Mencius Moldbug: Religious Zeal for Promoting Democracy Led Anglo Powers into War Against Germany

Moldbug has made a good case for the idea that the America of the 20th century had a religious devotion toward democracy, and many elite Americans hated Germany because it had opted for Hitler's nationalism instead of Weimar republicanism. Moldbug excerpted writings by Anglophone writers in the 1930s who loathed Hitler before he did anything to regain the territory Germany lost in the Treaty of Versailles.

http://unqualified-r...sourcebook.html

America entered the war not because Germany was a strategic threat, but because the war was an opportunity for American internationalists to remake the world to their fancy and at the same time beat up on a sinner nation that had abandoned the secular religion of democracy. America's entry into the war in turn was the impetus for the Nazis' systematic efforts to kill off the Jews; since the Jewish holocaust would cause Western elites to make antiracism their highest value, the American faith in democracy and republicanism can be blamed for the demographic displacement of whites that is occurring now.

Moldbug's primary sourcebook on WWII shows that the Allies, in their "normal and sane" attempts to promote democracy, abandoned the centuries-old convention that limited hostilities to uniformed forces and reverted to primitive forms of war that targeted civilian populations for violence and starvation. Moldbug's block quotation from a book by F.J.P. Veale, whom he calls a British fascist historian, is worth reading because it dramatizes the sharp break the combatants made with the conventions of civilized warfare that had ruled Europe since the end of the 1600s:

As early as 1770, by which time the horrors of the Thirty Years War had become generally forgotten, the Comte de Guibert could express the already prevailing complacency by writing:

"Today the whole of Europe is civilized. Wars have become less cruel. Save in combat no blood is shed; prisoners are respected; towns are no more destroyed; the countryside is no more ravaged; conquered peoples are only obliged to pay some sort of contributions which are often less than the taxes they pay to their own sovereign."

An explanation is clearly needed to account for the fact that governments composed of educated men, reared in the 19th century and brought up to accept as a matter of course the standards of conduct then accepted by everyone, should have so quickly and easily overcome their natural repugnance and adopted and carried out such enormities as the systematic extermination of a defenceless minority on account of its racial origin, the mass-deportation of enemy populations numbering millions, and the deliberate slaughter of enemy civilians by terror bombing in order to generate among the survivors a disposition to surrender unconditionally. 

.... They failed to realize that genocide and terror bombing were not isolated phenomena but symptoms of the same retrograde movement which had mysteriously overtaken Western civilization.

In the rest of the sourcebook, Moldbug attempts to use primary sources, mainly Edgar Mowrer's "Germany Puts Back the Clock," to explain the cause of the "retrograde movement" that accounted for both the civilian bombing and genocide. Moldbug includes a long quotation from Mowrer (a journalist from Bloomington who was apparently human) to show that the Anglosphere's casus belli was to punish Germany for "rebelling against the nascent international community," and WASP republicanism. Whether the Mowrer passage proves that thesis or not, the block quotation is a good read and it brims over with a sort religious loathing of the German republicans for failing to keep Hitler from coming to power. Mowrer's book was a best seller and he won the Pulitzer Prize.

Why Antiracism Become the West's Supreme Moral Value

The West's conversion from the ethnocentrism of the late 19th century to the liberalism of the mid-20th century occurred in part because the Third Reich's treatment of the Jews horrified English-speaking intellectuals and tainted the hereditarian view of human nature and group differences. Western elites made it taboo to assert that biology or genetics could cause race differences in IQ or behavior because that inquiry would just lead to another Auschwitz. American and European elites opened their countries to mass nonwhite immigration as part of a long recoil against the Jewish holocaust.

          

Half-Baked Thoughts on Tragedy and the Sublime

The best art is honest, and honesty requires acknowledgment of the fact that the universe is godless and morally empty, that life inevitably frustrates man's desires, including his desire for eternity.

The great tragedies hit a sweet spot where technique and an uncompromising commitment to truth can be combined to achieve the sublime.  At the end of Hamlet, for example, all the members of Denmark's royal family have died violent deaths, and the state itself has fallen to Fortinbras's invading army from Norway. The characters that Shakespeare made you sympathize with and their entire country have been destroyed. With the corpses of the royal family lying all around, a messenger arrives to announce that the king's will has been done because the government of England has beheaded Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. This is a sublimely ironic announcement because the king of Denmark had actually dispatched the two of them to escort Hamlet to England and give the king there an order that Hamlet, not Rosencrantz and Gildenstern, be beheaded. Destruction can be so complete, ambition thwarted so roundly, it can be sublime.

Secular, modern art can depict an intellectually honest form of transcendence. The man whose reach exceeds his grasp can be heroic. A man's life can be worthwhile even though his desires and ambitions will inevitably meet with frustration. "A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him."          

Lawrence Auster on the Origins of Multiculturalism in America

Larry Auster’s psychological interpretations of liberal positions at times remind me of Nietzsche’s genealogical explorations of the origins of morality. Auster tries to open a window into the liberal mind and examine the thought processes that have given rise to the liberal values that rule the Western world.

In The Path to National Suicide, he argues that American elites endorsed ethnic diversity as an end in itself only after the 1965 Immigration Reform Act unexpectedly led to dramatic growth in the Asian and Hispanic populations. Although backers of the 1965 Act had insisted that the reform would not upset the ethnic mix of the country, it did just that, with the Asian population increasing from 900,000 in 1960 to 8 million in 1990, the Hispanic population rising from less than 7 million to 22 million, and whites’ share of the population dropping from 85% in 1960 to 75.9% in 1990 (and down to 63.4% in 2011). By the late 1970s, American elites had discarded all values but humanitarianism and equality; according to Auster, the burgeoning nonwhite populations left the elites with no choice but to declare ethnic diversity the purpose and destiny of America. That is, the elites made diversity into a sacrosanct value as an after-the-fact response to the large nonwhite populations that were unexpectedly created by the 1965 Act. Around this time multiculturalists began disseminating propaganda claiming that the ethnic makeup of the country had always been in flux, and that America had never had a fixed racial and cultural identity. Outside the paleoconservative and alternative Right, these myths are widely accepted, but of course they are belied by the fact that, for the first 350 years of its existence, America drew its population and culture overwhelmingly from Europe.

Auster predicts that, as white Americans begin to grasp that mass Third World immigration has stripped their country of its Anglo-European identity, they will suffer “the same collapse of spirit that occurs to any people when its way of life, its historical identity, is taken away from it.” But the pain will be short lived:

As the clerics of diversity indoctrinate new generations into the Orwellian official history, even the memory of what America once was will be lost.

The Path to National Suicide, An Essay on Immigration and Multiculturalism, is a free download here: http://jtl.org/auster/PNS.pdf

What is racism?

In The Path to National Suicide, Lawrence Auster offers a fascinating deconstruction of the meaning of the word “racist.” Auster argues that, because we have not taken care to define the term precisely, it has become an instrument of thought control; and our uncritical acceptance of the notion that racism, when broadly defined and practiced by whites, is wrong leads to an intellectual justification for a totalitarian program to merge all the races and thereby purge human beings  of their tendency to prefer others of the same race, class, and intelligence. 

According to Auster, racism should be defined as the attitude that denies the humanity and intrinsic moral worth of members of a particular racial group based on nothing more than their race; it also includes the feeling of hatred or hostility toward another based solely on his race. Racism should not be defined as the simple acknowledgement that races differ from one another on particular traits because such differences are undeniable. We have a concept of race only because there are “plainly discernible physical groupings of the human family.”

When the term is properly defined, simply writing about and discussing the physical and intellectual differences between the races, without expressing animosity toward, or denying the humanity of, a particular racial group can’t be described as racist. But people have accepted a broad definition of the concept that deems as “racist” any statement that is offensive to members of a particular race; our society’s disapproval of racism has therefore become a “prescription for the massive repression of speech.”

The idea of racism has so run amok and grown so broad that it is now considered “racist” for whites to prefer the company of other people of like ethnicity, race, and class, since that preference means excluding people of other races. This preference for similar people exists among men and women of all races and few would accuse a black man of bigotry for joining a black church or marrying a black woman. Yet when it comes to white people, this preference for similarity is deemed “racist” and “xenophobic,” and the United States government seeks to prohibit whites from acting on it, at least when it comes to where they live and send their children to school.

The belief that racism is wrong implies the existence of a non-racist norm from which the racist person immorally deviates. But this non-racist norm has no basis in reality because all people have a preference for associating with others who are intellectually, racially, and ethnically similar to themselves. Auster suggests that, because everywhere people act on their preference for similar people, the norm of anti-racism leads to a justification for the “ultimate totalitarian project” whereby the government seeks to overturn the world as it exists and build in its place a non-racist world in which there are no racial differences and people cannot prefer members of their own race. Auster writes:

"… the only way the nations of the earth could truly cease being racist would be to institute a world-wide exchange of populations, creating an identical racial mix in every country, followed by several generations of scientifically planned and state-controlled intermarriages, resulting in a single perfectly blended human race. We may see, in the current efforts of government to enforce statistical racial balance in every area of life (based on the assumption that the absence of such balance must be due to racism), the beginnings of just such a global experiment."

Although Auster cautions in his essay that no one calls for a global program to merge all the races, his vision turned out to be prescient. In 2007, William Saletan in Slate called for higher rates of intermarriage between whites and blacks as a means of closing the IQ gap between the races. According to Saletan, if the racial intelligence gap has partially genetic roots, the best way to close it is to “reunite the genome.”

As scientists amass more and more evidence that race differences in psychological attributes have genetic origins, more liberal intellectuals will explicitly call for racial intermarriage as a means of eliminating those differences. Perhaps the 21st century will see the enactment of anti-anti-miscegenation laws designed to cap the percentage of whites who marry within their race each year.

Auster had good comments on Saletan's argument here:

http://www.amnation....ves/009262.html