington Post, Breitbart, the Atlantic, Forbes, and the Department of Labor, to name just a few.

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Immigration Reform: A Historical Perspective

Inspired by Mencius Moldbug’s ‘Some perspectives from Prudentius.’

And here’s a compact version:

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Coming soon…

Retreating to Issue 9? Click here.